by Marc Rainer
“Talk to me.”
“They were fishing on the bank behind our house,” she began.
Trask figured she meant the neighbor kids and not the dogs. The lake shore was only about twenty-five feet behind the rear of the fence that surrounded the back yard. It was lined with white stone bric-a-brac to control erosion. The dogs were not used to having anyone behind their fence, as the house they had left in Maryland had been at the end of a cul-de-sac.
“The dogs started barking at the kids, and so the kids started grabbing some of those big rocks on the bank and throwing them at the pups. I could just imagine one rattling down Boo’s cone and hitting her in an eye, right after she just got her sight back. I’ve never been so mad in my life. I ran out onto the deck and yelled at the little monsters, and probably said some words I shouldn’t have used. Anyway, they ran off.”
“Probably to report you to the subdivision language police,” Trask said. “We’ll get a call from the homeowners association at any minute.”
“And I’ll give them an equally forceful earful about those little delinquents trying to hurt our fur-babies. You don’t mess with an angry mama.”
Something she said jarred something in Trask’s head. He kissed her on the forehead as he grabbed his cell phone.
He sent John Foote a text message:
“Humor me on this hunch. Check tomorrow and see if Mary Louise Monaco had any kids who may have had a beef with Little Dom Silvestri. Thanks.”
Liberty, Missouri
Jose Velasco, detective of the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department, and a newly-minted task force officer of the Kansas City Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sat in an unmarked car in the rear of a strip mall, and watched the back of the tire store at the end of the row, focusing his eyes on the service bays.
I’ve spent enough time watching the Dellums’ stash house to know that they aren’t getting deliveries there, not even pizzas. They have to be picking the stuff up somewhere else. I’ll follow them when they get off work. If they don’t get anything tonight, I’ll be back tomorrow night, and the night after that, and the night after that if I don’t see anything.
He smiled to himself.
Being a deputized fed isn’t all bad. I get to cross state lines now without worrying about my jurisdiction. I would have had to call the Liberty PD to ask for help before; now I can do it myself, the way I like it. I even get overtime.
He watched as a white pickup pulled into the lot behind the service bays and parked. He thought nothing of it at first.
Probably somebody picking up a part or delivering one from another store … maybe a specialized lug lock or key or something. Maybe one of the crew here stripped a stud with an impact wrench.
The driver of the pickup—a young, white male—walked up to one of the bay doors, which opened for him. He didn’t seem to be carrying anything.
The glass windows above the solid portion of the bay doors gave Velasco just enough of a view inside the service bay so that he could see who met the pickup driver as he entered the shop.
That’s Jazz Dellums. He’s handing the pickup guy a duffel bag! This isn’t store business.
Velasco’s right hand grabbed for the pen in his shirt pocket at the same time as his left hand reached for the note pad in his lap. He clenched the pen in his teeth as he picked up the binoculars on the passenger seat beside him.
Texas plates. Is this a local dope customer, or is this dude something else?
He wrote down the license plate number and waited to see what the pickup driver did next. For a second, Velasco thought he saw the pickup driver glance in his direction. He instinctively froze. The look—if there had been one—was so fleeting that Velasco told himself that the guy had not really been looking at him.
I’m good. No problem. He’s leaving. I’ll follow him to see if he stays in town. If not, I need to head home anyway.
Velasco waited a few seconds before pulling onto the street behind the pickup. He followed the Texas vehicle to an on-ramp for I-35 South.
At least he’s heading my way, back toward KC.
He dropped his speed so that he wouldn’t be following the pickup too closely. To his surprise, the truck took an exit off the highway a few miles south of Liberty.
I wasn’t that close to him. He won’t make me if I take the same exit.
He pulled his car onto the exit ramp, a road that curved down and to the left. The pickup was stopped at a light at the bottom of the ramp, in a lane that could either turn left or go across the street running under an overpass. Across the street was an on-ramp leading back to the interstate. Velasco pulled up behind the pickup, figuring that his safest course was to hide in plain sight.
Guess we’re going east. Maybe he is local, or maybe he wants to find a motel for the night.
It was neither. The pickup pulled straight across the road and onto the ramp heading back up to the highway.
Shit! He was checking to see if I was tailing him. Now I have no choice but to turn. He’ll think I was heading that way all the time. I’ll give him some space and then hang back so that he can only see the lights.
Velasco made the left turn, went a block, and then flipped before returning to the light. He took a left onto the ramp and sped up, expecting to reach the top of the ramp and see the pickup on the highway in the distance. Instead he saw it pulled over on the right shoulder, just past the point where the on-ramp merged with the interstate.
Damn! He did make me. Time to head home and call this off for now. I’ll run the tags in the morning and see who this clown is.
He accelerated to the speed limit and watched as the pickup slowly pulled onto the highway behind him.
Kansas City, Missouri
“Nice hunch.” John Foote looked at Trask from across the table in the CCU bullpen.
Cam and Trask had decided that it made more sense to have their morning meetings at CCU than in their office at the courthouse. There were four—and sometimes more counting the supervisors—investigators at CCU, and there were only two prosecutors. Fewer people had to travel to the CCU.
