Daylight (Atlee Pine #3)(2)
“Funny thing, Pine. I started out in Trenton more years ago than I can remember. It was going through some challenging times back then. It’s going through more challenging times right now.” He paused. “Okay, a few more days. If you need any backup or info, dial up the guys there and tell them Clint Dobbs said it’s okay. They won’t believe you, but they’ll believe it when I tell them it’s true.”
Pine glanced at Blum with wide eyes. “Um, I was not expecting that.”
“I wasn’t expecting to say it, Pine. The offer just popped into my head. But I need to make this point as clear as I can: You have to finish this and come home. You got that? The Bureau pays your salary to work for them. I know I told you to go after this to get your head straight, but at the end of the day that’s your problem, not mine. And you’re not the only agent I have to deal with, okay? I got hundreds of them, and they all got problems. You got that?”
“Yes, sir. Got it. And I’m so grateful. Thank you for—”
But Dobbs had already clicked off.
Pine slowly put the phone down. “New Jersey, here we come.”
CHAPTER
2
TWO DAYS LATER, Pine was driving in her rental car through a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Trenton. She was thinking about what she would say to Anthony “Tony” Vincenzo, who sometimes stayed at the home his father, Teddy, had apparently inherited from his father, Ito Vincenzo. She didn’t want to deal with the inevitable red tape of visiting Teddy Vincenzo in prison if she didn’t have to; Tony was low-hanging fruit. But with her current frame of mind, if Tony chose not to help her, she might just shoot him.
As the grandson of Ito Vincenzo, Tony could possibly tell her something about Ito—hopefully where he currently was, if he was still alive.
And that might lead to Mercy, which was why she was here, after all. The road to Mercy had been long and tortuous, and some days the destination seemed as unreachable as the summit of Mt. Everest. But now that Pine finally had a breakthrough in the case, she was going for it. And if it took her longer than a few days, so be it. Pine had been compelled to hunt for her sister after a disastrous encounter with a pedophile who had kidnapped a little girl in Colorado. Her rage, fueled by the memory of her own sister’s abduction, had resulted in Pine’s almost beating the man to death and breaking every rule the Bureau had. Clint Dobbs had given her an ultimatum: Resolve her personal issues about her sister or find another line of work. But now she didn’t need any motivation from Dobbs or anyone else. Now she would willingly chuck her FBI career in exchange for finding her sister.
It’s not just my job that I won’t be able to do if I don’t find out what happened to my sister. It’s my life that I won’t be able to do.
Being able to admit this to herself had been both frightening and liberating.
With a Glock as her main weapon and a Beretta Nano stuck in an ankle holster in case everything else went to hell—which it often did in her line of work—Pine pulled to a stop three cookie-cutter houses down from Vincenzo’s humble abode.
All the homes here were salt boxes with asphalt shingles, about 1,200 square feet set over a story and a half of unremarkable architecture. The area was all post–World War II housing, constituting a grid of homes that had surrounded virtually every city across the country within a decade after the “boys” had come home from fighting Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. Nine or so months thereafter, Baby Boomers by the millions were born in neighborhoods just like this. Those Boomers were now taking their rightful place as grandparents to the Millennials and the Z generations. What was left was an old, tired group of dwellings inhabited both by the elderly and also those just starting out.
Though they looked alike, the properties did differ. Some yards were neat and organized. Siding and trim were freshly painted. Mailboxes rested on stout metal posts, and washed cars were parked in driveways that had been kept up.
Other homes had none of these attributes. The cars in the driveways or parked in the yards were more often resting on cinder blocks than on tires. The sounds of air-powered tools popping and generators rumbling foretold that some of these places had businesses operating out of them, either legal or not. Siding peeled away from these structures, and front doors were missing panes of glass. Mailboxes were leaning or entirely gone. Driveways were more weeds than concrete or gravel.
She counted three dwellings with bullet holes in the fa?ade, and one that still had police crime scene tape swirling in the tricky wind.
Tony Vincenzo’s place fell into the houses-that-hadn’t-been-kept-up category. But she didn’t care what his home looked like. She only wanted everything he held in his memory or in hard evidence about his grandfather Ito and any others who might have played a role in her childhood nightmare.
She eased out of her car and stared at the front of the house. Ito Vincenzo had once owned this place and had raised his family here with his wife. Pine had no idea what sort of a father and husband he was. But if he had it in him to nearly kill one little girl and kidnap another, she would rate his parental skills suspect, at the very least.
Tony Vincenzo worked at Fort Dix, the nearby army installation. The prison where his father was behind bars was part of that complex. Maybe the son wanted to be close to the father. If so, maybe Tony visited Teddy regularly and thus might have information to share about Ito that he’d learned from his old man.