Authors: Michael Koryta
"No,"
I said. "Let's start with the first one, okay— Work forward."
He
didn't react other than to nod and slide the Harrison papers back into the
folder.
The
four offenders who'd worked with the Cantrells at their strange home in the
woods near Hinckley had all been sentenced for violent crimes. Three had been
convicted of murder, another for armed robbery and assault.
The
couple's first hire was a Serb named Mark Ruzity, who'd grown up in the Slavic
Village on Cleveland's east side. It was a damn hard neighborhood. At one time
Ruzity had a bright future. A blues guitarist of some renown, he'd been
featured in a few newspaper and magazine articles after landing gigs with
national acts. Ken had copies of those stories, glimpses of what could have
been. Ruzity's success had always been short-lived, though; his drug problems
limited his career. He bottomed out in New Orleans while touring with a band
called Three Sheiks to the Wind, attacking an audience member who sat in the
front of the club and talked loudly during the performance. Ruzity's luck was
poor—not only did he break a good guitar on the gentleman's back, but it turned
out his victim was an off-duty cop. That incident landed him in jail for six
months, and when he got out he was broke and bandless.
After
returning to Cleveland, Ruzity got a job in construction and began playing
again, mostly in local bars and for little money. For more than a year he held
it together, until he met a leggy redhead named Valerie after a gig one night.
She was beautiful, he was stoned, and by morning he was in love. There was just
one problem: Valerie was a prostitute.
He
didn't remember paying her that night, though he apparently had, and when she
informed him the relationship had been strictly professional, he viewed it not
as a deal-breaker but as a challenge. The Montagues and the Capulets. After a
day of brooding, with a few black beauties and some gin to clear his head,
Ruzity determined there was only one way this mess could be sorted out: He
murdered her pimp.
The
beautiful romantic vision came to a fast and painful end when Valerie herself
turned him in. The bad news was that he'd just been caught for murder; the good
news was that he'd murdered a pimp with a record. The sentencing judge went
easy, and Ruzity spent fifteen years in prison, writing songs and studying the
blues. He had no living family and no close friends, and the state's department
of rehabilitation placed him in a job with Joshua and Alexandra Cantrell, who
had some ideas about offender reentry that seemed worth a try.
Ruzity
lived and worked with them for six months before moving back into the city,
where he made a living repairing instruments at a pawnshop and teaching guitar
lessons.
The
second parolee who found his way to Whisper Ridge was Nimir Farah, who'd used a
machete in an attempt to murder his own cousin over a suspected affair with
Farah's girlfriend. Farah had immigrated to the United States only two years
earlier, fleeing a desperate situation in his home country, Sudan. He'd come to
Columbus to live with a cousin who'd arrived years earlier on a student visa
and was the last living member of Farah's family, or at least the last he'd
been able to keep track of as war and famine swept Sudan.
It
was thanks only to an exceptional emergency room surgeon that the cousin
survived, a point made emphatically clear by the prosecuting attorney in the
trial transcript Ken had photocopied. The charge was attempted murder, and the
sentence was twenty years in prison. Farah served ten, then managed to avoid a
criminal deportation hearing when Alexandra and
Joshua
Cantrell stepped in. Ken had tracked down a letter from the couple arguing
quite eloquently against deporting Farah to a dangerous country where he no
longer had ties. Instead, he was given parole and a job at Whisper Ridge. He
worked for the Cantrells for six months, then moved to Cleveland, where he
finished the degree in environmental sciences he'd started while in prison. As
of Ken's last check, he was employed by a nonprofit that specialized in water
sanitation issues—particularly the challenges faced in arid areas much like
Farah's homeland.
It
seemed to be, once again, a striking success for the Cantrells.
I
turned the last page of the Farah file over and found myself staring at a
picture of Parker Harrison.
He'd
been the third hire, and though I didn't need to refresh myself on his
background, I read through Ken's notes anyhow. I wasn't ready to disclose my
knowledge of Harrison yet, and skipping over him would be a clear tip of my
hand. So I pored over the old information, found nothing new, and then moved to
the fourth and final hire, a man named Salvatore Bertoli, who'd been raised in
an orphanage after his mother died following their immigration from Italy.
"A
lot of different ethnicities passed through," I said. "There a
reason—"
"Yeah,
that was the idea. Joshua was interested in culture and crime. It was a topic
of a lot of the papers he wrote, and how he met Alexandra."
I
thought about that and tried to fit Parker Harrison into the mix. His mother
had been Shawnee, and he'd told me that Alexandra Cantrell was fascinated by
the stories he'd heard and what he knew of the culture.
"I'll
tell you something else about their boy Bertoli," Ken said. "He's Italian.
As is, you might have heard, that Cosa Nostra thing to which brother Dominic is
connected. Allegedly."
"Merriman,
you profiling bastard."
He
held his hands up. "Just making connections."
"So
you think Salvatore was imported by Dominic Sanabria, orphaned, framed for a
crime, then paroled and tucked away at the sister's house to steal back the
dead father's money—" I considered it and nodded. "Yeah, that works.
Let's call it a day."
"I
can tell you this, wise-ass—Bertoli had been arrested on two different
occasions prior to the one he was finally convicted on. First was a car theft
charge, second was assault. In both cases, the guys arrested with him were
known associates of Dominic Sanabria."
The
smirk dried off my face. "You're sure of that—"
"Positive.
Arresting officers confirmed it for me. Said they were insignificant players—I
believe he called them grunts—but that guy was an associate of Sanabria's crew.
