Page 35 of Paranoia

“Don’t be silly. You’re not all that big.” She punched me in the arm as I grinned. “Now be serious with me. How do you feel physically?”

Mary Catherine bit her lower lip. It was one of her easy “tells” for when she’s anxious. “I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t feel lightheaded or faint like I did the other day. I’m just so worried about the baby. We went through so much just for me to get pregnant.”

I stroked her hair as I tried to word my next comment as carefully as possible. “We might need to be prepared for the worst. We can try again and again. But your health is the most important thing to me.”

“Prepared for the worst? Failure’s not an option.”

I chuckled and Mary Catherine wrapped her arms around me. She scooted over a bit and had me lie down next to her without shooing away the children. I popped off my shoes but kept all my clothes on. I was so tired, I felt like I was falling into a cloud.

She said softly, “Tell me about your Florida trip.”

I was going to tell her about the FDLE agent. I was going to explain how helpful Special Agent Frederick had been and how much she reminded me of Terri Hernandez. Before I began, I decided to take a moment to rest my eyes.

The next thing I knew, the kids were scurrying around, getting ready for school. I was still in my clothes and lying on the wrong side of the bed next to Mary Catherine.

CHAPTER 52

ROB TRILLING WAS seated at his desk when I walked into the office. In fact, everyone was seated at their desks. It was after nine o’clock. I had been slow to start this morning. Juliana had wrangled all the kids off to school and I took advantage of a few quiet moments with Mary Catherine. I had wanted to make sure she felt okay both physically and emotionally.

And I had needed another hour’s worth of sleep.

From his office, Walter Jackson walked over to where Trilling and I sat. He casually said, “My daughter saw a deer on the way to school.”

Without hesitation, Trilling said, “How did she know it was going to school?”

Walter let loose with a belly laugh. “I can’t believe you beat me to the punch line.” He looked at me and said, “This young man is going places.”

“If we don’t solve this case, the only place Celeste Cantor is going to have us going is back to patrol.”

That put a damper on the jovial mood. Everyone focused. Walter took out his tablet.

I noticed a patch of road rash on Trilling’s left elbow. “What happened?” I said, pointing toward the rough patch of scab.

He looked down at his elbow and the injury about the size of a drink coaster. “Nothing, really. Just fell in the road.”

If he wasn’t bothered by it, neither was I. After looking over a few notes, I filled in Rob Trilling and Walter Jackson on my time in Florida. Everything I’d learned was reinforcing my gut feeling that these deaths had been orchestrated, not just accidents or suicides. And that they were all involved in the case against Richard Deason years ago.

Trilling waited patiently while I told them about my trip. As soon as I finished, he looked like a kid ready to burst from not telling a secret.

Trilling fidgeted in his seat. “Terri and I had an interesting day yesterday.”

“Tell me about it.”

“We saw Antonio Deason.”

“Are you certain?”

“Terri took some pictures, and his head is down in most of them. But I’d say it’s the same man as in the images Walter sent us. Our informant confirmed that ‘Little D’ was the son of a big-time trafficker who was working the city almost twenty years ago. Deason was talking to our group in the Bronx. We didn’t get a great transmission, but the informant says he’s talking about moving a couple of kilos of heroin a week through them.”

Thiswasinteresting news.

Trilling said, “Antonio sounded young but pretty tough. He was there with one other guy who probably was his backup—a bigger guy—but Antonio stood up to the gang himself. He told them they needed him if they wanted to make any real money. Then the two of them came out, jumped into an electric Porsche, and took off. We could not risk following them.”

“Sounds like progress to me. I saw in the docs Walter sent me that Antonio signed a ConEd agreement for an apartment in lower Manhattan. I say we do this the easy way and go talk to him at his apartment.”

Then Walter said, “I’ve done a little more digging and there’s something else we might need to look into.”

From the way he’d said it, I could tell it meant we had a lot more work to do.

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