Free Falling Into You by Maureen Smith Page B

a mound of paperwork. He was oblivious to the
hidden video camera that enabled two undercover cops to spy on him from a
nondescript police trailer parked on the other side of town.
    “I don’t understand this guy,” Frank
muttered, shoveling a thick French fry into his mouth. “He’s rich enough to
hire a whole team of people to do his filing and bookkeeping, yet he insists on
handling those responsibilities himself.”
    “Maybe he doesn’t trust anyone else to do the
job right,” Vince suggested. “You said yourself he’s a major control freak.”
    “Yeah. And maybe he knows he can’t trust
anyone with confidential information about his business dealings. The fact that
one of his very own ‘bouncers’ is running surveillance on him is proof that he shouldn’t trust anybody.”
    “Must be a damned lonely existence.”  
    Frank snorted. “Small price to pay for being
filthy rich.”
    “Yeah,” Vince muttered. “It’s the ‘filthy’
part I’m worried about.”
    Frank gave him a long, appraising look. “Have
you ever considered the possibility that Rossi’s clean?”
    “No.”
    “Come on, man. Not even once?”
    Vince hesitated, then gruffly admitted,
“Maybe once.”
    “Yeah, me, too. I mean, I just find it a
little hard to believe that after five years of investigating this guy, the
feds haven’t been able to build a case against him.”
    “That’s not unusual. It happens more often
than we’d like to think.”
    “I know, but after all the time and money
that’s been spent on investigating Rossi, the only ‘evidence’ we’ve come up
with are a few questionable transactions to an account in the Cayman Islands
and his long-ago connection to the leader of another money laundering
enterprise, who Rossi hasn’t been in touch with for years. Even after the guy
served his time and got out a couple of years ago, Rossi made no attempt to
contact him, and vice versa.” Bemused, Frank shook his head. “If you ask me, Rossi
pissed off the wrong person at the top of the food chain, and now he’s doing
penance for it.”
    Vince said nothing, though the same thought
had occurred to him on more than one occasion. Frank was right. They had very
little evidence on Bruno Rossi. His phone records were cleaner than the Pope’s,
his financial holdings had held up under intense scrutiny by the IRS and FBI, and hours of surveillance tapes
had failed to reveal any clandestine meetings with shady “business associates.”
But Vince had learned from his own father that nothing was ever as it seemed.
    Vince McCall, Sr. had been a vice cop with
the Chicago Police Department for nineteen years. Frustrated with getting
passed over for promotions year after year, he’d yielded to temptation and
joined his partner in a money laundering operation that netted them over
$200,000 before they were eventually caught.
    Were it not for the slick-tongued,
high-priced attorney who’d defended them during the trial, Vince’s father may
have spent his remaining days on earth behind bars, instead of in a cold
hospital bed at Northwestern Memorial, his body ravaged by lung cancer. He’d
died without benefit of a stately police funeral, leaving a legacy of shame and
corruption that tainted the lives of his surviving wife and children. Three
years later, Vince’s mother succumbed to depression and quietly wasted away.
After that, Vince and his older sister dispersed—she to Los Angeles, he
to Baltimore, both desperately in pursuit of new lives.
    Oh, yeah. Vince definitely knew a thing or
two about not judging a book by its pretty cover. If anyone had told him that
his father—devoted family man and pillar of the community—was a
common criminal, Vince would have knocked the unlucky bastard’s lights out.
    Now he knew better.
    If Bruno Rossi was engaged in illegal
activity, Vince considered it his personal duty to uncover the truth and bring
him to justice.
    Nothing less would do.  
    “I’m not just defending Rossi