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  WHOSE GREATER GOOD

  A Dawson Vigilante Story

  DAVID DELEE

  COPYRIGHT

  FATAL DESTINY

  Published by Dark Road Publishing

  Whose Greater Good Copyright © 2012 by David DeLee

  Excerpt from Fatal Destiny, Copyright © 2011 by David DeLee

  Cover art copyright © 2014 by NAS CRETIVES/Shutterstock

  Book and cover design copyright © 2014 by Dark Road Publishing

  Fatal Destiny is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarities or resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is wholly coincidental.

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  WHOSE GREATER GOOD

  A SUDDEN WIND gust barreled off of Boston Harbor, carrying with it the smell of dead fish and diesel fuel. Kristine Seleski standing, staring out over the reflective black water, tugged her parka closed and hugged herself. It was late September, and already the air had turned bitterly cold and uncomfortably damp, a harbinger of the long, wretched winter to come.

  Across the harbor, a plane took off from Logan Airport, and the roar of its engines filled the quiet night sky. It was nearly midnight. The two warehouses behind Kris were quiet now—dark, except for the amber glow of security lights illuminating their empty parking lots. The lights didn’t reach where Kris stood waiting at the road’s dead end, just a stone’s throw from the water’s edge.

  She took a deep breath and tried not to think about why she was there. Alone. In the dark.

  “Mrs. Seleski?”

  Kris gasped and jerked away from the voice right behind her. By doing so, she stepped off the pavement and her heel sank in the soft ground, throwing her off balance. The man’s gloved hand lashed out, gripped her arm, kept her from falling. Once she’d stabilized her footing, he let her go and moved back, establishing an appropriate distance from her.

  How had he come up on her like that, without making a sound? The lapping water and the soft chorus of cicadas could hardly have been enough to mask his approach. Could they have?

  He wore black jeans, a black hoodie and a Red Sox baseball cap that cast a shadow, concealing the upper half of his face. Kris put him at six foot and broad in the shoulders. He stood light on his feet, like a boxer.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said. “I’m Dawson.”

  Kris’s heart hammered in her chest. She found it difficult to speak. “Mr. Dawson.”

  “Just Dawson.”

  “Oh, okay. So how do we do this? I mean…how do we start?”

  “Tell me why you contacted me.”

  Kris shivered. “Well. You were recommended to me. I…need you to find someone.”

  “Who?”

  Kris took in a ragged breath then she let it out. So it all came down to this. “I want you to find the man who raped my daughter.”

  There. She’d said it. And the tears burst from her eyes, searing hot as they tracked down her face. “I’m sorry.” She wiped away the tears with trembling fingers. “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.”

  He didn’t say anything. He simply waited. When she managed to regain her composure, he asked her to tell him what happened.

  His words were direct, clipped, to the point—even a little cold. But not his voice. She could never have explained it, but in his voice Kris heard empathy, felt a compassion the words themselves didn’t convey. Though he offered her no platitudes, no physical comfort, Kris could tell he felt her pain. Somehow, she sensed he carried a similar pain of his own.

  “Six months ago,” she said. “Amy was at the library studying with her friend Trisha Rosen—they’re both 15. Trisha’s mom came to pick them up, but Amy wanted to stay and finish the research paper they were working on. She called me and asked, and I said it was okay. I told her I’d pick her up out front at nine o’clock when the library closed.” Kris fought back tears again. “I was only ten minutes late. Just ten minutes.

  “When I got there, Amy wasn’t outside. I called her cell, but she didn’t pick up. I tried the library doors, but they were locked. I banged on them, desperate, yelling. Finally, a woman came to the door. She said Amy wasn’t inside, that she’d see her standing out front earlier, just a little before I got there. I called the police and then I started shouting, screaming for Amy to answer me.”

  Kris covered her face with her hands and cried. The way she had so often since that awful night.

  “The police arrived and organized a search. They found Amy a block away, in the parking structure behind the library. They wouldn’t let me see her—an active crime scene, they said. When they finally brought her out on the stretcher, Amy was unconscious. I watched them load her into the ambulance. Seeing her like that, I just lost it. It was like getting kicked in the stomach. I collapsed, right there in the street. How could I have let my little girl down like that?”

  “What happened then?”

  Kris could hear the anger in his calmly spoken words, a fury underneath, barely contained. “The police took me to the hospital where I met with a detective.”

  “Which detective?”

  “McGrath. He told me he was a detective sergeant.”

  “He is.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “It’s all a blur. Amy had been beaten and raped, sodomized they told me. They talked about a rape kit, vaginal bleeding, possible internal injuries, contusions. It was all so devastating. When they finally let me see her, her face was bruised, and she had cuts, terrible scrapes on her arms and legs... Her voice trailed off. “Amy’s just a little girl.”

  “Did the police identify her assailant?”

  “Yes,” Kris said. “Amy had given them a very good description. And just a few weeks after the attack, they asked Amy to come down to the police station where she picked a man out of a line-up. The police, Detective McGrath, he said they had DNA evidence from her rape kit, and they could match that to the suspect. He told us they had him. That it was over.”

