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bedlamsbard*pokes warily* Ha! I told you guys I'd get it done someday. Well, someday has come, and so has the next chapter of Omerta. Just as a reminder, Omerta does take place after Black Monday, so the Mac/Stella I posted earlier should be considered Snafu canon. And if that tells you something, more power to you.
“Messer,” Danny said, flipping his phone up to his ear after stripping off one glove. He sighed. “Val. Jesus. What the hell do you want?”
“I wanted to say I was sorry, Danny,” Val said.
“Oh, now’s a hell of a time to tell me that,” Danny scowled. Across the lab bench, Aiden raised an eyebrow at him. “Val Constantine?” she mouthed.
“Shut up,” Danny mouthed back.
“If I got you into any trouble –”
“Val. My boss just found out my uncle’s a made guy and that I spent four years of my life with Tanglewood. What do you think?”
Val sighed. “Danny, I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Oh, nice’a you to let me know.”
“I need a favor.”
“What?” His hands went abruptly white-knuckled on the edge of the lab bench, even before he realized he’d placed them there. “Jesus, Val, what the hell, no.”
“It’s important,” Val said with more fervor than Danny had heard in years. “I need to see Joey –”
“He killed a guy, Val. You really want me to lose my job? No.”
“He didn’t kill anyone, Danny,” Val snapped. “He was framed. I can prove it. I just need to talk to him –”
“Fat fucking chance. He’s Mafia, you think anyone’s gonna believe him when he says he didn’t kill Mac’s vic? No fucking way, don.”
“I’ve had my people on this case since Joey called me,” Val said flatly. “I can’t afford to put them on something like this, and half of them have been doing nothing but for the past twelve hours. The Family’s spread thin enough as it is. Damn it, Danny, we aren’t one of the Five Families. We can’t afford this. Joey didn’t kill Darin Pagliuca.”
“Yeah?” Danny said. “Well, what about all the other people he’s killed? You can’t tell me he’s never done a job for you, Val. Maybe I don’t know about it, but you can’t lie to me about that. If not Darin Pagliu –” He stopped abruptly. Pagliuca. Darin Pagliuca. Nicky Pagliuca. Capo di tutti capi. Joey Sforza. Constantine. Patriso. The Mafia Commission. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Darin Pagliuca’s dead?”
“I thought that might get through to you,” Val said, with taut satisfaction in his voice.
Danny shook his head. “I used to run with the guy,” he said faintly. “He wasn’t Tanglewood, but – Jesus. Joey killed him?”
“What part of ‘Joey didn’t do it’ didn’t get through to you?” Val thundered.
Danny yanked the phone away from his ear and shouted back into it, “I think I missed it because of the part where he’s a Mafia consigliere.”
“Danny,” Val sighed. “If Darin Pagliuca was dead, don’t you think the city would know about it by now? Don’t you think the Pagliuca Family would have come down on us, or on the Crime Lab? Don’t you think the Commission wouldn’t be demanding justice?”
“I thought you just said Darin Pagliuca was dead,” Danny scowled. “Now you’re sayin’ he’s not? Make up your fuckin’ mind, Val.”
“Darin Pagliuca is missing, Danny,” Val said. “The body Taylor found had all his ID, but it wasn’t Darin Pagliuca.”
Danny tried to digest this. Mac would have known. Mac didn’t screw up, no matter how much Danny sometimes wanted him to. Wanted him to break that perfect glass surface and just see him crash and fall and burn. “You’re lying, Val.”
“I’m not,” Val snapped. “You think I can spare the people I have working on this? I can’t. And I sure as hell can’t afford them looking in the wrong direction. I have my sources, Danny, and that body isn’t Darin Pagliuca’s and Joey didn’t kill him. I need to talk to Joey.”
“Well, you’re damn well not going to,” Danny snapped back. “Take it to Mac, Val, maybe he’ll believe you.” He snapped his phone shut on Val’s sharp intake of breath and glared down at the evidence from the Anna Dove homicide. “Where were we?”
