“Catalangelo likes flying product and people in. He’s big on flight. In my office we call him Cat Airlines, so, yes, the guy you’re looking for could have been flown in. Everything that crosses our border gets seen, but that doesn’t stop them. You know that as well as anyone, Grale. If it was their cartel and they brought your bomb maker in that way, Catalangelo would know about it.”
“That’s an answer we’ve needed,” I said. “Do you know where to look for him?”
“I don’t, but I can ask, and I’ll give you a number to call. I’m only calling back now because it’s you. Anyone else and I wouldn’t have.”
He gave me the number and said, “Take care, G-man.”
“You too.”
36
In the afternoon we got deeper into Denny Mondari’s bank records, credit cards, e-mail, phone messages, mail, everything we could reach. But it was a routine run for any outstanding traffic tickets in Nevada and the surrounding states—Utah, California, and Arizona—that turned things. The traffic ticket was for speeding and a burned-out taillight. A CHP patrolman on Highway 62 south of the Mojave National Preserve issued it on June 27. We also had Visa purchases on Mondari’s card made in the same general area. He’d bought gas in Borrego Springs a day after getting ticketed by the CHP. A few days prior, Mondari was in Scottsdale, Arizona, where the same Visa had also been used for gas.
And it wasn’t his first trip along this route. We mapped another that more or less followed the same path as recently as a few days ago.
“Look at this,” Lacey said. “Same hotel. He’s done this a couple of times. Why didn’t Agent Stone get into his credit cards?”
“There wasn’t a reason to. He was giving her information.”
The California Highway Patrol officer who’d ticketed Mondari on Highway 62 returned my call. We talked as I read an e-mailed copy of the citation.
“You’re lucky because I happen to remember the stop and the driver. Just something about the guy, I guess. He was jumpy and surprised to get pulled over. He told me he was moving to San Diego and had mistakenly gotten off I-15. He talked like a human road atlas for five minutes, then asked for directions like he didn’t know how to use his phone.”
“That’s our guy.”
“I get people regularly going twenty to thirty miles over the limit, and they still argue with me. He was barely ten over and apologizing. I don’t usually ticket for ten over, but he had a taillight out, and to be honest I’d had a slow night.”
“Can you remember anything about his face?”
“Only that it matched the driver’s license. He told me he hadn’t had a ticket in twenty years. He was surprised about the taillight, so surprised he didn’t believe me and got out and looked.”
“Any idea where he went after you gave him the ticket?”
“None. I watched him drive away, and then he was gone.”
“Any chance anyone was following him?”
“Funny you say that, there was a pickup I’d seen earlier that I’d tailed. It came by again right after he pulled out. The pickup should have been miles away by then. I remember wondering about it.”
“Do you remember the make?”
“Not really. It might have been a Ford F-150, but I’m not sure.”
I thanked him for calling back, and he asked if my questions had anything to do with the bomb investigation. “They do,” I said.
“Could these be pleasure trips?” Lacey asked. “Or going to visit somebody in the area. Girlfriend? Boyfriend? Going back there twice, it could be something like that. I mean, he’s not hiding where he’s been. He’s using the same Visa. You say he’s always after the next new woman. Maybe he went to Arizona, picked up the new girlfriend, and they drove to the Anza-Borrego. How much do you really know about him? He wasn’t paying cash and hiding his tracks. Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and all that. Maybe it is what it looks like.”
“Why would he go to the Anza-Borrego Desert when he already lives in the desert and prefers living in casinos? Mondari likes a roof over his head and air conditioning.”
“You think you know him, but maybe he likes wildflowers.”
I tried to get my head around Mondari hiking out into the desert to look at flowers and said, “Wildflowers are in February.”
“Well, hiking or wildlife then.”
“Hiking for Mondari is crossing the street to another casino. Wildlife is two-legged with a short skirt.”
I worked the Arizona end of Mondari’s trip and confirmed the hotel in Scottsdale, which led to more calls to confirm wherever possible that it was Mondari who had come through, not someone else. On each trip he did a lot of driving, and with both he made no effort to cover his tracks, which raised Shah’s question again. Were we investigating a vacation?