by Marc Rainer
“I didn’t know you were acquainted,” Trask remarked.
“Never met the lady,” Foote replied, the grin still on his face. He held up a hand. He wanted no more questions. “The letter and the manila envelope,” he said formally, “were sealed. We opened them after leaving the attorney’s office. The letter reads as follows:”
“‘Dear Special Agent Foote, my name is Mary Louise Monaco. I live in northeast Kansas City, immediately behind McElhaney’s Bar, the place run by Dominic Silvestri, Jr. Folks call him ‘Little Dom.’ I am a widow, my husband having died in the service of his country during the first Iraq War.’
“‘We had a son, Tommy, who was injured in a motorcycle accident after his father died. Tommy had some problems with his back that could never be resolved, and he was always in a lot of pain after the wreck. The doctors prescribed stronger and stronger pain medicines for him, and he became addicted to them. After the prescriptions ran out, and without my knowledge, Tommy began buying more of the painkillers off the street. Oxycontin, other opioid meds, whatever he could find.’
“‘When he couldn’t find the pills on the black market any longer, he started injecting heroin. I had no idea that any of this was going on until I found him unconscious in his bedroom one night when I got home from work. The needle, spoon, and some of the heroin were all lying beside him on his bed. I asked him where he had gotten the stuff, and he just pointed to McElhaney’s. I knew he had been spending a lot of time over there after he turned twenty-one.’
“‘I got him into rehab, and I thought for a while that it was working. He told me that he was clean, and he seemed to be his old self again. He went back to school. He was taking some classes at the community college, but his pain started getting worse, and I guess he relapsed. I found him in his room again one night, and this time I could not wake him up. The police told me that the autopsy showed he had died of an overdose of heroin and fentanyl.’
“‘After my son died, I decided that I would do everything in my power to take down the monster who had killed my baby. I started watching the back of McElhaney’s every night and taking pictures. I wanted to make sure that my information was good before I took any final actions. The photographs and my notes are in an envelope that Mr. Sanders will provide to you.’
“‘I began seeing a pickup truck driving into the rear parking lot of the bar on a fairly regular schedule. Sometimes the driver would give a small bag to Dom, and sometimes Dom would give a bag to the man in the truck. Some of my photos show these exchanges. I became convinced that these were drug deliveries and payments. What I saw was enough evidence in my mind to justify further action.’”
Foote looked around the table, taking evident satisfaction in the others’ collective astonishment.
“‘I started going to McElhaney’s to see what the workers’ schedules were,’” he continued reading. “‘I didn’t want anyone other than Dom to get hurt. I bought a gun and practiced with it. I didn’t really care about the consequences to me, I just wanted Dom to pay for killing my son, and I figured that Tommy might not have been his only victim. I thought about trusting the courts, but I couldn’t be sure about them.’
“‘Agent Foote, I’ve seen you on TV and in the paper, and I know you’ve worked cases against the local Mafia in the past. I didn’t know who else to give this information to. If you are reading this letter, then something in my plan went wrong, and I am no longer here to make things right for Tommy. I hope that you can do that for me now. Sincerely, Mary Louise Monaco.’”
Cam let out a long whistle. “How are the photos, John?”
“Damned good, for an amateur, and printed on decent paper,” Foote responded as he passed the 8x10s around the table. “As you can see, they’re also date and time stamped.”
“Useful intelligence,” Trask observed, “but without a witness to authenticate them at trial, that’s all they are for now. We have to have a witness to say that the photos are accurate and that they haven’t been doctored since they were taken.”
Trask picked up one of the photographs. It clearly showed the Texas plates on the white pickup.
“There’s the lucky part,” Trask observed.
“Not all of it,” Foote said. “After he gave me the envelopes, Sanders also gave me these.” He held up a set of keys. “They open the doors to Mrs. Monaco’s house.
