by Marc Rainer
“Best time of death window I can give you for now is sometime after midnight, probably between one and three o’clock. We’ll have a better idea after we get him to the morgue for the autopsy.”
“Thanks,” McPhail said. “Think that’ll happen today?”
“I think so. We’re not that busy, for once. I’ll call you with the time.”
“Appreciate it.”
McPhail watched as the transport contractors pulled the body out of the BMW, placed it on a gurney, and covered it. As soon as they loaded the corpse into the van, he walked around to the passenger side of the car and opened the glove box. He called one of the crime scene guys over.
“Get a couple of these, please, Fred.”
The tech took photos of the inside of the glove box. Two items grabbed McPhail’s attention. There was an envelope in the front of the compartment, and just visible behind it, an ID on a lanyard. The ID tag read, “Missouri Gaming Commission.” Wearing latex gloves, McPhail opened the envelope, exposing several sheets of blank paper, each cut into two-by-six-inch strips. He held the envelope open so the CSI tech could shoot another photo, then pointed toward the Gaming Commission ID. “That, too, please.”
The tech took the shots.
“Anything else, Mick?”
“No. Thanks.”
McPhail pulled off the gloves and hit a contact number on his cell phone. Tom Land answered the call.
“What’s up, Micky?”
“I’m at the entrance to the riverfront park down the road from you. What was the name of the gaming commission guy that was working with Jerry Dalton on that video you gave me?”
“I don’t remember. Benny something?”
“That’s what I thought. We just sent him to the morgue. I’m with his car inside the entrance to the park. Somebody put two in his head. ME guy thinks it was early this morning.”
“I’ll be right there. Jerry’s probably still in the rack. We can call him later.”
“We’ll wait for you.”
Jerry Dalton pulled his car into the space beside Tom Land’s. Tom and Micky McPhail were standing on the curb, waiting for him in front of the apartment. A couple of other guys in sport coats stood a few feet away. Dalton figured they were part of McPhail’s homicide squad.
“Hi, Jerry,” McPhail said, offering his hand. “It’s been a while. Wish it was a picnic or something instead of this mess.”
“Me, too. Mick. I just left his mom. She’s not in the best of health—heart condition—and this hit her pretty hard. Benny was all she had left.”
McPhail introduced the other detectives.
Dalton shook their hands, then he reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a key.
“You won’t have to bother the apartment manager. Benny’s mom gave me this. She said to just find out who did it and that she’d do anything she could to help.”
Dalton tossed the key to McPhail. It was a homicide, and that made it Micky’s case. Benny had been Dalton’s co-worker, but a homicide went to homicide detectives.
“I told his mom that you’d be coming by to get a statement,” Dalton told McPhail. “She’ll be expecting you.”
“Thanks. She have any ideas?”
Dalton had to smile a little. McPhail knew that there had been some conversation between Dalton and Benny’s mother, even if it wasn’t part of the official homicide inquiry. Dalton was a cop, too, after all.
“Not that she told me.”
McPhail nodded. “Let’s go on in.”
The apartment was a medium-sized one-bedroom, modestly furnished. The living area had a bistro set serving as the dining room furniture. There was a loveseat instead of a full-sized couch, and the television was small by millennial, single male standards.
“Nothing here to get killed over,” Land noted.
“He said he was having to help his mom with her medical bills,” Dalton said. He and Land followed McPhail and two other homicide guys as they did a quick tour of the place before digging in for a more in-depth inventory.
“Take the bedroom,” McPhail instructed one of the detectives. “I’ll look over here.”
He walked to a corner of the front room where a small roll-top desk sat under a poster from an old detective movie.
“Wannabe cop?” McPhail turned and asked Dalton.
“Flunked the academy physical,” Dalton said. “That’s why he went with the casino security gig.”
The roll-top wasn’t locked. McPhail’s hand—gloved in plastic—lifted the cover easily. He sifted through some bills that had been placed on edge in one of the wooden slots.
“Nothing weird,” he said for the benefit of Dalton and Land, who were standing a few feet behind him.
McPhail reached down and pulled open the drawer on the right side. Dalton saw lines crease Micky’s forehead.
“What do you have, Mick?” he asked.
McPhail held up three envelopes.
“We found a similar one of these in your guy’s Beamer. It was stuffed with paper cut into the size of currency.”
McPhail opened the first of the envelopes, which wasn’t sealed, and pulled out a stack of twenty-dollar bills.
“This isn’t just paper,” he said. “There’s five-hundred bucks in here.”
McPhail put the first envelope down on the desk surface. He opened the other envelopes and pulled similar stacks of bills out of each of them.
“Same for these,” he said. He looked at Dalton. “Any idea why he was meeting somebody for a payoff by the river, Jerry?”
Dalton shook his head as he muttered, thinking out loud. “I never suspected anything. Seemed like a good kid. Benny, Benny, Benny. What did you get yourself into?”
Marylou Monaco stood across the street from the front door of McElhaney’s and scanned the parking lot. It was just after 9:30 p.m., and as far as she could tell, the place was empty on this Tuesday night. That meant that either Sharon was alone behind the bar, or that she might be off, and that the bartender on this evening would be Dom Silvestri, Jr.
