“Take me home, Severino,” the mobster said softly. “I don’t feel well.”
Twenty-seven
Special Agent Ronald Bishop of the FBI was not having a good day either. In his early 40s, which made him roughly the same age as Martelli, Bishop was a former ADA who joined the Agency ten years earlier and had held a number of positions around the country. Now he headed the FBI’s task force on the Mafia-controlled waste-hauling industry. “Any news, yet?” he asked his former partner and a member of his task force, Agent Pete Timberlake, a 15-year veteran of the Bureau.
“Not a peep, Ron. It’s difficult to say whether her apartment was the scene of a struggle or was torn up by someone looking for something. As you know, there were no signs of blood. My guess is, she was ‘made’. Somehow, Lupinacci figured out he’d been played and had her killed. If that’s the case, and it’s a good possibility, chances are we’ll never find her body.”
Bishop nodded. He appeared resigned to the fact his informant, Katlyn Lundquist, aka Nicole Davis, was dead. These things happen, he told himself. God, she was a fucked-up kid, but she didn’t deserve this. All I needed her to do was engage Lupinacci in conversation. ‘How are you, honey?’ ‘Will I see you tonight?’ ‘Can we go dancing again?’ I didn’t even ask her to wear a wire . . . yet. So, how the hell did he ‘make’ her?
The fact was, Bishop’s informant was a young, inexperienced woman almost 20 years his junior. To protect her, he depended almost entirely on the wiretap he had placed on her phone, something of which she was not aware. However, to accommodate the possibility he might have to get a message to her or that she might have to reach out to him, their agreement was that at 1 PM every Tuesday for 20 minutes, he would have a female agent wait in the woman’s restroom of a small diner around the corner from Lundquist’s tattoo parlor. The agent came and went via the diner’s back door, and she would always wait in the third stall. That way, if Lundquist had made a tattoo appointment or simply had decided to visit the parlor to chat with the owner—and she always made a point of going there at 2 PM on a Tuesday if she were going to go—an agent would be waiting to meet with her when she stopped for lunch prior to going to the tattoo parlor.
There never was a sexual relationship between Bishop and his informant. The task force leader was happily married and had a son in college. ‘Never get your meat where you get your bread,’ he always warned his agents. And he threatened to bring disciplinary charges or worse against any agent who violated that tenet.
Not that Lundquist did not try to comprise Bishop. On occasion she hinted to the female agent with whom she met that she needed to speak with Bishop about a matter of the utmost importance. But Bishop kept his distance, based more on the warning Chief Packard had given him about Lundquist than any concerns he might have had about becoming involved with her. As far as Bishop was concerned, he was content to take what he could from the wiretap he had placed on her phone. The intelligence gleaned from the tap already had shut down a number of Lupinacci’s operations, including several that involved the transportation of illegally stamped cigarettes on their way from NC to NY. But beyond that, he could not take the chance she would betray him.
Still, it appeared he was concerned about Lundquist. I wonder what happened to her? Was it something we did that got her killed? Was it something I did. Did Lupinacci have her followed, only to discover those meetings in the diner? God, this is a dirty business.
Twenty-eight
‘Lou, it’s Missy. Give me a call when you get a chance. I have the data.” Indeed, a courier had just delivered a carton containing a printout of all calls made to or from Nicole Davis’s phone in the last year. Damn, this is going to take a while to go through. I wonder if O’Keeffe has time to help.
It was almost 20 minutes before Martelli returned her call. “Sorry, Hanlon had us in his office, asking for a briefing on the Davis case . . . wanted to know why Antonetti still hadn’t issued a death certificate, why we hadn’t asked for additional resources to solve the case, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The usual bullshit.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him Antonetti still hadn’t received the results for all of the pathology tests he had requested, that we were still going through the evidence we had, which was slim at best, and that there had been no missing person reports filed in the five boroughs or the surrounding areas matching the woman’s description.”
“So, basically, you completely withheld the most important information on the case from your captain.”
