Page 58 of Salvation

Slamming my hands on the table, I rage as the various report pages seem to mock me from the surface. “What the hell do we have to do here?

“Goddammit to hell! We just need one fucking lead! Just one! We have to be missing something!”

Detective Rodgers throws his pen to the table, seemingly as frustrated as I am.

Thank God!

I’m about to choke him from his constant clicking.

He pinches the bridge of his nose. “We can go work the neighborhood again. I can go.”

I glare at him. “We’ve already talked to everyone in that fucking neighborhood six times. No one is talking to us.” I exhale and stare at the ceiling of the conference room before grabbing the top file in the chaos. I point at it. “We need to find Mrs. Mascareni. If we can just find her… I know that the rest will fall into place.”

Alan glances at me, flatly saying, “She’s fucking dead.”

I grimace and shake my head. “No, she’s not dead. But she is a ghost…

“Gabrial has her somewhere. But where?”

Alan regards me coolly. His thinning hair is falling onto his forehead while his bloodshot eyes focus on me. He doesn’t blink. “Why do you think she’s alive?”

Flipping through the file, scanning everything again, hoping something jumps out at me, I answer him. “Because Gabrial doesn’t kill women. He protects them. He always has. No matter what else he’s done… he would never harm a woman and if any of his men did, they’d be gator bait.” The confidence in my words is unmistakable. My eyes search the file I’ve memorized for one small thing I may have overlooked or missed the importance of.

One thing. I just need one thing.

Something has to be here.

It’s probably staring me in the face and I’m just not seeing it.

Where are you?

Just fucking give me one thing.

Alan grunts and grabs his pen…

That fucking pen.

He says, “You seem sure as shit of that.”

I look right at him, meeting his eyes with my own. “I am.”

We have a stare off until a harried knock on the door has me swiveling my head. The door hastily opens.

Our boss, Lieutenant Warren is standing there smiling as he waves a folder. “I think we’ve got something. A rich, pretty boy with a whole lot of skeletons in his closet from Shreveport is missing…

“Word is that he was trying to take over the crime scene there. Big mouth and even bigger ego. The last time anyone saw him was a week ago. He set out for a meeting with four men…

“He was supposedly meeting with Gabrial DeLucca.”

Fucking Gabrial…

Thank you, Jesus!

We might finally have what we need.

My back immediately straightens and Alan’s feet hit the floor so hard he almost falls over backwards in the chair. Glaring over at him like he’s an idiot, I stride over to Lieutenant Warren. “Give me everything you have.”

He enters the room and together we all go over the report top to bottom. When we’re done, I summarize it as best I can. “Renald Antoinette is a want-to-be mobster out of Shreveport. Recently attempted to take over command of all drugs and gun trafficking out there. He comes from money but was disinherited a few years back by his only surviving family… his paternal grandfather who raised him, the oil tycoon Maxwell Antoinette, after some shady behavior in college. There were reports that he was dealing laced weed and Rohypnol on campus and that he drugged and raped a young female professor one night in her office. She later dropped her case, but everyone thinks a major payoff was involved.

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