“Mary Louise Monaco had a kid named Tommy who OD’d on a heroin/fentanyl cocktail a few weeks back,” Foote continued. “I checked with the state’s vital statistics and got hits on both his birth certificate and a death certificate. When I saw that he’d died so young, I called the Medical Examiner. What gave you the idea to check that out?”
“Angry mama syndrome,” Trask answered. “I’m pretty familiar with that. Anyone have any intel that it was Little Dom who might have been pushing the dope?”
“Not specifically,” Tom Land said. “Our intelligence guys had some street scuttlebutt that the Gonzalez boys might have switched over to dealing heroin after they ran out of pharmacies to hit for oxy and the other synthetics, but there wasn’t anything tying Dom to that other than his association with the Gonzalez brothers.”
“Then let’s keep our eyes and ears open for that, too,” Trask requested. “He’ll do a helluva lot more time for dealing heroin than for being a felon in possession of a firearm. Speaking of that, any more witnesses or info coming forward?”
“Not yet,” Foote said. “It’s a ‘he said, she would have said but she’s dead’ case, at least as far as his self-defense claim.”
“What’s Jackson County doing with it?” Trask asked Land.
“The county DA is not moving to charge him with the murder until they decide whether the self-defense thing is legit. They’re hyper-cautious down there, and don’t want egg on their faces if it goes south. We have to gift wrap and bow tie every case we give them to get anything charged.”
“I’ll go ahead and get the gun charge filed this morning,” Trask said. “Where’s Dom now?”
“We’re holding him at a county lockup. We were waiting to get the word from you,” Billy Graham said.
Trask nodded. “Good. I should have the complaint filed in an hour or so. Single charge, short memo, so it won’t t
ake long. As soon as it’s done, I’ll call you and you can transport him to the marshals. We’ll hold him pending trial—assuming the magistrate who draws the case doesn’t kick him loose—and the county folks can make up their minds about any murder charge while he’s locked down.”
Trask looked at Cam Turner. “More pleas today?”
“Two this morning, two more this afternoon,” he replied. “Judge Brooks and I are getting to know each other very well.”
“How many does that make?” Land asked.
“I think we’re about halfway through the list,” Cam answered.
“We have the drug analysis back from the crime lab now,” Graham said. “That should speed some more pleas up. Some of the defense attorneys don’t trust our field tests and always wait on the lab reports.”
“We’ll push those out in discovery asap,” Trask told him. “The herd gets thinner.”
Trask looked at his watch. “I have to brief my boss in about thirty. Everybody got their assignments?”
They all nodded.
“See you in the morning, if not sooner,” Trask said as he got up to leave.
“Sorry, but there’s no doubt he made me last night,” Velasco said to his supervisor. “I can’t go back to that tire store for a while, but that may well be where they were getting the drop. Since I saw the guy in the pickup getting a bag instead of leaving one, he might have been picking up a payment for a prior drop.”
“It fits,” Furay said, nodding. “Texas plates. He could be working as a courier for one of the Mexican cartels. Run his info and we’ll see what we have there. In the meantime, I think your assessment is a good one, but it’s what we think rather than what we can prove, at least for now. We don’t have enough to get any kind of warrant since we don’t know what was in the bag.”
“Yeah, my fault.” Velasco shook his head.
“Don’t sweat it,” Furay said. “Could have happened to any of us. We’ll stay shy of the tire store for a while and let things cool down there. Just concentrate on the house across the highway,” he nodded toward the window in the direction of the Dellums’ stash house, “and let’s get as much on the operation there as we can for now.” He looked over the top of his glasses at Velasco. “Without getting burned, if possible.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Velasco said. “They only seem to be over there when they’re moving the dope, probably in the days right after one of their loads comes in. My point is, there’s plenty of dead time where we could put a bug in the place without being seen. I’ve got several buys out of the joint with my source, and he says all the deals happen in the front room. What do you think about a video bug?”
Furay thought it over for a moment. “I like it,” he finally said. “Write it up and we’ll take it to the AUSAs in KCK.”
Dallas, Texas
“I don’t care if I have to carry the stuff in my cab, Dom. Tell your boy Sammy I ain’t goin’ back to his tire shop. That was either a cop sittin’ on the place, or somebody waitin’ to rip me after I picked up the money. I’m bettin’ it was a cop, ’cause he passed me after I pulled off. If he was wanting to do a rip, he’d have pulled over behind me.”
“I hear ya. What would you have done if it had been a rip?” Silvestri asked on the other end of the call.
“I had my gun ready. If he’d come to the window with a gun instead of a badge, it would have been the last thing he ever did.”
“Okay. Whaddaya want me to do?”
“Get with Sammy and set up another place for the deliveries. Just you and him and me; we’re the only ones that know. He can’t tell his crew. I don’t know if they got followed, or shot their mouths off, or whatever. I deal directly with you or Sammy from now on. Nobody else, and no more tire shop.”
