“Sean, meet Kyle Lambert, one of my closest friends in high school,” bellowed Martelli.
Lambert and O’Keeffe shook hands. “Kyle ran the fastest 100-yard dash of anyone in our high school’s sports division. His record hasn’t been beaten to this day, if my read of the sports pages is correct.”
Lambert smiled and bowed.
“Kyle, Sean and I work homicide out of the First Precinct in Manhattan. But you already know that, at least about me, given that you know what happened to Vince.”
Lambert nodded. “I always knew he was going to come to no good when his dad stopped him from going into the Army with you. Once he took that job on the docks, it was all over. I felt terrible for Elena, especially after Vince left her. But there was little I could do for her. I sent her money when I could, but in the end, it was simply tragic. Whatever happened to her, do you know?”
“Last I heard, neighbors said Elena had abandoned her home in Brooklyn and left for Chicago to join her widowed brother, Angelo DeSanctis, who had a job waiting for her. One neighbor told me Elena said she was going to get help for her addictions to alcohol and cigarettes, and start over again.”
Lambert made the sign of the cross. “Maybe there’s a God after all.
“So, how can I help—”
“Kyle, I’m sorry to interrupt.” It was the receptionist. “Your next appointment is here.”
“Thanks, Alicia. Tell her I’ll be just a moment. Go ahead, Lou.”
“I’m sorry to take time away from your business. Should we come back later?”
“No, no, go ahead. If there’s something you need, I want to help, Lou.” He turned and shouted to his client, “Sweetheart, these are old friends from high school. I haven’t seen them in 25 years. Give me a few minutes. I’ll give you a 20% discount for your patience.”
The woman smiled broadly. “Take your time, Kyle. I’ve got some calls to make anyway.”
“So, Lou, you were saying . . . .”
“Take a look at these photos. We’ve talked with a few people, and they say no one but you could have inked this lady. Is that true?”
Lambert took the photos from Martelli, and in an instant his face lit up with recognition. “Oh yeah, I did these. Aren’t they beautiful? They were both done last year. The one on her back took several sessions, but it was worth it. She made me promise I’d never do another like it for anyone else. It was important that she be the only one to have this particular tat. Why do ya need to know who inked the art?”
“Well, we’re trying to find this young woman to ask her some questions regarding a case we’re working. These photographs turned up during our investigation. We thought if we could find the person who did the tattoos, we might get a lead as to who she is and where she lives.”
“Sure, sure, no problem. Her name is Nicole.”
“That’s it? Just Nicole?”
“Hey, in this business, I don’t ask questions, Lou. With some customers—these are the ones we call ‘cadavers’—I’m lucky if I get two words out of them in a session.”
“How did she pay?”
Lambert turned to his receptionist. “Alicia, how did Nicole pay for our services?”
“She paid in cash, Kyle.”
“What can I say, Lou? But hey, it’s great for business. No credit card charges on my end.”
“And how did she make her appointments?”
“Sometimes she called, sometimes she simply dropped in. Nothing regular, you know. But whether she had an appointment or simply dropped in, it was always on a Tuesday around 2 PM. Come to think of it, though, I haven’t seen her for a few weeks. I hope she’s okay.”
“That’s what we’re trying to determine. Do you have a telephone number for her?”
“We don’t keep track of customer telephone numbers, Lou. But she did have my card and as I recall, she once called me on my cell phone. It was last March, early in the morning . . . before the store opened. She wanted to cancel an appointment. I probably still have the call listed in my phone.”
Lambert took out his cell phone and with a few keystrokes, brought up his cell phone’s incoming call history. “Let’s see . . . I remember the call came in from an Unknown Caller. Oh, here it is. The number she called from was 718-555-0138. It appears to be a New York number.”
“Thanks, Kyle. This is a big help. We’ll let you go now. Gosh, it’s great to see you. Here’s my card. If you ever want to get together for a beer on a Friday night, give me a holler. Meantime, I’ll get with Stephanie and find a date when we can have you over for dinner. It’ll be like old times!”