Aiden eyed him with interest. “You,” she said, “are so fucking dead when Mac finds out about this.”
“Mac’s not gonna find out,” Danny said flatly.
She watched him a moment with her eyebrows raised and her mouth cocked in disbelief. “Yeah,” she said. “Just keep telling yourself that. I’ll send flowers to the funeral.”
*
“Nicodemo Pagliuca,” Mac said to Stella as she came into his office.
“Head of the Pagliuca Family, yeah,” she replied, perching on the corner of his desk. “What about it?”
“You know he’s Darin Pagliuca’s father.”
“Kind of hard to miss that, so yeah.” She arched her eyebrows at him. “What’s your point?”
“DNA just came back,” Mac said. He pushed the folder over his desk toward her. “I did some checking. Both Darin Pagliuca and Nicodemo Pagliuca have been arrested before; Darin did three years for robbery back in ’97. Their DNA’s in CODIS, their prints are in AFIS.”
“Yeah, we do tend to do that when we arrest someone, if you haven’t noticed yet, Mac,” Stella said. She flipped the folder open. “What, haven’t you had your coffee yet this morning?” Damn it, and it was morning too. Three in the fucking morning. Christ. There were days she hated this job, and those were usually the ones when she pulled an all-nighter. Fun as those could be.
That must have been the reason she had to read over the DNA report twice, just to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her. Lack of sleep. Too much coffee. “Our vic’s DNA doesn’t match up with Darin Pagliuca’s,” she said, and read the report once more for good measure. “You know, I’m pretty sure that’s not normal. Aren’t people’s DNA’s usually supposed to match up with their own?”
“Fingerprints too,” Mac said. He offered her another file folder. Stella blinked at it, looked down at the one in her hand, and waved it away. “I’ll take your word on it, Mac. If our vic’s not Darin Pagliuca, then who the hell is he, and why does he have all of Pagliuca’s ID?”
“I’d been wondering that myself,” Mac admitted. “I didn’t run Pagliuca’s – the vic’s – prints because I assumed that he was Darin Pagliuca and there didn’t seem to be any reason to at the time. But since he isn’t – I want to doublecheck with dental records, and try and get a family member in here to get a negative ID on the body.”
“Mac, if you don’t’ remember, there’s not really anything to ID. The vic’s face was smashed to a pulp.”
“Which would hold off on visual ID, yes,” Mac tapped his fingers on his desk lightly. “I also want to go back over the crime scene, treat like it’s a new investigation. We’ve been working off the assumption that the vic was Darin Pagliuca, but since he isn’t –”
“That completely changes the dynamics of the case, yeah,” Stella said. She flipped the folder closed and handed it back to Mac. “We don’t have an ID on the vic, then. No match in CODIS or in AFIS –”
“Maybe we’ll get something off of dental,” Mac shrugged. He seemed reluctant to continue for a moment, then he said, “If our vic isn’t who he seems to be –”
“Then maybe our perp isn’t either,” Stella finished. “You want to take another look at Joey Sforza?”
Mac sighed. “Like I said, I want to take another look at this whole case. There’s something a little strange going on here.”
“That’s one way to put it.” She waggled her eyebrows at him, and he ducked his head with a small sheepish smile lingering at the corners of his mouth. “I’ll try and get a hold of the family again. They were out of town last time I called, but maybe –”
“I’ll go with you,” Mac said immediately. “They are Cosa Nostra, after all.”
“ ‘This thing of ours,’” Stella translated. “Anything sounds good in Italian. Better in Greek, though.” She paused a moment, thinking. “I guess the question is, how’d our vic end up with all of Darin Pagliuca’s ID? Someone obviously wanted us to think he was Darin Pagliuca, but they must have known we’d find out sooner or later.”
“Danny let something slip when he was in here earlier,” Mac said. “He said that Nicky Pagliuca was capo di tutti capi – boss of all bosses.”
