Only Child

“That’s what all those years as a prosecutor taught you. Thing is, they also tell the truth. And if someone she knew is lying, then either they’re the person she met, or they know who it is. Doesn’t sound random to me.”

“The liar could be the girl herself.”

“I thought of that. Off on an adventure, and she didn’t know the territory. Sure. But teenagers, they don’t usually go on adventures by themselves. Runaways, yeah. But you didn’t see a shred in all that stuff you brought about a reason for the kid to run, did you?”

“No. But that doesn’t mean—”

“I know,” I said. “The mother didn’t have a boyfriend?”

“There’s no evidence she even dated. Why are you so big on that one?”

“I was in a case once. Mother’s boyfriend, a few years younger than her, he was going at the daughter for years, since the kid was about nine or ten. Girl gets to be thirteen, she disappears one night while the mother is at work. During a big snowstorm. Boyfriend said he had a few beers watching TV, fell asleep, never saw her leave. They find the kid’s body in a vacant lot, day or so later. The same snow that covered the kid covered whatever tracks there might have been.

“The cops find the girl’s diary in her school locker. She thought she was having an ‘affair’ with the boyfriend. They were going to get married as soon as she became of age. She didn’t want to wait.”

“What did the boyfriend get?” she asked, eyes cold.

“Get? He never got arrested. They questioned him, but he was smart. Kept it very simple. Didn’t admit anything. He had a prior—exact same MO, but no homicide. And he knew they couldn’t even make out the stat rape without his confession, much less a killing, so he lawyered up immediately. Forensics were useless; they had lived in the same house.”

“This isn’t anything like that.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“I’m sure the mother wasn’t hiding a boyfriend in the basement, yeah. But it could have been a similar scenario...one of her teachers, maybe.”

“Maybe. Whatever happened to that...case you had?”

“I told you, he never even got arrested.”

“So that filthy freak and the girl’s mother lived happily ever after?”

“Far as I know,” I lied.

“Giovanni Antrelli has three arrests,” Wolfe said, a half-hour later. “None in the past fifteen years. No convictions. He’s a family man; this you knew, of course. If he were a doctor, he’d be a general practitioner. Gambling, loan sharking, bust-out schemes, labor racketeering. Supposed to be a real comer. Word is, he reports to a capo but he’s actually a higher rank himself. Which means the old men have big plans for him, down the line.”

“He’s never been Inside?”

“In the Tombs, overnight, maybe. Or on Rikers for a week, at most. The charges were always dismissed. The court records don’t say why, but I don’t think we have to waste a lot of speculation on it. I guess the bosses always thought highly of him.”

“Anything about him trafficking?”

“Funny you should ask,” she said, twisting her mouth as she spoke. “His rep is, he wouldn’t touch drugs. Too risky, he says. And the time is so high, a bust could make anyone in the chain roll over. In fact,” she went on, watching me closely, “the feds did make a little probe of their own, a couple of years ago.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It was almost comical,” she said. “They popped some moke with serious weight, turned him right at the scene. What they wanted was what they always want: the man at the top. A headline-size fish. But what they got was this genius running around trying to make new cases for them. He was wired when he approached Antrelli—on his own, the memo says—and tried to get him to go into business.”

“And you think Giovanni made him?’”

“I didn’t hear the tape,” Wolfe said. “Just read the transcript. What Antrelli told him was, and I quote, ‘Drugs isn’t a game for white men. Let the spear-chuckers and the banana brains have it. The money never sticks to their hands, anyway. We always get it back from them, one way or the other.’”

“The guy the feds have, is he still under?”

“That’s not part of our deal,” she said, no-argument cold. “You want to protect your pal Giovanni, hire on as a bodyguard.”

“I wasn’t looking to...Never mind.”

“Right. Now, Felix Encarnacion, this one is another story entirely. He’s never been arrested in America, but Interpol has him on file as an assassin for a Colombian cartel. Supposed to have done a half-dozen very professional jobs, two of them in Europe.”

“Supposed to...?”

“All of this was a long time ago. He was held—I wouldn’t say ‘arrested,’ not with the system they have there—in Peru a while back. Held for about two years, until he was released. Ransomed out, that’s what I’m told.”

“By the Colombians?”

“Could be. Nobody’s sure. Encarnacion himself’s not Colombian. Or Peruvian, either. Guatemala is what the money’s on, but even that’s just an educated guess.”

“Then we know two things about him for sure,” I said. “He can do very hard time and not give anyone up. So he’s got a lot of trust going for him. And a sure pipeline to pure.”

“Yeah. The rest is all gossip-level. Antrelli’s supposed to have no temper. Pure ice. Never loses control. An old man’s head, that’s what they say about him.”

“And Felix?”

“What they say is, he can never go back down south. And that, to him, a gun’s like a hammer to a carpenter.”

I spent the next three days in my place, sifting and straining the information in Wolfe’s paper through every filter I had, adding to my charts until I could see bits and pieces of Vonni’s life in every room.

When I ran dry, I went out to see what I could find of her death.

I started where they’d discovered the corpse. A culvert off an unpaved lane in the swampland between Jamaica Bay and JFK Airport. I could feel the hackles that must have gone up on Giovanni’s neck when he’d first been told. The area’s a big favorite of mob guys who have a recurring need for unmarked graves.

As I slowed to a stop, my shoulders tightened and my nostrils flared, taking the pulse of the place. It was way too long after the murder for the cops still to be staking out the dumping ground; but I’m an old dog, and sniffing for danger is an old habit.

Her body had been found wrapped in heavy plastic sheeting, secured with baling wire. “Like a slab of meat, ready for the freezer,” one cop’s notes had said.

You’d think that would rule out a Lovers Lane encounter that had gone wrong. What kind of man carries plastic sheeting and baling wire in his trunk?

I knew the answer to that question, so I spent an hour crisscrossing the area. But there was nothing resembling a regular spot for car sex. About the only dry land was where the body had been dropped off.

Dropped off, not buried. That meant something. Maybe the killer was in a hurry.

Or maybe he was a psycho, making a statement. Those kind never write their messages in invisible ink.

One look around was enough to show me that the site was outside New York’s special two-tier recycling system. You want to get rid of something in Manhattan, you just leave it out at the curb. It doesn’t matter if the