Nine
‘Missy, it’s Martelli. Where the hell are you? Sean and I have been on the job since early this morning, busting our humps on behalf of the City of New York while you’re probably sitting in some salon having a mud bath and facial. When you decide to come back to work, give us a shout. We need a little help. Out!”
Martelli ended the call and slipped his cell phone into his suit pocket with a chuckle.
“You do know, Lou, that Dugan, using an old Egyptian mummification technique, will extract your brain through your nose when she hears that message.”
“Ah, yes, the lass will certainly have to be scraped off the ceiling, that’s for sure. But we have to do something to cheer up our otherwise dull and uneventful lives.”
Martelli had no sooner finished speaking when his cell phone rang. It was Dugan. Martelli put her on speakerphone.
“Hi, Lou. Gee, I’m so sorry I missed your call.”
The men looked at each other. There was not even a hint of anger in her voice. Yet it was clear she had gotten Martelli’s message.
“How can I help you?”
Martelli and O’Keeffe looked at each other again. Now, it appeared they were getting worried . . . worried, perhaps, that Dugan was up to something to which they were not privy, something that involved them in ways that could be painful, very painful.
“Well, ah,” Martelli intoned, attempting, it appeared, to juggle a number of things in his mind at the same time, “we have a lead on our Jane Doe. Her name appears to be Nicole. We have a telephone number for her, if you have a pencil and paper handy.”
“Sure, go ahead, Lou.”
“718-555-0138.”
“Just a minute. I’d be happy to do a reverse lookup for you.”
There was a strange, sing-song lilt in Dugan’s voice that appeared to unnerve Martelli and O’Keeffe. Martelli covered his cell phone’s microphone. “What the hell is going on? I get the feeling that any minute she’s going to come through the phone with a sledge hammer and take us both out!”
O’Keeffe grimaced and shrugged.
“Are you still there, Detective?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Well, this is interesting. The owner has Caller ID blocked, but I was able to get around it. It’s registered to someone named Nicole Davis at an address on Henry Street in Brooklyn. I’ll send you the address via instant messaging.”
“Do me a favor, Missy. See what you can dig up on Davis. Who she is, where she came from, who she works for, you know, the usual stuff.”
“Sure, I would be happy to do that for you. Anything else, Lou?”
The men stared at each other. Now they appeared to be really concerned. “Ah, no . . . no, this would be great, Missy. And, hey, you know I was just kidding around earlier, right? I didn’t mean any harm.”
“Lou, I’m sure it was all in good fun. And you know, we’re all going to have a good laugh about it at dinner tonight . . . you, Stephanie, Sean, and me, at Robert, the restaurant on Columbus Circle . . . just so you can show me in person there are no hard feelings. I’ve already made the reservations in yours and Sean’s names.”
“What are you talking about, Missy?” asked Martelli, taken completely by surprise.
“Well, I decided to turn the other cheek and try a different tack with you and Sean when you tease me. So, I went into our Department’s servers and chan
ged your passwords so you can’t use your computers unless, and until, you buy Stephanie and me the best dinners in town, which, as it turns out, you’re going to do this evening. Once that’s accomplished, I’ll restore your systems to the way they were before you made those naughty comments.
“See you at 6 PM. Don’t be late. I know how you guys like to primp in front of a mirror for hours at a time before meeting with us beautiful women.”
There was a loud ‘click’ and the line went dead.
Martelli looked at O’Keeffe. “We are so screwed!”
Ten
‘Well, Lou, that was an expensive little dinner last night. My share, as you know, set me back $155 clams. I don’t know how to thank you. Perhaps you’ll think a little more carefully about what you say to Dugan next time you leave a message on her phone. At least I was able to get into my computer again this morning.”
