by Ray Daniel
“Why did you take her today?”
“Because I bought her a sled for Christmas—”
“Yesterday.”
“Yeah. And she wanted to use it.”
“She didn’t have a sled?”
“No.”
“So you provided one.”
“Yeah. I bought her a Christmas present.”
“So instead of a doll or something you got her a sled, something that would get her out of the house.”
I smelled a rat. “So I do need a lawyer.”
“I’m just listing the facts.”
“Really.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I already knew all that.”
“How?”
“Your friend Bobby Miller.”
“Oh.”
“He’s still an FBI agent, you know. Still interested in justice even when his tech buddy is involved.”
I stopped walking.
Cantrell turned, stepped close, and spoke into my ear. “You got nothing to say? I see a nifty plan where you take Maria to the park and hand her off while Sal murders his wife.”
“Why would I hand her off?”
Cantrell filled the silence. “You and Sal are good friends, right?”
“We’re cousins.”
“What do you know about Sal’s line of work?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, the omerta, eh?”
“I’m only half Italian. I don’t do the omerta.”
“So why won’t you talk about Sal?”
“Because you’re a dick.”
“A detective?”
“Sure. That kind of dick.” I hunched my shoulders. My earlobes ached. “It’s freezing out here.”
“So let’s move it.” Cantrell started walking, hands in his pockets.
I followed. My hands were cold in or out of my pockets.
He asked, “Sal ever tell you about his dealings with the FBI?”
“No.”
“How long have you known David Anderson?”
“Who’s David Anderson?”
“Hah! Good answer.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re telling me you don’t know David Anderson?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“He’s a high-tech private equity guy, so I figured a nerd like you would know him.”
I stopped walking again. “Quit fishing.”
Cantrell stopped. “Do I have to fucking arrest you to get you to walk with me?”
I started walking. Getting arrested wouldn’t help me find Maria.
Cantrell said, “Thank you.”
“We only have a day or so,” I said.
“Forty-eight hours,” said Cantrell.
“What?”
“The odds of finding a kid go down like a rock after forty-eight hours.”
“So why am I wasting time talking to you?”
“Because you don’t want to spend that forty-eight hours in lockup.”
“Oh, fuck you!”
“Fuck me? From where I sit, you’re Sal’s perfect accomplice.”
“Sal didn’t kill Sophia.”
“How do you know?”
“He loved her.”
“There are only two people who know what’s going on in a marriage. You’re not one of them.”
“There is no way.”
“You do know that your cousin’s a killer.”
I did know that Sal was a killer. I’d seen him kill. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Well, let’s just say that a guy like that had to earn his stripes.”
I had had enough of this. You can’t swing a dead cat in the North End without hitting a coffee shop. We were passing one now.
“I’m freezing,” I said. “I’m stopping for a coffee.”
“Wimp,” said Cantrell.
“Whatever, you go on without me—save yourself.”
Cantrell stood on the sidewalk, looking down the street and back at me, trying to decide whether he wanted to bully me anymore. Apparently the cold got to him. He beckoned me closer.
I obliged.
Cantrell leaned toward my ear. “That guy, David Anderson?”
I said, “The private equity guy?”
“Yeah. There’s something you should know about him.”
“What?”
“Sal put a hit out on him. Ten thousand bucks.”
I said nothing. What could I say?
Cantrell pointed. “Your cousin is a killer.”
“Is there a point to this?”
“His friends are killers.”
“Again, is there a point to this?”
“You get involved with these guys and you’re likely to get killed.”
“Thanks for the advice. Can I go look for Maria now?”
“It’s your funeral. I thought you should know.”
Cantrell turned, strode down the street, never looking back.
I ignored the coffee shop, stepped into the doorway next to it, and rang the buzzer.
Adriana Rizzo’s voice crackled through the speaker. “Speak!”
“It’s me, your cousin Tucker.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“Buzz me in.”
Six
The Statue of Liberty tells the world to send us its huddled masses yearning to breathe free. When those huddled masses arrived in Boston, they did their huddling in the tiny apartments of the North End. First the Irish, then the Italians lived in tiny one-room affairs as they dug Boston’s tunnels, filled in its swamps, and earned a place for themselves in the new world.
As prosperity percolated through the North End, landlords combined tiny apartments to create larger ones, except for the studios which stayed tiny and provided a financial toehold into the neighborhood.
My cousin Adriana and her wife, Catherine, lived in just such a studio, the combined income from Adriana’s job as a restaurant server and Catherine’s as a social worker barely covering the rent.
Catherine opened the door. My cousin-in-law was nearly my height, thin, with short black hair. She made way, closing the door behind me and walking over to a standing desk that held a Facebooking laptop. Adriana sat at the other end of the room at a tiny table, nursing a coffee and poking at a tablet. She had been crying.
I approached and she spun the tablet so I could see it. Facebook statuses filled the screen:
I’m so sorry Adriana.
