The CAPU, Daugherty explained later, still didn’t know then if Russell Forrest and Nancy Bonadio were in cahoots with Zaffino. In a way, they had to assume they were. The worry was that if Zaffino had gotten a sniff of what was going on, there was no doubt he was going to head out there himself, call ahead or do something to obstruct the investigation, whether he had anything to do with Jeff Zack’s murder. That bike seemed to be the key right now; it was as good as the CAPU was going to get to a fingerprint left at the murder scene. If Zaffino found out what was going on behind the scenes, the CAPU was never going to see the bike. And without the bike, they knew they didn’t have much of a case.

  Then there was Christine Todaro: if Zaffino knew what was happening, there was a chance he was going to blame it on Christine, which would, in her view, put her, her son and her father in even greater danger.

  “It was that important,” recalled one detective.

  “Go to that car lot,” Captain Daugherty told McFarland and Shaeffer, “and get the bike. If you run into trouble, attempt to get it through a search warrant. The PSP will initiate a warrant while you guys are en route.”

  McFarland and Shaeffer were excited—the big break everyone had been waiting for. “Still, you never know,” McFarland said later, “what can happen. The way the case was going, this could have been just another lead gone astray.”

  “I was thinking,” Mike Shaeffer later told me, “it’s going to be a long day. With the possibility of doing a search warrant and the process it takes to get one, and the interviews [with Bonadio and Forrest], plus the two-hour drive both ways, we were going to be gone for a while. I was excited to [possibly] get the motorcycle and to hear what Bonadio and Forrest had to say. I figured this would be a big break in the case and I was more than willing to put the time and effort in to assist.”

  McFarland added, “We were optimistic. The bike was a key piece of evidence.”

  Time would certainly tell.

  63

  Russ McFarland and Mike Shaeffer arrived at the PSP barracks Troop B Headquarters at about 3:00 P.M. They had talked during the drive, but not about the case. Instead, they caught up on family, friends, football. “You know,” Shaeffer said later, “we aren’t like TV cops, racing to a scene, talking about the case the whole way. We live it. So when we have some driving time, we catch up on family, knowing that once we get to the location, it’s going to be all business.”

  Trooper Bova was waiting to greet them, along with two other troopers designated to help any way McFarland and Shaeffer needed. After briefing the PSP about Zaffino and his possible relation to the Zack homicide, filling them in on what had brought them to Pennsylvania, McFarland said, “We want this to be low-key.”

  It was something Captain Daugherty had encouraged from the moment she found the bike on the Internet. Patience…we can’t jump the gun on this.

  The PSP understood. It was agreed one trooper would hang back from the pack of unmarked vehicles heading out there. They would all dress plainclothes, so as not to cause too much of a commotion when they arrived. If word got back to Zaffino even at this late juncture, things might start happening: witnesses disappearing, evidence tampered with. Christine Todaro would be in big trouble. They couldn’t chance any of it. They were too close.

  By 3:30 P.M., they pulled into the driveway of a ranch-style home. There was a car lot carved out of the side yard, where a large portion of land had been cut like a divot from a steep embankment. Small, triangular-shaped red, blue and white flags hung like Christmas lights, flapping in the slight wind, around an assemblage of cars on display for sale. The sign out front read “Forrest Motors.” It was a mom-and-pop place started, apparently, by someone who had lived in the house at one time. The living room and bedroom, McFarland and Shaeffer could see after pulling into the driveway, had been converted into office space. There were about twenty cars out front—no bike that either detective could see—and a spacious two-car garage in the back.

  McFarland looked toward the garage as he turned off the car, saying, “That’s where it is.”

  “I bet you’re right.”

  When they got out of the car and walked up to the front door, a woman approached. She said her name was Nancy Bonadio. “Can I help you?”

  It was odd that four men were walking up to the office door.

  Bonadio seemed genuinely surprised—which was exactly what they wanted.

  “I’m Trooper Bova, ma’am. Is Russell Forrest here?”

