A Woman Was Tied to Train Tracks by a Mafia Boss — Then His Loyal German Shepherd Led the Detective to Expose the Deadly Plot
Chapter 9
Vincent Moretti was released from custody the following morning, the charges against him quietly withdrawn once the assistant district attorney reviewed the federal evidence and understood exactly how thoroughly the case against him had been manufactured. He walked out of the precinct with the same unhurried confidence he’d walked in with days earlier, his lawyers trailing behind him, though something in his expression had shifted slightly, a wariness that hadn’t been there before.
He found Marcus in the parking lot, loading Rex into the patrol car at the end of a long shift. “Detective Cain,” Moretti said, stopping a respectful distance away. “I understand I owe you something more than the usual professional courtesy.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” Marcus said. “I was doing my job. Following the evidence wherever it went, even when my captain didn’t want it to go there.”
“Most detectives in your position would have taken the easy version,” Moretti said. “Arrest the crime boss everyone’s wanted arrested for fifteen years, collect the credit, let the details sort themselves out later, or not at all. You didn’t do that.” He studied Marcus a long moment. “I’ve made my peace with being hated by every cop in this city, Detective. I’ve earned every bit of that hatred fairly, over thirty years, and I don’t ask anyone to feel differently about it. But I’ll admit I didn’t expect one of you to actually care whether I was innocent of a specific crime I hadn’t personally committed.”
“I don’t care about your innocence in general,” Marcus said honestly. “I care about the truth of what actually happened at those tracks. Those are different things, and I’d appreciate you not confusing the two into something that sounds like absolution, because it isn’t one.”
Something that might have been respect moved across Moretti’s face. “Fair enough, Detective.” He glanced down at Rex, sitting alert in the back seat, watching him with the same wary attention he’d shown from the start. “Your partner never trusted Reynolds either, did he. I saw it in the precinct that first morning. Everyone else was congratulating themselves on finally catching me. Your dog was the only one still looking for the actual threat.”
“Rex doesn’t care about headlines,” Marcus said. “He cares about who’s actually dangerous in the room. Turns out that’s a rarer instinct than it should be, even among trained detectives.”
Moretti nodded slowly, then turned to leave, pausing once more before he reached his car. “For what it’s worth, Detective, whatever you decide to do with the rest of your career, you might consider that some of us who’ve spent our lives on the wrong side of the law occasionally develop a fairly reliable instinct for recognizing the rare cop who can’t be bought. Reynolds fooled a great many people for a great many years. He never once fooled your dog, and eventually, he stopped fooling you too. That’s worth something, even coming from someone like me.”
He walked away without waiting for a response, his lawyers falling into step around him, and Marcus stood in the cold morning air a long moment, turning the strange exchange over in his mind, before climbing into the patrol car beside Rex, who immediately rested his head against Marcus’s leg with a low, contented sigh.
The department’s reckoning with Reynolds’s corruption took considerably longer than the arrest itself, unfolding over the following year through federal prosecution, internal affairs investigations, and a painful public accounting of exactly how deep the rot had run. Reynolds pled guilty eventually, to charges that included conspiracy, obstruction, and accessory to murder in Sammy’s death, trading a full confession for a sentence that would still see him spend the rest of his working life behind bars, though considerably less time than the charges might otherwise have carried. Sarah Morrison, whose real name turned out to be something else entirely, cooperated fully with federal investigators in exchange for a reduced sentence of her own, providing testimony that closed several other threads Reynolds’s careful corruption had left dangling across the department for years.