Chapter 11 #3
“And a bullet between the eyes, of all things.” I glanced over at Edwina. Her breathing had evened out. She was definitely asleep now. “Would a jealous girlfriend really do that? Wouldn’t she be more likely to shoot him in a rage, and go for the heart?”
Unless she had wanted to make it look like a mob hit to deflect suspicion. To do that, she would have had to know about the mob, and I didn’t know if she did.
So maybe it looked like a mob hit because it was one. Maybe Gio Abruzzi or Izzy Spataro or someone like them had made his way into Nick’s apartment and shot him.
They wouldn’t have had any problem with the lock. And if they’d discovered that Nick had involved the police—if it was Nick who had involved the police—they might very well want to make an example of him. That kind of thing couldn’t be encouraged.
By this point, we had made our way out of Bellevue all the way to Pegram, and now I turned the car onto a smaller road, one with an uneven surface that hadn’t been paved in a while. Edwina opened her eyes and then raised her head to look around.
“Sorry,” I told her as I kept going. “Detour. We were almost in Pegram anyway, and I thought we’d take a look at where Sal lives.”
Edwina put her head down on her paws, but she kept her eyes open.
“This is the road he lives on. Now I just have to find the number…”
The landscape had changed as we left Nashville, from neat, square lots with neat houses to more rural, more wooded. Out here, people had acreage, privacy, and the kind of space you couldn’t afford closer to the city.
The road became narrower as we went, a winding country lane with houses set well back from the road, behind fields or large lawns.
Some were old farmhouses, others were newer constructions designed to look rustic.
Here and there was an old mobile home that had seen better days.
All of them screamed ‘leave me alone’ in one way or another.
When the numbers matched what Rachel had told me, I slowed to a crawl.
Sal’s house was set back from the road at the end of a long gravel driveway.
It was a log cabin, the kind that looked like it belonged in the mountains rather than thirty minutes from downtown Nashville.
Not ostentatious, exactly, but certainly large, and impressive in its own way.
The logs were dark and weathered, and the roof was a steep pitch that probably made the upstairs feel like a proper second story rather than just an attic.
Plenty of windows, a wraparound porch, and what looked like at least three thousand square feet.
To no one’s surprise—or at least not mine—there was a garage adjacent to the house, with no less than five doors.
They were all closed, but it looked like Sal owned plenty of toys.
In front of the garage sat what appeared to be Lieutenant Samantha Copeland’s unmarked sedan.
I pulled over to the side of the road and sat there for a moment, engine idling, staring up the driveway. The gate was open, but it had a No Trespassing sign prominently displayed. On the sign, just to make the point absolutely clear, was a silhouette of a shotgun.
“Better not,” I told Edwina, who was peering through the window just as intently as I was. “The sign isn’t encouraging. And it looks like Lieutenant Copeland is already here, anyway. She must be informing Sal about Nick. Or questioning him. Or both.”
Edwina’s tail wagged uncertainly.
“We’re not going up there,” I assured her. “Even if the gate is open, that No Trespassing sign means business, and the last thing I need is to get arrested by Lieutenant Copeland for snooping.”
And why would I snoop, anyway? Sal wasn’t a suspect. He was Nick’s boss, his mentor, the man who’d taken him in and given him a trade. By all accounts, they’d had a good relationship.
Although Sal also owned a business that was being used for money laundering. Money laundering that Nick, according to Mendoza, was responsible for. History or not, Sal might justifiably be resentful of that.
And according to the sign, he might even own one or more guns.
Unless the sign was just for deterrence, of course. That was possible, too.
“Lieutenant Copeland will probably ask,” I told Edwina, “don’t you think? And then they’ll run ballistics tests and that sort of thing. And if there’s a match to the bullet they’ll probably dig out of Nick’s head, then Sal will be arrested.”
Edwina yawned.
I nodded. “Right, that’s not our problem. All we were asked to do, was prove whether Nick was cheating on Jacquie. We did that. We’re not responsible for what happens next.”
The murder investigation was out of my hands, where it should be, and so was the money laundering operation.
The police were handling both, and didn’t need my help.
Mendoza and Megan had their undercover gigs, and Lieutenant Copeland would figure out who had killed Nick. There was nothing more for me to do.
Except go home, pour myself a glass of wine, and try to pretend that this day had never happened.
“Come on, Edwina,” I said as I put the Lexus back in gear and continued down the narrow country road to the end of the cul-de-sac, where the map indicated that I could turn around. “Let’s go home and get a snack.”
Edwina wagged her tail in agreement, and put her snout back down on her back legs for the ride home.