House Standoff Read online

  “I thought at first that maybe it was the hookers or their pimps who’d set up the cameras. Or maybe some employee at the hotel, like the concierge who’s a first-class creep. It turned out it was the fifteen-year-old son of the hotel manager. He planted cameras in a dozen rooms and would get into the hotel’s registration system to find out who’d rented the rooms. And he was not only blackmailing people, he was selling videos of naked people to his buddies. He used hotel customers’ credit cards to buy the cameras and a few other toys for himself. He even blackmailed one of the call girls, this gorgeous gal in her twenties who charged about a grand a night, into having sex with him. This little bastard was a one-man crime wave but because he’s a juvenile he got off with probation. I can hardly wait to see what he does when he gets older.”

  DeMarco was laughing when John Bradley called him back.

  Bradley said, “I got your message and I was intrigued.”

  DeMarco said, “Mr. Bradley, I’m not in a place where I can talk right now. Can I call you back in ten minutes?”

  DeMarco paid the bill and he and Tommy went out and sat in DeMarco’s car. DeMarco put his phone in speaker mode and dialed Bradley’s number. He said, “Like I said in the voicemail I left, you were mentioned in a journal Shannon kept while she was in Wyoming researching her next book. She wrote that she talked to you about a photograph.”

  “That’s right. She said she found an old photo of a man and woman standing in front of a restaurant in Cleveland. She said she could only see part of the restaurant’s name in the photo. The part she could see was gretti’s. That’s spelled g, r, e, double t, i, apostrophe s. But she couldn’t tell what was written before the g.”

  “Yeah, I know that,” DeMarco said. “That’s what Shannon said in her journal. But why did she call you?”

  “She called me because I’m sixty-nine years old and have lived in Cleveland my whole life. I’d never met her but we have the same publisher and she was such a big deal that I was happy to talk to her.”

  “Would you mind telling me what you told her?”

  “Tell me again why you’re interested in this.”

  “I’m interested because I’m trying to find out who killed her and whatever she learned from you could be relevant.”

  Bradley hesitated. “Okay. I told her there wasn’t any restaurant in Cleveland with a name ending in gretti’s but the first thing that popped into my head was a restaurant named Sangretti’s in Chicago. That’s probably the first thing that anyone who writes true crime books would have thought of.”

  “What’s the significance of—”

  “I’m getting there. I told Shannon to give me a day to do some research and I found a photo of Sangretti’s in Chicago online and I texted it to her. She called me back and said that was the restaurant in the photo that this man and woman were standing in front of.”

  “I didn’t know that,” DeMarco said. “In her journal, she said she’d heard back from you but never said what you told her. And her phone was taken when she was killed so I don’t know what was in it. But what’s the significance of this restaurant in Chicago?”

  Bradley said, “In 1990, a hot-headed punk named Tony Russo shot a man in Sangretti’s. Tony was the son of John Russo, a major mafia figure in Chicago. The FBI knew about the killing because Sangretti’s was John Russo’s hangout and they’d wired his favorite table there. But the FBI wasn’t monitoring the wire full time. They’d had the bug installed for months and it wasn’t producing anything, so some agent would listen to the recordings in the morning when he got to the office. The next day, the day after Tony shoots a guy, an agent hears three gunshots and people screaming. The FBI goes barreling down to the restaurant and naturally, there’s no body. A tech finds a couple drops of blood on the floor but the owner of the restaurant claims the blood belonged to a customer who’d cut himself with a steak knife. The owner of the restaurant was a man named Gino Sangretti. His wife was Helena Sangretti.

  “Well, the FBI’s not buying Gino’s story and they squeeze the shit out of him. They knew that John Russo owned a piece of Sangretti’s and they suspected he’d been laundering money through it, which of course he was. The FBI tells Gino that he’s going to do time for a dozen financial crimes, like money laundering and wire fraud and tax evasion, and if they can prove someone was killed in his restaurant—and keep in mind they have a recording of the shooting—they’re going to put Gino away for being an accomplice.

  “Gino eventually caves. But he didn’t see the killing. He was in the back cooking. Helena Sangretti was the one who saw it. She tells the FBI that Tony got into a screaming match with some guy he was eating with, went completely nuts, and shot the guy. John Russo, who was also there at the time, gets the names of all the customers and tells them he’s going to kill them if they talk. Then Russo’s guys haul off the body and Gino and Helena mop up all the blood.

  “At Tony’s trial, Helena Sangretti testifies, Tony is sentenced to twenty years for murder, and John Russo swears he’s going to kill Helena and her husband. The FBI knows Russo isn’t kidding about killing them so they disappear them into the witness protection program. Then, just to add a little more drama to the whole thing, Tony gets killed in prison and there’s no doubt that if John Russo could ever find Gino and Helena, he’d have them both whacked.”

  “This happened thirty years ago,” DeMarco said. “Is John Russo still alive?”

  “Yeah, he’s my age, about seventy. His kid was twenty-five when they sentenced to him to prison and Russo was forty at the time.”

  “And this is what you told Shannon?”

