Shakedown

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.”