“So this is all confirmed?”
“Far as I can tell, yes,” Colgrave said.
“Hmm…” On top of picturing her, he was also trying to clear his mind of the Heather aftereffect. But the thought of an eccentric mob boss moving in on the tribal casino and having a reason to pay Jessie a visit caused his stomach acids to feel extra toxic.
“You know, I’m interested in this too, now,” she went on over his silence. “The Organized Crime unit’s been fairly quiet—once they made gangs their own thing we haven’t had anything to speak of. The local mob was busted up in the eighties. But if they’ve got hard-ons for tribal casinos, for one thing, you’ll need help. This Bastone guy sounds like a character out of a Puzo book, but maybe that’s just his shtick. He’s not faking the dangerous part.”
“Tell me about the thug who disappears people.”
Colgrave sighed. “My source didn’t have a name, but apparently he’s been with the family some years, except for a few tours in the Middle East.”
Lupo’s ears pricked up. “Yeah? Soldier boy, huh?”
“Yeah, and also a contractor after he mustered out. He’s definitely a killer, but no one can ever find any evidence.”
Lupo had heard enough.
He ran a nervous hand through his hair. He was suddenly very glad Ryeland hadn’t put him in charge of the bus case. Now he and DiSanto could cut loose and hardly anyone would notice.
“Thanks, Danni, I owe you.”
“Noted.”
“Seriously, if you need anything…”
“Lupo, this guy’s trouble. If you need anything, just call. Or you know where I hide out.”
“Okay.” He did have a sense that she was sometimes on the edge. On the borderline. She had that rep among the detectives, anyway. She had some dark secrets, that was for sure. And he was more curious than he had any right to be.
But there was more important shit to worry about…
He clicked off and dark thoughts rolled through his head like an up-north thunderstorm in midsummer.
Why did shit like this always happen in threes?
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lupo
For the first time since he’d started the mandated therapy sessions with the police psychologist, he could almost say he liked the therapist.
Marla Anders was forthright, serious, discreet from what he could tell, and she really seemed to listen. And it didn’t hurt that she was a beautiful woman unlike that crone Barrett, who’d had it in for Lupo. It had been her undoing, though, and then the new psychologist who had replaced her was Marcowicz and he’d been almost worse, selling him out to that vulture Killian.
Now they were both resting together in eternity, thanks to a couple favors he’d called in.
Not their murders, only their disposal.
Lupo’d been set up to look like a murderer, but he’d played his hand faster and his connections had given him an out. He was all out of favors there, he figured.
No, it didn’t hurt that Marla Anders had flawless olive skin, her oval face crowned by lustrous black hair that she wore cascading down one side of her head onto her shoulders. She looked as if she should have had a bright tropical flower woven through its silky strands. He figured she probably traced her heritage to some interesting confluence of African-American and Latino bloodlines, and as far as he was concerned she was more or less the most attractive woman to be found in the MPD’s central precinct on any given day, with the only possible exception being Danni Colgrave.
He grinned. Sometimes he enjoyed being that chauvinist cop everybody hated. It was just part of being a male cop—the locker room was never far away.
He’d suggested postponing his session, but Ryeland was adamant that there was no reason.
“Besides, DiSanto’s picking the rest of his team today, the lab results won’t be in, we’ve heard nothing from anyone, and the mayor called with his full support. For today, anyway.” Ryeland chuckled wryly. “Keep your appointment. I want everyone on the team to have a clear record, and if you start skipping sessions, that’s gonna look bad. And everybody’s gonna try following your lead. My system will collapse.”
“Well, you know where I’ll be then…” Lupo had said, hiding the sinking feeling that his star was starting to fall.
Now he was sitting in Anders’ office, across her neatly arrayed desktop. Marcowicz had been something of a slob, but Anders was almost OCD. There wasn’t much on the smooth surface and everything was lined up with perfection.
She had been watching him grinning. “What’s funny?” She smiled to show that she wasn’t offended by his private musing.
She had a nice smile, he realized.
“Just thinking about some of my previous sessions in here.” Well, it was true.
“You didn’t feel they were very helpful?” She raised an eyebrow.
“You could say that. They seemed to be more interested in what I thought about the weather on any given day.” That wasn’t true. They’d been interested in pinning some of the strange happenings on him.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said and sounded sincere. “I’m just interested in giving you a forum to get anything off your chest you feel might help you. We can talk about anything. Since your injury—” she glanced down his leg at his prosthetic “—you’ve been through a lot.”
If you only knew, he thought. At least he’d remembered to limp a little when he’d come in.
He nodded, and told her about the cases he’d worked. He had to lie about some of it, of course, but if he sat there without talking it would just infuriate her into disliking him, too, so it was best to play the game.
He went on at length, as she nodded encouragingly.
She’d encouraged him to share, and for once he’d found someone he instinctively believed really wanted him to.
She was startled by his losses. He talked about his longtime partner, Ben Sabatini, who had been murdered by the serial killer Martin Stewart. Then he’d lost a good friend in Sam Waters, casualty of the first encounter with Wolfpaw mercenaries. He’d lost another friend in Tom Arnow, briefly sheriff of Vilas County—and his guilt there would forever remain. There was no end to the list of heartaches he’d suffered since those days. It was good to talk about them, even if in oblique terms.