“Yeah, you could say that. But I didn’t lie to him. I just didn’t tell him the whole truth.”
“And for that, Detective, you are to be commended.”
“Why thank you, Ms. Dugan.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t want you to put out something to the media, you know, to see if someone might recognize the woman and in the best of all worlds, provide information leading to the arrest of whoever killed her.”
“Oh he did, believe me. But I convinced him alerting the media might compromise our investigation by giving away details about the case only we knew. I reminded him how unusual it was for someone shot execution-style to be dumped where she was. I mean, her body was found in the park across the street from the building in Lower Manhattan that just happens to house the FBI. This was as in-your-face, up-front, and personal as it gets. In any other situation, the victim of a mob hit, if that’s what it was, would be swimming with the fishes. So I said, ‘We have to be very careful what we release to the media, if anything, until we fully understand what the hell’s going on here.’
“Then Hanlon, God bless his pointed little head, says, ‘So, why don’t we turn everything over to the FBI?’
“And I responded, ‘Captain, do you remember what happened in 2010 when that banker was shot in Times Square on Halloween and how miserable the Bureau made our lives while we were attempting to solve our murder?’”
Missy let out a maniacal laugh. “How could he forget? The FBI did everything they could to take the case away from you.”
“That’s right. And it was that guy Bishop who pissed me off to no end until you and I figured out a way to get around him.”
“So what did Hanlon say then?”
“He said, ‘Oh Jesus, Martelli, I forgot. Just solve the goddamned case already, before the FBI gets wind of it and the commissioner fires both of our asses.’”
“You do know, Lou, that sooner or later, this could blow up in both of our faces.”
“I know, I know. By the way, I got a call from Antonetti. He said the cotton fibers found in Lundquist’s nostrils most likely came from some kind of cloth her killer had soaked in something and placed over her face to knock her out. Whatever it was—”
“Let me guess. Chloroform.”
Martelli laughed. “You’ve been reading too much crime fiction, Dugan. You’d have to breathe that stuff for five minutes before it would knock you out. Anyway, whatever it was, it had evaporated to the point where the lab couldn’t find a trace.” He reiterated Antonetti’s belief Lundquist was taken by surprise, disabled using some fast-acting chemical agent, driven to a remote location where she was murdered, and then dumped in the park where she was found.
“The poor woman.”
“Well, at least she never knew what hit her, Missy. Anyway, we need to get moving on this case before Hanlon forces my hand.
“So, you got the phone records.”
“Yep. Joel came through for us. Do you think Sean might have some time to go through the stuff with me?”
“Hanlon has him tied up closing out another case with Fitzpatrick and Lewis. How long do you think it will take you to go through the data alone?”
“Perhaps a couple of hours. I’ll take care of it. I already took a quick look. Most of the vic’s calls were to local numbers. She also received a lot of local calls, mostly from the same number in Brooklyn. Oh yeah, there appear to be a number of outgoing calls from her apartment to the 717 a
rea code and a few to one other out-of-state location.”
“Where’s the 717 area code?”
“The Lancaster-York area of Pennsylvania.”
“That’s strange. The chief of police where Lundquist used to live, which, by the way, is a town located between Lancaster and York, said no one had heard of her since she left. You’d think if she was talking to anyone out there, they’d have mentioned it to someone else and, well, you know how people talk.”
“Maybe someone else made the calls from her place, Lou. Anyway, I don’t think it’s going to take long to determine what’s going on here. I’ll get back to you as soon as I have something.”
“Work your magic, Missy.”
Twenty-nine
Ittook Dugan less than two hours to sift through the data and get some idea as to who might have made the calls to and from Lundquist’s phone. Assembling her notes, Dugan grabbed her handset and punched up Martelli’s number in the First.
“That was fast, Missy. I hope you found something we can use.”
“The lady didn’t make most of those long-distance phone calls, Lou, unless she was in the trash hauling and recycling business.”
