Page 32 of Fitch

Benecio Barbieri.

A boy of maybe six years old with his mother, now deceased. It was a paparazzi photograph in a newspaper article; they were crossing a street. He was in a school uniform, a small kid for his age. His dark curly hair was longer now, but his eyes.

The eyes don’t change.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much, and I was in the office early, digging through the Barbieri files. Files that Nolan had worked on. Admittedly, he only did admin and data correlation on this case, but still...

This wasn’t good.

This compromised the entire fucking case.

I knocked on Nolan’s door, case file in hand. “Got a second?”

He looked up and smiled when he saw me, oblivious to the truth bomb I was about to drop on him. Unless he knew already? Oh fuck. Did he know his Benji was Benecio Barbieri?

I sincerely hoped he didn’t. For his sake.

“Sure,” he replied. “Come in.”

So I did. I closed the door behind me so no one else could hear. I needed to know what he knew... because if he did know who Benji really was... well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

After some initial small talk about Benji and Fitch, I cut to the chase.

“What do you know about him?”

“Benji?”

“Yes.”

He seemed confused, defensive. “That he’s twenty years old. Been in his line of work for two years.”

“Anything about his family?”

“Only that they weren’t good people, and he spent his whole life dreaming of leaving them.” He was past confused and defensive now, approaching angry.

But not guilty.

“Do you know his last name?” I asked.

He made a face. “He told me it was Smith, but I highly doubt that’s true.”

Smith?

Jesus Christ.

He glared at me. “Hardly surprising to not give actual names in his line of work, is it?” He shook his head, fire in his eyes. “What’s going on, Dom? Why the questions?”

I thought it was better to show him, so I put the manila folder on his desk and opened it. “I thought I recognised him, but I couldn’t be sure,” I said quietly. “It took me a while to place him. He’s older, thinned out a lot, but his eyes...”

And I watched for his reaction, something I’d been trained to do. The smallest of signs, cues. This is where the truth often hid, in the smallest tells of a person’s reaction.

I’d seen it on the stand a hundred times.

And Nolan’s reaction was no different.

He saw the photograph of a twelve-year-old Benji standing at his mother’s funeral, and he paled, his breath leaving him in a sorrowful rush. And that was an honest reaction if I’d ever seen one. Shock, disbelief, and finally hurt.

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