It was a typical squad room, a small glassed-in boss’s office at one end, two rows of gray, steel desks down the middle, file cabinets, a copier, a mini-fridge and a coffee station against one wall. When Quinn entered, the detectives put on their poker faces while trying to figure out if he was some asshole Fed who was there to tell them how to do their jobs, get in the way, and then take the credit for any successes but none of the blame if it all turned to shit.
Quinn smiled, nodded through the introductions and made a mental note to get a two-sentence bio on each of the team members before the end of the day. Janet had called her boss when they reached the Department of Public Safety garage and he appeared a couple of minutes after she introduced Virgil to her team.
In contrast to most of the detectives’ baggy sport coats and scuffed shoes, Deputy Chief Raymond Rogers looked like he had just stepped out of an ad in GQ. He wore a charcoal gray suit with thin, lighter gray stripes, a red and black rep tie and a starched shirt so white that it almost glowed. All the detectives stood when Rogers entered the room.
“Virgil, this is our boss, Deputy Chief Raymond Rogers. Chief, this is Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Quinn.”
Rogers gave Quinn a tight smile that didn’t make it from his lips to his eyes.
“Mr. Quinn, glad you could join us,” Rogers said, briefly shaking Quinn’s hand.
Mister Quinn, Virgil thought.
“Same here,” Virgil said, deliberately omitting Rogers’ rank.
Rogers’ smile tightened a millimeter and he glanced at Janet.
“Let me give you a run down on the men we’re after,” he said turning toward Tanner’s office. Once inside he sat behind Janet’s desk and they settled into the two steel chairs that filled most of the rest of the available space.
“You know we don’t normally give badges to people who haven’t been processed through our system,” he said, staring at Quinn, “but the acting Mayor,” he said the word “acting” like it was the name of a disease, “ordered special privileges for you. As instructed, here are your badge and ID. Captain Tanner supplied us with the picture. I hope it meets with your approval.”
Rogers slid a leather credentials folder across the desk. Virgil opened it and made a show of studying the photo.
“That’s not my best side. I think I look a little stern there . . . .” Quinn watched the frown creep across Rogers’ face, “but I guess it’ll do.”
“Excellent,” Rogers said in a clipped tone. “Do you need a weapon?”
“I’ll use my Glock.”
“All right then,” Rogers said, standing. “I think we’re done here. Captain, I’ll expect daily reports on your progress.”
“Yes, sir.”
Stiff as a board, eyes looking neither left nor right, Rogers marched through the squad room and out the door.
“Is he pissed at you or at me?” Virgil asked.
“Both. They initially hired me to be the liaison between the Felony Fugitive Squad and the Marshals, DEA and FBI. Things went well and about three years ago my boss, Hank Vergari, made me squad whip. Promoting a woman and somebody from outside the department to lieutenant didn’t sit well with Rogers but Vergari and I had a good relationship and he pushed it through. Then a couple of months ago Hank left early to see the doctor and he never came back. Kidney disease. He’s on dialysis twice a week now and they’re looking for a transplant. Rogers wanted to bring in one of his buddies to take over the squad, but he didn’t have a good reason to pass me over. He still tried to get rid of me, but someone whispered the words ‘gender discrimination lawsuit’ into the City Attorney’s ear and Rogers was overruled. As for you . . . .”
“I’m an outsider and a Fed and the Mayor shoved me down his throat. Three strikes.” Virgil glanced at the squad room and a couple of detectives quickly looked away. “Is he going to try to screw us?”
Janet laughed. “He can’t do anything before the election, but if Sammy Theriot wins, we’re toast.”
“Rogers is supporting Theriot?”
“That’s his only play. He’s getting no love from the Chief. A new Mayor might mean a new chief and Rogers figures that if he helps Theriot get elected the new Mayor might give him the top job.”
“So, we’ve got about two months to find these guys.”
“More or less,” Janet agreed.
“OK, then I guess we’d better get started.”
Janet took a breath then led Virgil into the squad room.
