He watched her speed away and wondered if it was for good.
He called Victoria from the airport to say he’d left a note, without indicating its brevity. He dodged her questions with a lie, saying his plane was boarding.
It wasn’t.
He took a taxi from Atlanta’s airport to his hotel. The young desk clerk scrutinized him surreptitiously as he registered. Moments later, when he glanced back from the lobby elevator, the clerk was on the telephone.
From his room Venturi ordered dinner. While waiting for the meal, he swept the room for a camera or a listening device. He found it in a fire alarm sprinkler head in the ceiling. He didn’t tamper with it or ask to change rooms.
He knew the three phones, on the bedside table and the desk, and in the bathroom, would be monitored from the hotel’s telephone room.
He turned to the business pages of the Atlanta newspapers he’d picked up at the airport and began to make local calls on his prepaid cell phone using the names and titles of people whose names appeared in articles. He spoke to them about various business deals and haggled over investments, franchises, options, and real estate. He confirmed meetings, dropped first names, last names, full names, and various interchangeable combinations. He wheeled and dealed, energized and animated, doing business, making money, having fun.
The conversations were all one-sided. There was never a voice at the other end. His cell phone was turned off. But he improvised enough fascinating dialogue to keep investigators busy for days checking it out.
“I’d like my participation kept strictly confidential,” he’d say during each call. “As you know, I prefer to stay low-profile when it comes to business.”
He didn’t care whom the FBI annoyed, interviewed, called, or questioned as long as they didn’t approach anyone near and dear to him.
After tipping the server well, he ate prime rib and a caesar salad, and drank half a carafe of excellent wine.
Later he stretched out on the soft bed, sipped scotch from the minibar, and “called” an imaginary lady friend in Atlanta. He announced his arrival and arranged a romantic rendezvous for the following evening. He chatted with her about mutual acquaintances, dropped more names, a few fictional, others straight out of the newspaper, and mentioned a number of events he’d recently attended. None of it was true. But it gave the FBI lots of people, places, and facts to sift through. Enough, he hoped, to keep them too busy to focus on the real people in his life.
His “conversation” with the lady evolved into playful sex talk. He grinned, imagining the investigators, who could only hear his side of their intimate discussion, creatively filling in the gaps as he reacted to the woman’s propositions and racy remarks.
He ended the marathon phone session at one a.m., leaving hours of conversations to transcribe, dozens of people to interview.
He double-locked the door and retired. He hadn’t slept the night before and needed to be alert for what was to come. Still, he stared sleepless at the ceiling, acutely aware of what failure would bring. The FBI would probe his bank records, personal life, close associates, and recent activities. That scrutiny would prompt questions he dared not answer. Images from the lonely graveyard of his past filled the night around him. The little girls. Dead. Salvi’s nephew in camouflage. Dead. Every man he killed in the military, faces he thought he’d forgotten. They all materialized like an angry mob.
He replaced their faces with the people he had to protect. Danny asleep beside his wife, their baby in her belly, their young children dreaming nearby. At least he imagined Danny asleep beside his wife. No one was ever sure where Danny really was or what he was doing. The only certainty was that Danny would always cover his back.
He thought of Keri curled up in her bed, beeper nearby, or masked in a sterile environment as she delivered a small and helpless new life into a dangerous and unpredictable world. And Victoria, safe and asleep in her room at his home, her metal and plastic prosthesis resting against the headboard. And Scout, on his dog bed, legs jerking as he ran free through some canine field of dreams.
Alone in his strange bed, in a strange room, Venturi endured the night terrors that slither into guilty minds like snakes in the dark. He knew, to his infinite regret, that they would all be safer had he never intruded into their lives.
Madison appeared as always, along with those recent brief acquaintances, the legally dead, still alive and breathing out there in the world.
He wished Keri was beside him, his thoughts strictly carnal. Time in her arms would bring him the peace he needed for sleep.
Exhausted at dawn, he made an effort to sound cheerful when he called room service. He ordered a hearty breakfast despite his lack of appetite. He projected the image of an innocent and successful, happy man with a healthy lust for food, drink, and sex, not necessarily in that order, a man at the top of his game in both life and business. He put on a good act.
The bright eyes of the young woman who delivered breakfast roved his room as she arranged the meal on his desk. Hotel employee? he wondered. Or rookie agent on her first undercover mission? Hoping she was FBI, he tipped her lavishly in cash, asked her first name, then called her sweetheart instead. He did everything but pinch her backside, hoping she’d walk out of his room with serious questions about her career choice.
Later, whenever the food service cart rumbled down the hall, he’d peer through the peephole. Someone else was always pushing it. He didn’t see her again.
He picked at the food: three eggs over easy, bacon, sausage, hash browns, a side of grits, a tall orange juice, a pot of fresh coffee, and a small wicker basket piled high with fragrant sweet rolls and miniature Danish. He wished Scout, whose appetite never flagged, was there to enjoy it.
Without activating his cell phone he continued to make fake business calls. He even used a second cell, brought for that purpose, to call the first so that his phone rang constantly.
“No way!” he informed one caller. “I want no part of that. Not on your life.”
