“Them?” Yates asked.
“Yeah,” I said. Then I wrote their parents’ names on the board, Petar and Maja, and underlined the first two letters of each. Together they spelled PEMA.
“Them.”
Chapter Sixty-seven
“What do you know about the family?” Yates asked.
“The parents are a nice old couple. They live on Strawberry Hill. He sits on the porch and she tends the ?owers. The old man used to run a bar called Pete’s Place and a restaurant next to it called Pete’s Other Place. Now Nick runs the restaurant and Tanja runs the bar. Marty Grisnik introduced me to them the other day. Colby was there trying to stick his tongue down Tanja’s throat.”
“What’s her story?” Yates asked.
“She and Grisnik had a teenage thing. She grew up and moved to New York. Married a guy that owned a restaurant called Mancero’s. She says she divorced him a few years ago and came home. Still keeps a photograph of the restaurant on the bar.”
Yates straightened in his chair. “What was the name of the restaurant?”
“Mancero’s. Why?”
“When I was assigned to the New York office, there was a made guy in one of the families named Mickey Mancero. He bought and sold enough cocaine to melt every nose in the five boroughs and washed the money through a restaurant he owned. Somebody put a bullet in him before we could take him down.”
“You think it’s the same guy?” Troy asked.
“He had a good-looking wife. Blond, great figure. Except her name was Tina. I’ll ask New York if they can find a picture of her.”
“Was the wife involved?” Troy asked.
“We never got her on tape, but the operating assumption was that all the wives knew what was going on.”
I said, “Tanja told Grisnik she was divorced. Tell them to check those divorce records, too.”
“You run any of this past Grisnik?” Yates asked me.
“I talked to him. Petar and Maja are his godparents and I think he still carries a torch for Tanja. He can’t be objective but he thinks it’s all bullshit.”
I didn’t tell him that Grisnik was taking me to see the family tonight. If Yates knew that, he’d handcuff me to my chair.
Gina Tomkins opened the door and wheeled in a bookcase loaded with the Thomas Rice file and parked it against the wall. Yates told her what he wanted from the New York office and she left. Ammara Iverson came in as Gina was leaving.
“We’ve confirmed that Oleta Phillips was one of the bodies in Latrell’s basement and we’ve got tentative ID on the other two skeletons,” she said. “We did some more digging in the basement and found a wallet belonging to a guy named Johnny McDonald and a necklace with letters on it spelling the name Shirel.”
“Marty Grisnik was supposed to be checking arrest records for a woman living there seventeen years ago,” I said.
“I know. So I called him. He found her. Her name was Shirel Kelly. She was a prostitute. She’s listed on Latrell’s birth certificate as his mother. Grisnik also checked the property records on the house. Johnny McDonald owned it. Both of them were in the system for priors, but they dropped off the radar seventeen years ago. Latrell bought the house at a tax foreclosure sale a few years later.”
“If Latrell buried them in the basement, why did he need a secret hiding place somewhere else?” I asked.
“Secret hiding place?” Yates asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Latrell thought I had followed him there. It’s got to be a place where you need lots of ?ashlights and batteries. We need to find it.”
“Why?” Yates asked.
“Because that’s where Colby found Latrell’s gun and the photograph of Latrell. With Latrell dead and Colby on the run, the Andrijas could be using it to hide Wendy.”
Troy said, “There used to be a lot of mining in Wyandotte County. Maybe it’s an abandoned mine, or a cave.”
“Grisnik is a walking history book on Kansas City, Kansas. He told me that Argentine got its start with mining operations. Latrell worked at the railroad terminal in Argentine. I’d start with abandoned mines in that area.”
Troy grabbed the phone again and instructed an agent to find someone who could find records of old mines on a Saturday afternoon.
“I’ve got more,” Ammara said. “You asked me to find out whether Colby had visited anyone at Leavenworth who might have had a connection to Thomas Rice. There’s no record he was there in the last six months.”
“So that’s a dead end.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I asked for the names of everyone who visited or made phone calls to inmates in the last six months.”
