Momma Lupe, Book 1 in the Ty Connell 'Novella Series. A Mystery/Suspense Thriller. Cooking or killing -- Momma Had Her Funny WAys

by Michael C. Hughes

  The man returned to his unit and they went around the house.

  Shortly, Connell heard movement inside and the deadbolts sliding across. They and the other SWAT unit moved inside.

  They fanned out quickly through the rooms of the small place but found no sign of Momma or of the sons.

  But there were signs of hurried packing: empty closets, drawers empty and left open, bathroom toiletries cleared out, and Connell got a sinking feeling.

  John called to him from the kitchen.

  "Uh, Ty, better come have a look."

  Connell walked in, and on the kitchen table was a two-inch thick black leather bound book: A Digest of the Criminal Code of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It was sitting, like a paperweight, on the corner of a note.

  Connell glanced at the setup. Ma's perverse touch?

  The note was hand-printed in pink day-glo marker. It read: "Please water the plants and feed the cat. Gone fishing. I. Lupanier."

  At that moment, a cat wandered up from the basement and made a small meow at the door.

  Momma, it seemed, had simply walked away from her operation and had left with the two sons to who-knows-where.

  Maybe, Connell thought, with Ma no longer in town, Emily Dumont would be willing to tell a court what she knew. What they also really was a witness to one or more of the murders. Emily might also be of some help there.

  The next day he and John called on Miss Dumont’s apartment, to advise her that they had recovered her sister’s body, but that proceedings against Ma would not be going forward until they could pull together more evidence. Maybe she’d be willing to go to a secure refuge center for women while things moved forward. She’d be safe there. She could maybe start a detox from the junk.

  But there was no answer.

  They knocked repeatedly, but after five minutes it was clear that Emily Dumont wasn't home.

  They called the Crazy Horse to see if she’d been there. They said she’d been sent home three days ago and had no idea.

  Had she gone back to Quebec? Gone to stay with a friend?

  Connell turned once again to Paul Geddes. If he didn't know where she was, he could find out.

  So Connell and Morgan drove once again to the donut shop.

  But this time Geddes wasn't there either.

  Connell had no idea where Geddes lived because he had never had need to track him to his residence before. But now he had to do so, so he called in Geddes' name over the SDR band and he got back an address in Chelsea, the town just north of the city across the Chelsea River. A neighborhood of with low rent rooming houses and welfare apartments.

  There was also the little matter of owing Paul the final forty-six hundred dollar payment. Connell was always good on his word to informants —how he kept their trust and co-operation— and he knew that Geddes would forgive him tracking him to his door when he handed over the little canvas bag.

  His apartment was in a dreary, foul smelling and rundown city owned tenement, but Geddes didn't answer the door.

  They knocked several times, but he, too, was not home.

  Was he out chasing a fix? Was he inside? High, holed up, and not answering? Had he overdosed and was lying dead or in a coma?

  They decided to round up the super and have a look.

  Once inside, the first thing that hit them was the stench. Rotting food. Geddes hadn't picked up a beer can or a pizza crust in months and the place reeked of old food bits scattered in all corners and all around the floor.

  They made their way through a garbage strewn living room and down a short hallway to the apartment's single bedroom. Connell was braced for the worst: finding Geddes’ stinking carcass on filthy old bed sheets.

  But Geddes wasn't there either. The bedroom was also a garbage dump, with just enough space pushed aside on the saggy old mattress for a person to lie down.

  Still no Paul.

  Then they went into the small kitchen: more beer cans and pizza boxes, mixed in with other discarded bits of molding food.

  There was a small table in one corner, mostly covered with dirty plates and fried chicken boxes. But the garbage had been pushed aside so that one corner of the table was clear.

  On the corner was a note.

  When Connell read it, it gave him a chill: "Gone fishing with Ma. Paul."

  It was hand-printed in pink day-glo marker. In the same scratchy hand style as the note at Momma’s.

  Isabelle Lupanier, a.k.a. Momma Lupe, disappeared permanently from the New England area.

  Emily Dumont and Paul Geddes also were never heard from again.

  State Police divers re-searched the spot where they had found the original crates, but found nothing more. They also began a scan of the entire lake. The Reservoir Lake is a big lake, second biggest in the state, also inter-connected to a series of smaller lakes and rivers around it. They kept the sonar going for a week, but found no more crates.

  For lack of hard evidence —other than the hearsay statement of Emily Dumont— Momma Lupe was never officially charged with murder and could not be compelled to return to Massachusetts even if she were found. That seemed to be an end to it. No charges ever brought against her.

  But it wasn’t the end for Connell.

  He kept making occasional calls and, several years later, he heard rumors that someone sounding a lot like Momma had surfaced in New Orleans. On the stripper/hooker scene. Recruiting girls from small backwoods towns across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Mississippi to work in mobbed-up strip clubs along the Gulf states.

  Connell made calls to the New Orleans PD and to the FBI Regional Office there to see if anyone could verify the rumors. But no one down there had even heard of any Momma Lupe. Or of any Isabel Lupanier. Or about anything unusual from strip clubs around the Gulf states. Women came and went from these places almost daily. Who could track it?

  Then, on a nagging hunch, Connell did a nation-wide search of Isabel Lupanier, to see if there might be relatives somewhere with whom she might have had contact.

  But no Isabel Lupaniers popped up.

  That was strange.

  The no Lupaniers at all showed up.

  That was really strange.

  How was it possible that there were no Isabel Lupaniers, and even no Lupaniers at all in all of America?

  Connell then broadened his search to Canada.

  Again, no Isabel Lupaniers. And no Lupaniers at all.

  In frustration, and as a last resort, he worked through an associate at INTERPOL in DC. A man he’d gone to college with. He asked the man to do a world-wide search for any Lupanier any where.

  The man did.

  There was no one named Isabel Lupanier on planet earth, he said. There wasn’t even another Lupanier.

  “There are no Lupaniers anywhere,” the man said. “It’s a made up name.”

  Connell set the phone and could only shake his head once more at the most evil and cunning woman he’d never meet.

  “Officially she never existed,” he said to himself. “Still doesn’t. Amazing.”

  He still makes calls. Still hasn’t given up.