  “But something happened.”

  “About a month ago, I got a call from the district attorney’s office. The man who called said he was sorry, but the D.A. had decided to not move forward with the case. When I asked him what that meant, he said there were problems, and the D.A. didn’t think they could secure a prosecution against Amy’s attacker. Those were his words, they ‘couldn’t secure a prosecution.’ Just like that, my daughter’s attacker, her rapist, was going to get off unpunished.”

  “Did they tell you what the problems were?” Dawson’s voice was tight.

  “No. Just that it was over. There was nothing more they could do.”

  “Did the man from the D.A.’s office tell you his name?”

  “Yes. Hawley. Ken Hawley.”

  “I have what I need,” Dawson said.

  Her heart lifted with a sense of hope. “Does that mean you’ll help me? You’ll find Amy’s attacker?”

  Dawson nodded. “I’ll find him. But I have a question you need to answer. Since the D.A. won’t bring charges, what do you want me to do with him when
I find him?”

  “Mr. Dawson, my daughter won’t eat. She won’t see her friends. She won’t even leave the house. She’s stopped doing anything but stare blankly at the television and cry. Every night when she goes to sleep, she wakes up screaming from horrible nightmares.”

  Kristine Seleski straightened her back and defiantly wiped away the last of her tears. “What do I want? May God forgive me, Mr. Dawson. I want him dead.”

  -----

  ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY Sarah Stevens sat in a booth at her favorite diner, a place on Broadway off F Street in Southie. A high stack of pancakes, sausage and toast were set in front of her, along with a cup of steaming-hot black coffee. She smiled. Blessed with a super high metabolism, she could eat whatever she wanted and remain as skinny as a stick. Her mother told her to enjoy it while she could. Sarah intended to.

  A bell jangled over the clatter of plates, the shouting wait staff and short-order cooks, and the din of customer conversation, bringing with it a blast of cold air. A minute later, Detective Sergeant Scully McGrath slid into the booth beside her. He slapped a file onto the table and said, “Did’ya order for me?”

  “Coffee,” Sarah answered around a mouthful of pancake.

  “That’s it?”

  Sarah swallowed. “You’re on a diet. You’ve got fifteen pounds to lose, McGrath. Don’t look to me to help clog up your arteries and rush you into a heart attack.”

  He grumbled as the waitress poured his cup of joe, staring daggers at Sarah’s syrup-drenched pancakes. “I’m starving to death here.”

  “You want a menu, honey?” the waitress asked.

  “Naw,” he said, resignation in his voice. “I better not.”

  The waitress left and Sarah grinned, “Good boy.”

  “Bite me.”

  Sarah laughed, nearly spitting out her coffee. “My, aren’t we in a mood this morning.”

  McGrath sipped his coffee before carefully setting the cup in the saucer. “Yeah, well, it ain’t like I’ve got nothing better to do than scrounge up copies of my old case files for this guy, right?”

  By “this guy” he meant Dawson. And this wasn’t the first time Sarah and McGrath had worked with the enigma known to them only as Dawson. Though Sarah had to agree with McGrath, working with Dawson was a bit of a misnomer. Dawson came to them often for information, but he gave little in return. Considering how Dawson operated, Sarah suspected he did it to protect her and McGrath. Plausible deniability.

  “I ain’t his errand boy, you know,” McGrath went on, sipping more coffee and looking around the diner. “Where the hell is he, anyway?”

  Sarah sympathized, feeling the same way sometimes, though she tried to not let it get to her. Knowing Dawson operated outside the law didn’t bother her. She knew he did what the law clearly could not or would not do. Besides, she owed Dawson too much to complain: she owed him her life.

  “That the file?” …Dawson’s voice.

  McGrath and Sarah both snapped their heads around to find Dawson standing over them, wearing his customary black jeans, a black hoodie and a Red Sox baseball cap. He’d lowered the hood so it bunched around his throat, still hiding most of the hideous burn scars on his cheek and neck. Scars that covered the right side of his body, including his arm and gloved hand, scars from the terrible fire that had killed his family and changed his life—forever.

  “How the…” Sarah sputtered, twisting around to see where he’d come from. The bell over the front door hadn’t rung; she’d felt no sudden blast of cold air. It was as if Dawson had simply appeared. “How’d you do that?”

  “He’s a freakin’ ghost. Don’t you know that, Sarah?” McGrath said. “Not like us mere mortals.”

  Dawson slid into the seat across from them. The brim of his cap shaded the top half of his face, making him look like every police suspect sketch ever drawn. Sarah did catch a glimpse of his eyes though—icy blue, intense and cold.

  “Is that the file?” he repeated.

  “Yeah, that’s the file.” McGrath slid it across the table.

  Dawson spun the folder around and flipped it open with his gloved hand. Sarah knew what the file contained. She’d tracked down the D.A.’s copy after Dawson’s call. It was all part of the prosecutorial package drawn up before the case got squashed.

  McGrath had been the investigating detective on Amy Seleski’s rape. He’d conducted the initial interview with Amy at the hospital, got her description—and it was a good one—arranged for the sketch artist and coordinated the neighborhood canvas, arming the uniforms with the sketch and description of Amy’s assailant.