“Head of the Italian Mafia,” Stella said. Then she blinked. “Wait – I thought nobody knew who’d gotten the job after John Valachi –”
“Danny knew,” Mac said. He was frowning a little. “Joey Sforza is one of Val Constantine’s men.”
“Yes. Thus Val Constantine coming in here at one in the morning with a lawyer and a bunch of mob guys.” Curious, she watched Mac’s face. He hadn’t lost it again, had he? He seemed to have reacted surprisingly well to the news Danny was connected, although surprisingly well in Mac’s case had never meant much. He’d been a little more sane in the past months than he had since Claire died, and while she didn’t want to hope that it was because of Chicago – don’t think of Chicago, she told herself, because that was a train of thought she really didn’t want to take while still at work, with Mac in front of her. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“One of the few good prints we lifted matched up to a man known as the Sphinx. His real name is Roy Dimassi. He works for the Patriso Family.”
Stella blinked. “Oh, yeah, I remember. Remind me again why we didn’t haul him in?”
“Dimassi vanished last year when a court order was issued for his DNA in relation to the 1995 shooting of John Vallaria,” Mac said. “John Valachi’s underboss. The FBI’s still looking for him, but –”
“The obviously haven’t found him,” Stella shrugged. “So so far we’ve got a John Doe with Darin Pagliuca’s ID – Darin Pagliuca, who happens to be the son of the godfather of the New York mob – a suspect, who happens to be one of Don Val Constantine’s most trusted advisors, and a fingerprint matching up to a missing Patriso guy. Didn’t one of Constantine’s guys say something about a turf war going on between the Constantine Family and the Patriso Family?”
“It’s been all over the news,” Mac said. Then he corrected himself, “Well, not exactly all over, but it’s come up a time or two in the past few months. No one at the Post seems to know the proper cause, but Constantine and Patriso men have both been killed. Patriso and Constantine men both showing up in the same case, which happens to involve another mobbed up guy –”
“It’s a set-up,” Stella said. She shook her head in disbelief. “Jesus, how’d we not see this before?”
“It wasn’t exactly obvious,” Mac said. “There’s no evidence to prove that Joey Sforza is innocent and plenty to show that he’s guilty, but there’s a reasonable doubt now –”
“Plus, the whole vic not being who we thought he was thing.” Stella shook her head again. “I thought we’d closed this case. Damn. And here I was hoping I could get a full night of sleep, too.”
Mac looked about to say something, then he closed his mouth, bending down over his files.
“Spit it out, Mac,” Stella said, hopping off his desk and working the kinks out of her legs.
He sighed. “Stella…”
She’d heard that tone of voice before. A lot, actually. Too much for her to be happy about, but there was something reassuring in the familiarity of his exasperation. “Mac,” she replied, prompting a little.
He smiled almost shyly, something small and unsure and awkward looking. Stella tried to push away the tiny thrill that uncurled in the pit of her stomach, because this was Mac, and they were at work, and it was New York, not Chicago, and he was actually not about to have a nervous breakdown, unless she’d misjudged his mood of the past hour or so, which was possible. It always made her nervous when he smiled, even as it made her grin in return. Dinner, she promised herself, remembering the red silk dress in the back of her closet. Sometime soon. After we close this case. Somewhere nice. Dinner, and that would be all. A chance to catch up on whatever they’d missed in the flurry of late summer cases. Talk, and maybe some dancing and drinking, depending on where they went. Dinner and conversation and drinks, like partners did.
Mac’s nervous smile faltered a little after a moment. “If we’re not too busy,” he said hesitantly, “would you like to go out for breakfast later?”
Stella’s jaw dropped. Okay, maybe he has lost his mind. If this was his new form of insanity, though, then maybe she liked it. “Sure,” she said, grinning widely. “Any time.”
“Messer,” Danny said, flipping his phone up to his ear after stripping off one glove. He sighed. “Val. Jesus. What the hell do you want?”