“Gather around, everybody,” Janet told her detectives. “We need to bring Virgil up to speed on these animals. Stan, you want to give him the rundown?”
A doughy detective with a walrus mustache and barrel chest moved to the front of the room. He dragged a whiteboard from the left-hand wall then flipped it over to expose a complicated network of lines, pictures and not a few question marks. Virgil somehow remembered that the detective’s last name was ‘Kudlacik.’
“We’ve got a crew of between five and seven guys,” he began, tapping a box in the upper left-hand corner labeled ‘Mad Dogs.’ “It’s hard to say for sure because they make a habit of killing all the witnesses. We’ve got one eleven-year-old kid who somehow managed to survive two gunshot wounds who says it was four guys, he thinks, but that wouldn’t include anyone they might have left outside in the vehicles. A neighbor at a different location saw two vehicles, a van and a sedan, and she thinks that the driver never left the van. So, it could be four inside and one outside, but that’s mostly guesswork. It could be five guys inside and two drivers outside or more or less than four guys inside and zero, one or two drivers outside so, for now, we’re going with five to seven perps.”
“And,” Janet broke in, “it could be different participants on different jobs. There could be ten guys in the gang and the number and the participants varies depending on the target and which gang members are available at any given time.” Janet paused for a moment then nodded. “Go ahead, Stan.”
“Like I said, we’re low on witnesses and the statements we do have are all over the map. Three times they’ve hit between three and three-thirty a.m. and nobody saw anything. Twice they struck just after dinner time, around eight. In the first one a neighbor reported a white van with a twenty-four-hour plumber logo on the side and a silver Audi in the driveway. Nobody thought anything about either vehicle. The second time the van had ‘Comcast’ painted on the side and the car was a black BMW.”
“Comcast actually showing up at eight at night? That should have been the tip-off right there,” a thin, black detective with a close-shaved head said, laughing. Kudlacik scowled then turned back toward Virgil.
“The only constant,” he continued, tapping the Mad Dog box on the board, “is that they always hit after dark and they always seem to use a van to cart away the loot and a high-end car to transport most of the doers.”
“Any descriptions?” Virgil asked.
Kudlacik frowned and tapped another spot on the board. “The kid who lived said they all wore black masks and blue gloves. We showed him pictures and he picked out a balaclava for the mask and Nitrile surgical gloves. He told us that something about their eyes made him think that two of the men were white, the rest could be white or black or purple for all he knew.”
“What about weapons?” Virgil asked.
“Again, all over the map. The boy was shot with a .25 pistol. They muffled it by firing it through an empty soda bottle. Most of the victims were struck on the head with a steel or heavy wooden instrument, billy club, baseball bat, a piece of rebar, something like that, then their throats were cut. A couple were shot with a small caliber weapon whose noise could be muffled. One was shot in the head with a forty-caliber pistol. As far as we can piece it together, they storm in, immediately whack most or all of the victims in the head, then they secure their ankles and wrists with zip-ties. They go through the house grabbing anything they want and load it in the van. When they’re done, anyone who isn’t already dead gets their throat slit.”
“What are they taking?”
Kudlacik shrugged. “The usual stuff – money, jewelry, watches, paintings, coin collections, guns, anything small and valuable. Most of the places they’ve hit had safes which we found empty. We’re guessing they keep the husband conscious long enough to force him to give them the combination.”
“Any hits from fences or eBay or wherever?” Virgil asked.
“Nothing. We’ve leaned on every fence and pawn shop in the state and nothing has turned up. We think they’re going to sit on the goods until the heat dies down and then maybe sell them out of state or even out of the country.”
Virgil thought about that then frowned and shook his head.
“Taking that stuff across international borders doubles or triples the risk plus most of the richest buyers are here. Are there any connections between the victims?”
“Other than being rich? Not that we’ve been able to find,” Janet told him. “Similar neighborhoods, some overlap on schools, but that’s to be expected.”