  With a look of grave concern on her face, Bonadio yelled into the back of the house for Russell, who quickly came out of his office, saying, “Yeah…what’s up?”

  “Mr. Forrest,” Trooper Bova said, pointing to McFarland and Shaeffer, “these are two Akron, Ohio, detectives. They want to talk to you.”

  Forrest seemed fine with it. “Sure, sure…what can I do for you?” He invited them into his office.

  Closing the door behind them, McFarland began the conversation. “We’re investigating a homicide and have good reason to believe that a motorcycle you have”—McFarland pointed to the VIN of the bike on a “waiver” he had in his hand, showing it to Forrest—“was involved. We would like to seize the motorcycle for processing and possibly confirm its involvement [in the homicide].”

  “You can have the bike,” Forrest said right away, anxiously. “Where do I sign?”

  While Forrest signed, McFarland said, “Sometimes a person in possession of a vehicle uses it in a crime and gets rid of it and the bike passes from hand to hand.” McFarland offered the comment as comfort. He didn’t want it to seem like they were focusing on one particular person, or suggesting anyone was a suspect. It was a tactical move. He and Shaeffer weren’t prepared to offer up Zaffino’s name.

  After Forrest signed the waiver, he shook his head in agreement with McFarland’s statement, as if to say, You bet I’m not involved, but I have a feeling who is.

  Bonadio was standing nearby, not saying much of anything. But there was no doubt she knew by then that the target of the investigation was her ex-husband.

  Forrest then spoke up. “I know it’s John Zaffino you’re looking at.” He pointed at Bonadio. “She’s my fiancée. She used to be married to him.” Forrest had a look of utter contempt on his face; it was clear there was some history between Forrest and Zaffino.

  Shaeffer changed the subject and asked Forrest where the motorcycle was being stored.

  “In the garage out back,” Forrest said, getting up and walking toward his office door. “Come on, I’ll take you there.”

  64

  When Christine Todaro decided to come clean with CAPU, in effect she made a decision to put her life on the line. She was fearful of John Zaffino and what he was going to do once he found out—and sooner or later, she knew, he would. Although Zaffino had been playing Christine for the past year, using her as a mark, she still believed he viewed her as an ally. Definitely not someone who was going to turn on him and begin a relationship with the police. “He thinks,” Christine later said, “even right up to the day I walked into the Akron Police Department, that I am working for him. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”

  After the CAPU spent hours interviewing Christine and believed she was telling the truth, they hooked up a recording device to her telephone. Wearing a wire and meeting with Zaffino in person was the next step, but first they wanted to hear what Zaffino was telling Christine over the telephone.

  As it were, John Zaffino was becoming increasingly paranoid. As each week passed, he had acted more strangely and out of character than the previous. No one had to tell Christine that a paranoid person was capable of anything if he or she felt threatened. And if there was one thing Zaffino had made clear to Christine throughout their relationship, it was that he didn’t want to ever end up in prison. Faced with that option, Christine assumed, he was capable of anything. Even, she said, “another murder to cover up the first one.”

  As the day neared when Christine was going to have to engage her ex-husband in dialogue about Jeff Zack’s murder, she grew unsure of herself and what she had agreed to do. But after a long discussion regarding how to handle Zaffino, the CAPU assured Christine that her safety would always come first. There was going to be plenty of “backup” there to support her anytime she went out to meet Zaffino.

  It was then decided that the best way to draw Zaffino out was to put him on the defensive. “We go to the Akron Beacon Journal,” Dave Whiddon explained to Christine, “and we ask them to do a one-year anniversary article about the case.”

  The article would serve two purposes: one, it would push the Zack case back into Zaffino’s face and tell him the CAPU was not giving up; and two, show him that they were no closer to catching their killer than they were on day one.

  The article was going to provoke Zaffino, yet also give him a sense of relief. Maybe even throw him off, which would allow Christine to wiggle her way into his embrace and, with any luck, get him to admit he had, in fact, killed Jeff Zack.

