Death, Taxes, and a Chocolate Cannoli (A Tara Holloway Novel) (22 page)

I glanced at the corresponding door on the left. Unlike the standard interior door on the room I’d just peeked into, this door appeared to be made of heavy-duty steel, like the new back door that had been installed at the bistro. A second security keypad was mounted next to this door. Like the front entrance, this door also contained an old-fashioned keyed dead bolt. If my suspicions were correct, this was the room that housed the monitoring equipment and Cyber-Shield’s server and Wi-Fi router.

The control room.

The next set of opposed doors were marked with the standard male and female signs indicating they were restrooms. The administrative assistant would have hers all to herself. I stepped past them and gently pushed on Tino’s door which, like the locked door back down the hallway, was made of reinforced steel. It opened to reveal the man wearing his standard Cyber-Shield shirt and sitting behind a broad desk in a high-back leather chair. Given his short stature, the pinnacle of his head barely cleared the top of the chair. A keyboard, a mouse, and a large flat-screen computer monitor sat on his desk. Behind him was a cabinet topped with bookshelves. Rather than books, each shelf held photographs of his family. Some were professional family or individual portraits, while others were candid snapshots. Again, it struck me as odd that a man who seemed to love his family could have such an evil, violent side. If he loved his family so much, how could he not have empathy for his clients and their families, too?

“Special delivery.” I held up the bag and forced a smile to my lips.

“None too soon,” he said. “I’m starved.”

I set the bag on the edge of his desk and unpacked it for him. The bag held a generous serving of capellini pomodoro, garlic knots, a salad with Italian dressing, and a chocolate cannoli. Benedetta had also included silverware and a cloth napkin.

Tino ran his eyes over the feast. “My Bennie. She sure takes good care of me, doesn’t she? I’m a lucky man. I don’t know what I’d do without that woman.”

“She’s a great boss, too,” I told him, engaging in idle chitchat to give me time to take a surreptitious look around the office. Oddly, while the rest of Cyber-Shield’s space was as secure as a prison, I noticed no security camera in Tino’s office. Whatever happened in here, he didn’t want it documented, didn’t want anyone else to be able to look in. “I like working for her.”

He tucked the napkin into the neck of his shirt, like a bib. “She likes you, too. Says you’re a hard worker and that you don’t complain.”

“No reason to,” I replied. “Where else would I be treated to a chocolate cannoli at the end of each shift?”

Tino laughed. “Thanks for bringing this over.”

Clearly, I was being dismissed. “My pleasure.”

I stepped out of Tino’s office, pulling his door back to the nearly closed position it had been in when I’d entered. As I headed to the front door, a young man who had to be Eric Echols stepped up to the glass front door of Cyber-Shield. Like the other Cyber-Shield employees I’d seen, he wore the green uniform shirt, although his was not tucked in and was so wrinkled it looked as if he’d slept in it.

He typed in a code on the keypad and came inside, the door giving off the same warning buzz it had when I’d entered minutes before. He was looking down at the cell phone in his hand as he walked in.

“Hello,” I said. “Working late tonight?”

He looked up, startled, his buggy eyes even more buggy. Was it just my imagination, or did his gaze flicker to my upper lip, as if checking for regrowth?

“Yeah.” He turned his attention back to his phone, as if avoiding my eyes.

“I’m Tori.” I stepped toward him and extended my hand. “I work at Benedetta’s.”

Still looking down, he muttered, “That’s nice,” and scurried past me like a mouse running from a cat. He unlocked the dead bolt on the reinforced interior door, typed in a four-digit code on the keypad, and was inside in a flash. I caught only a quick glimpse of multiple, wall-mounted monitors before the door slammed shut behind him.

Hmm …
I couldn’t tell whether the guy had bad manners or merely poor social skills. Either way, he could benefit from a few sessions at Miss Cecily’s Charm School.

I exited Cyber-Shield’s offices to find Echols’s Mustang parked at the curb between two of the patrol cars. The guy might be a geek, but he did drive a badass car.

A glance at Gallery Nico told me that Nick still had an eye on me. He stood at a sculpture, lightly brushing it with a feather duster. Even from this distance I could see his shoulders relax as he spotted me exiting the building alive.