“I wanted to say I was sorry, Danny,” Val said.
“Oh, now’s a hell of a time to tell me that,” Danny scowled. Across the lab bench, Aiden raised an eyebrow at him. “Val Constantine?” she mouthed.
“Shut up,” Danny mouthed back.
“If I got you into any trouble –”
“Val. My boss just found out my uncle’s a made guy and that I spent four years of my life with Tanglewood. What do you think?”
Val sighed. “Danny, I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Oh, nice’a you to let me know.”
“I need a favor.”
“What?” His hands went abruptly white-knuckled on the edge of the lab bench, even before he realized he’d placed them there. “Jesus, Val, what the hell, no.”
“It’s important,” Val said with more fervor than Danny had heard in years. “I need to see Joey –”
“He killed a guy, Val. You really want me to lose my job? No.”
“He didn’t kill anyone, Danny,” Val snapped. “He was framed. I can prove it. I just need to talk to him –”
“Fat fucking chance. He’s Mafia, you think anyone’s gonna believe him when he says he didn’t kill Mac’s vic? No fucking way, don.”
“I’ve had my people on this case since Joey called me,” Val said flatly. “I can’t afford to put them on something like this, and half of them have been doing nothing but for the past twelve hours. The Family’s spread thin enough as it is. Damn it, Danny, we aren’t one of the Five Families. We can’t afford this. Joey didn’t kill Darin Pagliuca.”
“Yeah?” Danny said. “Well, what about all the other people he’s killed? You can’t tell me he’s never done a job for you, Val. Maybe I don’t know about it, but you can’t lie to me about that. If not Darin Pagliu –” He stopped abruptly. Pagliuca. Darin Pagliuca. Nicky Pagliuca. Capo di tutti capi. Joey Sforza. Constantine. Patriso. The Mafia Commission. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Darin Pagliuca’s dead?”
“I thought that might get through to you,” Val said, with taut satisfaction in his voice.
Danny shook his head. “I used to run with the guy,” he said faintly. “He wasn’t Tanglewood, but – Jesus. Joey killed him?”
“What part of ‘Joey didn’t do it’ didn’t get through to you?” Val thundered.
Danny yanked the phone away from his ear and shouted back into it, “I think I missed it because of the part where he’s a Mafia consigliere.”
“Danny,” Val sighed. “If Darin Pagliuca was dead, don’t you think the city would know about it by now? Don’t you think the Pagliuca Family would have come down on us, or on the Crime Lab? Don’t you think the Commission wouldn’t be demanding justice?”
“I thought you just said Darin Pagliuca was dead,” Danny scowled. “Now you’re sayin’ he’s not? Make up your fuckin’ mind, Val.”
“Darin Pagliuca is missing, Danny,” Val said. “The body Taylor found had all his ID, but it wasn’t Darin Pagliuca.”
Danny tried to digest this. Mac would have known. Mac didn’t screw up, no matter how much Danny sometimes wanted him to. Wanted him to break that perfect glass surface and just see him crash and fall and burn. “You’re lying, Val.”
“I’m not,” Val snapped. “You think I can spare the people I have working on this? I can’t. And I sure as hell can’t afford them looking in the wrong direction. I have my sources, Danny, and that body isn’t Darin Pagliuca’s and Joey didn’t kill him. I need to talk to Joey.”
“Well, you’re damn well not going to,” Danny snapped back. “Take it to Mac, Val, maybe he’ll believe you.” He snapped his phone shut on Val’s sharp intake of breath and glared down at the evidence from the Anna Dove homicide. “Where were we?”
Aiden eyed him with interest. “You,” she said, “are so fucking dead when Mac finds out about this.”
“Mac’s not gonna find out,” Danny said flatly.
She watched him a moment with her eyebrows raised and her mouth cocked in disbelief. “Yeah,” she said. “Just keep telling yourself that. I’ll send flowers to the funeral.”
*
“Nicodemo Pagliuca,” Mac said to Stella as she came into his office.