He paused, as though listening.
“Screw profits!” he boomed indignantly. “It’s a goddamn federal offense. Run it by your lawyer. He’ll tell you. Way too risky. Count me out.”
He canceled their fictional meeting, then used the hotel room phone to call the number the chief had given him. He was not surprised to hear Archbold, the prosecutor, answer. The lawyer tried without success to persuade him to meet them at the U.S. Attorney’s office.
When Archbold reluctantly agreed to come to the hotel, Venturi said his room was much too uncomfortable, too small, and hadn’t been made up yet. He offered to meet instead in the hotel’s main dining room in an hour.
The more public the better.
Not sure what the FBI could set up in an hour, he hung the Do Not Disturb sign on his door and went downstairs to explore.
He found a conversation pit with potted palms, hanging plants, and big comfortable armchairs around a coffee table in a secluded atrium off the lobby.
He rearranged the chairs, then returned to his room. Aware that the FBI would examine whatever he’d left there, he selected random numbers from the Atlanta phone book and scribbled them on a pad next to the bedside phone. He took his mostly uneaten breakfast and left the tray outside a suite down the hall around the corner and past the ice machine. They didn’t need to know that their imminent arrival had killed his appetite. He left a laptop he’d brought with him, snatched up his briefcase, and took the elevator down to the dining room, stopping only once, to dispose of his newspapers in a receptacle two floors below.
The dining room staff was busy setting up long banquet tables, a microphone, and a podium during the lull before lunch. When Venturi said he expected some colleagues shortly, the maître d’ quickly pointed out “a quiet table” near a bay window visible from the street. Asked about the banquet tables, he said they were for today’s Chamber of Commerce luncheon.
Perfect.
Venturi ordered coffee, took a few sips, th
en saw Archbold arrive with two strangers. He went to greet them, pumped Archbold’s hand, and was introduced to Snow, a boyish-looking FBI agent in his thirties, and Harrington, a veteran in his fifties.
“Sorry.” Venturi frowned as though annoyed. “We can’t stay here. The Chamber of Commerce is about to descend. But I have a place where we can talk in private.”
Archbold and the agents exchanged glances, then all three trailed him across the lobby, past the elevator bank, to the secluded nook near the atrium. Venturi slid into the only chair shaded by greenery from the sun streaming through a skylight.
“We can have coffee brought out,” he said, taking secret pleasure in the way they sank into the soft cushy armchairs that made it impossible to maintain their posture and authoritative demeanor. They declined coffee. They wanted answers.
Archbold kicked it off, mildly asking how and what Venturi was doing these days. The older agent fumbled for his shades. The other squinted into the blazing sun.
The money made Venturi’s answers easier. His former colleagues were aware of Madison’s death along with their unborn child and the cash settlement that eventually followed. They were also aware of his spartan lifestyle. He never lived above the income his paycheck provided.
They’d even wondered aloud why he worked at all. They compared him to a lottery winner who reports to work as usual the day after his big win. At least they did until Ruth Ann coldly pointed out that what happened to him “wasn’t like winning the lottery, it was like losing it.”
“After my wife and baby were killed,” Venturi candidly told Archbold and the two agents, “I received a substantial financial settlement.” He paused. “But I could never bring myself to touch it. It felt too much like blood money. But after I turned in my badge, I took time off to decide how to spend the rest of my life. That’s when it finally seemed right to use those assets to make the transition easier.”
Archbold listened, the agents took notes. Their questions made it clear he was suspected of passing confidential information to the victims’ enemies. Or that he killed them himself.
Unanswered questions about the armored-car robbery and Salvi’s arrest had created enormous hostility among his embarrassed superiors who were now under fire. The Salvi case created a storm in the press, public outrage, and, worst of all, the high-profile scrutiny of a Congressional oversight committee whose members were scheduling hearings, asking questions, and compiling reports.
Losing the Schoenberg case was unforgivable.
No one could prove what role, if any, Venturi had played in the entire debacle. But speculation flourished, private conclusions were reached. Certain people, powerful people, would never forgive him. They wanted him to be guilty.
Pinning everything, including murder, on him would be justifiable payback in their eyes.
He saw their side, and it dismayed him.
They could build a case based on his state of mind after his wife’s death. He had taken little time off, received no counseling, started drinking. Their lost infant was a girl.
Prosecutors could forge a believable argument that when the little girls disappeared, Venturi focused on Salvi and lost it. That he was a disgruntled former employee bent on undermining the program.
He’d sound like a madman.
His lawyer, he thought, could build a defense based on temporary insanity or diminished capacity. How outlandish to be thinking about a defense. How ludicrous to think he’d need one. The killers were out there somewhere. The three men carefully scrutinizing his demeanor and noting every word should get off their fat federal asses and go find them.
Pressed for his whereabouts at the time of each murder, he was deliberately vague. “All I know,” he said, frowning, “is that I was in the South Florida area. I’m not sure of precise dates, but this trip is the farthest north I’ve been since I left the Marshals Service.”
They asked what he thought had happened to the three murdered witnesses.
