Chapter 55

• Nayla Bell
• I had stared at the wall of pictures in my apartment so many times, I could see every single detail of every single picture, even with my eyes shut. The entire wall of my living room—floor to ceiling—was covered in over a hundred pictures of Eddie Vasco and his crime syndicate. For over a year I had been working on this case with a revolving door of different detectives, but my obsession had kept it alive when others may have let it go cold. For a mafia crime boss, Eddie Vasco kept his nose clean… on the surface. I couldn’t get enough to indict him, even though I knew the man was guilty of every possible crime I could imagine and even some I couldn’t. But I had one shot to bring Eddie down, and I would need all the evidence I could to make a conviction stick.
• For a man who was feared by so many, the pictures on my wall spoke of a different story. There was no bloody mayhem or torture. There was not a single picture of Eddie holding a gun or weapon of any kind. Though he was over six feet tall, muscled from head to toe, and had tattoos on every part of his arms, the pictures never captured him in any form of violence or intimidation. The man was a killer, yet the pictures didn’t reveal that fact in the slightest. There were pictures of Eddie dressed in an expensive suit going in and out of a black town car, or into five-star restaurants. There were also pictures of him dressed far more casually as he entered the local Italian restaurants that had been in the neighborhoods for decades. I had pictures of him going to Catholic mass, or buying a hot dog at the corner stand. Pictures of him had been snapped as he sat by an old Sicilian hitman by the name of Bobby Dancer—long retired—in Central Park. That was about as close as I could get at having anything worth mentioning in an indictment.