Sophia is in our prayers.
What can I do to help?
“I had to find out like this?” Adriana asked, then slipped into a new round of crying.
“I came here first thing,” I said. “The police were questioning me.”
“Why you?”
“I found the body,” I said.
“Oh my God. Was Maria with you?”
“No.”
“No? You guys were going sledding. It was on her status.”
“We did go sledding. Then it all went to shit.”
Catherine joined us at the tiny table as I started to tell them how it had all gone to shit. Adriana interrupted me.
“So you lost Maria,” she said.
“Well, I mean, she got into—”
“You lost her! It’s one of those nightmare stories where your kid disappears.”
“But we just have to find—”
“Get out of my house.”
“Yeah but—”
“Get out! Get out and don’t come back until you find her!”
Seven
Self-medication has a bad rap. Who’s to say that dealing with your feelings by pouring a few fingers of Bulleit rye whiskey into a rocks glass is a worse way to deal with yo
ur emotions than watching a Battlestar Galactica marathon, mutilating zombies in a video game, or getting into an online screaming match over the political outrage de jour? Certainly not I.
My South End condo runs from the front of the building to the back in shotgun fashion. The living room’s bay windows overlook Follen Street, then comes the kitchenette and office. My bedroom at the back of the condo looks out on trees and the next street’s houses.
I sat at the kitchenette’s breakfast bar, drank my rye, and attacked the problem of finding Maria the way I attacked all problems—by Googling. I started with basic searches about finding lost children, learned that many of them were just cases of miscommunication. Could that be the case here? Sal had been terrified for Maria, running across a field of frozen snow to try to get to her in time. Yet Maria had been calm, getting into the car with just a single glance back toward me. She knew her abductor. The two reactions made no sense. How could Sal be beside himself and Maria just walk away?
My Google searches strayed from the true path of child-finding and slid into questions about Sal and this guy David Anderson. Click and Clack, my hermit crabs, seemed to have been energized by the smell of a good rye whiskey. They climbed onto their feed sponge, and four eyestalks followed me as I drank rye and Googled David Anderson.
The whiskey kicked in, tickling the pleasure centers and loosening my tight gut. I said, “Holy cow, boys. There are hundreds of David Andersons.” I refined my search to just include Boston. “Oh, good. There are only ten in Boston.”
Still, David Andersons filled my screen. Boston-based David Andersons included two college professors, a lawyer, a state senator, a dead guy, and—there it was—a private equity guy.
“Well. There he is. Why do you suppose Sal would be messed up with a private equity guy?”
Clack scuttled across the tank and plopped into his water dish. I think that’s hermit crab for, “You’ve had a little too much to drink.”
“Nonsense,” I told him. “What do you know? You’re a teetotaler.”
David Anderson was a principal in a firm called Battery Street Capital. Battery Street is next door to Salutation Street. The Battery Street website featured a picture of the man himself: dark hair, dark suit, and a toothy, predatory smile. The site went on to list companies in Battery Street’s portfolio.
I copied the list of companies into evernote.com and dug in. Found press releases for each company proudly announcing that they had obtained funding in the form of seed-round investments led by Battery Street. Seed-round investments are usually small investments that get a good idea off the ground. They are long-shot bets with a one-in-ten chance of success, perhaps one in twenty.
I dredged around the Internet, determining which of the Battery Street startups had lived and which had died. It was easy to find signs of life, but it was hard to find signs of death. Entrepreneurs love to tell you when they’ve finally secured funding, but they rarely talk about burning through their cash and slinking away to plumb LinkedIn for a job.
“Happiness is positive cash flow” is the mantra of all successful startups. It means that you can keep running your business forever without having to sell it off or borrow in order to survive. Bill Gates was so enamored of cash that Microsoft always kept a year’s worth in the bank—fifty billion dollars—just in case everybody stopped buying Windows and Office.
Startups that get an initial round of funding do it because they can’t generate enough cash to survive. In some cases they need inventory: “We’ve built the Rolex of mousetraps, but we need five pounds of gold.” In other cases, the founders can’t get employees to work without salaries: “We’ll be rich! Rich, I tells ya! We’ll all have salaries next year.” “Yeah, no thanks.”
In the worst cases, the founders blow the cash creating an engineer’s Habitrail, complete with Ping Pong, foosball tables, yoga instructors, and weekly massage therapy.
Cash-negative entrepreneurs eventually have to come crawling back to the VCs, hat in hand, begging for more money. This was where David Anderson and his predatory teeth really got cranking. By the time he was done, he owned the company and the entrepreneur was working for him.
I picked up my Bulleit, saw the bottom of the glass, refilled it a finger or two, and got back to Googling. On a rye-induced whim I typed “Sal Rizzo.” Sal had his own Wikipedia entry:
“Sal ‘Schizo’ Rizzo (born September 29, 1962) …”
Schizo?