  Near the end of June, the Akron Beacon Journal ran a fifteen-hundred-word article—a lot of space for a daily newspaper—under the headline WHODUNIT PERPLEXES DETECTIVES: ONE YEAR AFTER HIT MAN GUNNED HIM DOWN, POLICE WONDER WHO WANTED JEFF ZACK DEAD. In the piece, written by Journal staff writer Stephanie War-smith, the idea that the CAPU was at a standstill in its investigation was made clear: “A year ago Sunday…a motorcyclist pulled up behind [Jeff Zack], got off the bike and shot him in the head…. The identity of the shadowy figure remains a mystery. Police have not yet made an arrest, though they now believe a hit man was responsible…. Over the last year, detectives have focused on who might have hired a professional killer—and why.”

  Ed George was never mentioned in the article as a possible suspect in what the CAPU was saying could be a murder-for-hire plot. Road rage was publicly ruled out for the first time. The CAPU said its focus was now on several new suspects, but urged the public to come forward with any information. Elayne Zack had been interviewed. It was obvious that time had not lessened the pain of losing her son, regardless of what people were saying about him. “He did a lot of nutty things. But he didn’t deserve what he got,” Elayne told the Journal. She said she had spent the past year in counseling, dealing with the loss.

  Although the article seemed to imply that Jeff Zack’s murder was the result of an affair he was having with Cynthia George, Cynthia’s name, like her husband’s, was never mentioned.

  As the article hit newsstands, Christine went about her daily routine of work and raising her children, waiting for the moment when she felt Zaffino had seen the article and, undoubtedly, wanted to speak to her about it. “The article was designed,” Christine said later, “specifically so I could call him after it was published.”

  A few hours after the article ran, Christine called Zaffino. He wasn’t answering his telephone, so she left him a voice mail: “Hey, it’s me. You need to call me right away.”

  A short while later, Zaffino returned the call.

  “What are you doing?” Christine asked.

  “Oh, just getting ready to go. I got to get a part for [my son’s] four-wheeler.”

  “Did you see the paper today?”

  “No.”

  “You need to read the paper, John.”

  “What’d it say?”

  “It’s in there about that guy—that guy you took out.”

  65

  Late afternoon was upon western Pennsylvania. It was near 4:30 P.M. Nighttime in certain parts of the state can be as dark as a cavern, the sky a shadowy purple velvetlike blanket scattered with sparkling white specks. Not that cops worried about working in the dark, but it was much easier to move around a foreign location during the day. Getting the bike and having it shipped back to Ohio for processing was one of the most important reasons for the trip. Patience was an asset now. Forrest and Bonadio probably had a lot of information to offer, but the bike was the catch.

  As they all walked toward Russell Forrest’s office exit, en route to the garage, Mike Shaeffer asked Forrest if he, by chance, had any helmets Zaffino might have given him along with the bike.

  “Yes, we do,” he said. “They’re in the closet. Let’s go there first.”

  Inside the closet, Forrest took out two identical helmets: black-gray-and-white. Then he grabbed a saddlebag he said Zaffino had given him, along with the helmets and bike, saying, “When John rode up here from Ohio, he had these two helmets, the saddlebag and title.”

  “That’s it?” Shaeffer asked.

  “That’s it. Right, honey?”

  Nancy Bonadio nodded.

  As they walked out to the garage, Forrest began talking about the problems he and his fiancée had been having with Zaffino over the past several months, and as far back as a year ago. McFarland and Shaeffer were of course eager to hear it all. “It was over the helmets,” Forrest said. “Three weeks ago, John called my fiancée and said he wanted the helmets back. He apparently had a buyer for them. Nancy said she didn’t want to give back anything, since the helmets would probably be sold with the bike.”

  “What did Zaffino say to that?”

  “John threatened Nancy, saying she wouldn’t get [their son] back.” Zaffino had the boy for the weekend. If she wanted to see her son again, he said, he’d exchange the boy for the helmets. “When Nancy got off the telephone, she came to me and told me what happened.”

