“Take it easy, I’m here about Mondari. What happened to his car?”
“It was torched. ERT didn’t find anything and neither did a cadaver dog. ERT is in his apartment, but so far the only blood is in a bathroom and probably from a shaving cut.”
When Venuti didn’t respond, I added, “They’re not going to find anything.”
“How much longer will they be in there?”
“No more than an hour.”
“Let me know what you learn.”
My undercover DEA friend Bruce Ortega hadn’t called back. Maybe we weren’t going to hear from him at all. He worked deep undercover at times, so I reached out in another direction, calling a retired Las Vegas Metro homicide detective I trusted. Mike Sulliver retired, then started a private investigation business with one employee, himself. His cop friends joked about it, but Sulliver wasn’t a golfer and, as in my situation, his wife died too young. He liked having a reason to get up in the morning, and in his own words, he was “permanently restless.” He was pushing sixty-five, silver-haired, and in some combination of the same clothes every day—jeans, a leather belt with a buckle he was proud of, a button-down shirt, and a Stetson, as if he had a horse out front instead of a blue SUV.
He also carried a steady, quiet certainty about right and wrong, and though he and I differed politically in every way, we saw eye to eye about justice. We stopped to pick up coffees at a little restaurant where, as Sulliver said, “The coffee sucks, but I know the owner.” That was Mike. We sat outside in his SUV with the air conditioning running.
“The rumor I heard is that Mondo boy and his two twerps were into somebody’s business and got caught,” Sulliver said.
“That’s pretty much what Mondari told me. Now he’s missing too.”
“Missing or hiding?”
“Could be either.”
“And now you’re reaching out every which way because you don’t know where to look.”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“I know where one of his tech geeks lives.”
“Which one?”
“Pylori.”
“I’ve been by his place,” I said. “I went by after I got the story from Mondari, and no one was home.” I paused. “The apartment manager stalled me and I haven’t been back yet. We’re getting a warrant signed today.”
“You don’t need it. I can get you in. An ex-Metro cop manages that complex and a half dozen other buildings. He doesn’t like Feds. That was your problem.”
“But he’ll open the door for you?”
“Sure.”
He did open the door to the apartment, and none of us said anything for several seconds. The place was ransacked, torn apart, everything cut open or emptied, yet I didn’t see any blood. Sulliver and I stepped in with Marty the manager behind us, saying it was now completely legitimate for us to look around. When the look didn’t turn up anything, I thanked Sulliver and headed back to the office thinking we’d gotten more from their phones.
Lacey called before I got there.
“The casino gave up Catalangelo. They asked that we refer to them as an anonymous source.”
“We can do that for a little while. What have we got?”
“A contact e-mail, cell number, credit card, and a Nevada driver’s license for a Catalangelo Garcia, not Miguel Catalangelo.”
Half an hour later I sat down alongside a triumphant Lacey, who waved an invisible banner for the new FBI where you got more from a computer than you could ever get knocking on doors. She’d made calls and done the rest via computer and access to databases. I could have reminded her that this all started forward when I’d confronted Mondari late in the night after his drinking dinner with DOD Warner, but why interrupt her when she was on a roll.
Later that morning we got copies of the phone records on Pylori and the other missing man, John Edelman. The most recent group text from Denny Mondari to them was yesterday, so Mondari still had hope. But that text, like all in the prior weeks, was never received.
I was still with Lacey when my undercover DEA friend, Ortega, called. I put Ortega on speakerphone and introduced Lacey.
“I know some things about Catalangelo,” Ortega said, “but I’ve never dealt with him. He has a rep as tough. Make a mistake and you’re hurting. He watches over a dozen managers in the southwest and oversees shipments from Mexico into California. They’ll cut open empty plastic bottles, line them up, and put glow sticks in them to make a runway. Sometimes they’ll leave a plane behind. They’re using drones more and more now.”
I’d heard that, but everyone was using them more or planning to. It wasn’t surprising.
“What else?” I asked.