Bonnie Read Free Page B

retrieve an incriminating journal held by the North Koreans. He was just a patriotic nineteen-year-old kid at the time, and he thought he was doing his duty to his country. As I said, he was captured and thrown into that prison. It was years after he escaped and fought his way through a hell of a lot of mental problems that he became suspicious of Queen and Jacobs. He went after them.”
    “I can see why he’d want to put them down for setting him up and letting the Koreans get him. But what the hell did that have to do with the killing of Eve Duncan’s little girl?”
    Venable could understand Dickson’s impatience. The search for Bonnie Duncan’s killer had become as complicated as a spiderweb. Keep it as simple as you can. “Queen and Jacobs wanted to get rid of Gallo and remove a possible witness against them. They hired a contract killer, James Black, to go after him. But Gallo is very, very tough, and Black ended up with Gallo’s knife in his belly and egg on his face with his employers. Black was furious, and after he recovered, he started planning on hurting Gallo in any way he could.”
    “So Black killed the kid?”
    “That’s the way it looked, that’s what Gallo and Eve Duncan, Joe Quinn, and Catherine thought. They hunted him down in the Wisconsin woods.”
    “And put him down? So what’s the problem? Catherine should be free now.”
    “Except that Black swore before he died that he hadn’t killed Bonnie Duncan, that John Gallo had done it.” He paused. “Evidently he was very convincing. Both Eve Duncan and Gallo believed him.”
    “Shit. You mean because Gallo had been having mental problems? You said he was experiencing blackouts.”
    “Yes. Gallo thought he might have had one at that time and killed his daughter. He almost went crazy. He took off into the woods after he killed Black. Catherine went after him, hunted for weeks, and tracked him down.”
    “But you said she changed her mind about Gallo’s killing the kid. Why?”
    “How do I know? It was a judgment call. She just said that Eve and Gallo had been stupid to take the word of a murderer even if every instinct told them that he was telling the truth. They should have looked in another direction. The other direction was Queen and Jacobs. Black had been hired as a contract killer many times before by them. It wasn’t logical that they wouldn’t have known his intention to kill the little girl. Queen and Jacobs were regarding Gallo as a threat, and he had a history of mental problems. Kill the child and send him over the edge? There was a possibility that they’d been involved or hired someone else to kill Bonnie. So they went after them.”
    Venable could almost feel Dickson’s frustration and impatience at the other end of the line. Well, suck it up, big man. He was almost finished.
    “Nate Queen was killed over a week ago, and that left Thomas Jacobs. Catherine and Gallo tracked him to New Orleans, and she’s hoping either to force Jacobs to confess or get info from him about who did kill Bonnie Duncan. Gallo has rented a house on the bayou across the Mississippi, where they’re going to take Jacobs to interrogate him.”
    “Then she should be able to tie this up soon,” Dickson said. “How soon?”
    “I don’t know. The last I heard, Catherine had told Eve Duncan and Joe Quinn about Thomas Jacobs, and they were on their way to join Catherine and Gallo in New Orleans.”
    “You don’t know?” Dickson asked. “Give me an estimate.”
    Screw this. “I don’t have a crystal ball, dammit. It will be done as quickly as she can do it. When she gets the information, she’ll call me. As you can see, I’m not totally out of the loop.”
    “That’s not good enough. Get into the middle of the loop,” Dickson said. “You take as many men as you need and go down to New Orleans and wrap this up. Keep me informed.” He hung up.
    Venable pressed the disconnect and turned to Harley. “It seems we’re going to New