  Forrest called Zaffino. “You’re not getting the helmets back,” Forrest told Zaffino after a round of yelling and screaming obscenities at each other. “That’s final, John,” he added, hanging up on him.

  Forrest told Nancy that if Zaffino called back, asking about the helmets, explain to him that they had sold them.

  When they picked up the boy the next time, Zaffino came wandering out toward the car with a cocky look on his face.

  “What do you want?” Forrest asked.

  Zaffino smiled. “You don’t want to mess with John Zaffino,” he said, talking about himself in the third person. “He’s a bad dude. If you cross him”—Zaffino waved his finger in front of Forrest’s face, back and forth—“he’ll get even.” He sounded intimidating, Forrest told them.

  Forrest told Shaeffer and McFarland that they could take the helmets and saddlebag. “I’ll help you guys any way possible.” The detectives believed him. He came across sincere, eager to sink Zaffino, who obviously had been a pain in his ass ever since he knew him.

  Next to a classic Jaguar—“Nice car,” McFarland said—and an RV, which Forrest owned, there sat the motorcycle, kickstand down, standing erect. Both the PSP and Shaeffer took Polaroid photographs of the bike as it stood like the suspect it had become. They wanted to document how they found it. One of the PSP troopers called into the barracks for the tow truck McFarland had set up before he and Shaeffer left Ohio, so it could come in before dark and tow the bike away. Later, that same truck would return the bike to Akron.

  Back at the PSP barracks, McFarland and Shaeffer separated Forrest and Bonadio and began asking questions about John Zaffino. It was an official recorded interview. Neither Forrest nor Bonadio had to concede to the interview, it was up to their own discretion. Both wanted to talk, though. They had nothing to hide. “Their body language and facial expressions,” McFarland later wrote in his notes of the interviews, “were indicative of truthfulness. Their replies to our questions were immediate. They had no idea we were coming when we did and, therefore, could not be prepared for the interviews….”

  Forrest was quick to tell stories about Zaffino that painted him as the thug the CAPU thought he was. There was one time just recently, Forrest explained, when he drove to a meeting point in Ohio, a restaurant, to meet Zaffino and pick up Bonadio’s son. When he arrived, Zaffino was there waiting.

  “Go into the restaurant,” Forrest heard Zaffino tell his son, “and get yourself a soda.” He handed the boy a few dollars.

  After watching his son walk into the store, Zaffino addressed Forrest. “The cops are wanting to talk to me. They left business cards at my place.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “A homicide.”

  Bonadio was in California at the time, visiting a family member. Forrest called her when he got home and told her what Zaffino had said. “What?” Bonadio answered, surprised. “My God, Russell, I’m scared for [my son].”

  “I know. I know.”

  They had no idea, according to Forrest, that the situation was connected to the motorcycle, or to Jeff Zack.

  Sitting, talking to McFarland and Shaeffer, Bonadio was “terrified” and “nervous,” she said. McFarland told her to relax. She wasn’t in any trouble. They just wanted to find out a few things about Zaffino.

  After she got comfortable and described parts of her life with Zaffino, Shaeffer asked Bonadio if she knew of any girlfriends Zaffino had. “Since I left him? Oh, boy, yes I do. I don’t know her last name, but her first name is Cindy. That’s what he tells me.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He refers to her as ‘Cindy,’ and she owns a well-to-do club or restaurant kind of club…um…and I can’t”—Bonadio paused, trying to recall the memory best she could—“I don’t even know where, but it’s in Ohio, and he says she got a lot of money and she’s probably about my age and he’s been with her for…I would say, a year anyhow.”

  “What color hair?”

  “Blond.”

  “How does she wear it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Next they talked about the child Zaffino and Bonadio had together. Bonadio had been married to Zaffino from December 1989 until, she said, “I left him in March of 1995.” There had been some sort of trigger that made Bonadio leave; she said she had run to her sister’s house in Pittsburgh because she “didn’t want John to find” her. The only reason she’d stayed in contact with him was because they had a child together.