“That has to be a huge list.”
“It is, and they didn’t want to give it to me without jumping through ten levels of red tape even though it’s all in a searchable database. So I gave them the list of the people we are interested in and they searched our names against the database and only came up with one hit,” she said, pointing to the dry erase board. “Nick Andrija phoned a prisoner named Wilson Reddick five hours after you saw Thomas Rice.”
“Who’s Wilson Reddick?”
“Homeboy right out of Quindaro. Drove all the way from here to New York City, filled the car’s door panels with cocaine, and drove back. A cop tried to stop him for a busted taillight when he got home. Turned into a chase that ended when Wilson ?ipped the car. He started out serving five years but that turned into twenty-five when he put a shank into one of his neighbors on the cellblock.”
“Case sounds familiar,” Troy said.
“I thought so, too,” Ammara said. “I checked and we’ve got our own file on Reddick. He was one of Colby’s snitches. Less than four hours after Nick Andrija called Reddick, Rice was hanging from the rafters in the laundry room.”
“Fits with what Grisnik’s source told him. Was the call from Andrija monitored?” I asked.
“No, just the name and number,” she said.
The door to the war room sprung open. Gina Tomkins marched in like she expected a salute and handed a photograph to Ben Yates.
“New York e-mailed this,” she said.
Yates tossed the photograph across the table to me. Her hair was longer and her face a little thinner, but there was no mistake.
“That’s her. Tanja Andrija. Anything on a divorce?” I asked.
“No. The Widow Mancero is still a member of the family and whisper has it she took out her husband,” Gina said. “New York says she left town after the funeral and they haven’t kept tabs on her since.”
Ammara said, “Marcellus was killed before we could track the money from his operation. Suppose Tanja used her New York connections to open up in Kansas City. She could have supplied the local dealers like Marcellus, Javy Ordonez, and Bodie Grant.”
“Thomas Rice could have washed the money through deals like PEMA Partners,” I said.
“And Tanja’s New York in-laws would take a healthy cut,” Ammara said. “Wouldn’t have left much for Marcellus.”
“I think it’s time we talked to the Andrijas,” Yates said.
Troy stood. “You and me, Ammara,” he said.
Watching them leave, I was numb. Troy had been right that someone on our squad was dirty, even if Colby hadn’t tipped Marcellus to the surveillance camera. Troy was willing to look for answers in the dark places where it hurt to be right. My dependence on smoking guns to prove guilt had shut my eyes to crimes masked by human subtlety.
As much as I wanted to believe that Tanja and Nick would use Wendy to make a deal, I knew that it could as easily go the other way, especially if Troy came at them with a lot of firepower.
He wouldn’t go after them alone or in a hurry. It would take time to get warrants, map out a plan, and assemble a backup team. That gave me a window in which to work. Yates stopped me as I headed for the door.
“Is this what you wanted from Rice’s file?” he asked, handing me an Excel spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet contained a list of people who had invested with Rice but had not sued him. They were the lucky ones, the ones who’d made money with Rice. To his credit, it was a long list. It was also alphabetized. Petar and Maja Andrija were near the top.
“That’s it. I saw them sitting in their kitchen last night. They were frail and frightened. When Tanja showed up, they looked more frightened. She must have used them to hide her money the same way Rice used his wife to hide his.”
I was finished. I couldn’t bring myself to add that it was the same way Colby Hudson had used my daughter.
I took a slow walk around the room, brushing my hand along the wall. The tables, chairs, carpet, and whiteboards were all fungible. You could find them in ten thousand offices in a thousand office buildings. I came to the door and stood for a minute, my hand on the brass knob, certain that I’d never come back. Leaning my head against the door, I felt Ben Yates standing behind me.
“I’m sorry, Jack.”
“Me, too.”
Chapter Sixty-eight
There is a moment in every case when you can feel the end coming. Momentum builds off a series of breaks, large and small. People pick up their pace, forgetting how tired they are. Phones ring louder. Doors slam. A surge carries everyone to the finish, whatever it turns out to be.
