The Wrong Man

102

I returned to my office after leaving Tom and Aunt Deidre. I was moving slowly these days. I lost a lot of skin on the left leg and some on the arm, too. And my left knee hadn’t been doing so well even before that time. The doctor at the hospital told me I probably could avoid surgery but I had to avoid stress on that knee for two months.

When I walked into my office, I found everything from the Stoller case in boxes. Marie, our office assistant, had apparently decided to put in a few hours of labor.

Someone had left today’s Chronicle on my desk. Yesterday, the U. S. attorney’s office had announced the indictments of Stanley Keane and eight others for murder, mayhem, and lots of other things you’re not supposed to do, like providing material assistance to a domestic terrorist organization. Manning had used the cover of his corporate entity, Global Harvest International, and Stanley Keane’s SK Tool and Supply, to slowly stockpile an astonishing amount of bomb material. They had armed two trucks, headed to the federal and state buildings, with one hundred bags each of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and three drums of liquid nitromethane. Each truck was part of a three-person team. The driver, traveling solo, would smash the truck into the building. The other two team members would follow in a car as a backup. Once the truck penetrated the building-if it didn’t detonate on impact-the driver and his partners were supposed to race to the nearest subway station, head underground, and try to avoid the blast. The driver would have set the five-minute fuse in advance and the two-minute as well, so the driver was likely doing a suicide run.

The third truck-Manning’s truck-was different. It was armed with only fifty bags of ammonium nitrate, half the amount of explosives, because its target was smaller and less sturdy-a mosque as opposed to a multi-story building. And because Manning didn’t want to level the mosque. He wanted to destabilize it, just like the hotel in Adana, Turkey, where his family perished. He wanted people to run from the mosque, so he and his two helpers-Patrick Cahill and Ernie Dwyer-could pick people off like the Adana terrorists did.

Manning, everyone had acknowledged, had been smart and disciplined. Had that bomb material been purchased in bulk, or had it been purchased by individuals, the federal government likely would have noticed. But under the cover of legitimate corporate transactions, and over time, Manning had stockpiled enough material to blow up ten more buildings besides those on December 7. Only yesterday the feds found the remaining stockpile in an underground facility several hundred miles away.

According to Stanley Keane, who was cooperating with the authorities, Randall Manning hadn’t expected to survive December 7. Nor had he expected his soldiers to do so. But the other two “brains” of the operation, Bruce McCabe and Stanley Keane, were expected to carry on the mission. The way Manning figured it, no roads led back to Keane or McCabe, and they’d be free to conduct further attacks. That, of course, was before he killed Bruce McCabe, for a reason that isn’t yet clear.

The federal government had missed all of this. They should have noticed that Summerset Farms was buying a hell of a lot more ammonium nitrate than it needed, but on paper the farm had the size to justify the purchase. Had anyone bothered to go out and notice how little of that acreage was actually being used for farmland, they would have become suspicious immediately.

And they missed the part about December 7 being the Islamic New Year, too. But for that much, I can’t really blame them. For one, Lee Tucker and that guy Osborne didn’t have much time to think about all of this. I’d only given them the info a few days earlier, and nobody knew for sure that December 7 was even the target date until the day before. Plus, the Islamic New Year isn’t some major holiday for most Muslims. But it was close enough from Manning’s perspective, allowing him to combine a day that commemorated an attack on our soil with a day that was significant to Islam.

The good news for me was that my name had been kept out of it, as much as possible at least. The reporters know that I was Tom Stoller’s lawyer, but that’s the extent of it.

I saw a large three-ring binder in one of the boxes and didn’t immediately recognize it. Then I remembered. Joel Lightner had put together a dossier on the identity of Gin Rummy, the guy nobody could ever identify. For a short time during this investigation, it had been my focus, but Tori had correctly noted that it wasn’t really going to help me, in the end. Even if I identified the guy, it wasn’t like I could drag him into court and get him to confess. Finding out his identity wasn’t going to help me win Tom Stoller’s case.

It brought me back to Kathy Rubinkowski, the first one to speak up about suspicious activity taking place at Global Harvest. She was now a heroine in this entire saga, the one who started the ball rolling.

Her murder was technically unsolved. Everyone figured Randall Manning’s guys did it. Maybe one of those guys picked up ahead of time, Patrick Cahill or Ernie Dwyer. Maybe another one. Close enough. It wasn’t a critical detail in the scheme of things. I could tell the police about Gin Rummy, but to their mind, it would be like telling them the Easter Bunny did it. Nobody knew his identity, and nobody really cared anymore about Kathy Rubinkowski’s murder.

For no particular reason, I opened up Joel’s lengthy work. He had identified a number of people within and outside the Capparelli crime family who might qualify as Gin Rummy. Joel even had an executive summary, the kind of thing his corporate clients would like:

Approximately four years ago, federal authorities first heard the name “Gin Rummy” transmitted over a wiretap by two known members of the Capparelli crime family. Since that time, a number of killings have been attributed to Gin Rummy, but his identity has remained a mystery. It is believed that, in the face of increasingly invasive surveillance by federal agents, the Capparelli family has entrusted its most important work to Gin Rummy, including the murder of top crime boss Anthony Moretti, and has deliberately kept his identity known to only a handful of people. Federal agents believe, in fact, that his identity is known only to Paul Capparelli, his sole confidant Donnie Mancini, and Gin Rummy himself. We believe, of course, that Lorenzo Fowler also knew that information, and was willing to trade on it before he was gunned down, probably by Gin Rummy himself.

Right. I recalled that odd conversation with Lorenzo, right here in this office, when he first mentioned “Gin Rummy” to me. A hit man? I asked. Close enough, he said. An assassin? Right, he said. I never got the answer to my follow-up question: What’s the difference between a hit man and an assassin?

And I probably never would. Joel, for his part, had given his best guess in the following paragraph of his executive summary:

The most obvious suspect is Peter Gennaro Ramini, a/ k/ a “Pockets,” who served as the primary assassin for the Capparelli family under Rico Capparelli, before Rico’s arrest and imprisonment left his brother Paul Capparelli in control.

I finished reading the executive summary and let out a sigh. Some questions don’t get answered. Who knows? Maybe I’d keep looking for the elusive killer.

Or maybe, at some point, he’d come looking for me again.

Or maybe not. Maybe I was done with this. Maybe Tori was onto something in her apartment, the night before December 7. We could leave here. We could ditch everything and run away, start over. Was I ready to do that?

I looked at the photographs on my desk. One of my deceased wife, Talia, clutching our newborn child, Emily. Talia would always be the love of my life. That spot was permanently filled.

The other photo was Shauna and me, mugging for the camera in the bleachers last summer at a ball game. I stared into her frozen eyes and felt my heartbeat ratchet up. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know what we meant. I wasn’t sure I had the courage to find out.

Exhale.

I decided not to confront that particular topic at this time and, instead, flip through Joel’s report. I’d had enough drama in my life for one year.