It was 8:30 AM on Friday morning. O’Keeffe had just gotten into Martelli’s Crown Vic, which was parked in front of Nicole Davis’s apartment building on Henry Street in Brooklyn. Martelli, for his part, had his eyes glued to a pair of binoculars that were focused on an empty black sedan parked three spaces in front of them.
“I know,” Martelli replied, forlornly. “It was quite an expensive undertaking, if I do say so myself.” Martelli’s focus shifted to the entrance of the building in which they hoped to find some evidence of Nicole Davis’s presence. Suddenly, Martelli bent forward.
O’Keeffe looked up in time to see two men leave the building.
“Shit!” exclaimed Martelli. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes! That’s Ron Bishop.”
Ron Bishop was the former FBI Special Agent in Charge for New York City before he was reassigned to Anchorage, Alaska, in January 2011 for gross mishandling of a murder investigation that saw the Bureau butt heads with the New York Police Department in late 2010 . . . and lose.
For Martelli’s part, the battle between him and Bishop was personal. Years earlier, Bishop had accidentally fired a slug into Martelli’s prosthetic leg while the two men were taking down a gang that was hauling cigarettes up from North Carolina. The accidental shooting was something Martelli would not let the agent forget. ‘It could have been my good leg you hit, and then, where would I have been?’ Martelli had shouted at the agent when they first met to discuss the murder investigation.
Then, adding insult to injury, the Bureau attempted to wrestle the case—which involved a murdered international banker—away from the NYPD. The reason was, Martelli’s murder investigation threatened to derail an FBI investigation into the funding of Islamic terrorists by two US-based organizations, one located on Wall Street, the other, in Brooklyn. It was Dugan’s hacking into Bishop’s files on the FBI’s secure server in Quantico that provided Martelli with the data he needed not only to solve the murder, but also, to arrest the men who had been funding terrorism in the Middle East. Bishop took the fall for the Bureau’s failure to close the terrorism case, and it was months before he figured out, though he never was able to prove, how Martelli had outsmarted him.
Now it appeared the two men were about to face off again—except that Bishop did not have a clue that Martelli was about to enter the FBI’s domain. And Martelli could not have been more puzzled as to why Bishop, of all people, had just walked out of the apartment building in which the detectives believed their victim had lived.
After watching Bishop and his partner leave the area, Martelli spoke. “This is unbelievable, Sean. It’s been well over three years since they booted Bishop to the Land of the Midnight Sun. Yet who should show up in Brooklyn, in front of this very apartment, on this very morning, but that asshole! Talk about destroying my day!
“Dugan was right. This case doesn’t pass the smell test. Something’s very wrong.”
Martelli called Antonetti using his car’s hands-free cell phone capability.
“Gooood morning, Louis. Isn’t this just the best day we’ve had all week? And it’s Friday, to boot!”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, Michael, but that sonofabitch Bishop is back in our lives.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Antonetti.
“Sean and I just saw him coming out of the building we believe our Jane Doe had an apartment in. Something doesn’t compute here. Why is the FBI interested in this woman? What’s she to them? Have you had any inquiries from the Bureau regarding someone fitting the description of our vic?”
“No, it’s been very quiet. There hasn’t been Inquiry One regarding that woman. We still haven’t gotten back all the pathology results, however, so I can’t write up a death certificate yet. That might have something to do with the fact we haven’t had any inquiries.
“Oh, and by the way, regarding the 9mm slug I dug out of her head . . . it didn’t match anything in our database.”
“I wouldn’t think so, Michael. Looks like a mob hit. They usually leave the gun at the scene, but then, we don’t have a clue as to where she was killed. I doubt it was the park.
“No matter. Listen, I want you to take this whole case off the grid. Make it disappear for now. Stall on writing up the death certificate. Call for more tests. Do whatever you have to do keep a lid on it. I don’t want anyone other than you, your assistant, Sean, Dugan, and me to know about Jane Doe. Let’s see if we can’t flush the FBI out and force them to come to us. If they’re looking for this woman, for whatever reason, and can’t find her, it’s just a matter of time before they start sniffing around the various morgues in this area. Don’t let them get near her. I need time to understand who she really is and how she plays into the federal government.”