Two hours later, after helping Elena and Dario clean up the dining room and kitchen, I wrapped up my shift at the bistro and exited the restaurant with some leftover manicotti and a chocolate cannoli tucked under my arm. I only wished I was leaving with some hard evidence that would implicate Tino Fabrizio.

chapter twenty-eight

A
n Inconvenient Truth

Tuesday morning, I went to class at DBU. A pointless exercise probably, as nobody seemed to have followed me to the campus. After class I went to the library and used one of their computers to e-mail Alicia, as I’d promised I’d do.
I’m fine,
I told her.
But if they don’t stop sending me home with chocolate cannoli I’m gonna have to buy bigger pants!

I was working the late shift at the bistro again today, which would give me a chance to look into those gray Chevy vans this morning.

I swung by the first address. The Cargill Brothers’ van was parked in front of the three-story office building that housed several businesses. I went inside the building and consulted the building directory. The Cargill offices were on the second floor. It was a small space, telling me that whatever business the company operated wasn’t an extensive one.

When peeking through the glass door told me nothing, I went inside and approached the receptionist. “Hi,” I told her. “I recently lost my job in the building and I’m checking around to see if anyone is hiring. Can you tell me what your company does?”

“Sorry,” she said. “We don’t have any openings.”

She hadn’t given me the vital bit of information I needed. “What does Cargill Brothers do?”

“Commercial cleaning services,” she said. “We provide janitorial services to businesses.”

That explained the van. They probably had some large clients who’d need an extensive crew to clean their spaces.

I found the second van parked in the driveway of a two-story house half a block down from an elementary school. The raucous sounds of children playing at recess met my ears as I parked and climbed out of my car.

The back window of the van featured a series of those people-shaped stickers intended to represent a family. This series was particularly long, including a father, a mother, and seven children—four girls and three boys. Per the stickers, the family also had a couple of dogs and a cat.
Holy guacamole!
I didn’t like being lonely at my apartment, but it was definitely preferable to living with eight other people under one roof.

I supposed it was possible that the father of the family could be Tripp Sevin, but one peek inside the van told me such was not likely to be the case. The van held no less than three child car seats. The seats and floor mats were hopelessly stained with what appeared to be grape juice spills. Lego bricks and Hot Wheels littered the space. An unwrapped peppermint was stuck to the back of the middle seat, apparently glued there with spit. The residents of Whispering Pines had given me the impression that the van had been clean and spiffy when the Cajun con artist had brought it by. Cleaning up this van to show it to would-be vacationers would take hours and be an exercise in futility. I couldn’t imagine anyone putting themselves to that much trouble.

“Can I help you?”

I looked up from the van to find a woman standing in the front doorway of the house, a baby on her hip, a toddler clinging to her leg, and a kid who appeared to be around four years of age standing next to her. The woman was frowning, a leery look in her eyes. Who could blame her? I’d be creeped out if I was home alone with my children and found some strange woman peeking into my family car.

“I thought I heard a noise coming from the van,” I told her. “I thought maybe a child had accidentally been left inside. I guess I’m just hearing noises from the school.”

“Oh.” Her face relaxed. “All of my offspring are present and accounted for. ’Least all the ones that aren’t old enough for school.”

“Okeydoke,” I said, raising a friendly hand in good-bye.

As she went back inside, I headed back to my car. Would we ever find this so-called Tripp Sevin? I wasn’t sure. For all I knew the guy was pulling his stunts somewhere else by now. Heck, he could be up in Oklahoma offering some Okies from Muskogee a weekend jaunt to Dallas, plying them with promises of rides on the Ferris wheel at the state fairgrounds or dinner in the revolving restaurant in Reunion Tower.

Having crossed these two possible vans off my list, I drove downtown, parked in a garage a block over from the IRS building, and took the alleyway to my office.

The man I’d spoken with earlier from the Louisiana Consumer Protection Division had left me a voice mail saying that he’d found no cases involving charter van companies.
Darn.

I’d spent half an hour dealing with items in my in-box when the phone on my desk rang. It was an attorney from the company who’d issued the prepaid credit card Tripp Sevin had used to purchase his burner phone and to pay for the Triple 7 Adventures domain name and Web site.

