Then they had to clean up the rest of the loose ends, starting with Thomas Rice.”
“The warden still can’t prove it wasn’t suicide,” Troy said.
“And Grisnik’s sources inside Leavenworth still say someone with a badge put a hit on Rice. Colby is the only one who fits that description who would have benefited from Rice’s death.”
“If Colby had Rice taken out, you figure him for the Ordonez hit, too?” Troy asked.
“Hard not to.” I explained my theory about how Colby could have followed Latrell, found Latrell’s gun, and later used it to kill Javy. “You find Bodie yet?” I asked. Troy shook his head.
“That’s some serious corporate reorganization,” Yates said. “Take out the people making you all the money. You would have to replace them with new people who are loyal to you and who can control their territories.”
It was an expensive way to do business. But it proved my point about the importance of kicking these things around, talking out loud until the holes in the theories were either patched up or grew too big. I got up and paced in the center of the rectangle, studying the whiteboards, stopping when I came to the list of witnesses.
“There’s another possibility,” I said, as one thread suddenly tied together with another.
“What’s that?” Yates asked.
“Retirement. Once things started to unravel, maybe they decided it wasn’t worth the risk anymore. Time to take the money and run.”
“So who are we talking about?” Troy asked.
I rose from my chair and walked to the whiteboard and drew a circle around Tanja and Nick Andrija’s names.
“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.”