“Do you have any theory on how they’re picking their targets?”
“No,” Janet said as if admitting a sin.
“What about surveillance cameras, security systems?”
“Most of the houses had video cameras but the perps tracked down the hard disks and took them with them. A couple streamed their security video to the cloud but when we checked their accounts there was nothing there. The logs show that the victims accessed their accounts at the time of the robbery and manually wiped the file, under duress, of course. On top of that the tech guys think the perps used some kind of wi-fi jammer to kill the camera’s connection to the server during the attack. We got reports from the neighbors of problems with their networks starting around the time we think the robberies began. We figure they had the jammer running when they drove up and turned it off once they’d destroyed all the cameras and the server. If we’re right at least that gives us a solid start time for each attack.”
“Any video on the vehicles going or coming?”
“About what you’d expect,” Kudlacik said. “Grainy, dark, in profile, no plates, no faces. They were smart enough not to trip any red-light cameras. The van looks like a Ford E150 but we can’t be sure. We never spotted both a van and a luxury sedan traveling together so we think they split up as soon as they leave the scene.”
“Anything from your CIs?”
“We had a couple of guys bragging what bad asses they were but we checked them out and it couldn’t have been either of them. Other than that, if anybody knows something they’re not talking.”
Virgil stared at the board and tried to make sense of it all.
“Has anyone done a profile on these guys?”
“You mean like for a serial killer or something?” Kudlacik asked. “Why would we? I mean they’re thieves.”
“But they’re not normal thieves. They wore masks and gloves so they weren’t worried about being identified, so why would they kill the victims, especially by slitting their throats? All that does is increase the heat by about a thousand percent. Why would they do that unless there’s some other motive here that we’re not seeing?”
“You’re thinking this is more about the killing than the stealing, that the robberies are secondary to the murders?” Janet asked.
“That’s what doesn’t make any sense. That’s what’s bothering me. The unnecessary killings don’t fit with the robberies. If there were one or two perps I’d think we had a couple of thrill killers, psychos, and the robberies were only incidental, but five guys or more? You don’t get five serial killers joining up in a gang to murder people. Impossible. So, what’s going on here?”
“Do you really think a profiler could help?” Janet asked. Virgil shrugged.
“I admit it’s a long shot but it couldn’t hurt.”
Janet thought about that for a moment, then nodded. “All right, I’ll call the FBI and see if they can give us anything. That could take a while though.”
Again, Virgil shrugged, as if to say, It’ll be what it’ll be, then turned back to Stan Kudlacik. “Is there any target that doesn’t fit the pattern? Anything that stands out?”
Kudlacik glanced at the thin, black detective who paused, then raised his hand.
“Carl Montgomery,” he said, then pointed at the list of victims on the right side of the board. “The third job, Robert and Eleanor Randazzo. They weren’t rich. Total middle class. He owned a tire store. She was an elementary school teacher. One kid, Marie, fourteen. We have no idea why they’d be targeted.”
“I’d like to read their file, then maybe we can take a run out there so I can look at the scene.” He glanced at Janet and she nodded her agreement. “Is there anything else, Stan?”
“That’s pretty much it,” Kudlacik said, clearly unhappy with the state of their investigation.
“Thanks. Let me take the morning to go through the files. I’m sure I’ll have lots of questions.”
The room was silent for a moment then Janet told them, “Carl can you get Virgil the Randazzo file? Everybody else, lets get back to it. . . . You can have that desk over there, Virgil.” She pointed to an empty one behind Montgomery.
A couple of minutes later Carl dropped a four-inch-thick file on the gray steel surface.
“Let me know if you need anything,” Montgomery said.
“You bet.” Virgil opened the folder to page one. Forty minutes later he had reached the end and he gave it back to Montgomery.
“You mind if I go with you to the scene?” Carl asked as he put the file away.
“That would be great. I need all the help I can get.”