“Hard to say. It’s been a long time. Conte’s wife was always a concern because of her family ties. Their sons were relocated with them, but her parents insisted on staying in New Jersey. She cried a lot, and I knew she’d be tempted to contact them. You know how family members gossip and leak secrets to friends.
“The other two seemed to be doing fine. I don’t know what they got into.” He shook his head. “We all know that one in four, that we know of, reverts to old criminal behavior, or picks up new, nasty habits. Like Sammy the Bull.
“Wouldn’t it be ironic,” he speculated, thinking aloud, “if their deaths had nothing to do with their pasts?”
They didn’t buy that; he saw it in their eyes.
He cocked his head, as though thinking it through. “Of course, the time frame tells us they must be related. They took place in such quick succession.” He frowned. “That can’t be coincidence.
“What’s your theory?” He looked from one to the other. “Have you got ballistics, or forensics linking them? Witnesses? Descriptions? Tag numbers?”
No one responded. “You know we can’t discuss an open investigation,” Archbold finally said.
Then what the hell am I doing here? he thought.
The dumb fucks were too stupid to trust the one person who might help them. They intended to pick his brain without revealing anything in return. It was what he expected, what Danny had predicted, but it still pissed him off.
“Are you willing to undergo a polygraph test?” Archbold asked casually.
“Absolutely not! No way,” he said, properly indignant. “Why should I?” He raised his voice. “I’ve done nothing wrong. Not a damn thing. I’ve spent my whole adult life in service to my country. And you’d accuse me?” He rose to his feet as though to leave in a huff.
“Calm down,” Harrington said soothingly. He gestured toward Venturi’s chair. “Take a seat. Don’t fly off the handle. We’re not accusing you. But if anyone raised the question, it would be convenient to say you’ve been eliminated. It would save us all time and trouble.”
Reluctantly, still scowling, Venturi sat down.
“I resent the implication,” he said, his voice tight. “I thought I might assist in your investigation. That’s why I’m here, because I know them. Knew them.”
“That’s the hell of it,” Snow said. “You knew them and their locations. Obviously people will look at you.”
Venturi thought for a moment, drummed his fingers on the coffee table, his anger appearing to subside. “If I agreed, it would have to be a highly regarded and experienced private polygraph operator, not someone from your office.”
The three men exchanged glances. “That can be arranged,” Archbold said. “There are good people in Atlanta. I’ll get some names.”
“Do that,” Venturi said. “But no fishing expeditions. Only questions relevant to the three cases.”
They agreed.
Snow could not hide his elation.
Archbold made some calls and came up with three names. One was Joe Harper, the man Clay had said was the best in Atlanta.
“I don’t know any of them.” Venturi scanned the names. He shrugged. “How about number three, Harper?”
Three hours later he was seated in an office near the courthouse. They agreed to four relevant questions.
There were also two control queries: “Do you believe I’m going to ask you any questions other than the ones we have discussed?” and: “In the past five years, did you lie to someone who trusted you?”
“Yes,” he said to the latter, thinking of Victoria, just the day before.
“Did you kill, or do you know who killed, Dominic DelVecchio, also known as Louis Messineo?”
“No.”
“Did you kill, or do you know who killed, Angelo Conte, also known as William Rubino?”
“No.”
“Did you kill, or do you know who killed, Carmine Cuccinelli, also known as Joseph Mannozzi?”
“No.”
“Did you ever give, sell,
or provide to anyone the new identities and/or locations of any protected witnesses?”
“No.”
They told him he’d passed.
I know, he thought, because I passed the same test yesterday in Miami.
Archbold and the two FBI agents were crestfallen.
“What do you think?” Archbold asked him candidly, over a drink later. “Where would you start? What’s your gut reaction?”
“I’d look where the files are,” Venturi said. “Ask people with access to submit to polygraphs. I’d focus on finding what the three victims had in common—aside from me. They didn’t know each other to my recollection, but they must be linked somehow. A mutual friend, enemy, or lover. Check ex-wives and childhood sweethearts. The neighborhoods where they grew up. The schools they attended. Find their juvenile records. See who they ran with back in the day. Maybe they did know each other once. Maybe…” He shrugged.
“Maybe, maybe, maybe.” Archbold sighed. “Unless we get lucky, or a local cop stumbles onto something, it won’t be easy.”
“I really wish you good luck, man,” Venturi said. He meant it.
Back in his room he found, as he expected, that the contents of the laptop he’d left had been accessed and copied. He’d filled the hard drive with endless files full of Sudokus. None of the numerical puzzles had been solved. With a playful smirk, he wondered what the super-serious FBI analysts and cryptologists would make of that.
Although he was eager to fly back to Miami, he stayed until the next day, still pretending to conduct business.
He didn’t want them to realize that they were the only reason he had come to Atlanta.
Spirits lifted, Venturi relaxed on the flight home the next afternoon. He even began to think about how to help Maheen, the disfigured girl still in peril. He landed in Miami far more at ease than when he’d left, picked up his car at the airport, and drove home.
He used his remote to open the front gate but it stood motionless; the system failed. When he stepped out of the car to punch the code in manually, he saw why. The box containing the motor had been smashed, the gate forced.
Legally Dead Page 23