Our computer geeks were dissecting Wendy’s hard drive. Wyandotte County officials were being yanked off the golf course and quizzed about the county’s underground history. Agents in New York and Kansas City were connecting the dots between Tanja Andrija and her late husband’s family while Troy Clark passed out bulletproof vests.
Even with everything coming together, the dull reality was that it might be too late to save Wendy. I may have persuaded Ben and Troy that she was more likely a victim than a perpetrator, but there would be little comfort in saving her reputation if I lost the rest of her to a bullet or a prison cell.
If presented with these facts in any other case, my professional judgment would be that she was most likely dead. Wendy had been missing for two days. She had become a pawn and pawns die unless both sides want them.
Marty Grisnik had promised to call me. I decided to use the time until he did to visit Kate.
It was late afternoon by the time I drove back to the KU Hospital. The day had gotten colder, the pale sky deepening to dirty gray, pressing toward the ground like a ?atiron.
Kate’s room was at the end of a long hall, voices echoing through her open door. She was propped up in bed surrounded by people I knew but had never met. They were her family, names she had mentioned more than once. I had no trouble putting names to faces.
Her sister, Patty, had the short, frizzy hair Kate had once described as steel wool on a bad day. She stood on the near side at the head of the bed, her features a rough match of Kate’s, her face lined with worry as she and Kate whispered to one another.
Kate’s son, Brian, leaned on the other side of the mattress, idly playing with a handheld video game, which was a thirteen-year-old boy’s way of dealing with the world. His eyes jumped back and forth from the screen to his mother.
Her father, Henry, who had raised her from micro expression guinea pig to professional partner and who Kate had said was nearly eighty, stood at the foot of the bed. He had a thick body, white hair, and blotchy cheeks, his stubby hands clutching at the memory of cigars he’d been forced to give up. Kate’s ex-husband, Alan, balding, thin, and dressed in a runner’s sweat suit, was next to him, the two men locked in an intense, animated conversation, the few words I caught as I stepped into the room sounding like shoptalk.
It all stopped when they saw me. Kate rolled her eyes and smiled at me, a look that was half happy and half anesthetic hangover.
Her family’s faces widened with recognition and then dismay, eyes and mouths narrowing in collective disapproval. Patty turned her back to Kate as if to shield her. Brian straightened, edging closer to his mother. Henry and Alan slid toward Patty, the three of them forming a human barricade cutting me off from Kate.
It was clear that I wasn’t the hero of whatever story Kate had told them about what had happened. I knew she would have given them a version unadorned by exaggeration, rich with responsibility for her own actions, and gratitude for mine. But they were her family and were having none of it. There was nothing hidden in their micro expressions. I read in their faces their indictment of me, the FBI agent who’d led their loved one into danger and nearly cost them someone they held dear.
I didn’t blame them because it was true, Kate’s likely protest notwithstanding. That’s the way it’s supposed to be with families. Members were to be protected, taken care of. Anyone who threatened one of them threatened all of them. Anyone who failed in their duty to protect one failed all of them.
I couldn’t argue and I didn’t. No one spoke. It wasn’t necessary. I nodded at them, turned around, and left. Kate called my name from behind their backs but I kept on walking.
Chapter Sixty-nine
Ammara Iverson called me as I was leaving the hospital. It was dusk, the air dry and charged.
“We hit the jackpot with Wendy’s computer,” she said. “The important files are encrypted but we’ve been able to break into some of them. We’re still working on the others. So far we’ve got some offshore accounts and names.”
“Was it Tanja’s show?”
“Locally, but she was working for her in-laws. Colby joined up late last year.”
“That was when he and Wendy had gotten married. How do you know?”
“He included a confession of sorts, called it his insurance policy, and said he hid it on Wendy’s computer. It said that he would probably be dead by the time anyone read it. He says he knows that he fucked up and he’s sorry. He also says that Wendy had nothing to do with it.”
True or not, Colby had tried to protect her, though he wasn’t much of a character reference at this point. I thought of her, wondering where she was and if I’d ever see her again.
“Doesn’t help much.”