To Catch a Cook: An Angie Amalfi Mystery

by Joanne Pence

  Suddenly, outside the apartment, car wheels screeched, followed by a loud thud. She ran out to find a man lying on the street near her car. His head was bathed in blood.

  Neighbors poured onto the street. “A dark blue car hit him!” a little boy informed anyone who would listen. “I saw it!”

  A man dropped on his knees to the hit-and-run victim. Angie understood when he used the word muerta. The man was dead.

  Chapter 11

  Since 1974, FBI headquarters has been housed in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, a two-and-a-half-million-square-foot monstrosity located on Pennsylvania Avenue between Ninth and Tenth streets in Washington, D.C. It stands seven stories tall in the front, but the rear rises to eleven stories. Of the more than seven thousand employees in the building, fewer than a thousand are special agents. Most employees work on maintaining files, running the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, indexing and confirming fingerprints, and handling freedom-of-information requests.

  Special Agent Nelson Bradley stood at the third-floor window by his cubicle and watched a turbaned Sikh and a woman in a bright-hued sari emerge from a cab. His thoughts weren’t on the couple, who meant nothing to him, but on the message slip in his pudgy fingers. He didn’t like the way his fingers had gotten fat, or the way the rest of him had as well, or the way his hair had thinned, and the years wore heavy on his face.

  Simply reading Paavo Smith’s name on the message slip had made his hip begin to throb, adding to the generally aging and decrepit sentiment he had about himself. He hadn’t heard from Smith in years, not since San Francisco happened. That was how he thought of it—San Francisco happened.

  He went back into his cubicle. The blue burlap-covered partitions that divided the agents’ desks made him feel like a rat in a maze. A Northern Telecom multibuttoned telephone set, filled with features he didn’t understand or care to use, waited silently for him. He hated his desk-bound job, but it was all he could handle ever since going out to Frisco on a special assignment with a gang task force. Several Vietnamese families working in computer hardware manufacturing had been victims of home invasions. The FBI found an informant within the Vietnamese community and set up a sting operation. Bradley was a part of it, and when the sting went south, he was nearly killed. A couple of homicide cops, Smith and his partner, Kowalski, happened to be in the neighborhood investigating the latest home-invasion murders when bullets started to fly. Kowalski had called for reinforcements as Smith went into the house with the agents to see if he could help. Smith found Bradley with his leg and hip torn up and bleeding badly. He pulled Bradley out of the back door and toward an ambulance that answered Kowalski’s call. Seconds after Bradley was clear of it, the house went up in a firebomb. The two other agents had been killed.

  Bradley had heard that Kowalski, too, had been killed a while back. It was too bad. He’d been one of the good guys.

  Bradley owed his life to Smith. He didn’t like being in debt to anyone. He liked it even less than he liked being stuck here at a desk job in headquarters when he’d always been a field agent. No wonder he’d put on so many pounds. But at least they hadn’t been able to retire him on disability like they had wanted to do. He had fought them. Leave it to the Bureau to turn against you when you had given your all, he thought bitterly.

  Always on his mind were the two guys who never had a chance for disability, Harris and Lane. They’d only been dead two weeks, he’d heard, when two new special agents were given their desks. Nobody cared, it seemed. Just him.

  He returned Smith’s call, and was given a strange request. Smith wanted to know if, some thirty-five to forty years ago, anyone working for the FBI in Washington had been named “Cecily.” That was it, just the one name.

  He told Smith it would take a while. For him to act on such a request without higher-up authorization was strictly illegal. He’d have to access employee records, which were protected from routine searches by anyone other than the personnel department.

  He’d manage. Once he hacked into the database, he’d have plenty of time to manipulate it until he found what he needed. In fact, he had time for a lot of stuff these days. The work the Bureau gave him was garbage, something to keep him from twiddling his increasingly pudgy thumbs all day long. They wanted to insult him, to force him to ask for disability retirement, to somehow get rid of him.

  No way. He’d stick around just to needle them. It was fun. It was payback.