“I did the background on the family,” Montgomery continued, apparently surrendering to some inner need to explain. “These things,” Carl slapped the bulging folder, “are full of facts but they don’t tell you about the people, what they were like, how they lived.” Montgomery looked at Virgil as if hoping for some sign of agreement or at least understanding. Quinn gave him an encouraging nod. “We collect all this paper and we end up turning these crimes into lists – how many people were shot, how many were stabbed, when this happened, when that happened, what kind of gun, what kind of knife, how many dollars worth of this and how many dollars worth of that, and before we know it the people have disappeared.
“That file won’t tell you that Robert Randazzo supplied the tires for the food bank’s trucks at cost or that his wife tutored kids whose parents were too busy working a second job to help them avoid flunking out. It won’t tell you that Marie. . . .” Montgomery paused and looked away. “Anyway,” he said a moment later, “Their lives, who they were, that’s the real reason we do this job, but none of that stuff makes it into the file.”
An image of Nicole, still a child of ten, blurred around the edges from the passage of all these years, filled Virgil’s mind, then, just as quickly disappeared.
“How about you take me on the walk-through, fill me in on all of that at the scene,” he told Montgomery. “I think that would help me a lot.”
“Sure, I could do that.”
“Janet,” Quinn called across the room. “Carl’s volunteered to run the Randazzo scene for me if that’s OK with you.”
Janet hesitated for a fraction of a second then shrugged. “Sure. Give me a call when you’re on your way back so we can plan out the rest of the day.”
“We’ll have to make a stop at my hotel,” Virgil told Montgomery on their way to the garage. “The Chief gave me my badge but I still need to pick up my gun.”
That evening Virgil fell into one of those in-between times, one of the irregularly-shaped fragments of the day that did not properly fit into the tightly-organized world of early twenty-first century Americans – too late for any productive work, too early for dinner, too short to watch a movie, too long to contemplate the errors and triumphs of one’s life, if Virgil Quinn had been a contemplative sort of man, which he was not.
Quinn glanced at the digital clock next to his bed. He still had thirty-eight minutes to kill before meeting Janet for dinner and their mutual exchange of the highs and lows of the last nine years of each of their lives. The clock blinked. Thirty-seven minutes. His thoughts turned back to his morning with Carl Montgomery and their walk-through of the Randazzo murder scene.
Virgil lay back against a wall of pillows, closed his eyes, and wondered what had really happened on that last day of Robert, Eleanor and Marie Randazzo’s lives.
A little after ten a.m. Eleanor Randazzo loaded the last child into her Tucson Santa Fe and, in caravan with Morris Fletcher and his old Chrysler Town & Country, set out for their first “Farm In Town” site. The ten kids were all from what the school district politely called “challenged environments” and ranged in age from nine through twelve.
“We’ve got to reach them while they’re young,” she’d told Robert yesterday, “before the gangs and the guns and the drugs get their claws into them.”
How carting the kids from one backyard, vegetable plot to another to look at beets and beans and summer squash helped them Robert didn’t know, but he was smart enough not to ask. There had to be some appeal there because Marie had asked if she could go along.
For a couple of hours they traipsed up and down rows of tomatoes and corn amidst lectures on the niceties of selective watering and non-chemical pest control. Everyone was allowed a snack of a raw carrot and a handful of sugar-snap peas followed by a lunch of vegetable lasagna, home-made whole-wheat bread and lemonade. Marie escorted kids on bathroom breaks, helped coral a runaway chicken, and gave four excited girls a tour of the new makeup and beauty app on her smart phone.
After dropping off their charges, mother and daughter filled up a cart at Costco with napkins, laundry detergent and bottled water.
“Do you want to learn how to make risotto?” Eleanor asked Marie on the way out.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a kind of rice casserole.”
“OK,” Marie said without much enthusiasm.
“We’ll make a salad to go with it,” Eleanor promised. On the way home they stopped at the Prince Valley for mushrooms, rice, lettuce and a couple of chicken breasts.
