Breach of Trust

88

I walked into suite 410 fifteen minutes later. Lee Tucker had just shown up, still wearing his coat, his cheeks still pink from the cold outside. “What’s the problem?” he asked. “The F-Bird didn’t work?” I handed it to him. “It worked just fine. I just thought you should have this right away.”

It wasn’t the real reason I was turning in the F-Bird early, but it sounded like a sensible explanation.

Tucker stared at the recording device I’d handed him. “This was your breakfast with Hector Almundo?”

I nodded. “Listen to that. You might be adding a name to that indictment.”

“Well-c’mon. Give me a preview.”

“Let’s just say you’re going to learn a few things about Hector Almundo. I sure did.”

“C’mon, Counselor. Don’t be a putz.”

I smiled, which felt odd. I hadn’t done a lot of that recently, and this surely wasn’t a time for mirth. “Greg Connolly,” I said. “It was Hector. Hector and Charlie.”

Lee Tucker nodded at me, but hardly reacted. Nothing in his eyes, nothing in his movements. “Okay. Anything else?”

“You knew,” I said. “You already knew.”

Tucker wasn’t going to say yes, but he didn’t say no, either.

“The guys he hired?” I asked. “You traced them back to Hector? Forensics? What?”

It felt silly, but I’d been living in my own little world, working up a case for these guys. I hadn’t considered the obvious-these guys were capable of some investigating of their own. They could have swept the place where I was interrogated for fingerprints or DNA-shit, the one goon spilled a pool of blood out of his nose after I clocked him. And they followed the car that dropped me off that night. They probably knew the names of both of those guys and had easily secured search warrants to access phone records and anything else they might need to trace those guys back to Hector.

“Well, now you have a confession, too,” I said.

Tucker paused, debating what he could say to me. “That will help us a lot. Let’s say it will confirm what we strongly suspected. Great job, Jason. Really.”

I held out my hand. Tucker put a new F-Bird in my palm but didn’t release it. “You’ll take one more shot at Snow? You’ll give it the old college try?”

I pried the new F-Bird from his hand. I looked him in the eye but didn’t answer.

“Jason, don’t be an idiot. You’ve done so much for this case. Hell, you risked your ass for us. Chris won’t prosecute you. Not if you take this one last shot. Even if you fail. Just try.”

Mom always said, if you don’t have something to say, keep your mouth shut. So I did.

“But you tell Chris to fuck off now-Jason, c’mon, man, you know he’ll go after you. Don’t throw all your hard work away. Don’t do that.”

I thought Tucker’s impassioned plea was not entirely self-interested. Yes, he wanted to be part of an historic investigation that took down the governor. And yes, he could dutifully play the good cop to Chris Moody’s bad. But I thought Lee meant what he was saying. I’d earned something with him after everything I’d done. He was rooting for me, I thought. He wanted me to avoid prison. That sounded like an okay idea to me as well. But it wasn’t Tucker’s call.

It was Moody’s call. And, as Moody had said to me earlier, it really was up to me.