from jail.”
His detachment in telling us the details of the story chilled me to the bone but he had saved our lives. Who was I to judge?
I felt as if the ground below me were shifting, unsteady. I put an arm around Bea and turned away, wiping my eyes on the arm of my sweater. In the distance, I heard the persistent wail of sirens and relief flooded my body.
Franco put his hand in his pocket again and pulled out my cell phone. “You’ll probably want this back,” he said and tossed it to me.
It started ringing the minute it hit the palm of my hand. Crawford. “Hello?”
His voice crackled over the bad connection but I could tell that he was frantic. “Alison? Is Bea with you? Are you both okay?”
I filled him in as best I could and told him I would call him back when I got to the station house; I knew, from experience, that being the witness to a homicide meant a long night. The police cars that had been in the distance sped up to our location, spewing dust and decomposing garbage into the air. I covered my mouth and tried not to gag. Dozens of cops jumped from the six or more cars that had pulled up and immediately sized up the scene. Franco pulled his FBI badge from his pocket and began detailing what had happened over the past hour and a half.
I took one last look at Gianna’s form before getting into the police car and said a silent prayer for her tortured soul.
Chapter 30
The week passed without incident, a new and joyful experience for me. Work returned to the mundane, and after having been shot (sort of) and kidnapped (for real), the back-up of papers, phone calls, and student visits was overwhelming. By the end of the week, I was frazzled, but in a good way. Work had helped return my life to normal and that was a good thing.
Sister Calista had begun eyeing me warily every time I set foot in the office area. I wanted to walk up to her and say, “You want a piece of me, lady?” because the events of the past weeks had obviously given her pause when it came to me. Maybe that would make her reconsider her recent recalcitrance.
Franco’s promise to put Peter away was kept: a day after Gianna’s death, Peter was picked up at a social club in Little Italy and arrested. Franco apparently wasn’t the only undercover member of the Miceli family; there were four in total and they had amassed quite a file of information. The number of indictments against him and several of his closest “family” members was staggering and the story filled the paper. Several local newspapers called me for interviews, as did most of the morning programs, but I declined all comment and sent them to my new lawyer, Jimmy, a man I had grown very fond of in the last few weeks. He was a nutcase, and obviously had terrible eating habits and high blood pressure, judging from his potbelly and florid color, but I felt secure knowing that he was fielding all of my phone calls, even if I couldn’t be sure of how he was characterizing the situation.
Jimmy was circumspect about the possibility of my testifying at the trial but promised he would do everything to keep me out of it.
Jimmy was also true to his word in getting my resisting-arrest charge dropped along with the harassment portion of the charges. Crawford had continued looking into the stolen-car part of the case on his own time but couldn’t come up with anything. He had, however, found out that the person driving the car and who had called the New York State Troopers to report that I was following them was a man. So, it could have been Jackson. Or not.
My money was still on a Miceli but I still hadn’t figured out the motive part of things.
Regarding the state troopers, however, I had to pay a fine for driving without my license and registration, had points put on my license for the speed, and had to enroll in the defensive driving class. I sent them a fruit basket just for good measure. All in all, not too bad. But I would never go to Stew Leonard’s again without thinking about getting arrested in my pajamas.
I had spoken with Crawford a few times, but we hadn’t seen each other since the week before. Our