  “He’s been moved out of intensive care,” the nurse, a slim, blond woman in a crisp white uniform, said as she led Angie through a maze of corridors to Aulis’s new private room.

  “That’s wonderful!” Angie cried. She felt as if her prayers had been answered. “He’s awake, then?” she asked.

  “Not yet. He’s still in a coma,” the nurse said. “But it’s a light one. He can breathe on his own, his vital signs are strong, so he doesn’t need the special equipment in intensive care. He’s just not awake. We nurses call it a twilight sleep. The doctor will give you all the medical details, I’m sure.”

  “But overall, this means he’s getting better?” Angie urged, trying hard to find some positive news.

  “Let’s just say, it’s a good sign. Now, we have to wait and see how he is when he wakes up.”

  “You’re saying he will wake up.”

  As if jarred by the question, the nurse stopped and glanced sympathetically at Angie. “At his age…the doctor will be able to tell you more.”

  Their gait was slower this time. “What has your experience been?” Angie asked.

  “In my experience”—the nurse seemed hesitant—“in my experience, it’s pneumonia, not the coma, that you have to be worried about. For older people, having to lie on their backs, being unable to move, fluid collects in their lungs, and sometimes there isn’t a thing we can do about it.”

  “I see.” The graveness of it was all but overwhelming. The two continued on in silence.

  In the hallway, two nuns stood talking. They both wore traditional, cream-colored habits.

  “Here we are.” The nurse turned in to the private room right where the nuns were standing. Their proximity gave Angie a chill, as if Aulis might be closer to death than anyone had been led to believe.

  The nurse bustled about the room, quickly checking Aulis and scanning his chart. “I’ll leave Mr. Kokkonen in your hands,” she said, then was gone in a flurry of white.

  Angie went to Aulis’s side and held his hand as she greeted him. She told him that she and Paavo were well, and looked forward to him getting better and going home. She said a few more words, then stepped back, saddened that she could see no change, no reaction at all in the old man. She covered her face in her hands.

  “Are you all right, dear?”

  Angie glanced up to see one of the nuns in the doorway. She was an older woman, heavyset, with a round face. Her hands were folded, her expression curious but serene.

  “Yes,” Angie said. “It’s just that I’m so worried.”

  The nun entered the room. “I’m Sister Ignatius. I visit our Catholic patients here, along with Sister Agnes. But I’m afraid I don’t know this man.”

  Angie placed her hand on Aulis’s. “His name is Aulis Kokkonen. He’s Lutheran, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind your visits or your prayers.”

  The nun smiled. “Well, thank you. I’ll be sure to stop by, then, on my rounds. Is he a relative?”

  “No…not yet. I’m dating his son.”

  “Ah, I see,” the nun said warmly. She studied the bandages on Aulis’s head. “What happened to him?”

  “He…he was shot.”

  “Oh, my!”

  “It was a robbery, we think, at his apartment.” As Angie began to explain what had happened, the thought that niggled at the back of her mind sprang forth and her eyes filled with tears. “First my apartment was burglarized, then Paavo’s—that’s my boyfriend—and a few days later, Mr. Kokkonen’s. I’m so scared that the three might be related…and if so, it all started w
ith me.” She took a Kleenex from the bedside table and wiped away her tears.

  “Why you?”

  “I don’t know! That’s the problem. If it was me, why? I don’t understand the connection between Paavo and Aulis and me with these robbers. Yet they struck my apartment first.”

  Through her rimless eyeglasses, the nun’s warm brown eyes were calming. “It’s not your fault, dear You can’t know what would possess someone to go after another person.”

  “Thank you, Sister,” Angie intoned, the nun’s words making her feel a little better. She even felt a twinge of good old Catholic guilt over her initial reaction to the two nuns in the hall.

  “It does sound as if you and your friend need to be careful, however,” the nun cautioned.

  “We’re trying to be,” Angie replied.

  “Good. I’m glad.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “Oh, gracious! I must go now. I’m sure Sister Agnes must be ready to leave without me. We can’t be late for evening prayers.”

