Silent Island by Dana Perry

Author:Dana Perry [Perry, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-SEVEN

Chief Wilhelm was flustered. And mad. Really mad. As mad as I’d ever seen him.

And, of course, he was mad at me.

“Wait a minute!” he said after I told him about our interview with Ruggerio at his house. “You’ve been telling me for days now that Ruggerio is the guy who did all this. Pushed me to help you get a warrant to force him to talk, even though you had no real hard evidence against him. But I finally let you get the warrant – the warrant you said would break the case wide open with Ruggerio – and now you tell me that he’s innocent?”

“He’s far from innocent,” I said. “He’s a bad guy. Really bad guy. He belongs in jail. They should lock him up and throw away the key, as far as I’m concerned. But I don’t think he killed Thomas Lavelle and his family – or snatched their daughter.”

“And yet you confronted one of the richest and most powerful people on this island and practically accused him of the murders.”

“I thought then he did it. Now I don’t.”

“Because he told you ‘I didn’t do it’. And you believed him?”

“Uh, yes…”

“Jesus, Pearce!”

“It’s more than just that. He convinced me he had no motive. That he wasn’t angry with Lavelle. That Lavelle helped him, the same way he helped a lot of his other patients that we checked out. Without a motive, the case against Ruggerio falls apart.”

“What about the reservation for the Lavelles that he made at The Beach House? You used that as the basis for us getting the damn warrant.”

“I don’t think that it was him who made the reservation. I think someone else used his name. They wanted to set him up as a suspect for us.”

“Why?”

I shrugged.

“Ruggerio’s an easy target. Anyone would believe he could do something so terrible as wipe out an entire family. Hell, I believed it too. But this isn’t about Ruggerio. Oh, he’s part of it for some reason, whether he realizes it or not. But someone else is out there pulling all the strings. We don’t know who that is.”

That’s when Wilhelm really lost it.

“Goddamit, Pearce, you’ve come up with nothing on this case! I know you’re supposed to be this hotshot ex-NYPD homicide detective. But I have to go the mayor and the city council now and tell them what we know. What am I supposed to tell them? They’re not going to be happy with me.”

I thought about saying to Wilhelm that he should tell the unhappy mayor and city council leaders how much he’d contributed himself to this investigation. That ought to give them a laugh.

But I bit my tongue instead. It wasn’t easy, but I didn’t want to take a chance of being suspended by him for insubordination or something. I needed to stay on this case, no matter what. Even though I wasn’t exactly sure what to do next.

The hard truth was that I felt as lost on the Lavelle case at the moment as Chief Wilhelm.

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