“As explained to me by Mr. Sanders,” Foote explained to the team, “Mrs. Monaco made me her sole heir. Her estate is just in excess of the floor amount that requires it to go through probate. That process would normally take about a year-and-a-half, but she made it clear to Sanders that if she died soon, she wanted me to have immediate access to her house, so he put it into a Living Trust. She named me as the residual trustee, meaning that the house goes to me now and outside the probate process.”
“Congratulations,” Cam said, his voice a mix of sarcasm and confusion. “You are now a resident of the old northeast side.”
“I can’t accept it, of course, since it was given in anticipation of some action within my official duties,” Foote said. “It will all go to charity once we are finished with it.”
“And what are we going to do with it?” Veronica Lincoln asked.
“John and I talked about that on the phone while he was driving back,” Sgt. Land said. “The ‘we’ in this case is you and your new husband.”
“What?!” Ronnie asked. It was her turn to be flabbergasted.
“I agreed with John that his face is too well known in that part of town to have him coming and going from that house. We need to put some people in our new observation post who won’t raise eyebrows. Like a younger, married couple. A cousin of the late Mrs. Monaco and her husband, a couple from out-of-town who are thrilled to be living in the big city, rent free, thanks to the lady’s untimely and tragic death.”
Ronnie jumped to her feet, trying to decide how hard to object to her new role. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “Who—?”
“Detective Graham, please stand,” Land requested.
Billy stood.
“I now pronounce you man and wife,” Land said.
“Can I kiss the bride?” Billy asked, winking at Ronnie and leaning across the table.
“I wouldn’t,” Land said. “I’ve seen your range scores. She’s a lot better shot than you are.”
“I suppose this means we won’t need a pole cam on the bar,” Trask observed.
Pole cameras were normally used for remote surveillance. The FBI—or the police—could pay the phone company to put the television cameras on phone poles and wire them so that they sent video feeds back to the investigators’ offices.
“We’d never get one up in that neighborhood without being made, anyway,” Foote said. “This is a whole lot better, easier to monitor, more flexible, and more comfortable.”
“I’ll say,” Graham quipped, leering at Ronnie.
“Do I get a vote, here?” Ronnie asked.
“Only if it’s ‘Sure, Boss, happy to help,’” Land replied.
“Did you have a chance to deconflict these plates?” Trask asked Foote, looking at the photo of the truck again. They were required to see if any other investigative agency was looking at their target vehicles, people, or trucks as part of another investigation or case.
“That’s where the ‘good’ comes in with the ‘lucky,’” Foote said. “I had Billy call in the numbers from the car on the way back from Sanders’ office. We got a hit in my own squad where I used to work, at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” He looked at Land again, who was rolling his eyes skyward. “We should have another couple of guests here shortly, so let’s take five.”
Trask walked around the corner to pull a Diet Coke out of the unit’s communal snack fridge and dropped fifty cents into a coffee can inside the refrigerator door. When he came back into the bullpen, he noticed two more bodies standing around the table.
Foote introduced Trask to Supervisory Special Agent Michael Furay and Detective Jose
Velasco. The team sat at the table again, and for the next half-hour Velasco briefed them on his source buys of heroin from the Dellums brothers and his aborted surveillance of the white pickup at the tire store in Liberty.
“Where does this leave us—organizationally I mean?” Trask inquired.
“We have our flag planted on the Dellums brothers and on Sammy Collavito, their boss at the tire store,” Furay noted. “The FBI will be the lead agency now.”
“Any squawk with adding Dom and our pickup driver to that?” Trask asked Land.
“Not at all,” Sgt. Land said. “Everyone here works well together. Mike can federally deputize all my people. The team just transfers to another flagship.”
“And I get to be a real federal agent again,” Foote said, drawing another eye-roll from Land.
“What’s the name of our pickup driver?” Trask asked Velasco.
“That would be Tyler Pemberton Cannon, IV,” Jose answered. “Lives alone north of Dallas. No record, yet.”
