Bad Break: A Novel

Chapter Seventy-Three

Turner couldn't decide if she was more impressed or simply shocked that the U.S. Attorney had tipped me off about Willis's plans to flee the country.

He hadn't done a very good job of covering his tracks, and it was likely a mix of arrogance and lack of Internet-savvy that led the minister to think he could simply search for and make his travel arrangements on an "incognito" browser window and not leave a trace.

"It was nothing. They were grateful that I had helped them make a case against him when I shared what he had confessed about his relationship with Tasha Stone. They really wanted to get him on tax evasion for profits from personal investments that he had made through church-owned entities. But this was an easy way to nail him and force him to plead out on the other stuff."

When I learned that Willis was going to run and that the feds planned on being there to grab him...after letting him think he had gotten away, I thought there'd be no better time to break the news than as it was happening. Can't beat real-time!

It turned out that Chief Watson's frequent visits to my hospital room were neither because he was worried about my health nor curious about what I knew about Willis (and how I knew it). He was already fully cooperating with federal authorities to nail Willis.

Watson kept coming to see me because he wanted to know what, if anything, I knew about Guttfeld and Forsythe – about one of them being the triggerman in the triple shooting, about them "allegedly" starting a street war for no wrong-headed nobility but for greed, for their involvement in Tasha Stone's kidnapping, and about their own more recent disappearance and whether or not other cops with street hooks in 'em were involved.

The Southern Poverty Law Center published a study several years ago revealing that police departments across the United States had been infiltrated by a wide range of bad actors, from white supremacists to mob hangers-on, to increasingly sophisticated street gang members. They all shared the same logic: there was money to be made and, more importantly, saved if they had people on the inside who could either sound the alarm about police investigations or break the law themselves with little chance that fellow officers would hold them accountable.

If there was an upside beyond Tasha Stone finally getting the counseling and care she needed, she also received a cash reward from the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children, because her information about G-Force led to an investigation that exposed four police officers who actually were human trafficking. A dozen girls were rescued from the cop-pimps.

The reward wouldn't make Stone a rich girl, but between it and donations from the police department and police union – both of which needed to save face, her college education and living expenses would be free or close to it. She would be rich eventually. But it would take years for the courts to unravel Pogano's theft and ownership of patents on her mother's blood testing invention.

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I had been mostly awake for a week but was still hospitalized because of periodic incidents of sudden unconsciousness and related concerns that I might have suffered permanent neurological damage.

It took her a few days, but Turner finally got around to telling me about the outcome of the Phillips case. She had to tell me since I had agreed by phone to be interviewed on camera by CNN, the BBC, and ABC News. Their crews would start arriving at the hospital in about two hours to set up, and I had asked Turner to be there with me.