by Kirk Russell
“And that’s the problem—it’s according to Mondari.”
“Hear me out, Dan. The fabricante des bombas, the bomb maker I think we’re looking for is a traveler and experienced. He may have arrived ready to blend in and go to work. He may not be with the sleeper cell. A pro bomber is going to want to do it his own way, in his own space. He could have ID, credit cards, everything he needs to get set up. The e-mail said a fabricante des bombas was delivered. The Sinaloa cartel delivered him. They’re capable. It fits. It’s a smart way to bring a traveler in.”
I expected Dan to brush that aside, but he heard me. He knew I was serious.
“You’re saying one of his tech criminals worked for the hotel and knew about this cartel mid-level guy who stayed there monthly.”
“Yes.”
“Targeting a cartel manager is stupid but also believable. How hard have you looked for these missing tech guys?”
“Not very hard. I’ve reached out to contacts, and Lacey is working it different ways. We do know their phones were canceled within minutes of each other on June 21 and that they were last seen approximately forty-eight hours before that. The girlfriend of one called the North Las Vegas police, but she’s not quite enough of a girlfriend to fill out a missing-persons report. She told Lacey she’d have to take off from work to do that.”
“It feels real to you.”
“It does.”
“You went out with a BOLO on Mondari and his car this afternoon. What’s that about?”
“I can’t find Mondari today after all but tucking him into bed last night. He’s missing again, and I’m asking for help finding him, so yeah, I went out with a be-on-the-lookout-for.”
“Most likely he just took off again.”
“Probably,” I said, but I knew Dan had heard me.
“You’re saying Mondari saw ‘fabricante des bombas’ in the e-mail?”
“That’s what he says.”
“So why is he reversing himself and telling us now? It’s not because you’ve been chasing him around.”
“He’s scared. Remember, I worked with him a long time. I know him in some ways. He’s scared enough to need our help. That’s why he gave it to me.”
Venuti shook his head and said, “He didn’t give Jane anything that specific. All right, Grale, I’ll stop fighting you on this. Let’s move Mondari to a priority and get him in here.”
34
“I need to do more for her.”
The charge nurse neither agreed nor disagreed. She said, “Your niece needs somebody to guide her through the worst.”
When I walked into the hospital room, Julia’s eyes were open but listless. She gave little sign of recognition and had nothing to say about the visit from her friends. I pulled a chair over and took her hand.
“Bad day?”
“Real bad, Uncle Paul.”
“Maybe it’s time to get out of here.”
“What will it be like if I live with you?”
“Hard at first, but we’ll make it into something good. I don’t know how yet, but we will. We’ll give you your mom’s car, and as soon as you get your driver’s license that’ll give you mobility and some freedom. I’ll always be there for you, but you’ll also have to become pretty independent.”
“Can I have friends over if you’re not there?”
“Sure, of course, and I’ll do everything I can, Julia. It’ll just be you and me, but do you like Jo?”
“I like her a lot. Mom said you broke up with her.”
“Jo and I made a mistake.”
“That’s what Mom said.”
“She was right.”
I felt a surge of emotion.
“I’ll tell you a story about your mom. When our mother died, your mom was fourteen, I was twelve. Melissa tried to become a mother to me. That didn’t work because nothing was the same anymore, and I didn’t want a substitute mother. Your mom figured that out and that we needed to start new lives. You can’t start life over, but she realized we’d reached the end of what we’d had and needed to make something different that would make our mom proud of us. I know it sounds sappy, but it was pretty real. Your mom brought us back into life again.”
“Mom did?”
“That’s right, my older sister, Melissa, showed me a way. That was the biggest gift anyone ever gave me. Ever. She was my North Star when it mattered. I think we take a page from her book and make something new and good. I see that part of your mom in you. I always have.”
I didn’t know if I’d reached her or not, but thought I might have. As I was leaving she asked, “Do you have any stories about Dad?”
“I have a million stories about your dad, maybe more.”