“Mom,” Eleanor said out of nowhere as they pulled into their driveway, “I’ve decided that I don’t want to be a farmer.”
“Why is that, honey?”
“I don’t think I could make enough money doing that.”
“Oh. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe be a teacher.”
“I’m sorry to tell you that you’re not going to make much money doing that either, sweetie. What’s your second choice?”
Marie thought about that for a moment as she grabbed the huge package of napkins.
“Do you think I could make apps for smart phones?”
“I don’t know. After dinner let’s go on the Internet and check it out.”
The salad was a success and it gave Marie the chance to tell her father about all the vegetables they had seen growing in the urban gardens. For its part, the risotto turned out a little sticky but Robert picked out the chicken pieces and told them it was terrific.
It had been a good day at the store. They always sold a lot of tires in the summer which was good because Robert had to make enough money before Thanksgiving to get them through the dark days of January and February when new tires were the last things on his customers’ minds. Recently he had expanded into headlight, hose and belt replacements to help pick up the slack. By eleven their doors were locked, the lights were off and everyone was in bed. It had been a thoroughly normal, ordinary day.
At midnight, the streets in Livonia were as silent and deserted as the dark side of the moon. Still, the crew waited until three a.m. to begin their attack. Like almost all the houses on Hubbard Street, the Randazzo’s was a two-story brick colonial with a big front lawn and a two-car garage. Though for this job they didn’t really need the van, the Mad Dogs brought it anyway to maintain the pattern and hide the real reason for the attack. For tonight they had applied a decal showing a rack of new tires and the words “Wholesale/Commercial” with a random 800 number printed beneath. As usual, the leader, Kyle Neddick, occupied the BMW’s front passenger seat with Ralph Anderson behind the wheel and Paulie Sturdevant and Latwan Monroe in back. Dion Jenkins was alone in the van.
Tonight Anderson and Jenkins stayed with their vehicles while Neddick, Sturdevant and Monroe slipped around the back of the house and cut a hole through the window next to the sliding glass door. The jammer in the van had already killed cell service and Monroe clipped the wires for land line and Internet access.
Once inside Sturdevant went after Marie while Neddick and Monroe burst into the master bedroom and quickly taped up Robert’s and Eleanor’s mouths, wrists and ankles. Neddick ducked down the hall to make sure that Sturdevant had the girl under control then he dragged Robert down the stairs, leaving Monroe watching the wife. As always, he wore a black, knit mask, just in case the targets had a working surveillance camera that their search missed.
“Who did you tell?” Neddick asked when he had propped Robert up against the couch.
“What? Tell about what? Look, you’ve made a mistake–”
The Nitrile glove made a crackling sound when Kyle slapped it across Robert’s face.
“You’re Robert Randazzo and you stuck your nose in where it didn’t belong. My friends are upstairs with your wife and daughter. Do you understand what’s going to happen to them if you don’t do what I say?”
“Please! Please don’t hurt them! I’ll do whatever you want. Anything!”
“Good. Who did you tell?”
Randazzo’s mouth gaped and he looked helplessly around as if he might find some clue to what this madman was talking about posted on the living room wall.
“Tell about what?” he asked almost in a scream.
“Tell about us.”
“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know anything!”
“The longer you take, the more time my friends will have to get acquainted with your sweet little daughter.” Neddick waited for a couple of heartbeats while Randazzo thrashed helplessly against the couch.
“I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please! I’ll do anything you want. Just tell me what this is all about.”
“Our van,” Kyle said softly. “We brought it to your shop today for some new tires. My man saw you snooping around, writing down the VIN number, poking into the glove box and the panels.”
“We write down the VIN on all the cars, for the tire warranty and in case there’s a recall,” Rantazzo panted, unable to catch his breath.
“But you don’t find guns in every car, do you?”
“Guns? What are you talking about? I don’t know anything about any guns. . . . Please! I’m telling you the truth!”
Beneath his mask Neddick pursed his lips, then shrugged.