“Here’s to the ‘yet,’” Trask said, holding his Diet Coke up in a toast.
“To the ‘yet,’” Velasco echoed.
“We do have one minor problem, though,” Trask said. “We can’t follow Cannon to Dom right now.”
“Why is that?” Velasco inquired.
“Because our hero here—,” Cam said, pointed to Trask, “just got him detained for being a felon in possession of the firearm he used to shoot Mary Louise Monaco.”
“Mrs. Monaco now certainly appears to have fired first,” Trask said. “I think we’ll be kicking the young man loose very soon. We can’t be prosecuting the lad for acting in self-defense. I’ll brief the boss—again.”
Lee’s Summit, Missouri
“Your boss didn’t have any problem with kicking him loose?” Lynn asked Trask as they followed the pups around the inside perimeter of the dog park.
Trask waited until another couple passing them and walking the other direction was out of earshot. Lynn understood why. Trask couldn’t risk any privileged information being overheard by the public, and he couldn’t even be too specific with her about the facts of an open investigation.
“We got some stuff that backed up Dom’s claim of self-defense, and if the case against him was left open, we would have had to release that information to his attorney in discovery. That would have torpedoed an even bigger open investigation, so we really didn’t have much choice. J.P. didn’t like doing it—neither did I—but he understood why we had to dismiss the case.”
“Is he happy with the progress on the new thing?”
“Very. We all are. You know the old saying, ‘I’d rather be lucky than good?’”
“Of course.”
“I’d say we’re riding a hot streak at the moment. ‘Lucky’ doesn’t even begin to describe what we got yesterday.”
“You’ll have to fill me in when you can.”
“Certainly. I had a hunch about it—thanks to you—but I had no idea how correct that hunch was.”
“Thanks to me?”
“You can be an angry mama when somebody threatens the pups, like when those kids were throwing rocks at them the other day. If Dom goes down like I think he will, it’ll be in large part because of another angry mother.”
Trask looked ahead and saw Boo and Tasha make the turn at the far end of the park before heading back to Lynn and Trask at a full run. A small, full-blooded Husky saw them passing her and easily caught up, loping beside them. Tasha was surprised and gave the larger dog her most menacing warning. Boo greeted the Husky happily, making a sound like a Star Wars wookie.
“I think Boo sees a cousin,” Lynn said as Nikki trotted up to greet the Husky, rubbing noses with it. “Nikki has always had a thing for Huskies, too.”
“Tasha has delusions of grandeur,” Trask replied, picking up their little Mini-Schnauzer to keep her out of trouble. “You’re not the park referee, squirt.”
The Husky trotted off across the median to her owner, and Trask and Lynn completed their last lap. They unlatched the leashes hanging on the fence by the gate and loaded the girls back into the rear seat of the Rogue.
They headed back southward toward Raintree.
“Without telling me what you can’t tell me, how big is the new thing with Dom?” Lynn asked.
“We’re not even sure yet. We just have some very good leads to follow that will give us those answers.”
“Do we need to be worried about security at the house?”
“No more so than usual. If that changes, we’ll make the adjustments.”
“I don’t want you, or me, or the pups to get hurt.”
Trask patted her hand. “I don’t either, and I hate to see you upset. I really don’t want to see you angry.”
In the back seat, Boo made her wookie sound again.
“Neither does Boo,” Trask added.
Kansas City, Missouri
“What time did they let you out?” Sammy Collavito asked between sips of the whiskey-laced orange juice in his glass.
“After midnight this morning,” Dom responded, looking up at the gyrating torso of the naked dancer on the stage in front of them. “Those assholes knew it was self-defense, but they had me on the inside anyway—for more than three days.”
“Where were they holdin’ ya?”
“That pit in Cass County—Harrisonville—along with every hillbilly meth head and black junky in the county. I’m so pissed I can’t see straight. That new prosecutor, Trask, was really pleased with himself when he got me locked down without bail, then he turns around three days later and dismisses the case. What kind of shit is that? I get three days in a county lockup without a trial and my lawyer tells me there’s nothing I can do about it, and I should just be glad I’m out.”
