Harper held his gaze, because looking away had never once made her safer. "I know," she said. "That was the mistake."
Chapter 23: Danny Krol
They questioned Danny Krol at the station, and afterwards, because Harper was a protected witness and not a rubber stamp, Okafor sat with her and Nico in Ferrante's office above Casa Loma and told them plainly what could lawfully be told, with the office door shut and the gala's music still faintly rising through the floorboards from a party that had, astonishingly, continued.
"He's talking," Okafor said. "Men like Danny always talk once they understand nobody is coming to buy them out of the room. He wants a deal and he wants protection, in that order, and he is frightened of your cousin considerably more than he is frightened of us."
Harper sat with her hands around a cup of tea she had not drunk. "Is it him? Properly him, I mean. Not just a man with a tattoo."
"It is him." Okafor opened the thin folder she had brought, though she read nothing from it aloud that Harper would later need to unhear. "Daniel Krol. Forty-one. Worked Kovac docks and Kovac warehouses for eleven years, then walked away two years ago telling everyone the family had gone soft. Defector is the polite word. The accurate word is purchased. He has been taking money from Stefano Barone's loan business for two years. Regular payments, disguised as collections work that never happened. We have them from his phone, and his phone, I am happy to say, was not locked when he ran."
Sylvia Grant, who had joined them with a notebook she did not open, made a small sound. "Two years. The warehouse."
"Two years," Okafor agreed. "There are messages timed to the warehouse fire, Harper, the one you identified from the photographs last month. Same method, service entrance, timed to a shift change. Danny does not admit the fire in so many words. He admits being paid to be elsewhere that night and to lose a key, and he admits he understood what the money was for. His lawyer will spend months on those distinctions. A jury will spend about an hour." She turned a page. "And there are messages timed to the night of Table Nine, including one sent twenty minutes before you found the box, and one sent after, unanswered, that says only: it is under. He planted it. For money. He has now said so on the record, bargaining, but on the record."
Okafor let the silence do its work. She was good at that, Harper had learned, at not filling a room with comfort before the facts had settled into the people who had to carry them. Downstairs a burst of applause rose for some toast or raffle, absurdly cheerful, and Sylvia glanced toward the door as if to remind them all that the world they were trying to protect was still, stubbornly, having its party.
Harper set her cup down carefully. She had known all of it in pieces, the way you know weather coming, but hearing it assembled in a detective's level voice gave it a weight her imagination had not managed. "And the key to the restaurant?"
"The copied service-door key was on his ring when we searched him. He had it cut two years ago by a locksmith who remembers him, which is the sort of witness prosecutors dream about. He used it for Table Nine and he came tonight intending to use the service corridor again. To retrieve or to plant, he is still lying about in circles, and I expect the truth is whichever version his lawyer tells him costs less. It does not matter. The errand never began. You saw him first."
Nico had said very little. He stood by Ferrante's shelves of ledgers and old menus with his arms folded, listening the way he listened in council, storing everything. Now he asked the question Harper had been circling. "Stefano. In his own words. What did my cousin promise him?"
"War," Okafor said simply. "Stefano told him the peace would ruin them both. Danny's phrase, repeated twice, was that Stefano promised war would make them rich. Loansharking thrives when families are frightened and businesses need cash no bank will touch. Peace is bad for that trade. Stefano told him if the peace dinner failed, if people died or nearly died and the families blamed each other, the old money would come back. Danny believed him because Danny wanted to be rich more than he wanted to be loyal, which, in my professional experience, is the most common sentence in organised crime."
"And the chapel?" Harper asked. She thought of the decoy left where Bianca took her music lessons, the folded note in its careful hand. Witnesses burn too. She had read those three words so many times that they had lost their shape and become pure dread. "Was that him too?"
"His work. He admits it, and seems almost proud of the craftsmanship, which tells you everything about the man. He insists it was meant only to frighten. No device, no fire, a prop and a note to send a message. His words were: nobody was supposed to get hurt at the chapel." Okafor's mouth thinned. "He appears to believe that distinction makes him a better person. I have recorded it faithfully and without comment."
Sylvia closed her eyes briefly. "The Kovac side. Have they been told?"
"Within the hour, through the liaison channel. Their leadership asked for the payment evidence and we shared what we lawfully could." Okafor glanced at Nico. "Their answer was short enough to memorise. Danny Krol is not theirs. He has not been theirs for two years. He acted for Stefano's money, not on Kovac instruction, and they disown him utterly, their word. They also asked me to say that the peace signing stands, and that they will send their own security chief to walk the service corridor with yours tomorrow morning, if you will have him."
Nico exhaled, a long breath through the nose, and some of the iron went out of his stance. "Tell them I will have him, and I will walk it myself beside him."
"Will he give evidence against Stefano in open court?" Nico asked. "If the prosecutors ask it of him, yes," Okafor said. "He knows it. That is why he wants protection written down before he signs anything else. He sold his loyalty once for money. He is now selling his silence for safety, and he understands the second buyer is considerably more reliable than the first. Men like Stefano never forgive an invoice that talks."
Harper looked down at her hands, which had finally steadied. Danny Krol had a name now, and a history, and a phone full of other people's money, and it did not shrink what he had done. But it changed its shape in her mind from a shadow that could be anywhere into a man in a cell who was frightened and bargaining, a man whose paymaster had a name too, and whose name everyone in this room already knew.