Little Dom. Big man in your own little world. I hope you’re here tonight, you bastard.
She hadn’t driven this evening. Her car in the parking lot might be seen by someone. There was no need for it. The weather was good, and she could walk away in the darkness when she was done.
It’s time. It’s past time, long overdue.
She walked across the parking lot, telling herself not to run, even though she felt like sprinting, the adrenaline filling her blood. She paused at the door before pushing it open, taking in a long, deep breath.
Naturally now, relax.
She looked toward the bar, hoping for a strange second that she would just see Sharon again, a last second thought. She did not see Sharon. She did not see anyone.
The bell above the door rang as the door closed behind her. She walked toward the bar, looking at the door to the side of and rear of the bar as it opened.
“What can I get ya?” Dom asked as he put a cocktail napkin in front of her.
She forced herself to smile a little.
“Just a beer,” she said. “Sharon here tonight?”
“Nah, I gave her the evening off,” Dom said, stepping toward the taps.
“Not a draft,” Marylou said as she reached into her purse. “I think I’ll have one of those Corona bottles.” She pointed toward a glass-front cooler on the wall behind the bar.
“Sure.”
Dom turned to get the beer from the cooler and popped the top off the bottle. He turned back toward her and froze.
“Don’t move a muscle, you worthless little scum ball,” Marylou said, levelling the little .45 at Dom’s head. “You remember my son, Dom? Tommy Monaco? He used to come in here quite a bit.”
“Yeah, I knew Tommy.” Dom’s eyes darted from Marylou’s face to the room behind her, wondering if she was alone, trying to pick a move that might allow him to make others in the future. “It was a shame what happened to him. He got sick, didn’t
he?”
Marylou pushed the gun toward him. She saw him flinch at what might have been a trigger pull. He pulled back a few inches, still clutching the Corona in one hand.
“Don’t you dare play dumb, you son of a bitch. I’ve been watching you for months now. I know you’re selling that poison, and that you gave Tommy the dope that killed him. I just wanted you to know exactly who was sending you to hell tonight and why.”
His move was the only one she had not planned for. Her days at the firing range had included quick practice shots to either side—a few inches to the left or right—as she played this scene out in her mind. She had fired into the margin of the thug silhouette: just outside the shoulder to the right, then to the left, and she thought she was ready. Dom did not dart to the left or right, however; he simply went down like a sack of bricks, and he was gone from her view, hiding low and behind the bar.
She froze, confused and furious that she had lost control of everything, if only for a second. She kept the gun ready to fire as she moved slowly toward the open end of the bar.
He has nowhere to run. Keep a few feet away from the opening in case he tries to rush—
He was suddenly up from behind the bar, not rushing, but pointing a gun of his own.
Startled, she fired twice. Dominic Silvestri, Jr., fired once.
She lay on her back, choking on the blood filling her lungs. She saw him standing over her, clutching his left arm where her bullet had struck him. She saw the blood seeping out from under his hand where he was holding the wound. He was saying something, but she couldn’t hear it. She looked at his blood again and smiled a little.
Kansas City, Missouri
Cam was handling the guilty pleas this morning for three more Michoacanos in front of Judge Brooks, so Trask decided to head for the CCU to get updated on their activities over the last evening. He pulled into a spot in front of their nondescript offices and plugged in the code they’d given him to gain entry.
The whole crew was assembled around the table in the bullpen closest to Tommy Land’s office. Land saw Trask rounding the corner and waved him over. He saw Land, John Foote, Billy Graham, Bubba and Ronnie, plus a new face. Land introduced him to Sgt. Jerry Dalton of the Missouri State Police.
“I hear you were busy yesterday,” Trask said to Land.
“Yesterday and all night,” Land corrected him. “I’ll give you the short version. First of all, I get called out by the homicide guys to an entrance to one of the parks by the river. There’s a body in a BMW with two rounds in the head. They ID the victim from his Missouri Gaming Commission card, and it turns out it’s a kid named Benny Collins who worked with Jerry here at Harrah’s. In fact, he’s the one who made the video copy of Little Dom Silvestri and the Gonzalez brothers following Big John Porcello off the boat the night he got hit. There’s an envelope in the car with some blank paper inside it, and the paper is cut to the size of paper money. We follow homicide into Benny’s apartment, and he has three more envelopes like that in his desk, only those are full of real money.”
“You figure Benny got hit by whoever’s been paying him for something on the side, only this time he got a final payment?” Trask asked.
“That looks like the most likely scenario,” Dalton said, “especially in light of one additional fact. I went back into work last night and went over Benny’s work station. He made the copy of the surveillance footage for me—the one showing Dom and his boys tailing Big John—but he made another copy, too, and I have no idea where that copy went, or why he made another one.”
“Interesting,” Trask said.
“Interesting enough for you to work it?” Foote asked him.
“It is if you can find a federal crime in there somewhere,” Trask responded. “The boss asked me to keep an eye open for cases involving our local mob friends. I still need a federal nexus, otherwise it goes to the Jackson County guys. You know the drill.”
“All too well,” Foote said.