“The card was activated last June,” the attorney said. “The card was sold at a convenience store in Carrollton.”

Carrollton was a smaller city that sat a few miles northwest of Dallas, within easy driving distance. He gave me the date of the sale and the address for the store. I jotted down both pieces of information.

“Thanks,” I told him. “This should help.”

As soon as we ended our call, I phoned the convenience store and asked to speak to a manager. Luckily, she was agreeable to showing me the footage without a court order.

“As often as we get robbed,” she said, “we’d be stupid not to cooperate with law enforcement.”

“I’ll be right there.” I grabbed my purse, tucked a thumb drive into it, and headed back out of the office.

The drive to Carrollton took half an hour. I listened to my Italian CD on the way. Today I learned the names for family members, or
la famiglia.
Daughter was
la figlia
. Wife was
la moglie
. Father was
il padre.
I was looking forward to sending
il padre
to
il slammerino.
Assuming, of course, our task force could get a break in the case.

I pulled into the convenience store and parked out of the way at the far end of the lot. I went inside to find a woman working the cash register and a man stacking cases of beer in the front window.

I stepped up to the counter. “I’m Special Agent Tara Holloway from the IRS. Are you the woman I spoke with on the phone?”

“That’s me.” She raised a finger to signal the stocker to come take over at the counter before turning back to me. “Those prepaid credit cards you asked about? We keep those cards behind the counter here.” She gestured to a display behind her. “We used to have them hanging out front but people kept stealing them. I suppose they thought they were like stealing cash. Damn fools. Don’t they think we’d know better? A card is worthless until the cashier activates it.”

The man circled around the back of the counter and the woman motioned for me to follow her. “Let’s go back to the office.”

I followed her through a swinging door marked with a sign that read
EMPLOYEES ONLY
. She led me past the back of the refrigerated section to a small, windowless office. She offered me the only seat in the room, a rolling chair behind the desk.

“We’ve got two cameras,” she said. “One of them is positioned over the register. The other is over the gas pumps.” Leaning over me, she showed me how to pull up, rewind, and fast-forward through the video footage, and how to switch from the inside feed to the outside feed. “You know what date you’re looking for?”

“June nineteenth,” I told her.

“All right.” She pulled up the footage from the interior camera beginning at 12:01
A.M.
on the date in question. “There you go.”

I had my doubts that the man I was after would have come to the store in the wee hours of the night, so I fast-forwarded the video to six o’clock in the morning and began watching from there, the speed turned to eight times real time. As I watched, person after person came in for coffee. A few grabbed pastries, too, all of them moving at warp speed. One of the customers caught his foot on a magazine display rack and spilled his coffee. One of the store clerks appeared lickety-split and cleaned it up with a rag mop in three seconds flat. I wished I could operate as efficiently as someone moving eight times their normal speed. Just think of all the cases I could handle then!

As the time eased past nine
A.M.
, the customer traffic slowed, most people at this time coming in for a soft drink, candy, cigarettes, or lottery tickets. Around eleven, two young boys entered the store. They ducked down the first aisle and watched from the end until the clerk turned his back to grab a carton of cigarettes for a customer. While the clerk was distracted, the boys darted forward, each grabbing a candy bar and shoving it into their pants pockets before exiting the store.
Twerps.
I made a note of the exact time of their crime in case the manager was interested in pursuing the matter.

At half past noon, a man in sunglasses and a flat-brimmed cowboy hat entered the store. He looked very similar to the man I’d seen on the video at Whispering Pines. Was it the same man? I thought so, but I couldn’t be certain.

I slowed the video down to normal pace and leaned in close. He grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and headed up to the counter. Though the footage had no audio track and his words were inaudible, it was clear from the way he gestured at the display behind the counter that he planned to buy one of the prepaid credit cards. He also gestured out the front window. To the van, perhaps? He pulled a sizable stack of bills from his wallet and handed them to the clerk, who put them into the open till of the cash register and ran the purchased card through a skimmer to activate it. The clerk handed the card to the customer, who nodded and left the store.