“My man was watching. He saw your guy find one of our guns. A minute later your guy called you over. He told you about the gun, didn’t he? That’s when you wrote down the VIN. What did you think you were going to do? Call the cops? Get the reward? Be a hero? How’d that work out for you, hero?”
“I don’t know anything about a gun. No one told me about any guns. I told you, we write down the VIN on every vehicle we put tires on. Please! I’m telling you the truth!” Randazzo half-screamed then twisted around and tried to look up the stairs.
“Who did you tell about the gun?”
“I don’t know anything about any gun. I swear!”
Neddick studied Randazzo for a moment. When he nodded and held out both hands, palms up, Robert sighed and began to cry. Neddick walked to the bottom of the stairs and called out, “Bring down the wife.”
“Hang . . . on,” Monroe shouted back, his words almost a grunt.
“I guess he’s still getting acquainted with the Missus,” Neddick said.
Randazzo thrashed wildly but couldn’t break free.
“I don’t know anything,” he wailed. “I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t know anything. I don’t know!”
“I almost believe you,” Neddick said.
“Please, please, don’t hurt my wife.”
“Sssssh,” Neddick ordered, holding a finger to his lips.
A few minutes later, naked, bruised and bleeding, Eleanor was dragged into the living room.
“Eleanor!” Robert shouted and tried to wriggle over to her but Neddick pulled him back.
“This is your last chance. Tell me who you told about the gun or my friend here will kill her.” Monroe held up a slender knife. “One.”
“I don’t know anything about any guns. I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Two.”
Monroe put the blade against Eleanor’s throat.
“All right!” Robert screamed. “All right! I told the cops about the gun. I gave them the van’s license number and the VIN.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. What’s the cop’s name, the one you told?”
Randazzo’s head swivelled left and right “Lamp. . . son. Detective John Lampson!”
Neddick followed Randazzo’s gaze to the table lamp on the far side of the room.
“All right,” Neddick said, smiling under his mask. “I believe you.” Randazzo slumped against the couch. “You didn’t tell anything to anyone.” Neddick flipped his fingers at Monroe in a little salute and the big man ducked behind Eleanor and slashed her throat.
“No!” Robert screamed and tried to get his bound legs beneath him. “Eleanor! Elean–”
Neddick grabbed a cushion from the couch, pressed it up against Robert’s head and pulled the trigger on his .40 caliber.
“Start going through the house,” Kyle told him.
“This dump?” Monroe said. “It’s all junk.”
“Get started. We’ve got to make it look right.”
Neddick climbed the stairs and headed to the girl’s room. Sturdevant was on top, her balled-up pajama bottoms stuffed over her mouth to stop her screams.
“Finish up,” Neddick ordered, “and check the bedrooms for anything worth taking.”
“Give me five minutes,” Sturdevant grunted.
“You’ve got two. Take care of her when you’re done.”
Four minutes later Sturdevant came down the stairs with a wooden jewelry box under one arm. An almost invisible spray of blood streaked the front of his black t-shirt.
“Did you check her pulse?” Neddick asked.
“She’s dead.”
“Go back up and check her pulse.”
“Fucking waste of time,” Sturdevant grumbled, then put down the jewelry box and climbed back up the stairs.
Twenty minutes later they had loaded the jewelry box, a small coin collection, five hundred-fifty dollars in cash and a few other of the Randazzo’s meager possessions into the van and disappeared into the night.
“What a fucking waste of time,” Sturdevant complained as they headed up Farmington toward the 96.
“Hey, I was stuck here twiddling my thumbs,” Ralph Anderson complained. “At least you got a fuck out of it.”
“I can get a fuck anywhere. What I need is money and we damn sure didn’t get any of that tonight.”
“You’ve got no right to complain, Paulie,” Neddick snapped. “This mess is all your fault. Next time don’t leave your fucking gun in the van.”
An hour later they had divided the cash, burned their clothes, run the Randazzo’s last possessions of value through a wood chipper, and by dawn they were in their beds, fast asleep.