  “I’m glad to have met you, Sister,” Angie said. “My name is Angelina Amalfi, by the way. People call me Angie.”

  “I’m sorry for your friend,” the nun said, and then she was gone.

  The room felt emptier and colder. As Angie watched over Aulis, she said a few prayers as well, for Aulis, for herself, and especially for Paavo.

  Paavo glanced at the clock on the once-white, now-in-need-of-paint wall in the Homicide bureau. Nine o’clock. At night.

  The detail was empty, everyone gone but him. Mayfield and Sutter had been here until about ten minutes ago when a new case landed in their laps, a domestic dispute gone bad. Neighbors called the cops, but by the time the uniforms got there, all was quiet. They found the wife dead in the kitchen, the husband missing.

  Nelson Bradley had phoned earlier and told Paavo he’d best be able to access the personnel info when only the night-shift people were around. They were the forgotten people. There weren’t many of them, and no one bothered, at that time, to peer over anyone else’s shoulders to check on the validity of their “need to know” the data they were accessing.

  A friend in Personnel had given Bradley the password and access codes to get into those files without raising red flags in the Integrity Branch. One disaffected employee helping another, Paavo thought. He guessed it was some sort of bureaucratic sense of justice.

  Now he awaited Bradley’s call.

  The evening quiet gave him a chance to make a few phone calls to speed up the identification of the hit-and-run victim outside Aulis’s apartment. Paavo didn’t like the preliminary findings, that the victim—slim, late thirties, no distinguishing characteristics—had no identification on him, and no fingerprints on file. He was a John Doe, and unless something dramatic turned up, he’d continue to be one.

  The only interesting information came from a med tech at the scene, who had noticed the victim’s teeth. Several were missing, and the ones still in his mouth were decayed. In Paavo’s experience, most people with bad teeth ended up in a dentist’s chair at some point. The only ones he’d seen who hadn’t were generally from poor, third-world countries.

  Witnesses couldn’t agree on whether John Doe was heading toward Angie’s car, or even scarier, Aulis’s apartment, when struck by a dark blue car with no license plates. Something in the features caused everyone to believe the driver was a woman with short hair. Just what it was about the features couldn’t be agreed upon, and the consensus was that the car sped by too quickly for anyone to get a good enough look at the driver to attempt a composite drawing.

  A few people also noticed another car, a black…or brown…or dark blue one, leave the scene immediately after the accident, going in the opposite direction from the hit-and-run driver. No details could be given about that driver, either.

  The phone rang shrilly, and Paavo started. “Smith, Homicide.”

  “It’s me.”

  Paavo’s spine stiffened. “Any luck?”

  “I searched the personnel files going back from thirty to forty years ago searching for the name Cecily,” Bradley said. “Thank God it isn’t that common a name. Anyway, there were three. I think I’ve got a good idea which one you want.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, first, let me ask you about the one who worked the longest for the Bureau. She was in her forties during that time—Cecily Drury. She was a typist for thirty years, and retired at age fifty-five.”

  “Not her.”

  “Then I’ve got a sixty-year-old librarian, Cecily Reiner, who spent a year reassigned from DOJ to put our library in order.”

  “No.”

  “This is it, then. Cecily Hampton Campbell, a young woman, only in her twenties, married to a special agent, Lawrence Campbell. She was hired to work in Ident—that was the old fingerprint identification section. It used to be a big paper operation with thousands of people, most of them women. It was like an assembly line. Anyway, she left Washington and was transferred to the San Francisco Field Office. Her record shows deceased. So does his. She died over thirty years ago.”

  Paavo’s hand tightened on the receiver. That was her. The woman he’d spent a lifetime wondering about. To learn her name, hear of her marriage…her death…hit him a lot harder than he would have imagined. Cecily Hampton Campbell. “You were right. That’s the one. Would you send me her file? His, too.”

  “I’ll need another day or so,” Bradley said. “Files this old are in storage. It could take a while to get them. Of course, you know I shouldn’t send them. This is confidential information.”

