All but two of the hairdressers had been tracked down and interviewed, and three had agreed to look at photo boards. One of the agents said, “They won’t see anything. That woman that Lucas interviewed, Alicia Snow, called a couple of the girls to tell them that we’d be coming to see them. Those girls called around and they managed to scare the crap out of each other. Mafia shooters coming through their windows at midnight with silencers, that kind of movie.”
“What about the girl who disappeared?” Lucas asked. “Patty Pittman?”
“She has disappeared and I believe she’s probably dead,” the agent said. He nodded at Weaver. “Dale’s got the full report. We didn’t get back from Islamorada until after midnight last night, I gave it to him this morning. We talked to Pittman’s mother, who doesn’t want to believe it, but . . . she’s dead. Pittman had four credit cards, none are being used. Her telephone is gone. There’s money in her bank accounts, it’s still there. Here’s the thing—she talked to her mother about the guys on the Mako. She wondered if they might have been the ones who did the shooting. She was wondering if she should call the police. She didn’t, as far as her mother knows, but she disappeared within a couple of days of the two of them talking about the shootings.”
“She could have identified the guys,” Lucas said. “Then she did something stupid, like talk to one of them about it and they killed her.”
“That’s what I believe,” the agent said. “Maybe she was involved with one of the guys, couldn’t believe he could really do something like that, the murders, so she talked to him . . . and, she’s a naïve twenty-year-old hairdresser and he’s a fucking animal.”
“She was a pretty girl,” another agent said, and several of the agents nodded.
The agents agreed that they’d be taking around iPads with photo displays to show to the women who’d agreed to look at the mug shots, and they’d be looking for the last two. The two were not missing, they’d simply moved to different parts of Florida, out of reach on a day’s notice.
* * *
When the meeting ended, the two non-FBI members went on their way. A half hour later, the FBI agents, with Lucas and Bob, met in Weaver’s room, dragging chairs around and sitting on his bed.
There was one new face, Jason Tennan, the agent working at the Angelus Hotel. He was a tall man with curly brown hair, freckles over a short pug nose, square jaw, tall and thin with bony shoulders. He was wearing a white shirt and a black bolo tie with a silver-and-turquoise slide.
“I don’t want anyone to think that there’s anything . . . wrong . . . with the other team members,” Weaver said to the group. “But they won’t be involved with the next issue we’ll be dealing with, and, well, I’m more comfortable with an all-FBI meeting. Plus the marshals.”
He turned to Lucas and said, “Tell them. I haven’t.”
“We’ve got a name,” Lucas said.
That created a stir, and Weaver opened a file and took out a photograph, and handed it to Tennan. Tennan looked at it and said, “Yeah, I know him, Don Romano. He used to live in Perth Amboy, but he moved out when the Hispanics got too thick in there. He’s been down here in Florida for quite a while—years—but his name is still on some business licenses up in Jersey and on Staten Island. He’s never been one of the big dogs, but he’s always been around. Maybe he’s still around because he was never one of the big dogs. He’s old, by the way. Must be in his late seventies by now. Might be eighty.”
“Exactly what kind of asshole are we dealing with?” Bob asked.
“Routine asshole,” Tennan said. “He did loan sharking for years, had a couple of leg-breakers on staff. He worked through bartenders in northern Jersey, and across the water on Staten Island. He owned a couple of dry cleaners in Jersey, probably as money laundries.”
“How about drugs?” Lucas asked.
Tennan scratched his neck, then said, “Don was always sort of a smart guy. He stayed away from the high-profile stuff. I doubt he had any kind of moral problem with drugs, he just didn’t want the attention from the DEA and the local cops. But there’s one thing . . .”
Bob: “Like what?”
“Guns. There’s a rumor, only a rumor, that if you know the right guys, you can buy a decent handgun and they’re coming out of Romano’s loan-sharking operation. You know, a bartender is maybe the connection between a guy who needs a loan and one of Romano’s loan managers. The same system can get you a gun.”
Weaver asked, “Is there money in that? Guns?”
“Oh, yeah. Not millions, but a steady income stream. There are guns all over the confederate states, which means a lot of them get stolen,” Tennan said. “And as they say, shit slides to the coast, which means Florida. Buy guns cheap here, sell them up north. In Philly, you could get a grand for a good Ruger semiauto, stolen down here and sold for a hundred bucks. All those northern states are tough on handguns, like they are on payday loans, which spells ‘opportunity’ for the mob boys. It’s like cigarette smuggling, but with bullets.”
“A thousand percent is an attractive markup,” Bob said.
Tennan said, “And it creates more need for a money laundry down here, if your man’s right about the warehouse.”
Lucas said, “The gun distribution system might work for drugs, if the bartenders were willing to get into it.”
“I’m sure some would be,” Tennan said. “You don’t see a lot of rich bartenders walking around.”
Lucas: “You know anything about Romano’s son-in-law?”
Tennan shook his head: “Not much. Name is Larry Bianchi. He’s good-looking. That I know. The story is, Romano’s daughter met him in high school, he started banging her, they got married maybe because they had to, Don being Don. He basically runs errands for his father-in-law. He and the daughter have a couple of kids. Actually, it might be four or five.”
Bob: “You know anything about the lights warehouse? That operation?”
The agent was shaking his head. “Don’t know about that. Basically, Don’s supposed to be retired. He’s fallen off our radar the last few years. Didn’t have a rep for killing people. Breaking elbows, cutting off thumbs, maybe, but not killing them. And only when he felt he needed to make an example.”
“Nice,” Lucas said.
Weaver said, “We need to know what he’s doing, we need surveillance. We need to find a reason to punch into that warehouse. I looked up the place on Google Maps, the satellite view. It’s across the street from a Quality Inn. I’ve talked to a fixer up in Washington and she’ll get us rooms on the second floor, looking across the street. From what I can tell from the satellite photos, we should be able to see all the entrances to the warehouse.”