look down on a small ravine cut into the rocky hillside. A winding offshoot of the Kiskiminetas River has carved its way toward the Beaver Run Reservoir, eating away at the hillsides and creating this quaint plateau of ground.
A tidy, two-story structure with a shingle roof, Michael Travaglia’s boyhood home sat patiently, waiting and watching, as Tom stepped out of his car and walked along the frosty grass leading to the front door.
Once inside, Tom quickly covered the perfunctory formalities that made up the who, what and why of his visit and then launched gently into a measured series of questions. Tom didn’t want to telegraph more details than necessary, but he gently probed the senior Travaglia for vital bits of information that he hoped would bring some closure for Peter Levato.
Bernard Travaglia’s wary answers to the questions Tom posed signaled a growing concern over his son’s recent behavior. Tom watched Bernard’s face flush as he slowly revealed that Michael had owned a .22-caliber handgun. He swallowed hard, paused and, with a hint of hope, said that Michael had been hunting in Ligonier a while back, and a game warden had confiscated the weapon. Tom voraciously scribbled notes. Bernard’s voice dropped an octave as he added, “At least that’s what Michael said.” Tom felt the older man’s pain. He was a father, too. He understood how it must have felt for Bernard to slowly realize that his child could be capable of murder.
Tom knew that silence is an interviewer’s strongest weapon, so he paused. He waited for that uncomfortable silence to grow so painful that Bernard couldn’t let it continue.
“I think he might have taken some electrical cable from my work truck, too,” Bernard Travaglia added at last.
Tom was very interested. As Bernard Travaglia’s wavering voice dropped the rest of the bits of information one at a time, Tom scribbled the words “Carol Cable” on the bottom corner of his notebook in big letters.
Whether the hardworking patriarch of the Travaglia family fully grasped the gravity or significance of the information he had just given the affable investigator was unclear to Tom. What was clear is that those seemingly innocuous strands of random data bounced around in Tom’s head all the way back to the barracks. He knew that he was tracking the right man.
That evening, with the winter sun well below the horizon, Tom Tridico sat in his living room clearing away the jagged details of his day. The monotone voices of velvet baritone newscasters rattled off the highlights and lowlights of another average Steel City day, and Tom drifted in and out of a light slumber. Filtered words bounded around in his head, and the flicker of images that crept through his half-open eyelids washed over him without effect.
Suddenly, one sharp word poked his amygdalae, jolting his eyes open. The word was “murder.” By the time Tom cleared the fog from his eyes, the news anchor had handed off the story to a shivering field reporter positioned strategically in front of a yellow ribbon of police barrier tape draped in front of the swirling circular ramps of the Smithfield Liberty garage. Now fully engaged, Tom drank in every detail.
As the velvet-draped body rolled behind him on a rickety gurney, the frozen reporter recounted the details of the recovery of a woman’s body from the third floor of the Gimbel’s Department Store parking garage downtown. “Shot twice with a small caliber handgun, police speculate that the motive for the killing is robbery,” the reporter said. Tom heard nothing more; he only saw. Sitting in the background of the frame, surrounded by evidence technicians and police detectives, Marlene Sue Newcomer’s new Dodge Ramcharger—two-tone brown with window curtains—screamed at him, “Look at me.” He scrambled from his chair and reached for the phone.
As he dialed the phone, his mental checklist rattled off to-do items at a mile a minute. Eventually, after
A tidy, two-story structure with a shingle roof, Michael Travaglia’s boyhood home sat patiently, waiting and watching, as Tom stepped out of his car and walked along the frosty grass leading to the front door.
Once inside, Tom quickly covered the perfunctory formalities that made up the who, what and why of his visit and then launched gently into a measured series of questions. Tom didn’t want to telegraph more details than necessary, but he gently probed the senior Travaglia for vital bits of information that he hoped would bring some closure for Peter Levato.
Bernard Travaglia’s wary answers to the questions Tom posed signaled a growing concern over his son’s recent behavior. Tom watched Bernard’s face flush as he slowly revealed that Michael had owned a .22-caliber handgun. He swallowed hard, paused and, with a hint of hope, said that Michael had been hunting in Ligonier a while back, and a game warden had confiscated the weapon. Tom voraciously scribbled notes. Bernard’s voice dropped an octave as he added, “At least that’s what Michael said.” Tom felt the older man’s pain. He was a father, too. He understood how it must have felt for Bernard to slowly realize that his child could be capable of murder.
Tom knew that silence is an interviewer’s strongest weapon, so he paused. He waited for that uncomfortable silence to grow so painful that Bernard couldn’t let it continue.
“I think he might have taken some electrical cable from my work truck, too,” Bernard Travaglia added at last.
Tom was very interested. As Bernard Travaglia’s wavering voice dropped the rest of the bits of information one at a time, Tom scribbled the words “Carol Cable” on the bottom corner of his notebook in big letters.
Whether the hardworking patriarch of the Travaglia family fully grasped the gravity or significance of the information he had just given the affable investigator was unclear to Tom. What was clear is that those seemingly innocuous strands of random data bounced around in Tom’s head all the way back to the barracks. He knew that he was tracking the right man.
That evening, with the winter sun well below the horizon, Tom Tridico sat in his living room clearing away the jagged details of his day. The monotone voices of velvet baritone newscasters rattled off the highlights and lowlights of another average Steel City day, and Tom drifted in and out of a light slumber. Filtered words bounded around in his head, and the flicker of images that crept through his half-open eyelids washed over him without effect.
Suddenly, one sharp word poked his amygdalae, jolting his eyes open. The word was “murder.” By the time Tom cleared the fog from his eyes, the news anchor had handed off the story to a shivering field reporter positioned strategically in front of a yellow ribbon of police barrier tape draped in front of the swirling circular ramps of the Smithfield Liberty garage. Now fully engaged, Tom drank in every detail.
As the velvet-draped body rolled behind him on a rickety gurney, the frozen reporter recounted the details of the recovery of a woman’s body from the third floor of the Gimbel’s Department Store parking garage downtown. “Shot twice with a small caliber handgun, police speculate that the motive for the killing is robbery,” the reporter said. Tom heard nothing more; he only saw. Sitting in the background of the frame, surrounded by evidence technicians and police detectives, Marlene Sue Newcomer’s new Dodge Ramcharger—two-tone brown with window curtains—screamed at him, “Look at me.” He scrambled from his chair and reached for the phone.
As he dialed the phone, his mental checklist rattled off to-do items at a mile a minute. Eventually, after
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