  “I don’t think so.” Paavo’s voice was harsh, jagged. “There’s no privacy act for the dead.”

  As soon as he hung up the phone, he searched California and then national death records for Cecily Hampton Campbell.

  No record existed.

  Chapter 12

  Angie constantly monitored the answering machine in her apartment for messages, especially on the lookout for those from her mother since Serefina knew nothing about her and Paavo living together in cousin Richie’s house, but also from the Russian jeweler. He hadn’t yet tried to contact her, or at least, hadn’t left a message. She called him, but the phone simply rang and rang. She wanted her brooch back.

  Since she was going out anyway to take some video shots of a new downtown restaurant with the unappetizing name of Les Chats, she decided to swing by Rose Jewelry and find out what was going on.

  As she drove slowly by the shop, searching for a parking space, she saw a CLOSED sign hanging on the front door. Taped below it was a note. She left her car double-parked and ran up to the note. It gave a telephone number in case of emergency. Back in her car, she punched in the number on her cell phone as she drove.

  “Lyons, Bernstein, and Rosin,” the receptionist’s voice said.

  “Hello. My name is Angie Amalfi. I’m a customer of Rose Jewelry, Mr. Gregor Rosinsky’s shop, and it’s closed. A sign in the window says to call this number. Do you know what’s going on?”

  “I’m sorry to tell you, Mr. Rosinsky passed away,” the nasally voice said. “His son, Martin Rosin, is handling business matters. Would you like to speak with him?”

  “He died? How awful. Had he been sick?”

  “Not at all. His shop was broken into. The robber killed him.”

  “My God!” Angie was shocked. How hadn’t she heard? But then, with so much going on, she hadn’t read a newspaper in days.

  “It was a terrible tragedy.” The woman spoke with all the emotion of announcing the weather. “I’ll put Mr. Rosin on the line for you.”

  When Rosin answered, Angie offered her condolences before telling him about the brooch she had left for repair.

  The son had a list of all the jewelry that was awaiting customer pickup, but after looking it over, didn’t see her name.

  A description of the brooch was no help. Rosin hadn’t seen a cameo in the entire collection. Not only was there none among the jewelry that was being repaired, there was none
for sale, either.

  “That’s impossible!” Angie cried in a panic, trying to remember what she had done with Rosinsky’s receipt. How was she going to tell Paavo she had lost his present on top of everything? “I was given a receipt.”

  “Would you read the number to me?” Rosin said. “I have all my father’s business papers here. I’ve been getting calls for days from customers.”

  Her tote bag! “Just a second, I think it’s right here.” One hand on the steering wheel, the phone crammed in the crook of her neck, she rummaged through the bottomless carryall, her car only occasionally crossing the double yellow line as she pulled out grocery and things-to-do lists. A red light allowed her to search two-handed and find the receipt safely tucked in her checkbook. “Got it!” she whooped, just a little while after the light turned green again. She read out the information he needed. The driver behind her seemed to be having some kind of fit—his face looked contorted and his arms waved spastically. She zipped away from him quickly.

  Rosin put her on hold to check for her receipt’s numbers. After a long wait, he came back on. “The store’s copy with that number is missing,” he said with undisguised surprise. “I have the one before and the one after, but that page was removed from the sales book.”

  She was first stricken, then furious. Her car weaved from one lane to the other as she screamed into the phone. “Removed? What do you mean, removed? Where is my brooch? It’s important to me!”

  “I’m sure it is—”

  “It’s a family heirloom!” She pounded the wheel instead of steering with it. “It was given to me by my—”

  “Miss Amalfi, calm down! Give me your phone number,” Rosin said soothingly. “I’m sure we’ll find it. I’ll contact you as soon as we do.”

  “I just don’t understand how it can be missing,” Angie protested, unsuccessfully trying to calm herself. “I heard your father was killed in a robbery. My brooch must have been among the things stolen! God, oh, God, how will I ever get it back?” She stamped her feet, and the Ferrari lurched and jerked and nearly sideswiped a startled pedestrian crossing the street.