“Head of the Pagliuca Family, yeah,” she replied, perching on the corner of his desk. “What about it?”
“You know he’s Darin Pagliuca’s father.”
“Kind of hard to miss that, so yeah.” She arched her eyebrows at him. “What’s your point?”
“DNA just came back,” Mac said. He pushed the folder over his desk toward her. “I did some checking. Both Darin Pagliuca and Nicodemo Pagliuca have been arrested before; Darin did three years for robbery back in ’97. Their DNA’s in CODIS, their prints are in AFIS.”
“Yeah, we do tend to do that when we arrest someone, if you haven’t noticed yet, Mac,” Stella said. She flipped the folder open. “What, haven’t you had your coffee yet this morning?” Damn it, and it was morning too. Three in the fucking morning. Christ. There were days she hated this job, and those were usually the ones when she pulled an all-nighter. Fun as those could be.
That must have been the reason she had to read over the DNA report twice, just to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her. Lack of sleep. Too much coffee. “Our vic’s DNA doesn’t match up with Darin Pagliuca’s,” she said, and read the report once more for good measure. “You know, I’m pretty sure that’s not normal. Aren’t people’s DNA’s usually supposed to match up with their own?”
“Fingerprints too,” Mac said. He offered her another file folder. Stella blinked at it, looked down at the one in her hand, and waved it away. “I’ll take your word on it, Mac. If our vic’s not Darin Pagliuca, then who the hell is he, and why does he have all of Pagliuca’s ID?”
“I’d been wondering that myself,” Mac admitted. “I didn’t run Pagliuca’s – the vic’s – prints because I assumed that he was Darin Pagliuca and there didn’t seem to be any reason to at the time. But since he isn’t – I want to doublecheck with dental records, and try and get a family member in here to get a negative ID on the body.”
“Mac, if you don’t’ remember, there’s not really anything to ID. The vic’s face was smashed to a pulp.”
“Which would hold off on visual ID, yes,” Mac tapped his fingers on his desk lightly. “I also want to go back over the crime scene, treat like it’s a new investigation. We’ve been working off the assumption that the vic was Darin Pagliuca, but since he isn’t –”
“That completely changes the dynamics of the case, yeah,” Stella said. She flipped the folder closed and handed it back to Mac. “We don’t have an ID on the vic, then. No match in CODIS or in AFIS –”
“Maybe we’ll get something off of dental,” Mac shrugged. He seemed reluctant to continue for a moment, then he said, “If our vic isn’t who he seems to be –”
“Then maybe our perp isn’t either,” Stella finished. “You want to take another look at Joey Sforza?”
Mac sighed. “Like I said, I want to take another look at this whole case. There’s something a little strange going on here.”
“That’s one way to put it.” She waggled her eyebrows at him, and he ducked his head with a small sheepish smile lingering at the corners of his mouth. “I’ll try and get a hold of the family again. They were out of town last time I called, but maybe –”
“I’ll go with you,” Mac said immediately. “They are Cosa Nostra, after all.”
“ ‘This thing of ours,’” Stella translated. “Anything sounds good in Italian. Better in Greek, though.” She paused a moment, thinking. “I guess the question is, how’d our vic end up with all of Darin Pagliuca’s ID? Someone obviously wanted us to think he was Darin Pagliuca, but they must have known we’d find out sooner or later.”
“Danny let something slip when he was in here earlier,” Mac said. “He said that Nicky Pagliuca was capo di tutti capi – boss of all bosses.”
“Head of the Italian Mafia,” Stella said. Then she blinked. “Wait – I thought nobody knew who’d gotten the job after John Valachi –”
“Danny knew,” Mac said. He was frowning a little. “Joey Sforza is one of Val Constantine’s men.”