“I want to hear all of them.”
“You got it. See you tomorrow.”
Late that night I climbed out of the lap pool and was sitting in a lawn chair talking on my cell with Jo when I received a text from the office alerting me to expect a call from the Nevada Highway Patrol Southern Command. It came twenty seconds later.
“A vehicle with a VIN matching the one you’re looking for was found out on an old desert road running toward Potosi Mountain. That’s the good news. Bad news is, it was on fire.”
“White Mercedes registered to a Denny Mondari?”
“It wasn’t white when we got there, but yeah, and we have an officer on-site. If you’re going out, he’ll wait.”
“Tell him I’m on my way.”
I missed the cutoff road on the first pass and turned around at the break for Highway 159, then retraced slowly until I found the dirt track. It crossed an old military tank road, but it wasn’t until a fire vehicle passed by heading out that I knew for sure. A mile later, I saw the lights of the Nevada Highway Patrol officer and smelled the burned car in the wind.
The highway patrol officer on-site perked up and got cheerful when I said I’d take responsibility for the car. After he left and I was waiting for FBI ERT, I walked a wide area with a flashlight searching for anything that could explain this.
An hour and a half later, ERT arrived with a canine unit not far behind. The car held no human remains, and a cadaver dog working a broad area around the vehicle didn’t scent on anything. At dawn I drove the dusty road back out to the highway. I had various ideas about why Mondari’s car was out here, but nothing quite explained it. In a café up the highway, I ate scrambled eggs and toast and drank enough coffee to carry me into midmorning, then drove back to Vegas and met Lacey at Denny Mondari’s apartment.
The manager unlocked the door for us and we looked for signs of violence, but didn’t see any. A tuna sandwich had dried on a plate in the kitchen. Next to it sat a glass of warm flat beer. The eyeglasses Mondari often wore were alongside the plate. In a bedroom was a half-packed suitcase. In the bathroom in the big master suite, I saw blond hair dye in the shower and condoms stacked four high on a counter next to an unzipped Dopp kit with an electric razor lying next to it.
“What do you think?” Shah asked.
“That it looks staged. It’s as if he saw us coming and put some props out and left.”
“Doesn’t the torched car worry you?”
“Neither the dogs nor ERT found anything.”
“Did Mondari burn his own car?”
“No, but he might sacrifice it to make it look like something else happened to him. I mean, torch the car, disappear, and leave us guessing.”
“Do you really think Denny Mondari did this on purpose?”
“Not really, but I can’t rule it out. It would be like him. It’s his way.” I gestured around at the room and knew I was just talking. “He knew we’d be in here if he disappeared again. The sandwich, beer, and glasses are just a little too neat.”
I glanced over at her.
“I have a bad feeling, Lacey, but I can’t go there yet. If Mondari believes the cartel came for his tech geeks, he has to assume the geeks gave up his name. Let’s widen our search for Catalangelo again. We’re missing something.”
“I’ve tried everything.”
“I know an undercover DEA agent who might be able to help us. Maybe he’s heard the name.” I pulled out my phone. “I’ll call him.”
35
The Neptune Society phoned later that morning. I told the polite woman that I’d sign and scan the papers today, but that my niece wanted to see the bodies so cremation would be delayed.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, sir.”
I didn’t either and sat thinking about it for several minutes after hanging up. I missed Venuti’s approach behind me. He pulled a chair over and sat across from me.
“How are you feeling?” He asked. “I saw you limping when you came in.”
The limp was harder to control when I was tired. Sometimes I worried it would cost me my job, or they’d finally box me into limited duty. I’d get a “we don’t want to lose you” speech, and then no more badge or gun and I’d become a back-of-the-room guy with clean clothes and glasses, who spent his days in front of a computer or in meetings. Not for me.