“Ah, that would be her boyfriend, Tommie Lupinacci, the guy who wooed her away from bucolic Columbia, Pennsylvania.”
“Tommie Lupinacci? Jimmie Lupinacci’s son?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“And you were going to tell me this when?”
“Well, I’m telling you now, darlin’.”
“It’s not nice to keep secrets, Lou,” she said in a sing-song voice. “Anyway, your tattooed lady ran with a pretty dangerous crowd. Tommie’s a real psycho. I’ve read some terrible things about him in the newspapers. No wonder she ended up with a 9mm slug in the back of her head.
“If it was Tommie Lupinacci who made the calls, he placed several from her place over the last year to a company called Superior Trash and Recycling Services on Rt. 30 in Lancaster. I looked into their corporate history . . . a young company, but their revenues have grown rapidly over the last two years. They’re incorporated in Delaware.”
“Send me what you can on them, Missy.”
“Will do. They also operate in York, having opened there about the same time they did in Lancaster.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes, there were several calls made from Lundquist’s apartment to two numbers in the Fayetteville, North Carolina, area. I traced those calls to residences. Not sure what they were about, but I’ll send you the details.”
“Probably related to Lupinacci’s cigarette smuggling operations. North Carolina doesn’t put tax stamps on their cigarette packages, so running cartons of contraband cigarettes out of there and selling them in New York City with fake New York tax stamps on them is quite a lucrative business.”
“How lucrative?”
“Well, on a legitimate sale, a bodega owner in the city makes maybe 50 cents on the sale of a pack of cigarettes. But if he’s selling smuggled cigarettes with fake tax stamps on them, he can easily make a profit of $7 on a pack.”
“That’s a pretty big market, Lou, when you start to think about the number of people who still smoke.”
“And a dangerous one for smugglers. It wouldn’t surprise me if Bishop turned the info he gleaned from those calls over to ICE, ATF, and others. If you’ve read the newspapers, there’ve been quite a few arrests in the last few months in Virginia and Delaware of people charged with transporting contraband cigarettes. Lupinacci might have begun to put two and two together after thinking about some of the calls he made from her apartment. I suspect it dawned on him after a while that his girlfriend’s line was tapped. Whether he suspected she was working for the feds or he simply went crazy in a fit of rage we’ll never know. Once he made up his mind to kill her, the die was cast.”
“But wouldn’t Lupinacci be too smart to make business calls from her phone? I mean, these mob guys weren’t born yesterday. Don’t they all use prepaid burner phones that they replace frequently to avoid having their business calls monitored or traced?”
“Yeah, but remember, Lupinacci was a married man. He went over to Lundquist’s apartment to drink and have sex out of the sight of prying eyes. She probably liquored him up every time he was there, something I’m sure Bishop encouraged her to do. Hell, he probably even paid for the booze. And given Lupinacci’s volatile nature, it wouldn’t surprise me if he picked up her phone after having one too many and made calls to North Carolina and Pennsylvania on occasion without even thinking about the consequences. It’s only after he sobered up the next morning that he might have had second thoughts about having made those calls—if he even remembered making them. It probably wasn’t until bad things started to happen—as in the case of several truckloads of his cigarettes being seized—that the connection occurred to him.”
“I guess Philip Roth was right.”
“Who’s he?”
“Aw geez, Lou. Philip Roth! The novelist. He wrote Portnoy’s Complaint. One of the most famous quotes in that book is, ‘When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the sand.’”3
“You are, if anything, a delicate flower, Dugan.”
“That would be me, Detective.”
“Well, all right then. What else do you have for me?”
“As you might expect, I also found outgoing calls to a hair stylist, a drugstore—probably her pharmacy—several doctors, a dentist, places like that. She also made a lot of calls to a tattoo parlor on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.”
“That would be the place run by my old high school friend, Kyle Lambert.”
“Cool. I wanna go there with you sometime!”
Martelli rolled his eyes. “How about incoming calls?”