“Well, aren’t ya?”
“Screw you, Sammy.”
“I doubt it. What about her?” Collavito pointed to the blonde spinning on the pole on the stage above them.
“In a heartbeat.”
“That’s what I thought. I got ya.” Collavito pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his wallet and signaled to the stripper, who smiled and waved toward someone off-stage. Another dancer came out to take her place as the blonde’s clear heels clicked on the stairs down from the stage. Sammy pointed toward Dom, and the stripper grabbed his hand and led him toward a curtain in the back. A neon sign above the curtain read, “VIP ROOM.”
Dom was back in twenty minutes.
“Thanks, bud,” he told Sammy. “I needed that.”
“No sweat. What ya want to do now?”
“I just want to stay here a while and drink.” Dom made a signal toward the bar and held up two fingers. “This round’s on me.” He waited until another naked blonde brought over the two glasses of orange juice, and then pulled two mini-bottles of Jack Daniel’s out of his pocket. He handed one to Collavito.
“It’s been good hangin’ with ya again. Business is good, too. We just can’t deliver to you at your store anymore.”
“Yeah? How come?”
“Our driver got tailed out there on the last drop. Cops.”
“You sure about that?”
“The driver’s real sure about it. He pulled some of those counter-surveillance moves and caught the guy followin’ him dead to rights.”
“Did he get stopped?”
“Nah, but he’s not goin’ back to your shop anytime soon.”
“How about your bar?”
“Are you shittin’ me? After I had to shoot that bitch? It’ll be hotter than your joint for a while.”
“What’s the plan, then?”
“Tyler’s dumpin’ his truck for a new set of wheels. He told me he’ll get something with a compartment built into it, so he won’t need a shop to open it. He’s willing to make drops to you or me, but nobody else, and I can still pay him.”
“I thought you said your place was too hot.”
“It is, for his old truck and for deliveries, but as long as he’s in new wheels,
he can come inside the bar and I’ll put his money in a take-out bag. Nobody’s made him yet, just his old set of wheels, so it’ll look like any other customer carryin’ out a sandwich or burger.”
“Okay. Can he do the drops to you the same way?”
“He may not be hot right now, but I’m probably nuclear, especially if the cops connect the dots on Marylou Monaco’s kid. He OD’d on some of our dope.”
“No shit? That’s why she came gunnin’ for ya?”
“That has to be it.”
Collavito took another pull from his glass.
“I been meanin’ to ask ya. What did it feel like killin’ somebody? I never had to.”
Dom snorted. He looked at Sammy through bloodshot eyes. The liquor was starting to do its job.
“No different than the last time.”
“The last time? You done more than one?”
Dom nodded. He looked at Sammy hard.
“I guess I can trust ya. You remember Big John Porcello?”
Collavito nodded. “Sure, I—wait a minute—that was you?”
Dom smiled. “I ain’t sayin’ for sure that it was me, but I am sayin’ for sure that he was a rat.”
“Holy shit!” Collavito shook his head and laughed. “Holy shit!”
“Where are they now, Bubba?” Sgt. Land asked.
Det. John “Bubba” Smith raised the secure radio in his lap a few inches and pressed a button.
“We’re in the West Bottoms at Bottoms,” Bubba replied. “You know, Paulie Beretta’s juice bar. They’ve been in there a couple of hours now.”
“Who’s he with?”
“Sammy Collavito met him here. They went in together. They could be with somebody else inside. I haven’t been in there. I had to go in a few times before when I was workin’ the biker gangs. Didn’t want to risk getting burned today.”
“You had any sleep?”
“Not since I picked him up early this morning in Harrisonville.”
“I’ve got a relief headed your way. Nice work. Go home and crash.”
“Will do. What else is going on?”
“Billy and Ronnie are setting up house in northeast.”