  Scully McGrath was also the one who thought to check the traffic cams in the area that night, extending that search to several dozen blocks around the crime scene. It had taken days to review all the footage, but the effort had paid off, it was what broke the case.

  A traffic camera had taken a snapshot of a souped-up old Ford Capri running a red light at the corner of Dorchester and Eighth, twenty minutes after the attack. The captured video gave them a likeness that matched Amy’s description of her attacker, along with a license plate number. That led McGrath to an identity, a DMV photo and a positive ID when Amy picked the suspect out of a police line-up. A search warrant for a DNA swab followed, giving them the match they needed to secure a probable cause arrest warrant for rape, assault and battery, and a half-dozen ancillary charges.

  Dawson closed the file and slid it back to McGrath, Dawson’s hand encased in a black leather glove. To Sarah, he said, “Looks airtight. What happened?”

  Sarah felt as though she were back in the eighth grade having to explain why she’d flunked her English mid-term exam. “I don’t know. It’s not my case.” Sarah hated how that sounded—like she was passing the buck. She hastily added, “Look. I talked to Ken Hawley, the attorney assigned to the case. He told me to take it up with Brogan. The order to squash the case came straight from the D.A. himself.”

  Dawson swung his gaze over to McGrath. “Something had to be wrong with the police findings for the D.A. to drop it.”

  “Hey,” McGrath shouted, then lowered his voice. “That case was solid. Start to finish, by the book. I delivered a slam dunk to the D.A. Don’t look at me because he dropped the ball.”

  Dawson didn’t react to McGrath’s mini-tantrum. “Tell me about Ali Aftab.”

  Amy’s suspected rapist.

  McGrath settled back in the booth, relaxed now that he wasn’t forced to defend himself. The plastic seat squeaked under his weight. “A real piece of shit that one. He’s Somali, came over here with a bunch of escaping refugees about twelve, thirteen years ago when the government there went all to hell. After I arrested him, I talked to some guys on the street gang task force. Turns out our boy’s an out-and-out sociopath. They’ve got him pegged as a freelancer enforcer but he does a lot of work for the NPC.”

  La Noveno Parte Cofradia. Dawson’s jaw visibly tightened.

  No surprise there, Sarah thought. The Ninth Part Brotherhood was a Mexican criminal cartel with North American operations in cities like New York, Chicago, Miami, and LA, as well as Boston—even parts of Canada. They were rumored to be as large as the Mara Salvatrucha and as violent as the Los Zetas. Locally, they were responsible for all of the drug traffic and a good part of the illegal gun trade coming out of South Boston that wasn’t still controlled by the Irish mob.

  McGrath went on. “Aftab has a thick jacket, a dozen or more arrests. Robbery, assault, rape, theft, even kidnapping.”

  “Then why is he still on the street?” Dawson’s words were low and flat, emotionless. Yet they carried a clear indictment of the criminal justice system. A system that had failed him and cost him his family, a system that continued to disappoint him even now, Sarah knew.

  “I said arrests. I didn’t say anything about convictions.”

  “The cases fell apart,” Dawson said. “Just like this one.”

  “Not like this one at
all,” Sarah answered.

  “She’s right,” said McGrath. “Up until now, every time Aftab’s been arrested, the cases went south because a witness recanted or disappeared or the victims refused to testify. All of them clear cases of intimidation, but impossible to prove.”

  “Until now,” Sarah said.

  “Amy was willing to testify,” Dawson guessed.

  Sarah nodded. “I saw the trial prep tapes. She would’ve made a good witness, too.”

  “So why did the D.A. refuse to prosecute?”

  She pushed her empty plate away and leaned into the table, lowering her voice. “Here’s what I heard. Just before Hawley got told by the D.A. to drop the case, Brogan was on a conference call with the police commissioner, the state’s attorney general, several federal attorneys and a bunch of other federal agencies.”

  “Which ones?”

  Sarah shrugged. “FBI and DEA for sure, ATF probably. All I know is Brogan had steam coming out of his ears when the call was over. He came out of his office, all red faced the way he gets, and cornered poor Ken Hawley in the hall. He told him to dump the case, wouldn’t say why, just stormed back into his office and slammed the door shut.”

  “The feds ordered him to make the case go away,” Dawson concluded.

  “Sounds like it to me.”

  “But that’s not the worst of it,” McGrath added. “Ever since the D.A. rolled over for the feds, Aftab’s been in the wind. I figured to harass the shit out of the skivvy little scumbag, but I can’t find him anywhere. It’s like he’s disappeared.” The cop sipped his coffee then put the cup down. “Far as I know there’s only one federal agency can make that happen.”

  Dawson said out loud what they were all thinking. “WITSEC.”

  -----

  DAWSON WATCHED AS Deputy U.S. Marshal Frank Breuer left the John Joseph Moakley Courthouse at noon the next day and climbed into the backseat of a waiting black SUV parked at the curb. Breuer was a man in his mid-fifties, built like a linebacker with a bullet-shaped head and a crew cut that sported more gray than black.