“Yes. Thus Val Constantine coming in here at one in the morning with a lawyer and a bunch of mob guys.” Curious, she watched Mac’s face. He hadn’t lost it again, had he? He seemed to have reacted surprisingly well to the news Danny was connected, although surprisingly well in Mac’s case had never meant much. He’d been a little more sane in the past months than he had since Claire died, and while she didn’t want to hope that it was because of Chicago – don’t think of Chicago, she told herself, because that was a train of thought she really didn’t want to take while still at work, with Mac in front of her. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“One of the few good prints we lifted matched up to a man known as the Sphinx. His real name is Roy Dimassi. He works for the Patriso Family.”
Stella blinked. “Oh, yeah, I remember. Remind me again why we didn’t haul him in?”
“Dimassi vanished last year when a court order was issued for his DNA in relation to the 1995 shooting of John Vallaria,” Mac said. “John Valachi’s underboss. The FBI’s still looking for him, but –”
“The obviously haven’t found him,” Stella shrugged. “So so far we’ve got a John Doe with Darin Pagliuca’s ID – Darin Pagliuca, who happens to be the son of the godfather of the New York mob – a suspect, who happens to be one of Don Val Constantine’s most trusted advisors, and a fingerprint matching up to a missing Patriso guy. Didn’t one of Constantine’s guys say something about a turf war going on between the Constantine Family and the Patriso Family?”
“It’s been all over the news,” Mac said. Then he corrected himself, “Well, not exactly all over, but it’s come up a time or two in the past few months. No one at the Post seems to know the proper cause, but Constantine and Patriso men have both been killed. Patriso and Constantine men both showing up in the same case, which happens to involve another mobbed up guy –”
“It’s a set-up,” Stella said. She shook her head in disbelief. “Jesus, how’d we not see this before?”
“It wasn’t exactly obvious,” Mac said. “There’s no evidence to prove that Joey Sforza is innocent and plenty to show that he’s guilty, but there’s a reasonable doubt now –”
“Plus, the whole vic not being who we thought he was thing.” Stella shook her head again. “I thought we’d closed this case. Damn. And here I was hoping I could get a full night of sleep, too.”
Mac looked about to say something, then he closed his mouth, bending down over his files.
“Spit it out, Mac,” Stella said, hopping off his desk and working the kinks out of her legs.
He sighed. “Stella…”
She’d heard that tone of voice before. A lot, actually. Too much for her to be happy about, but there was something reassuring in the familiarity of his exasperation. “Mac,” she replied, prompting a little.
He smiled almost shyly, something small and unsure and awkward looking. Stella tried to push away the tiny thrill that uncurled in the pit of her stomach, because this was Mac, and they were at work, and it was New York, not Chicago, and he was actually not about to have a nervous breakdown, unless she’d misjudged his mood of the past hour or so, which was possible. It always made her nervous when he smiled, even as it made her grin in return. Dinner, she promised herself, remembering the red silk dress in the back of her closet. Sometime soon. After we close this case. Somewhere nice. Dinner, and that would be all. A chance to catch up on whatever they’d missed in the flurry of late summer cases. Talk, and maybe some dancing and drinking, depending on where they went. Dinner and conversation and drinks, like partners did.
Mac’s nervous smile faltered a little after a moment. “If we’re not too busy,” he said hesitantly, “would you like to go out for breakfast later?”
Stella’s jaw dropped. Okay, maybe he has lost his mind. If this was his new form of insanity, though, then maybe she liked it. “Sure,” she said, grinning widely. “Any time.”
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-04 04:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-05 01:12 am (UTC)Not well, I can assure you that. Thus, "Nothing here ends well." Of course, "well" is only relative...
Not to mention how things between Mac and Stella play out -- knowing what's happened between them in Chicago (and some of the reasons behind it) makes the subtle tension between them, and Stella's pleasure at Mac being more-or-less sane, play out really nicely.
Mac and Stella constantly surprise me. I'm nervous about writing Omerta without actually writing Black Monday first, but since the most important BM occurance has already been written...huh, I could just write Black Monday at the same time, I suppose. Oh, Mac, your sanity is leaving soon, I'm afraid.