Trask remembered his introduction to Foote, and the fact that Foote had been on the FBI’s organized crime squad, back when both his office and Trask’s US Attorney’s office had actually had organized crime squads. Back before the juice bars.
“You said ‘all night.’” Trask reminded Land.
“One thing leads to another,” Foote said. “Tommy calls me out after he gets another call from homicide. None other than Little Dom himself has been involved in a shooting at McElhaney’s—his bar in the old Italian northeast section—and Dom has shot and killed a woman. She apparently put a slug into Dom’s arm with her own gun before she died.”
“Who was the victim?” Trask asked.
“A gal named Mary Louise Monaco,” Land said, thumbing through a notepad. “Early forties. She lived in a little house in the neighborhood. It backs up to the rear of the bar.”
“Any idea what that was about?” Trask was starting to get the feeling that all of this was related. He had no reason for the feeling other than just a gut hunch. A jealous cougar confronting Dom Silvestri just didn’t seem to make any sense.
“Not really,” Foote said. “All Dom would say before he lawyered up was that it was self-defense.”
“Got a federal crime in that for me?” Trask asked.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Foote replied. “At least something to put him on ice for a little while until we get the rest of the story on the homicide. Dom took a felony hit on an assault about four years back. He was one of the little macho men beating on the dancers from the rival strip clubs that weren’t paying protection money to the mob. The assault was witnessed by an off-duty cop, otherwise Dom would have probably walked on the case. The dancer was too scared to testify herself, and juries don’t usually convict on the uncorroborated testimony of a stripper. Dom pleaded guilty because of the cop witness. He got a sweetheart plea offer from the Jackson County guys and got probation, but he did get a felony conviction.”
“Felon in possession of a firearm,” Trask acknowledged. “I’ll write it when I get back to the office. Did you run his gun for a registration?” He caught a series of glances between the cops at the table. “What?” Trask asked.
“Yeah, of course we ran both of the guns,” Foote explained. “The woman’s gun was purchased originally by an Army captain at Fort Leavenworth, but it was stolen in a residential burglary out there. The captain lived off base in the City of Leavenworth. He reported the burglary, but that’s the last time anyone reported seeing the gun until last night.”
“So, the lady victim bought a hot gun?” Trask asked.
“Looks like it,” Land said. “But even that’s not the weird part.”
Trask waited a few seconds, trying to make sense of all this. He told himself that he should have known better than to even try. Truth was almost always stranger than fiction in his business. He finally looked back at Tommy Land. “Well?”
“We ran the gun Dom used,” Land said. “It was originally purchased by one Steven Monaco.”
“Monaco?” Trask asked.
“Yeah, the same last name as the lady victim. We looked into that, too. Steven Monaco was her late husband. He died while serving in the Army in Iraq.”
Trask winced in bewilderment. “So Little Dom the local mob prince shot and killed this woman with her dead husband’s gun right in the middle of his own bar?”
“Um-hmm,” Foote said nodding. “Still want the case?”
“For now, yes,” Trask answered. “Dom is still a felon, he still killed somebody, and he still possessed the gun. The statute just requires possession; it doesn’t require ownership or registration. Get me the reports and we’ll file a complaint today.”
“You’ll have them within an hour,” Land said. “I’ll get you the homicide reports, too.”
Trask nodded. “Good. That should get him detained, even if we draw Heidi Hamilton again. Were there any witnesses on the scene?”
“Nope,” Billy Graham chimed in. “Just the vic—who can’t tell us anythin
g—and Little Dom. We specialize in collecting cases like that.”
“You can stop collecting them anytime now,” Trask replied. “Or just take them to the local guys.”
“Nah, we like you,” Billy said.
“I’m so glad I stopped in,” Trask said, getting up to leave. “If there’s nothing more in the way of the weird that you folks have to drop on my plate today, I have a United States Attorney to brief and a complaint to write.”
Land looked around the table. “I think that’s all we have for you at the moment.”
Lee’s Summit, Missouri
Trask’s drive home at the end of the day took him through some back roads south of Raytown as he explored all the alternative routes home to avoid the rush hour traffic. He drove by a park now known as Longview Lake, named after a wealthy family that made a fortune before the depression. They had built a mansion on the shores of the lake. They had even built their own little church beside the mansion, in the same architectural style as the big house and all the horse stables surrounding it.
Instead of the crawling line of traffic on the highway through Raytown, there was almost no traffic on this road. Trask saw one set of lights behind him, probably a half-mile back, and there was nobody in front of him. He took another rural road toward the south, passing another country mansion under construction. When finished, this one would obviously have a matching wall all along the property, a wall that would certainly cost ten times more than Trask’s recently-purchased house in the Raintree Lakes area. It looked like the new owner was also having a moat dug around his new home. Trask wondered what kind of money was paying for it all.
A few minutes later, Trask pulled into his own, more modest castle. He looked forward to the three smiling furry faces and an island of calm. What he got was something completely different.
Lynn met him at the door, fuming and almost snarling.
“If it wasn’t illegal, I would have shot a couple of the neighbor kids a few minutes ago,” she growled.
Trask gave her a hug. It didn’t help. She was still tense.