  “Yeah. DeMarco do you know who the people in the photo are? I’m willing to bet you the advance on my next book that it’s Gino and Helena Sangretti.”

  “No,” DeMarco said. “I’ve never seen the photo.” That was true, he hadn’t seen it, but he knew who the woman in the photo was.

  “Man, I would really love to see this journal,” Bradley said. “Can you send me a copy? I’m starting to think this could be my next book.”

  “I can’t do that. The journal is part of Shannon’s estate and the property of her younger sister. Maybe her sister will allow you to see it, but I can’t give it to you without her permission. Look, Mr. Bradley, I really appreciate you talking to me, but I have to go.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Bradley said, but DeMarco hung up.

  Tommy said, “You know what this means?”

  DeMarco said, “I know what it could mean. Shannon said in her journal that she almost gave Harriet a heart attack after she told her something.”

  “She obviously told her what she’d learned from Bradley,” Tommy said.

  “Yeah, but do you think that old lady was so scared that she would have killed Shannon?”

  “I don’t know. According to Bradley, if Russo found out Harriet—or Helena—was still alive, he wouldn’t care how much time had passed. He’d send someone out here to kill her and Harriet knew that. And there’s another thing. Maybe Harriet’s a lot cagier than you think. She might have intentionally told you about seeing a woman kill Shannon just to throw you off the trail.”

  “I can’t see it,” DeMarco said.

  “DeMarco, Harriet knew that if Shannon ever told anyone who she really was, she could end up dead. The best thing that would happen to her is she tells the marshals handling her in witness protection what Shannon learned, and they relocate her. Having to start life over at her age would be traumatic, and she might have been willing to do anything to keep that from happening. Including murder.”

  DeMarco shook his head. He couldn’t believe that Harriet had killed Shannon.

  Tommy said, “DeMarco, you need to tell Pat Morse what you know about Harriet.”

  “I want to talk to Harriet first.”

  44

  “Hey, Clara Jane. I think you ought to read this.”


  McCord looked up from her computer monitor to see an agent named Potter standing in front of her desk, holding a piece of paper in his grubby hand.

  Potter was the office prankster. He was also an asshole. He’d gone out of his way to find out what “C. J.” stood for and it couldn’t have been easy because she’d done everything possible to hide her real name. She’d even had her name legally changed from Clara Jane McCord to C. J. McCord when she was eighteen. Her mother had named her Clara as that had been her grandmother’s name and C. J. hated the name. Clara was a name you gave a cow and she’d called herself C. J. since junior high. She figured that Potter, the devious bastard, had sweet-talked some gal in HR into looking at her original FBI application, which required her to list any previous names or aliases.

  She said, “Potter, the next time we have hand-to-hand training I’m going to insist that I get paired up with you. And then I’m going to pound the snot out of you.”

  Potter elected to ignore the threat, which was genuine. “Weren’t you working on something connected with that big-name writer who got killed?”

  “Yeah, although the case belongs to the Sweetwater County sheriff.”

  “Well, take a look at this,” Potter said and handed her the piece of paper he was holding

  Pat Morse was sitting in his temporary office in the Waverly municipal building, creating a timeline of where all his possible suspects had been the night Shannon Doyle died.

  He’d talked to Jim Turner, Carly Turner, and Lisa Bunt several times to get the facts straight and they were all cooperative, knowing that being uncooperative could put them at the top of his list. He’d talked to several other people as well to confirm, as best he could, what his primary suspects had told him. He’d also looked at surveillance camera video footage, the cameras belonging to gas companies who stored expensive equipment along I-80.

  Two cameras showed Jim Turner’s cruiser, one outside Rock Springs and one near Table Rock. The times Jim was videoed were consistent with his story that he’d left the Best Western in Rock Springs at eleven and would have reached Waverly about midnight. The problem was that no camera showed exactly where he was after midnight, which meant that he could have stopped at Shannon’s motel and killed her before driving home.

  The video footage seemed to prove that Lisa Bunt hadn’t killed Shannon because Lisa would have taken the same route that Jim took to drive from Rock Springs to Waverly. But none of the cameras showed a BMW convertible zipping down I-80 around midnight. In fact, the cameras should have caught Lisa twice, once driving to Waverly to kill Doyle and then a second time when she drove back to the motel in Rock Springs. Morse knew she was in Rock Springs the morning after Doyle’s death because a clerk at the motel saw her leave about ten a.m. The problem was that there was a possibility that Lisa could have driven on backroads to get from Rock Springs to Waverly, but it seemed unlikely that she would have known about the cameras along the highway and taken them into account when she planned the murder. On the other hand, Lisa was a bright woman so maybe she did think about cameras on the highway.

  As for Carly Turner, she didn’t pass near any surveillance camera in Waverly. The bartender at the Desert Bar confirmed she was there from seven until nine, left the bar for an hour or so, then came back and drank until midnight when he cut her off. The problem was that from midnight until one thirty when Carly returned home, even she didn’t know where she’d been. She woke up at one, having passed out in her car, but she couldn’t remember anything after she’d left the bar. She’d had a blackout, not unexpected for an alcoholic.