Anders seemed genuinely touched. “You must have a lot of ghosts.”
He started to nod, then said, “What?”
“You know, I believe that some of us experience our ghosts more than others…” She looked up suddenly to find him staring at her. “I mean, I—I’m just sharing a thought I’ve had. Recently…”
“Yes?” Lupo said, leaning forward. This is strange.
She seemed to realize that somehow her session had been reversed. “Excuse me, I’ve been working on a series of articles—a book, really—and sometimes I get off on a tangent.”
“Sounds like an intriguing subject,” he said. She was embarrassed, as if he’d caught her at something. “What you said about ghosts, though, I’m really interested in that.”
She looked up suddenly, her eyes catching his, trying to draw him out.
And then he had the thought that maybe she was acting, that she was setting him up, as if she knew…could she have read Marcowicz’s files? It was one of his many missteps with the previous psychologist, telling him too much, believing it would truly remain between them.
Was she trying to get him to talk about Ghost Sam?
Chapter Twenty-Five
DiSanto
He was planning his day of taking command of the task force. He’d made a list of detectives he wanted to grab from other units, and he’d sketched out how they would proceed.
Of course he would take his partner into the task force. Nick was better suited for working alone, true, but DiSanto knew he could set him loose on his own tangent and he’d grab on to it like a pit bull.
It would take several days for forensics to give them a complete picture of what had happened e
xactly. Beyond knowing that an unknown shooter had taken out passengers and then the driver—and then disappeared—they needed to know the order of things. They needed to catalog and watch camera feeds from every public and private camera along the route of the entire incident, all the way to where it had ended tragically in death for so many.
For a small, contained incident, it had caused a shitload of casualties.
His mind buzzing with possibilities, ideas, tactics, and more points to add to his list, he finally entered the squad room before 8:00 a.m., and it was already a hub of activity.
In the glassed-in corner, detectives were sitting around the long conference table, holding coffee mugs. A smartboard was on, with tables and charts scrolling across it. Three strangers in suits stood positioned around the table, one of them with the remote.
“Sonofabitch,” DiSanto muttered. He was standing there, just staring, trying to process what he was seeing. That was his meeting, going on without him.
“Yeah, it’s the feds.” Ryeland had sidled up without a sound. For his size, that was impressive. “Didn’t give me any fucking choice.”
“They’re taking over?”
“Yeah. You can be part of the team, but it’s their ballgame. Which begs the question, what does Homeland want with our shooter? He doesn’t fit the terrorist label.”
“They’re not FBI?” DiSanto asked, stifling his anger. He thought Ryeland had changed his mind about him and called in the dreaded feds.
“Nope, I never called ’em. These are DHS, so they’re ten times worse.” Ryeland lowered his voice. “Tread carefully, especially with the tall guy wrangling that remote. Name’s Hart, or Bart. Anyway, something’s going on we don’t know about, and we’re in the middle with no clue.”
“Thanks. What about Lupo?”
“He’s on the team too, but he’s in with Anders I think. He seems distracted, your partner.”
“I don’t think so.”
“‘Cause I know he gets himself pulled around—he’s had more strange stuff happen to him than any ten guys. Yet he always comes out clean. Just from reading his cases and personnel file, I mean.” Ryeland turned and fixed DiSanto with a harsh stare. “You know anything you can share?”
“No, sir. That is, I’m not aware of anything improper. If that’s what you mean…”
“I’m easy, DiSanto. As long as bad guys go away for a long time, I don’t question much. But I don’t want too much off the reservation poaching. Capisce?”
DiSanto nodded. “Got it.”
“Now you’d better get to that meeting before they have you transferred to traffic control, or parking patrol.” When DiSanto’s eyes widened, Ryeland added. “Kidding!” Then: “I think. That Hart-Bart guy is an asshole.”
DiSanto shrugged and made his way to the table behind the glass while the guy with the remote droned on, squeezing in because no one had left him any space.
“Jesus,” he muttered.
“Sorry, Dee,” muttered an older detective named Mosher. “They herded us in here and took over. Seems like we’re in the middle of some deep, dark conspiracy—but they’re not tellin’ us what it is.”
“Hey, sorry to be bothering you over there in the corner.” The gravelly voice belonged to the agent Hart-Bart, who’d stopped his monologue to glare at DiSanto’s interruption.
“Carry on,” DiSanto said. Always a slave to his own wise mouth. He made a florid gesture.
Hart-Bart frowned, stared at him two beats longer, then continued.
“As I was saying, there have been several shootings in the Chicago area that we think are perpetrated by the same individual. This is why we were able to latch on to yours and offer our help. There doesn’t seem to be a motive, but we’re putting together an extensive file.”
“How is that any help?” DiSanto whispered to his coconspirator, who waved him away.
“Well, they haven’t figured out a motive, haven’t caught the guy, don’t know squat.” DiSanto’s voice carried, and Hart-Bart stopped again and glared at him.