But the FBI wasn’t about wheelchairs, grab bars, or handicapped agents. The Bureau was about reinforced gates and steel bollards planted in 7,000 psi concrete, deep enough to where a bomb-laden truck couldn’t ram through. It was about agents who fit an image. Venuti never let me forget that I’d volunteered as an SABT and gone to Iraq. A career choice, he called it, and maybe he saw it that way, but at the time the army was overwhelmed with bombings in Baghdad and asking for help.
After volunteering for bomb-tech training at Quantico and becoming a special agent bomb tech, I made three trips to Iraq during the period when the army was asking for help. On my third tour, and after all the worry about IED Alley and Route Irish, a booby-trapped motorcycle had caught us on foot in a market in Baghdad. Three of my team and seventeen Iraqis in the market died.
In Frankfurt a lacerated lobe of my liver was removed, along with my spleen. Then came multiple reconstruction surgeries, skin grafts, healing, adhesions, and more surgery. The scars on my lower back aren’t something you flash at a public beach, and the initial FBI response was to offer me limited duty, meaning no badge or gun in the field. Or option two, take early retirement and try to find a new job to cover the hole left by the smaller pension. I could have dealt with the money, but not losing my career. I leaned on connections and spent my limited duty with the best bomb techs in the FBI. I commuted between here and headquarters, and I learned the bomb makers’ craft. When I qualified for active duty here, I landed on the Domestic Terrorism Squad.
Problem was, I didn’t fit the FBI image anymore. I had passed the physical but walked with a limp when tired. Rumor was, other agents avoided being paired with me because it was dangerous. Maybe that was true. Maybe it wasn’t. But this much was true: I worked alone a lot. The autonomy Thorpe gave me for this investigation I took routinely.
I knew in some ways Venuti and perhaps others were waiting on my career to wind down. Venuti may outlast me. He might see my retirement as a victory for the Bureau way of doing things, but Beatty had nailed me. He’d been right on when he said at Willie McCool that I’m a Fed to the core. I am, and I’m after the bomb makers of the world. That’s my mission.
“You and I are the old men around here,” Venuti said.
“Lay off the limp.”
“Take it easy, I’m here about Mondari. What happened to his car?”
“It was torched. ERT didn’t find anything and neither did a cadaver dog. ERT is in his apartment, but so far the only blood is in a bathroom and probably from a shaving cut.”
When Venuti didn’t respond, I added, “They’re not going to find anything.”
“How much longer will they be in there?”
“No more than an hour.”
“Let me know what you learn.”
My undercover DEA friend Bruce Ortega hadn’t called back. Maybe we weren’t going to hear from him at all. He worked deep undercover at times, so I reached out in another direction, calling a retired Las Vegas Metro homicide detective I trusted. Mike Sulliver retired, then started a private investigation business with one employee, himself. His cop friends joked about it, but Sulliver wasn’t a golfer and, as in my situation, his wife died too young. He liked having a reason to get up in the morning, and in his own words, he was “permanently restless.” He was pushing sixty-five, silver-haired, and in some combination of the same clothes every day—jeans, a leather belt with a buckle he was proud of, a button-down shirt, and a Stetson, as if he had a horse out front instead of a blue SUV.
He also carried a steady, quiet certainty about right and wrong, and though he and I differed politically in every way, we saw eye to eye about justice. We stopped to pick up coffees at a little restaurant where, as Sulliver said, “The coffee sucks, but I know the owner.” That was Mike. We sat outside in his SUV with the air conditioning running.
“The rumor I heard is that Mondo boy and his two twerps were into somebody’s business and got caught,” Sulliver said.
“That’s pretty much what Mondari told me. Now he’s missing too.”
“Missing or hiding?”
“Could be either.”
“And now you’re reaching out every which way because you don’t know where to look.”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“I know where one of his tech geeks lives.”
“Which one?”
“Pylori.”
“I’ve been by his place,” I said. “I went by after I got the story from Mondari, and no one was home.” I paused. “The apartment manager stalled me and I haven’t been back yet. We’re getting a warrant signed today.”
