Tied Up in Knots (Marshals 3)

“So Fiore saves him and then turns round and kills him?” I was incredulous. “This is what Darra would have you believe?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell him to go fuck himself and charge his lying ass.” I was done and turned to go.

He grabbed hold of my shoulder to keep me there, and I rolled it, out of habit, instinctively, because someone I didn’t like was touching me. “Wait,” he barked. “The gun he gave us, the ballistics matched.”

“What gun? The gun he turned over to you?” I said, exasperated that I was having to stand there and listen to his bullshit.

“Yeah.”

“Well of course the ballistics match. He killed Romelli, probably on orders from Tony Strada. The last thing you fuckin’ want around when you’re the new boss is the old boss’s kid.”

“Yeah, that’s what we thought, but when we ran the DNA on the gun—there was Romelli’s on the muzzle, like the gun was shoved down his throat—and someone other than Darra’s on the grip.”

“So?” I was so aggravated. Cochran had always taken forever to get to the point.

“So Romelli was killed execution-style with a bullet in the back of his head. That’s why everyone figured it was a mob hit.”

“Then what?”

“Well, now we think whoever did it shoved his gun in Romelli’s mouth first—probably so he’d know who was pulling the trigger—and then shot him like he did to make it look like everyone would expect.”

“Okay, so lemme wrap my head around this. You have the gun, the ballistics match, so it’s for sure the one used to kill Romelli, but Darra’s DNA isn’t on it, and he says it was Fiore.”

“Yeah, plus we have Fiore’s prints.”

“You have Fiore’s prints on the weapon?”

He nodded.

“So bring his ass in.” I almost growled. “The fuck does this have to do with me?”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?” I retorted, done, at the end of my rope. I wanted to eat and go home and pass out. “You’ve got prints, DNA—get a court order and test Fiore’s DNA.”

“Yeah, we can’t get an order.”

“Why the hell not?!”

“Because we don’t have the gun.”

“What do you mean you don’t have the gun?” He was making no sense and I was a second away from walking—hoping he’d try and grab me again. I really wanted to hit him. Some of it was his fault because of our past and because he’d always been fucking irritating. But a lot of it was Ian and how much I missed him and how stretched thin with yearning I was. I needed my man home, and this close to getting it—a mere day—I was in that headspace where anticipation became panic racing around in my head like a cat scrambling after a mouse. I was scared something was going to happen and Ian would be gone again. I was taking it out on Cochran, but he was taking for-fucking-ever to get to the point. “You just said you got prints and DNA and—”

“We don’t have the gun ’cause it was transferred to the marshals by mistake,” he explained almost sheepishly.

“Come again?” I asked, incredulous, beside myself.

He cleared this throat. “My lieutenant—”

“Who’s that now?”

“Cortez.”

“Okay, sorry, g’head.”

“Yeah, so Cortez transferred three guns to your office because, like your guy said in the diner, lots of cases are being looked at by Justice right now, and lots of evidence is being reexamined. So our gun went back to evidence after ballistics and prints and DNA was run, but from there it was accidentally transferred to you.”

“What does it matter? It was tested for prints, which you got, and you’ve got the sample of whoever’s DNA was on it, so just get Fiore’s sample and match it… or not. It’s done either way.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Of course it is. The prints will compel the DNA sample.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“No? How the hell you figure no?”

“The ASA assigned to the case—Sutter—she says that without the gun, it’s our word against Fiore’s that the prints were from the gun. She says they could’ve come off anything, and it could look like we’re trying to set him up. Fiore could make a case for tampering.”

“Are you serious?” I asked, overwhelmed with the stupidity of all of this.

“Yeah, I’m serious!” Cochran flared. “Without the goddamn gun, we can’t make Fiore give us a DNA sample.”

If I thought about it logically, that made sense. No judge in their right mind would issue a court order to compel Fiore to give them a DNA sample if the item his DNA was supposed to be on was, in fact, missing. What if it was always missing? Never found? What did that say about the police department that they’d had the weapon in their possession but didn’t anymore? What if the prints in question had come from somewhere or something completely different, and Andreo Fiore had, in fact, never even been in the room where Joey Romelli was killed? It was a mess.