The Road to You (42 page)

And, for the first time since our road-trip adventure began, we felt we’d finally found an ally.

In the forty-eight hours following the shooting, we were under Billy Neville’s constant protective care and, as such, treated like royalty when it came to our safety and wellbeing. At the police station, where we spent the majority of those hours volleying questions and responses back and forth, we were made more comfortable and secure than if we’d been visiting dignitaries.

Not that Donovan and I weren’t both extremely suspicious at first.

“How did Andy Reggio start working with you?” Donovan asked Billy that first afternoon, distrust cutting sharp edges into his tone. “No one, including him, ever said anything about him being a cop. Just that he’d worked in that motorcycle shop and had an elderly mother in Shamrock.”

I nodded and crossed my arms, agreeing emphatically with Donovan’s skepticism. “And why did he leave after he shot Sebastian? Why didn’t he stay and help you with the body?”

Billy had used Sebastian’s own car keys to open the back of that beige sedan and, with Donovan’s reluctant help, tossed Sebastian’s body into the trunk before anyone at the church could come out and ask questions.

The forty-something Albuquerque police detective didn’t get flustered or defensive during our inquisition, though. He just took a deep breath and said, “There’s a good reason for all of this, and I’ll explain everything I know. Afterward, if you’re able to answer some of my questions, too, I’d really appreciate it.”

We agreed, though it was with a heavy dose of caution.

“To start with,” Billy said, “Andy Reggio isn’t a cop, but he’s a man with many talents. After I met Gideon, I brought Andy into this case as a civilian to do undercover work. He has a way with people and is capable of getting information from some sectors of the population that I cannot. Since I’m stationed out here in New Mexico, I can only travel so far, but Andy’s much more mobile, and he was willing to move around—”

“You talked to my brother?” I asked. “When? Why?”

“I only talked to Gideon in person one time, Aurora, and I’ll get to the details of that in a bit. Andy has been the liaison between me and Gideon ever since then, whereas I’ve been the one who’s primarily in contact with the FBI. I’ve got a couple of good friends there. The case they needed help with involved a major operation that had crossed a number of state lines but had begun in the Midwest. Specifically, in Chicago. There are a handful of bad seeds in the police department there with mob ties and, also, in a few places across the country. The Feds have wanted to put a stop to them for a long time.”

“There are a
lot
of bad seeds, not just a handful,” I said, unwilling to be fully trusting of the man, despite the fact that every vibe I’d gotten from the officer sitting in front of us had been consistently genuine.

Again, he didn’t get mad or become aggressive. Instead, he said gently, “Aurora, not all of us cops are bad. Most of us are not. But, yes, there
are
some—certainly more than we’d like—who are motivated to do illegal things by greed, ambition, excitement or sometimes fear. They get caught up in dangerous, unethical ventures, and they either can’t or won’t get themselves out of it. For me, helping protect the innocent in these circumstances was where I knew I could be of service to my country.”

I tried to remain unmoved by this declaration. “When and why did you meet my brother?” I asked again.

“We met after Sebastian James shot him,” Billy replied. “I’d heard about the truck explosion in Amarillo and, from my underground sources, figured out someone had escaped from the scene, what kind of car the man was driving and which direction he was headed—turned out to be right into Albuquerque. I waited at the eastern edge of the city and then cornered Gideon as he came into town. His car had a couple of hastily patched-up tires, he was bleeding out of his right side and, in the backseat—” He shot a sad, apologetic look at Donovan. “In the backseat was Jeremy’s body. It took some convincing, but I eventually persuaded Gideon that I was one of the good guys.”

Donovan, who had learned his lesson about believing the words of shifty cops, continued to appear indifferent to Billy’s thoughtful statements. But I could tell by his posture and by the pained look in his eyes that he wished he could take the police detective at his word. I could also sense that some part of him had still been holding out a tiny bit of hope that Sebastian had lied about killing Jeremy. Donovan didn’t welcome Billy’s confirmation of this bad news.

“So, Andy had been lying to us on the phone,” Donovan said, with no small degree of accusation. “All those things he talked about, saying he’d asked Gideon how my brother was doing…he knew Jeremy was dead from the beginning. And he told us he’d only seen Gideon twice—in the summer of ’76 and then in May of this year. Sounds like they’d had much more contact than that.”

“Andy was undercover, playing a well-developed role, Donovan. His only objective was to pass along those documents to you from Gideon—which I’d helped them compile—and to get you and Aurora to contact William James,” Billy said. “It was critical to the building of our case that we established proof of a criminal link between Sebastian James and his Minnesota cousin.”

“Why? Didn’t you already know they were criminals? Sebastian James
killed
Jeremy. And his cousin—” I stopped.

True, I’d always distrusted Officer William James and had suspected he’d been a dirty cop for the past two years, but it had been an intuitive thing for me. I couldn’t put my finger on why, exactly, he’d seemed so deceitful, despite his youthful hipness and general popularity. Yet, even
I
had doubted my own perceptions when my brother—via Andy—had said it was okay to trust him.

“Sorry,” I said. “I think, maybe, we need you to start earlier than meeting my brother. Go back to the ‘bad seeds’ and explain how this all started. Please.”

Billy Neville nodded.

“There was a Chicago journalist,” he began, “named Patrick Bradley. Your brother called him Treak. Treak Bradley had been working to crack a big story that involved a vendetta between a crime boss by the name of Vincent Leto and a corrupt union leader called Julian Carello. We’re talking about two major scumbags here, but they’re powerful ones who’ve evaded the law for years, all while threatening each other and retaliating violently whenever they could.”

