Page 120 of Sworn to Silence
“He got off on beating the system. I wanted to be the one to bring him down. Somewhere along the line, it got personal.”
Her expression sobered, and John could tell she knew the story was about to take a dark twist. “My partner was an old-timer by the name of Vic Niswander. Great guy. Good cop. Funny as hell in a politically incorrect way. Just became a grandpa. Four months away from retirement. We used to kid around about it, but he wanted to get Vespian before he left.”
Remembering, John smiled. But as his mind took him through the nightmare that followed, the smile made him feel as if he’d just bitten into a rotten piece of meat. “Vic and I had a snitch inside Vespian’s operation. I don’t remember where we found this guy. Just some dipshit junkie by the name of Manny Newkirk. Couldn’t think his way out of a bag. He’d spill his guts for twenty bucks. One night I set up a routine meeting with him, but I got sidelined. Kid stuff—frickin’ basketball or something—and I couldn’t make it. Niswander went in my place.” He blew out a breath to ease the pressure in his chest. “Someone ambushed them. Sons of bitches doused both of them with gasoline and burned them alive.”
John didn’t look at her. He couldn’t. Not with those ugly images running through his mind. “Everyone knew Vespian was responsible, but we couldn’t prove it.”
“But why burn a cop like that?” she asked.
“Vespian wanted information. And he got it.”
“What information?”
“My home address.”
Her recoil was minute, but John saw it. She knew what came next. “He went after your family.”
He nodded. “They broke into my house when I wasn’t there. Vespian and a couple of thugs. They raped my wife, raped my little girls, then murdered all of them. Burned them alive the same way they had Vic.”
Reaching across the table, she laid her hand over his. “I can’t imagine how horrific that must have been.”
“Some of the details never made the papers. The bodies were so burned, there was little evidence left. I didn’t find out about the rapes until I got my hands on Vespian.”
He couldn’t talk about what he’d seen when he broke through the line the fire department had set up. He wasn’t a strong enough man to voluntarily recall those horrific images. “The brass put me on sick leave. Somehow I got checked into a hospital. Fuckin’ psycho ward.” He tried to smile, but didn’t manage. “To tell you the truth, I barely remember.”
“I don’t understand why the cops didn’t go after Vespian.”
“Oh, they did. You know how cops are. They pulled together. Went after him. But the son of a bitch wasuntouchable.”
“I can’t imagine what that did to you,” she whispered.
“Well, while all that is going down, I’m in the hospital drooling all over myself. One morning I’m in thisOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nestgroup therapy shit, and some crazy guy tells me all I need to get myself cured is a mission. I got to thinking about that, and realized he wasn’t as crazy as everyone thought.” He looked at Kate. “So I found a mission.”
“You went after Vespian.”
“A cop can make a pretty good criminal when he puts his mind to it.” John stared hard at her. “Do you want to hear the rest?”
She nodded. “If you want to tell me.”
“I started following Vespian, got to know his routine. Where he went. Who he spent time with. Every other facet of my life went by the wayside. I didn’t eat. Didn’t sleep. But I was never hungry or tired. That crazy guy was right. I fixated on Vespian and it cured me.
“He played poker every Wednesday night. Like clockwork he drove to this mansion in Avon Lake. He usually left around three or fourA.M. One morning when he walked out to his Lexus, I was waiting.”
Kate stared at him, her expression braced. She knew what he was going to tell her next. It was like watching a train mow down a stalled car.
“I hit him with the taser. When he went down, I cuffed him, threw him in the trunk and took him to a warehouse I’d rented. Bad neighborhood on the waterfront. I tied him to a chair, and by God I got a confession. Got all the gory fuckin’ details on tape. Torture. Rape. Not just my wife, but my kids. Little girls.”
“Oh, John—”
He cut her off. “I knew that tape would be deemed inadmissible.” He blew out a breath, wiped his wet palms on his slacks. “I didn’t plan to kill him, Kate. All I wanted was the confession. But when he told me what he did to them... it was like I stepped out of my body. I watched while someone else doused that sick motherfucker with gas and burned him alive.”
John could feel the tremors wracking his body. His breaths shuddered out like stifled sobs. The sound was inordinately loud in the silence of the house. When he held out his hands, they shook uncontrollably, so he set them on the table in front of him, looked Kate square in the eye and told her what he’d never told another human being. “I watched Vespian burn, and I didn’t feel a goddamn thing but satisfaction.”
She blinked rapidly, but it wasn’t enough to stanch the flow of tears. Her hand shook when she wiped them away.
“Now you know what kind of man you slept with tonight,” he said. “You know what I did. Why I did it.” He shrugged. “Poetic justice? Cop gone bad? Or just plain murder in the first degree?”
For the span of several heartbeats, the only sound came from his quickened breathing and the howl of the wind around the eaves. After a moment, Kate cleared her throat. “Did the cops know you did it?”