“You don’t need it. I can get you in. An ex-Metro cop manages that complex and a half dozen other buildings. He doesn’t like Feds. That was your problem.”
“But he’ll open the door for you?”
“Sure.”
He did open the door to the apartment, and none of us said anything for several seconds. The place was ransacked, torn apart, everything cut open or emptied, yet I didn’t see any blood. Sulliver and I stepped in with Marty the manager behind us, saying it was now completely legitimate for us to look around. When the look didn’t turn up anything, I thanked Sulliver and headed back to the office thinking we’d gotten more from their phones.
Lacey called before I got there.
“The casino gave up Catalangelo. They asked that we refer to them as an anonymous source.”
“We can do that for a little while. What have we got?”
“A contact e-mail, cell number, credit card, and a Nevada driver’s license for a Catalangelo Garcia, not Miguel Catalangelo.”
Half an hour later I sat down alongside a triumphant Lacey, who waved an invisible banner for the new FBI where you got more from a computer than you could ever get knocking on doors. She’d made calls and done the rest via computer and access to databases. I could have reminded her that this all started forward when I’d confronted Mondari late in the night after his drinking dinner with DOD Warner, but why interrupt her when she was on a roll.
Later that morning we got copies of the phone records on Pylori and the other missing man, John Edelman. The most recent group text from Denny Mondari to them was yesterday, so Mondari still had hope. But that text, like all in the prior weeks, was never received.
I was still with Lacey when my undercover DEA friend, Ortega, called. I put Ortega on speakerphone and introduced Lacey.
“I know some things about Catalangelo,” Ortega said, “but I’ve never dealt with him. He has a rep as tough. Make a mistake and you’re hurting. He watches over a dozen managers in the southwest and oversees shipments from Mexico into California. They’ll cut open empty plastic bottles, line them up, and put glow sticks in them to make a runway. Sometimes they’ll leave a plane behind. They’re using drones more and more now.”
I’d heard that, but everyone was using them more or planning to. It wasn’t surprising.
“What else?”
I asked.
“Catalangelo likes flying product and people in. He’s big on flight. In my office we call him Cat Airlines, so, yes, the guy you’re looking for could have been flown in. Everything that crosses our border gets seen, but that doesn’t stop them. You know that as well as anyone, Grale. If it was their cartel and they brought your bomb maker in that way, Catalangelo would know about it.”
“That’s an answer we’ve needed,” I said. “Do you know where to look for him?”
“I don’t, but I can ask, and I’ll give you a number to call. I’m only calling back now because it’s you. Anyone else and I wouldn’t have.”
He gave me the number and said, “Take care, G-man.”
“You too.”
36
In the afternoon we got deeper into Denny Mondari’s bank records, credit cards, e-mail, phone messages, mail, everything we could reach. But it was a routine run for any outstanding traffic tickets in Nevada and the surrounding states—Utah, California, and Arizona—that turned things. The traffic ticket was for speeding and a burned-out taillight. A CHP patrolman on Highway 62 south of the Mojave National Preserve issued it on June 27. We also had Visa purchases on Mondari’s card made in the same general area. He’d bought gas in Borrego Springs a day after getting ticketed by the CHP. A few days prior, Mondari was in Scottsdale, Arizona, where the same Visa had also been used for gas.
And it wasn’t his first trip along this route. We mapped another that more or less followed the same path as recently as a few days ago.
“Look at this,” Lacey said. “Same hotel. He’s done this a couple of times. Why didn’t Agent Stone get into his credit cards?”
“There wasn’t a reason to. He was giving her information.”
The California Highway Patrol officer who’d ticketed Mondari on Highway 62 returned my call. We talked as I read an e-mailed copy of the citation.
“You’re lucky because I happen to remember the stop and the driver. Just something about the guy, I guess. He was jumpy and surprised to get pulled over. He told me he was moving to San Diego and had mistakenly gotten off I-15. He talked like a human road atlas for five minutes, then asked for directions like he didn’t know how to use his phone.”