Billy poured himself some coffee and, after offering us a cup to each of us, continued. “In late 1974, Carello stole Leto’s mistress at the time, and Leto responded by murdering a couple of Carello’s union heads, with the help of Leto’s henchmen, Rick Brice, who’d been on the city’s police force back then. Carello did some nasty stuff in return and framed Brice for it, which resulted in Brice eventually losing his badge.”

I remembered a few hazy details about union problems in those police reports and nodded at the officer, encouraging him to continue.

“In 1975 and ‘76, there was a full-scale war going on between them. Carello’s car and house in Chicago were bombed a number of times, and some of Carello’s ‘business interests’ in other parts of the country—including many holdings in cities along Route 66—went up in flames, too. Leto was a master of union intimidation schemes. While he focused most of his attention on Carello, there were other high-ranking union officers and business owners that were under attack by him as well. Leto needed a steady stream of explosive material that was cheap, easy to make and couldn’t be noticeably traced back to him.”

“So, he went out of state to get it,” Donovan said. “To Crescent Cove, Wisconsin.”

“Yep. He financed a fireworks factory not far from there.” Billy flipped open a box of Girl Scout cookies. “Thin Mint?”

“Thanks,” I said and, to be polite, I took one. Donovan took three.

“The journalist was a bright guy,” Billy said, “and he picked up a few patterns the other investigators had missed. He noticed a link between some of the out-of-state bombings and deliveries by the Americana Trucking company. Especially odd because fireworks were being shipped to some states that had their own big suppliers. And there was one driver whose name kept showing up again and again.”

“Hal Chaney,” I supplied.

“Exactly.” Billy downed several gulps of coffee and popped a chocolate-mint cookie into his mouth. “Addictive, these things,” he said with a wink. “You want another one?”

I shook my head. Donovan took three more.

“Hal was
not
such a bright guy. He wanted to be taken more seriously and paid a higher salary for the jobs he was doing,” the cop said. “But he didn’t understand just how far over his head he was or how expendable the mob would consider someone like him to be.” Billy sighed. “And he screwed up a lot of lives and jeopardized the FBI’s covert investigation because of his idiocy.”

“How did he mess up the investigation?” Donovan said. “Because of his demands?”

Billy bobbed his head. “While Treak was working on the Wisconsin pipe-bomb angle, which the FBI didn’t know about at the time, the government agents were tackling the problem from the corrupt union and dirty cop side. They’d been tracking the progression of union-intimidation bombings throughout cities along Route 66 and had suspected Vincent Leto of spearheading most of them. I’d been recruited by the FBI to act as a potential player in the game. Letting the word out through established undercover agents that I was a police officer who could be bribed.”

“And they tried to bribe you?” I asked.

“Yes. Eventually, I was contacted by one of Leto’s men and offered money if I’d be the cop who’d scotch the details of the investigation in my department and keep the state out when the explosives were detonated. The target was going to be a housing development on the outskirts of Albuquerque. I agreed. My Fed buddies and I were going to be ready to take down the operation when the shipment got here…but it never did.”

“Because word got back to Leto that Hal Chaney was going to talk, and Sebastian James killed him,” I guessed.

“Yes, Aurora.”

“But who killed Treak and that filmmaker, Ben Rainwater?” I asked him. “And who confiscated Gideon’s car and the files in Treak’s apartment?”

“It took us some time to piece all of that together,” the cop admitted. “Your brother was the one who’d helped us a lot with that leg of the investigation. When we matched the description of the man Gideon and Jeremy had seen up at that burnt-out mill in Wisconsin—”

“Bonner Mill,” Donovan interjected.

“That’s right. When we compared his observations to our records and showed him a photograph, it turned out to be Rick Brice,” Billy said.

“I knew it,” I murmured.

The police detective shot me an interested look. “How? How could you have guessed that?”

“From Treak’s notes. I narrowed the names down from there.”

“You have some of his notes?” he asked.

I pulled out the shorthand pages I’d decoded back in Missouri, but I didn’t want to explain how we’d gotten them.

“Don’t worry,” Billy said. “Gideon told me and the core members of our team about Amy Lynn Dreamson and the few items he’d left with her. Her whereabouts are top secret. No need for anyone besides our small circle to know, unless absolutely necessary. It’s safer for her that way.” He studied the sheets of paper I’d handed him. “I was going to arrange to get the film back for evidence but, from what Gideon said of the notes, we didn’t think there would be enough useful information on those few pages to bother retrieving them.” He looked at them more closely. “You decoded these?”

I nodded.

“My name’s on here…”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s why we weren’t all that anxious to meet you.”

He laughed—a good-natured chuckle—and put his hand lightly on my shoulder. “Oh, Aurora. I’m hoping I can make you change your mind about that before too long.”

I
N SPITE
of ourselves, both Donovan and I did, actually, change our minds about Albuquerque police detective Billy Neville. By the end of that very first night, he’d won us over, earned our trust and did the near impossible—made us believe once again that police officers were truly there to serve and protect.

Over the course of the next day or so, as we continued to exchange information with Billy, we realized that Treak had dug up many of the correct facts, but he’d picked up on the whisperings of his underground contacts and believed the mob party line about Billy being on the wrong side of the law.