No doubt about it." Ken pointed at the file in my hands. "Interested
now— Read on."
I
read on. Bertoli's story was far and away the least interesting of the group.
He'd beaten and then robbed the drug-pushing manager of a truck stop on 1-71,
who claimed Bertoli took cash, though when police apprehended him he had no
cash but did have some heroin. Truck stops are among the less wise locations
for crime. Lonely places along the highway that stay open all night tend to be
paranoid about their security. One of the parking lot security cameras caught
Bertoli, who was smart enough to wear a mask and use a stolen plate, but not
smart enough to use a stolen car. He put the fake plate on his own car—a custom
Impala featuring chrome rims with silver diamond cutouts, hardly the sort of
thing that stands out. It took police under two hours to locate it and arrest
him. Bertoli had a sidekick in the car at the time of the robbery, but it was
no high-level mob player. Rather, his passenger was a kid whose name was
redacted from the report because he was a juvenile. The arresting officer believed
Bertoli had promised to sell the boy the heroin. He was sixteen years old.
The
boy wouldn't testify to Bertoli's intent to sell, claiming he was just along
for the ride and oblivious to the crime, which weakened the case. Although
Bertoli—who was only twenty-three himself—already had three arrests, he didn't
have any convictions. He was offered a plea agreement sentence of five years,
accepted, and served two and a half.
"Kind
of a stiff sentence for somebody who beat up another guy just to take his
drugs," I said, "and odd that he didn't want to take it to trial.
Makes me wonder if—"
"They
tried to get him to roll on somebody and he wouldn't—" Ken said.
"That he was scared of that sort of pressure, so he took the deal and did
his time with his mouth shut to protect himself— Yeah, that was my idea, too—
and where Sanabria figures in, maybe."
"This
piece of criminal masterwork that got him busted hardly seems like a major mob
play, though. He beats the shit out of some guy and steals a small amount of
heroin so he can sell it to an underage kid— Doesn't feel like Dominic
Sanabria's work."
"I
agree, but Bertoli was associated with those guys, and it makes sense that the
prosecutor and the police would have tried to lean on him, doesn't it—"
Yes,
it did—but he'd taken his jail sentence instead of talking. Then, with just a
few years of time behind him for a relatively mundane crime, he somehow became
the next selection of the Cantrell rehabilitation effort. An effort that
promptly went awry. Bertoli spent only three weeks on the property before
leaving. When I saw Ken's note on the date he left, I looked up from the file.
"Hey,"
I said, and Ken turned his eyes away from the window as I held up the first
sheet on Bertoli. "Is this accurate— The release date—"
"Yes."
I
frowned and lowered the sheet. "Harrison was still there. Is that a
mistake—"
"No.
Harrison was the first one to stay longer than six months. I have no idea why.
Maybe they thought he wasn't ready to move on. Maybe he was their favorite
felon. I really have no idea. Anyway, he did his six months, stayed on, and
then they brought Bertoli in, and the two of them lived there together briefly.
Then Bertoli was killed, and the Cantrells took off."
"He
was murdered—"
"Officially,
no. It's listed as an accidental death. He somehow managed to tumble off the
roof of a six-story building. Oops."
He
looked at me with a grim smile, and I dropped my eyes and went back to the file
and read the details. Bertoli left the Cantrells abruptly, claiming to his
parole officer that he was taking a job at a restaurant in Murray Hill,
Cleveland's version of Little Italy. He never logged a day of work at the
restaurant, though. A few days after he left Whisper Ridge, Salvatore Bertoli
fell off the roof of an abandoned warehouse he had no reason to be in, and
Joshua and Alexandra Cantrell fell off the face of the earth.
"If
there's anything related to the Cantrells that feels wrong, it's Bertoli,"
Ken said.
He was
right. Bertoli felt wrong.
"So
let me ask you this," Ken said. "If you've got this case, who of that
group interests you the most—"
"On
the basis of his connection to her brother and his strange demise,
Bertoli," I said. It was as complete a lie as I'd uttered in a
while—Harrison interested me most, of course, but Ken's paperwork history
pointed in a different direction.
He
nodded. "So it would seem, but the detective I talked with, guy named
Graham, was interested in only one person out of that group: Parker
Harrison."
I was
really hoping he'd say Ruzity.
"He
tell you why—" I asked, thinking again of Harrison's letters, how they'd
started just after Joshua Cantrell's bones were found.
"Nope.
Was looking for information, not giving it out. He didn't ask any specific
questions about what I'd found on the other guys, though. Just Harrison."
"The
current detective— Guy who's working on the Pennsylvania side, where the body
was found—"
"That's
right. He was entirely focused on Harrison."
I
didn't say anything. I'd been holding off on sharing my client's identity with
Ken because it felt like the right thing to do, but how honest was it— If I
didn't trust the guy enough to tell him that, then what in the hell was I doing
offering my help to him— You had to pick a side, sooner or later.
I was
quiet for a long time, and Ken was watching me with a touch of confusion, as if
he didn't know what I was brooding over.
"Last
night you wanted to know my client's name," I said.
Ken
nodded.
"Parker
Harrison."
He
leaned forward, eyes wide. "You're shitting me."
I
shook my head. "He'd written me letters for a few months, asking me to
look into it, explaining his history to me. I threw them all out. Then he
showed up in person and seemed reasonably sane and talked me into it. He didn't
mention that Cantrell's body had been found. Once I learned that, I quit."
"Did he know it had been found—"