“ … is the reputed boss of the Boston La Cosa Nostra (LCN).”
The entry wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know about Sal being a crook, but reading it made it harder to shunt the knowledge into my peripheral vision. It was front and center on my screen.
I read through Sal’s background. It turned out that while I was getting soaked with the fire hose of knowledge at MIT, Sal was blasting his way up the Mafia hierarchy. The entry culminated with the following nugget:
“Sal Rizzo earned his reputation as ‘Schizo’ from his temper. He can be calm and measured one moment and in a murderous rage the next.”
Seriously? I mean, Sal had a temper, but that was a bit much.
I was done deadhorsing the fact that Sal was in the Mafia. Decided to go back to Anderson. Googled him and Sal together. Only one page popped up.
PASSHACK GARNERS SEED FINANCING
PassHack? That was Jarrod Cooper’s company. I’d done some consulting for Jarrod on PassHack. I had just clicked on the link to read more when something thwacked against my front door.
The newspaper?
I don’t get the newspaper. In fact, I don’t order any products that get thrown at my front door. The door’s peephole showed an empty hallway. I opened the door a crack, glanced up the stairs to the roof. No ambush. The street door slammed shut three flights down. A manila envelope lay on my welcome mat, the word TUCKER scrawled across it in black marker.
Eight
I reached for the envelope, then stopped inches away and imagined Bobby Miller yelling at me, You messed up the fingerprints, you idiot! He’d be right. I took a picture of the envelope with my phone and texted it to Bobby. He called right back.
“Don’t touch it!” he said.
“I didn’t,” I said. “But I’m going to. They might be waiting for me to call.”
“I’ll be right over.”
“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” I said.
“I’ve got as much time as it takes, Tucker. Don’t mess this up.”
I hung up, left my front door open. I didn’t want someone taking the envelope back. Considered pouring a little more whiskey, decided against it. Considered it again. Decided against it again. I put the bottle away, washed my glass, and tweeted:
Was it a mistake to call the FBI? #askingforafriend
Bobby buzzed my doorbell. Two sets of feet clomped up the steps. Bobby turned the corner, stopped short of the envelope. Frank Cantrell was right behind him.
Cantrell asked, “Did you touch it?”
I asked Bobby, “Why did you bring him?”
“Frank and I are working together on Sal’s case,” Bobby said.
Frank said, “We’ve come to collect the evidence and take it back to the office.”
“You will surely not ‘collect the evidence,’” I said. “We’re going to open it together.”
Bobby said, “Frank’s just—”
“I should never have called you, Bobby,” I said. “I wouldn’t have if I thought you were bringing him.”
“Just calm down,” said Bobby. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pair of blue plastic gloves, and slipped them on. “Frank, we’re going to open it here.”
Cantrell said, “For what? It’s just going to throw more variables into this.”
“Time is a variable,” I said.
Cantrell said, “Thanks, nerd.”
Bobby sai
d, “Frank, do you want to wait in the car?”
“Screw you, just ’cause this guy is your buddy doesn’t mean—”
“Tucker didn’t need to call us. It was a courtesy.”
“So now we’re corrupting evidence as a courtesy?”
“Are you guys going to help me find a little girl or not?” I asked.
Bobby picked up the envelope, stepped into my apartment, put the envelope on the kitchen counter, and produced a pocket knife.
Cantrell said, “Wait before you muck it up.” He took a picture of the envelope with his phone.
Bobby slid the knife into the top fold, ran it along the manila, sliced it cleanly, jiggled the envelope open, and reached inside with two blue-sheathed fingers. Pulled out a single sheet of paper. It was a printed PowerPoint slide titled DEMANDS. Maria’s picture took up one side, three bullet points took up the other.
Maria was duct-taped to a chair, her little wrists trapped against the armrests. She was crying, looking into the camera, probably at someone’s instruction.
“Motherfuckers,” Bobby and I said in unison.
Cantrell said nothing.
The bullet points listed their demands:
Tell Sal to plead guilty to the murders tomorrow.
If Sal does not plead guilty we will kill Maria.
Don’t call the police. We will know.
Cantrell pointed at the last demand. “Too late for that, I guess.”
Bobby said, “Shut up, Frank.”
“I mean, they might have seen us coming in.”
“Will you shut up?”
What had I done?
“She’s dead,” I said.
“No, she’s not,” said Bobby. “They always write that in demands, but if they killed Maria tonight they’d lose their leverage.” Bobby slid the picture around, considering it from different angles. “I’m no psych profiler, but this guy’s an idiot.”
“I can’t believe they’re not asking for money,” Cantrell said. “‘Plead guilty’? What kind of shit is that?”
Bobby said, “They know we’re charging Sal with murder.”
“It wasn’t a secret.”
“Still, this took planning. They knew we were going to arrest him and knew to grab Maria to force a confession.”