“Don’t worry, Louis, they’ll never find her.”
“Thanks, Michael. I owe you one.”
Martelli ended the call, turned around, and plucked his briefcase from the backseat.
“What’s with the briefcase, Lou?”
“I’m going to sell some insurance.”
Eleven
Martelli got out of his Crown Vic, looked in the side-view mirror, straightened his tie, and briefcase in hand, started toward Jane Doe’s apartment building. “Call me on my cell phone if you see Bishop or anyone else return.” O’Keeffe gave him a ‘thumbs up’.
Once in the lobby, he quickly scanned the directory. Let’s see . . . Nicole Davis . . . Nicole Davis . . . Nicole Davis, where are you? Dammit. Nothing. Wait a minute. Apartment 512 has no name in the escutcheon. Martelli looked around, then pressed several buttons on the directory’s brass panel. When a few people answered, he hollered “Delivery,” at which time two residents buzzed him in.
Taking the elevator to the fifth floor, he hurried to apartment 512 and knocked on the door. No answer. He was just about to take out his lock pick kit when the door to apartment 514 opened and an elderly lady dressed in a flowered housecoat and wearing coke-bottle eyeglasses stuck her head out.
“If you’re looking for Nicole, she’s not home.”
“Oh, that’s too bad, Miss—”
“It’s Mrs. Sampson. I’m a widow. Eighty-years old. My husband passed away two years ago come next month. The cancer got him. His passing was a blessing. Praise the Lord.”
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Sampson. My name’s Louis Martelli. I’m with the Bay View Life Insurance and Indemnity Corporation of Sunnyside, Maryland. I had an appointment with Nicole this morning to talk about her life insurance policy. She assured me she would be here.”
“Well, I’ll tell you the same thing I told those two other nice men who were here a few minutes ago looking for her. I haven’t seen her since Monday night when she came home from work. It’s not like her, though, to go off for days at a time without saying something to me. But you never know. Pretty thing like that, maybe she met a man.”
“When you saw her on Monday night, did she seem upset or different in any way?”
“No, we exchanged pleasantries as she arrived—I had stepped out to put some trash into the chute down the hall�
�and she went in and shut the door.”
“And that’s the last time you saw or heard from her?”
“Well, come to think of it, there was a bit of a commotion coming from her apartment on Tuesday night, but I didn’t think anything of it. Sounded like two people might be having a good time, if you catch my drift.”
“You never know, do you, Mrs. Sampson? By the way, would you be interested in talking about apartment renters insurance?”
“Oh my goodness no. Get on with you.” She motioned him away and shut the door.
Martelli shrugged. Oh well, not every call results in a sale.
Returning to apartment 512, and after checking the hallway to make sure he was alone, Martelli selected a lock pick from his leather-cased pick set. Feeling around with it for a few seconds, he popped the lock. The door opened, revealing a small apartment in total disarray. Is this the result of a fight that took place earlier in the week—one in which the vic was struggling to save her life—or a result of the place having been ‘tossed’ by the FBI this morning just before we arrived? thought Martelli. Probably both. The question is, what were Bishop and his friend looking for, and if there was something of interest to be found, might it still be here?
Martelli took two latex gloves from his suit jacket pocket and donned them. Then he carefully worked his way through the books, papers, broken vases, picture frames, and other fragmented material that once had graced the desk, tables, and walls in the apartment’s living room. Finding nothing there or in the kitchen, he moved to the bedroom. The place had been turned upside-down, with sheets and pillows everywhere. The mattresses, which had been slashed open, lay against one wall. Dresser drawers lay on the floor, their contents strewn about.
Wheel of Fortune (Detective Louis Martelli, NYPD, Mystery/Thriller Series Book 6) Page 3
