Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

expected the question, and I had to think for a moment. Finally, I nodded. “Yes, I think she probably is. I have no reason to think she isn’t.”

“Then why she never contact us?”

“She may be protecting you.”

“From what? Nelson is dead.”

I smiled. “Who killed him?”

She heaved a sigh. “Ay, Dios!”

Dehan asked her, “Do you know?”

José said, “Tell them, Mamá. Somebody got to stand up to these hijos de puta.”

She was screwing the tea towel into a bunch and releasing it again, over and over. She said, “The mothers gossip, we meet, we talk. After Nelson died, Carlitos took over. He was not so crazy. He is very dangerous man, but not like Nelson. The gossip was that Carlitos killed him.”

As far as it went, it made sense. “Did Carlitos have any kind of relationship with Maria?”

She frowned and shrugged. “No.”

I stared out of the small window at the grim, dilapidated buildings opposite, like a yellow-brick monument of despair. We had found Maria’s mother, her brother, and her boyfriend, but we were no closer to finding Nelson’s killers than we had been when I put the box on the desk. Maybe that was the way it should be. Maybe his killers should go unpunished.

José was leaning in the doorway. “You want I should talk to Carlitos, see if he’ll meet with you?”

“No!” I stared at him. “José, I am serious, whatever you do, you do not talk to Carlitos. You understand me?” He nodded. “If he thinks you’ve been talking to the cops, you will have big trouble.”

“Okay, okay…”

As we picked our way down the stairs, I began to feel mad. We got in the car and slammed the doors. “We pull him in.”

“Carlitos?”

“Yeah.”

“On what charge?”

“Anything. I don’t care. There have to be a thousand things we can charge him with. If he killed Nelson, he knows what happened to Maria.”

“He’ll call his attorney, plead the fifth, and sit it out.”

I sighed. “I know, but we need to get something on him and get him to break.”

She danced her head around a bit, like she’d had an idea and wasn’t sure if it was a good one. “Maybe Pro could help.”

I frowned. “How?”

“Word is that Carlitos and his Sureños are cooperating with the Jersey Mob. So maybe you could have Pro talk to Vincenzo, who talks to Carlitos to persuade him to cooperate with you.”

“That’s only going to work if Carlitos didn’t kill Nelson, and we are inclining to the view he did.”

“The other option is to get Vincenzo to supply information so we can raid Carlitos and some of his guys red-handed. We offer him a deal, which includes fessing up to Nelson and telling us what happened to Maria.”

I blew out and fired up the engine. “I doubt Vincenzo would go for it. But if we could pull Carlitos in and a couple of his associates, we might be able to play them against each other.”

Twelve

But things were about to take a different turn. I hadn’t expected to hear from Bernie for a couple of days at least, but he called me as we were on our way back to the 43rd. I answered and put it on speaker, then dropped it on the dash.

“Bernie.”

“Your instincts were right, as usual, John. But I don’t want to talk on the phone. You better come down to the bureau.”

“We’re on our way.”

We took the Willis Avenue Bridge, and pretty soon we were headed south on Park Avenue toward Broadway. We didn’t talk. Each of us was lost in our own thoughts. It felt like we were right there, within inches of the answer, but every time we tried to grasp it, all we got was a handful of what we had before. Nothing.

For the second time in a couple of days, I parked at Federal Plaza and stepped inside. We took the elevator to the twenty-third floor, and Bernie came to meet us in the lobby. He was short, overfed, and cheerful. As we walked toward his office, he said, “I got to tell you, John, you have a nose like a god-darn bloodhound. This is going to be messy.”

I glanced at Dehan. She was smiling.

We stepped into his office, and he closed the door behind us.

As we sat, he dropped a file on the desk. “This is for you. I didn’t want to talk about it on the phone, because we don’t know how far this goes.”

I picked it up and began to leaf through it. He carried on talking.

“To start with, Michael Harragan sold his house in 2006, for five hundred grand. That’s a high price back then. He sold it to a company that turns out to be just a name. It bought the house and has done nothing since. The company belonged to José Guzman. We’re looking into it now, but two gets you twenty he works for somebody in the Mexican cartels.”

“Or the Sureños,” Dehan said.

He nodded at her. “Okay. So the money was paid into an account in Miami. From which it was transferred, twenty-four hours later, to an account in Mexico, in Belize. But the payee account was not Michael Harragan.”

I said, “Who was it?”

“It was Michael O’Hannafin. A name change which makes the forging of documents pretty easy for a skilled professional. The chances are extremely high that Harragan is living in Mexico as Michael O’Hannafin.”

Dehan said, “That would take it out of our jurisdiction.”

He shrugged. “We’re not there yet. We’re talking to our counterparts in Mexico to see just how much money went into his account, and if there is any trace of O’Hannafin anywhere. But as you know, getting into an account in Belize is very, very difficult. And if he has opened a