Page 50 of Black Sheep
It doesn’t.
* * *
Ten hours later,I’m munching on a Granny Smith apple tart enough to make my eyes water and drumming my fingers on my kitchen counter.
My day off has been a bust.
Cannon hasn’t typed a single word on his laptop. The keystroke logger program is alive and well, but there’s literally nothing to see.
What if he doesn’t use that laptop?I don’t know how the hell I’d be able to get a program onto his laptop at the club because there are cameras everywhere.
As soon as the thought hits me, I cringe, and the apple falls to the counter with a bruising thud.
“What if he has cameras in his apartment?” I ask the empty walls surrounding me as my heart rate kicks up eighty-seven notches. “Why didn’t I think about that? Shit. Shit. Shit.”
I’m not usually such an idiot when it comes to this stuff. The only excuse I have is that Cannon Freeman has thrown me so far off-balance that I don’t know what has happened to the normal me who has instincts like a bloodhound.
Backing away from my laptop—where the camera has been covered with a little piece of electrical tape since the day I purchased it—I wonder when all my instincts for self-preservation deserted me.
My best guess? Somewhere between getting jealous that my target was possibly screwing his employees, and my screaming orgasm last night on his desk.
I have to pull it together. I have to ground myself and get back on track.
The best way I know how to do that? Remind myself exactly what the Casso family is capable of.
Pushing away from the kitchen counter, I snag my hot-pink Swiss Army knife out of my purse and head for the bedroom, which only takes four steps in my tiny apartment. Once I’ve located the flathead screwdriver, I go to work. With a few turns, one screw falls into my hand and the vent swings open, revealing a thick manila folder hidden in the ductwork. Silently, I drop into a cross-legged position on the boring white duvet that matches every other boring white thing in this place, including the boring white nightstand I rest the screw on.
This isn’t my real apartment. Just like this isn’t my real name.
The only real thing in this place is this folder, containing the pieces of my father’s investigation that got him killed.
When I flip open the battered front cover, the first picture that greets me is one of Dominic Casso, except instead of looking like a fierce silver fox, his hair is dark like Cannon’s without a single hint of gray. The date on the picture reads February 12, 1994. The collar of Dom’s long black overcoat is raised to cover his ears as he walks down the steps of the courthouse.
It was the first of many RICO cases where the charges didn’t stick. Teflon Dom isn’t his nickname because he likes to cook, after all.
On the back, my dad’s handwriting is barely legible, but there’s a case number written.
I pulled the records from the court system, but I couldn’t figure out what he was after. The charges were all about money laundering, and Dom’s lawyer managed to get him off with a jury verdict ofnot guilty.
Could they have bought the jury?It’s a possibility, but not something that would be easy to prove.
I turn to the next piece of information in the file, hoping the time and space since I’ve sorted through this will allow me to examine it with fresh eyes. Four stapled sheets of lined yellow legal pad slide out next. They’re filled with information about all the cases brought against Dom and the prosecutors who failed to gain convictions.
It doesn’t matter what the charges were; they’ve never been able to get him on more than a freaking parking ticket. And even then, there was only one.
Page after page, I leaf through until I see a picture of a man I couldn’t identify before, but now I know exactly who he is. Nearly a carbon copy of his son, GTR, who was watching Cannon’s apartment this morning, Giancarlo Rossetti also had to have been photographed when he was in his prime.
The rest of the file is filled with photos and notes about incidents that were suspected to be part of the rivalry between the families, but no one has been charged in connection with any of them because there wasn’t enough evidence.
“No one who will consent to an interview seems to know the cause of the resurgence of the feud,”my father noted, and I can only imagine how much that drove him crazy.“Other inquiries I’ve made about the Casso family have been met with suspicion and refusal to speak about anything. Several of my potential sources are either terrified, protecting someone, or both.”
My father was a man who never stopped digging until he felt he’d gotten every possible answer. Then he’d go one step further—review all the unearthed facts as objectively as possible and try to spot the story that no one else could see. That was why Leander Lockwood was incredible at what he did, even before he took the job anchoring the national evening news for two decades. He never stopped investigating. Ever.
“You can’t just report what you find on the surface. You always have to go deeper, and when you think you’ve found everything there is to find, dig another ten feet and then reassess.”
That was the secret to his success, and one I’ve always tried to employ in my own life, even before I was officially employed as an investigative journalist. Nancy Drew had nothing on me, which is why I use names from her stories as my aliases. The fact that no one has caught on yet—that Drew Carson is really just Nancy’s father’s name, Carson Drew, in reverse seemed quite clever to me.
But I’m less impressed with my cleverness when I look back down at the file and papers spread out before me.There has to be something here.I know it.