“I got ya. Listen, I just had some stuff go down here at the bar, too. Even if you won’t need a shop to pull your tank, we don’t want to make any deliveries here. I’m thinking you can drop the stuff someplace with Sammy, he can get it to his guys some place away from both of us, and then you can swing by here on your flip trips to get paid. I’ll set that up. I’ll be in touch.”
Kansas City, Missouri
“I’d stay away from briefing the press on this, J.P., even on the gun possession charge,” Trask advised Barrett.
“Why do you say that?” His eyebrows were up, meaning that he was looking forward to telling the reporters that we had one of the mob’s young stars locked down for a while.
“The Jackson County guys haven’t filed on the murder yet, and they may not, given Little Dom’s claim of self-defense. We can’t trace the gun ownership to him at this point, and he’s free to say that it may have been a weapon kept behind the bar just for instances like this.”
“Wouldn’t that still be enough access to justify the felon in possession charge?”
“It is, and that’s why I’m doing the complaint. That doesn’t mean we ought to put more chips on the table—like by crowing to the media—given our history on similar cases.”
“What history?”
“I did some digging in the office’s history. A few years back, we filed felon-in-possession charges on a guy who was a passenger in a pickup that stopped for gas at a station in Raytown. The driver gets out and is almost immediately wounded by one of two armed robbers running out of the place. His passenger’s natural reaction is to grab his buddy’s—the driver’s—shotgun out of the back of the cab and return fire. It took the jury about five minutes to acquit him. Yeah, he was a felon, yes, he had access to the gun—and probably less than Dom’s access to the gun at his bar—but we could only show him possessing and using the thing in self-defense. Most juries—especially those who believe in the Second Amendment—aren’t going to fault a guy for making the choice to defend himself versus going down without a fight.”
Barrett nodded. “I see your point. Do you still think we should charge him at all?”
“I do, but before we move from the complaint to a grand jury session, I think we need to try and flush out the ownership and possession trail on the gun he used. We’ll look better kicking the thing sooner rather than later if it looks like it’s going south on us.”
He nodded again. “Good call. We can dismiss before we get no-billed if it doesn’t get better. Our friends in the Italian neighborhoods might even accuse us of being fair for a change.”
Trask laughed. It was the boss’s joke, after all.
“I’ll let you know how that goes,” Trask said as he left Barrett’s office.
I sure would like to leave Little Dom on ice, Trask told himself as he walked back toward his own office. Mary Louise Monaco knew something, and she was a mad enough mama to be willing to die because of it.
Kansas City, Missouri
It was late on Friday morning, and court appearances had delayed the team’s morning meeting at CCU. It was almost eleven. Cam had a couple of more guilty pleas in front of Judge Brooks, and Trask had just wrapped up the detention hearing on Little Dom before Heidi Hamilton. Cam stopped by Trask’s office and they headed to the elevator together.
“The pleas go in okay?” Trask asked him.
“No problems. How about Dom? Does he stay locked up?”
“For now, yes,” Trask answered. “Detained and no bond. Whether he stays inside depends more on whether we decide to indict next week. Hamilton didn’t have any problem at all with either our detention motion or the preliminary hearing issues. Dead bodies have that effect on most judges—even new, green ones.”
They took Trask’s car and drove toward the river and CCU. When they walked inside, Trask saw that some bodies were missing at the table in the bullpen. Tom Land, Bubba, and Ronnie were waiting for them, but Foote and Graham were not.
“I just got off the phone with John,” Land told Trask, reading his face. “They’ll be here in a couple of minutes. I think they have a smoking gun for us. We’ll have some new team members from the Bureau as well.”
“What’s goin
g on?” Cam couldn’t wait for some sort of explanation.
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you, and I’d probably tell you wrong,” Land said. “Let’s wait for John. He outlined it for me, but it’s kind of complicated.”
Foote and Graham showed up ten minutes later. John was carrying a thick, manila, letter-sized envelope. They sat down at the table. John broke out in what most police circles would correctly describe as a “shit-eating grin.”
“I’ve always said that I’d rather be lucky than good,” Foote began. “But—in this case on this morning—we can say with some certainty that we are both.”
“Out with it, hero,” Cam prodded him. “The short version, if possible.”
“There is no short version, Cameron.” Foote looked toward Graham, who shook his head and snickered. He had the inside track on the story, having ridden back with Foote from wherever they’ve been.
“Let me begin, “ Foote said, “by informing you that earlier this morning, I got a phone call from my real office—that being the Federal Bureau of Investigation—,” he looked at Land to see if the verbal jab had had any effect, “and I was told to contact an attorney in Independence, a guy named Sanders. I called Mr. Sanders and asked him what he wanted. He told me it concerned Mary Louise Monaco. I immediately piled Detective Graham into the car, and away we went.
“When we got to Sanders’ office out past the mall, I was ushered into a conference room—”
“I was forced to wait in the lobby,” Graham complained, interrupting.
“—because of what became sort of an attorney-client privilege situation between Mr. Sanders and me,” Foote continued. “You see, it seems that I have kind of inherited a house.”
“What?” Cam asked.
“I think that the best way for me to explain this is to simply read the letter left for me by Mrs. Monaco,” Foote said, pulling some pages out of the manila envelope.