“Other than a few from her hair stylist and the drugstore, the incoming calls came from a single location.”
“And that was?”
“Lupinacci and Sons, Cartage, in DUMBO.”4
“Again, that most likely was Tommie Lupinacci calling. Obviously he wasn’t afraid to use his office phone to call his mistress. What was the last call from that location?”
“Let’s see, here it is . . . 10:21 PM on the night she was murdered. The call was 21 minutes, 17 seconds long.”
“Okay, my guess is Lupinacci probably was setting up a meeting with her, you know, making sure she’d be home and expecting someone—ostensibly him—to come by. Except when she went to the door, he wasn’t the one standing there. He no doubt gave her killers his key to her apartment building so she had no reason to suspect something was amiss when she heard someone at the door. Maybe the killers even fiddled with the key in the lock, feigning a problem, just to bring her to the door.
“I didn’t see any signs indicating she was shot there. And whoever went to her apartment that night—I suspect more than one person was involved—probably tore it apart looking for bugs before taking Lundquist out and shooting her.”
“That all sounds reasonable, Lou. So, waddaya want me to do with this document?”
“Shred it. We’re not supposed to have it. Besides, we don’t need it anymore. And thank your friend, if you would.”
“Will do. By the way, did anything I told you sound useful?”
“Time will tell. We’re dealing with some bad pathologies here, so who can say what was really going on? Lundquist was a compulsive liar who’d been in trouble with the law since her early teens. Tommie Lupinacci is a psychopath who’s been known to break thousand-dollar bottles of champagne over people’s heads because they looked sideways at his date. Put the two together and you had one volatile situation, that’s for sure. God only knows what might have happened to trigger her death. But that assumes Tommie’s the one actually responsible for her murder, which may or may not be the case.”
“You’re right. When you’re dealing with the mob, you never know. Someone might have wanted to send Tommie a message.”
Thirty
Homocide was not Ron Bishop’s stock-in-trade. After al
l, he was the special agent in charge of the FBI’s task force on the Mafia-controlled waste-hauling industry, an assignment that kept him busy seven days a week. If anyone asked, he would not have been able to recall the last time he had a vacation, a real vacation, one on which his cell phone did not ring at least twice each hour.
Now, after a full day’s work in the FBI’s field office at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, he could not get Katlyn Lundquist, aka Nicole Davis, out of his mind. What happened to her? And as nagging as that question was, even worse was the one that came to him in the middle of the night, when sleep evaded him, as it often did since Lundquist’s disappearance. Is she dead, and if so, was it something I did that led to her death?
It had been weeks since Lindquist had been in contact with the Bureau. As prearranged, one of Bishop’s agents had waited every Tuesday at 1 PM in the woman’s restroom of the diner near her tattoo parlor on the chance Lundquist might want to talk. She never appeared. And now a week had passed since Bishop, concerned, had gone to her apartment, only to find it in disarray, giving every indication she was taken from it by force.
Since her disappearance, Bishop had scoured the newspapers, checked with his sources, and ran all of the ‘traps’ in search of something, anything, that might provide a lead as to what happened to his informant, but he learned nothing. On the possibility Lundquist returned to the Columbia area, Bishop called Chief Packard. He was only able to speak with a deputy—Packard was tied up in court—who assured him Lundquist was not in the area, something the FBI’s undercover agents in Lancaster and York confirmed. In short, Bishop’s inquiries bore no fruit.
He was left with only one option, and it pained him deeply to think about it. To him there was only person who had the skills he needed to find Lundquist—or, at least, to solve the mystery of her disappearance—and he and that person, NYPD Detective-Investigator Louis Martelli, had, if anything, a most adversarial relationship. Specifically, Bishop knew Martelli had no liking for him whatsoever, an animosity that stemmed from the FBI having interfered with the NYPD’s work on a 2010 case involving a murdered international banker.
Wheel of Fortune (Detective Louis Martelli, NYPD, Mystery/Thriller Series Book 6) Page 8