  Pat had put off doing a search of the Turners’ house and Hiram Bunt’s ranch for the murder weapon, knowing in advance that he’d most likely be wasting his time, but he guessed that was the next step he’d have to take. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them he saw FBI Agent C. J. McCord standing in the doorway to his office.

  Morse stood up, smiled, and said, “What can I do for you, Agent?”

  Morse had met McCord before and thought she was a fine-looking woman. His ex-wife had been a full-figured gal like her. He knew she wasn’t married but he wondered if she was seeing anyone.

  “Nothing,” McCord said. “I’m here to do something for you. I drove all the way from Casper because this was something I wanted to do in person.”

  45

  The café had just opened. The day shift cook, Billy, was in the kitchen cooking bacon on the grill. Harriet was putting money into the cash register. When she saw DeMarco come through the door, she closed her eyes as if she was saying a prayer, the prayer most likely asking God to make DeMarco disappear.

  DeMarco walked up to her and said, “Harriet, we need to talk.”

  “I can’t talk right now. We’ll be getting customers in a couple of minutes.”

  “The customers are going to have to wait. I talked to John Bradley last night.”

  “Damn you,” Harriet hissed. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  “Let’s go up to your apartment,” DeMarco said.

  He thought Harriet would refuse but she let out a sigh, one of resignation, and called out to the cook, “Billy, I’ll be back in just a minute.”

  DeMarco followed her to the back of the café where there was a staircase leading up to the second floor. The stairs were steep and DeMarco could see she was having a hard time ascending them. Bad knees, bad hips, and too much weight. Inside her apartment, Harriet collapsed into a recliner in the living area Shannon had described and pointed DeMarco to a couch. DeMarco looked for a photograph in a silver frame on an end table but didn’t see one. Harriet had most likely hidden it, or maybe she destroyed it, after Shannon had seen it.

  “So what do you want?” Harriet said.

  “Like I said, I talked to John Bradley. I know who you are.”

  “How many other people know?”

  DeMarco decided not to mention Tommy. He said, “The only one who really knows is me. All Bradley knows is that Shannon found a photo showing a man and a woman standing in front of a restaurant called Sangretti’s. He suspects that the people in the photo are Gino and Helena Sangretti, but he doesn’t know your current name or that you own this café or anything else about you. I suppose Bradley could come to Waverly to look for you but I’m guessing that you look quite a bit different than you did thirty years ago.”

  Harriet made a sound that might have been a laugh. “I look fifty pounds different than I did thirty years ago.”

  DeMarco said, “What I need to know is if you killed Shannon because you were afraid that she’d expose you.”

  “No!” Harriet said. “I would never have killed her.”

  DeMarco studied her face. He believed her. Maybe she was the consummate actress but he didn’t think so.

  “And did you tell me the truth about seeing a woman knock on Shannon’s door the night she was killed?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t lying about that and I wasn’t lying when I said I couldn’t tell who the woman was.”

  DeMarco rose. “All right, Harriet.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Harriet asked.

  “About you? Nothing. Well, I may have a word with John Bradley and tell him that bad things are going to happen to him if he decides to come out here and poke around.”

  Bradley had no idea how much—or how little—clout DeMarco had. What he might do was tell Bradley that he was going to have his taxes audited by nitpickers at the IRS. If Bradley collected Social Security—at his age that was likely—he’d tell him that his payments might suddenly be interrupted and hopelessly snarled in red tape. His biggest threat would be Bradley getting a visit from U.S. marshals telling him about the trouble he’d be in if he exposed a federal witness they were protecting. Yeah, he was going to squeeze John Bradley’s nuts a bit when he returned to Washington to make him stay away from Harriet.
/>   DeMarco returned to his room and started to pack. A knock on the door interrupted him. He started to open the door, which didn’t have a peephole, then stopped. It occurred to him that maybe there was someone in addition to Lisa Bunt who wouldn’t mind shooting him.

  He called out: “Who is it?”

  “Deputy Pat Morse.”

  DeMarco opened the door.

  Morse said, “I know who killed Shannon Doyle.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. Why don’t we go over to Harriet’s and have a cup of coffee and talk. “

  DeMarco thought about that and said, “If you wouldn’t mind, let’s go to my friend Tommy’s trailer. I know he’d like to hear the story too.”

  DeMarco was afraid if he walked into Harriet’s with the deputy she’d have a stroke.

  Tommy was outside the trailer, looking everything over to make sure it was okay to make the trip back to Salt Lake. DeMarco said, “Tommy, let’s go inside. Deputy Morse has something to tell us.”

  The three men stepped into the small trailer and found seats.

  Morse took off his hat, wiped his brow, and placed the hat on the table. He said, “After I was assigned to the case, I tried to build a timeline showing where everyone was that night. I looked at surveillance camera videos. I interviewed Lisa Bunt, Carly, and Jim Turner multiple times as well as half a dozen other people who were able to corroborate, in one way or another, what they all told me.” Morse paused and said, “Here’s what happened the night Shannon Doyle died.”