“Detective…”
“Yeah, yeah,” DiSanto said, gesturing again. “All ears.”
His fellow detectives grinned, but Hart-Bart’s eyes turned dagger-like. He chose to ignore, however, and continued with team assignments.
DiSanto looked around the squad room. Still no Lupo.
He stalked off in search of Ryeland, shaking his head.
“This is bullshit…”
So much for the task force. He and Lupo could work the case better on their own.
Lupo
His call found her while she was on break.
“Nick!” Her voice was breathy. He loved that sound.
“Listen,” he said, without much preamble. There would be time for some tenderness later.
“Yeah?” She picked up on his intensity.
“I got the word and it’s not good.” He went on to give Jessie an abbreviated, slightly edited version of what Colgrave had told him.
“This is terrible! I have to tell Bill.”
He thought about it. “Okay, tell him what I told you, but that’s it. No investigating on your own. No hunting for Mafia guys. Listen, I grew up on the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and The Three Investigators and Brains Benton—okay? I was into the whole kid detective thing. Maybe that’s why I wanted to be a cop. But that stuff is for kids and when they get caught sticking their noses into some criminal’s plan nothin’ happens to them. You see? This is real life. These guys play rough. They might not really like you sounding the warning to everybody you know.”
“Well, I have to do something, Nick. You remember Charlie Bear, from that Archer thing down in Milwaukee?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s working casino security here now. Isn’t that what he did down there?”
Lupo winced. He was glad they weren’t on FaceTime so she could see his look. He remembered what had happened to Charlie because he hadn’t played ball with some very bad people, people they’d had time to get to know later on. Charlie’s family had paid the price.
“Yeah, he did do that kind of work. And he helped me out, but it got his family—uh, it was a bad thing that happened.” He didn’t really want to get into the details, not with what Jessie was facing now.
“I did remember. I told him I was sorry.”
Like that would help. His family was exterminated.
But she didn’t know everything. He’d never told her.
“Jess, I’m serious, you have got to hang back on this until I figure out what to do. It’s not like you’re tattling on the class clown here. These guys are really outside our world when it comes to legal and illegal.”
“Can they be any worse than Wolfpaw werewolves, Nick?”
“That’s not fair. That’s two different things. But yeah, I think they might be worse. At least Wolfpaw hid most of their crimes. These mob guys like to hurt folks publicly, to leave clear messages to other people who might cross them.”
He almost told her about the guy with the saw and blow torch, but decided she’d think he was being melodramatic.
“Nick?”
He heard something in her voice. Something more. Something else.
She knew something she hadn’t told him yet.
“Yeah?” Cautiously.
“I followed one of them. He’s a new one, looks like they squashed together a safari guide and a surfer, reminded me of Bruce Campbell. Not Bruce from Bubba Ho-Tep, more from Army of Darkness…”
“Great, you’re following thugs because they look like movie stars?”
“No,” she dragged the word out patiently. “I followed him because he looked like he was on a mission. He was.”
She told him about the research the guy had done.
“Shit! Jess, you’ve got to back off. Even more so now. It’s like worlds colliding…”
“What are you talking about?”
He sighed. This wasn’t a good time, or a good place. Nor was it advisable. But if h
e didn’t, he’d hear about it later. And he’d suffer for it, maybe in a trivial way. But maybe not. Maybe he’d suffer for not having been honest and open. Maybe he’d suffer because when the worlds collided they’d blow up.
“Jess, I’m not sure whether what you saw is connected to what I’ve got going on here—”
“The bus shooting?”
“Uh, no.” He paused and breathed, hoping the extra oxygen would keep him from fainting. Well, not fainting, but being zapped from afar wasn’t out of the question. “Uh, no,” he repeated. “There’s something else going down. Something happened in Madison…”
“Oh, yeah, I saw a headline about it online, but I didn’t have time to read it.”
“It was some kind of commando action against civilians, apparently trying to get hold of some very sensitive information that was being, uh, transferred from a whistleblower to…”
Fuck!
He was on his cell. So was Jessie. It was like broadcasting out to the universe. He’d just gotten so used to yakking on the phone that he’d forgotten even the most basic safeguards. Other people didn’t have to worry about their paranoia panning out. But if Heather was right, then they’d tracked her. Somehow, even though they shouldn’t have been able to.
Could they have tracked her right to him?
Thanks, Heather.
But no, that was too much paranoia, wasn’t it?
Jess was talking in his ear. “Yeah, you were saying? Transferred from a whistleblower to…who?”
“A reporter. A certain reporter. In this case, our old friend Heather.”
First there was silence on the line.
He didn’t dare breathe.
Then there was a gasp-inhale-growl so vivid that he wondered if Jessie hadn’t been bitten by a wolf. It sounded as if she were transforming into a raging creature over there.
Damn it.
“Heather’s back?” Jessie’s voice seemed to have gained a few octaves. She seemed to have become someone else. Her voice was more of a deep croak. “That fucking whore-bitch Heather is back?” She breathed loudly. “Please tell me I misheard that.”
Wolf's Cut (The Nick Lupo Series Book 5) Page 19