Forgive Me(110)

“No,” Angie said. “I’ll stay with you.”

Bryce punched 911 into the phone. “I got this. You get that.”

With a nod, Angie crawled over Walter, who was still breathing hard. She put her gun to his head, but took it away when he spit out a gob of blood. Instead of the barrel of her gun, she put her hand on Walter’s face and gave his cheek a gentle caress.

“Tell me,” she whispered in his ear. “Tell me what you and my father did. Tell me the truth before you’re gone, Walter. Let it go. Give that to me, please. If you love me like you said, you’ll do that one thing for me. You owe me the truth.”

Tears pricked the corners of Angie’s eyes. Her father was involved. His last words to her had made it clear.

“I killed people,” Walter managed.

“Who?” Angie asked. “Who did you kill?”

Walter licked away some of the blood from his lips. “People—going into witness protection. . . .”

A stab of pain took away Angie’s breath. She tried not to look at her bleeding, tried to center herself and her focus on the precious moment. Help would be there soon enough.

“We replaced people who were going to disappear with different people. Then we buried the records, made it . . . made it so there were no links between the old identity . . . and the new ones.”

A horrible feeling came over Angie.

May God forgive me.

Walter’s earlier words came back to her. This isn’t the first time I killed for you.

“You killed the Conti family, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” The word seeped out of Walter’s throat in a hiss.

“So that we could take over their identities.”

“Yes.”

“And there needed to be a little girl who I could become.”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t a baby when Isabella Conti died, was I?”

“You . . . and Isabella were the same . . . age. I took the picture of Isabella. . . . Your mother . . . asked me . . . for it.”

Angie’s father had lied when he told her she went into witness protection as an infant. He knew Angie would have made some connection to Isabella Conti if he had told the truth.

Walter was struggling even more. His breath sounds were completely erratic. Behind her, Angie could hear Bryce talking to a 911 operator, but she couldn’t focus on what he was saying. She couldn’t feel her gunshot wounds anymore, either.

“My mom,” Angie said. “She knew.”

“She did,” Walter said, his voice barely a fading echo.

“Why wasn’t my father’s Ponzi scheme reported? Why wasn’t there a trial?”

“No trial,” Walter said, “because he stole money only from the Mob. Dirty money. The Mob couldn’t go to the police—but they could kill him, and all of you. I”—Walter coughed up another glob of blood—“I knew there was a hit on him because I put a lot of connected guys into the program. They . . . they were still plugged into the life . . . still had their sources. One guy told me about your dad . . . I figured your dad had a lot of money . . . and he needed to disappear.”

And that was enough. Angie understood it all. Walter Odette had approached her father with an offer. Pay him whatever amount of money it took, and instead of the Contis becoming the DeRose family as planned, it could be the Harringtons—William, Claire, and Amelia. They were the perfect match—like organ donors, only instead of tissue types, it was the number of people in the family and the relative ages that were a perfect match. Angie’s mother knew Isabella Conti would die so that her daughter might live.

And Isabella had died all right. She’d died on March 4, 1988, the day they were supposed to enter witness protection, the day Walter Odette, a person the Contis had trusted implicitly, had murdered them all.

“You hired that man to kill me and my father,” Angie said, pointing at the puddle of a man without a skull. “Why?”

But Walter’s eyes held all the life of a cataract. His chest no longer rose and fell to any rhythm, and the final breath had left his body.





CHAPTER 60



The memorial service for the man who was Gabriel DeRose, but wasn’t, would have been more crowded had press been allowed to attend. It was Angie’s wish not to turn the somber occasion into a circus. Of the several dozen or so people who came to the Silverstone Funeral Home to pay their last respects, some were friends and professional associates of Gabriel, some were friends of Kathleen, some were connected to Angie. A few introduced themselves as relatives of William Harrington.

One such relative, a cousin named Marcia Lane, approached Angie from behind. She tapped Angie’s left arm, not seeing it was still in a sling. A string of apologies soon followed.

“What can you tell me about my father?” Angie asked after apologies were accepted and introductions made.

Marcia shrugged, making it clear nothing much would be forthcoming. “I heard on the news what happened and of course when they showed a picture of William, I mean your father, or Gabe, well, it triggered all sorts of memories of my cousin and his family who vanished one day without a word.”

The two women exchanged contact information and made promises to meet.

Over time Angie would dive into genealogy, but she needed to mourn the loss of her father. His actions, his horrible crimes, and those of her mother, didn’t erase the love she felt for her parents. And while she couldn’t condone their extraordinary actions, she could give her mother one thing she’d wanted.