After Jack briefly introduced how he and the NYPD chief had joined forces to eradicate the police gang "Blue Templars", the three NYPD officers present all showed shocked expressions.
Even Cassel had an expression of "I see, that's what I mean." "No wonder Gary McAllister acted so righteous when we were interrogating him. Oh, by the way, he was John Raglan's old partner.
This cunning old guy even deliberately provided false clues to mislead us when we first found him."
Seeing that he was going off on a tangent, Jack had to knock on the table to signal him to get back to the point. "What did they do in 19 years?"
"Black eating black." Beckett summed it up briefly. "At that time, there were five big gangs in New York that were running rampant. So they used violence to fight violence, kidnapping the core members of these gangs everywhere, imprisoning them for a period of time, and then extorting large ransoms.
However, something went wrong in one of the operations. At that time, John Raglan and Gary McAllister took a rookie police officer to the back alley of a club called "Sons of Palermo."
"'Sons of Palermo' was a gathering place for gangs at the time." Cassel interrupted and added.
Beckett continued, "When they were kidnapping a gang member named Joe Bugatti, something went wrong. There was an FBI undercover named Bob Amen present at the time, and he tried to prevent the kidnapping.
As a result, in the chaos, Bob Amen was accidentally killed by one of the corrupt policemen, and Joe Bugatti, who was supposed to be the victim, became a scapegoat and was tortured into confessing to the murder and was thrown into prison."
After hearing this, Jack had roughly figured out the ins and outs of the two old cases. "Many years later, uh, about seven or eight years later, Beckett's mother, a civil rights lawyer, heard about Bob Amen's wrongful case and began to investigate.
Then, about ten years ago, when she was about to find out the truth, she was murdered and died in the alley of the 'Sons of Palermo' club. After that, The other three insiders were also eliminated, and the case files vanished.
The perpetrator must have been Dick Coonan, the hitman alias Rathbone, who was killed by Beckett more than six months ago.
Seeing the others nodding, Jack waved his hand. "No, that doesn't make sense. John LaGrand and Gary McAllister are just two small-time detectives.
Even if they made a fortune from kidnapping and ransomware gangs—I'm assuming millions, or even tens of millions of dollars—they could easily afford a hitman, but to eliminate all leads and even make the court files disappear is clearly beyond their capabilities. There's
clearly another mastermind behind them. When he learned that John LaGrand had contacted Beckett and hired the hitman Hal Lockwood, he remotely sniped him in the café."
"We thought so too," Cassel said with a smug look as if he saw something similar. "After we talked with Joe Bugatti, who had been in prison for almost 20 years, we found John LaGrand's partner Gary McAllister again.
The old bastard admitted everything, including kidnapping and manslaughter, but when we asked about the real culprit behind the scenes, he kept his mouth shut. He would rather go to jail than say another word."
Jack sighed, "Don't tell me you just sent him to jail and then turned around to arrest the professional killer Hal Lockwood. You don't think it's easier to pry open the mouth of a professional killer than to make an old black policeman who is afraid of death speak?"
"Well, in fact, Kevin and Esposito had already found out the whereabouts of Hal Lockwood, but then an accident happened," Cassel tried to save face for the duo.
"No, that's not important. No matter what the process was, you did catch Hal Lockwood afterwards, but obviously, neither the professional killer nor Gary McAllister said a word, right?"
Jack's words were responded to by an awkward silence. Some of the four looked up at the sky, some drank tactically, some stared at the plate of peanuts, and the only one left was Beckett, staring blankly at the vegetable garden in the backyard.
After a long time, Cassel continued in a thin mosquito-like voice, "Not only that, just a few days ago, Hal Lockwood killed Gary McAllister in prison."
"How did he do that?" Jack seemed to be listening to a fairy tale, "How could you be stupid enough to put a professional killer like Hal Lockwood in the same prison as an important witness like Gary McAllister, or even in the same ward!"
"This is all my fault." Beckett said dejectedly, "I applied for a separate isolation ward for Hal Lockwood, but someone forged a transfer order and sent him to an ordinary ward a few days later."
Jack sneered, his eyes sweeping over the three NYPD officers in front of him one by one.
"What's wrong with you? Two professional assassins, sniped and murdered in the street, Kevin and Esposito nearly lost their lives after being tortured. Doesn't all that underscore the gravity of the situation?
You're still insisting on following official procedures. Do you need me to apply for a medal from Director Reagan?"
Seeing Castle looking a little guilty, Jack interrupted him before he could even begin.
"Do you remember what we did when Alexis was kidnapped? Is it really just because we were in Paris, not here in the US, that we didn't have to follow the rules?"
"But it wasn't that serious then," Castle retorted, his voice suddenly rising.
"Yeah, Hal Lockwood shot John LaGrand right in front of you and Beckett, set up a trap to capture Kevin and Esposito, and nearly killed them, without a care in the world about their police status.
And you still think it's not serious enough?" Jack felt livid, wondering if these guys had been possessed by some kind of idiotic aura while he was gone.
They didn't even bother to follow any rules. They actually followed the procedures step by step when handling the case.
Jack didn't feel like sipping one glass after another from a small wine glass at this moment. He just switched to the glass he usually used to drink whiskey and went back to the kitchen to get some ice cubes from the refrigerator.
"So, the guy behind the scenes never made a move on Detective Beckett because of Superintendent Montgomery, right? Could he be the rookie police officer who was taken by John LaGrand and Gary McAllister in the manslaughter case?"
Jack calculated the time and age, and felt that they should all match.
(End of this chapter)