Authors: Joseph Badal
With no regard for forensic evidence, Bishop tore open the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of paper on which was typed: “Three up and three down. Now it’s my turn at bat.”
Rolf Bishop was confused. He leaned against the front door, note in hand. ‘Three up, three down.’ What did it mean? He pushed off the door, spun around, and opened the front door. One of his CIA guards ran over to him as he reached the sidewalk.
“You shouldn’t be out here, sir,” the man said.
Bishop ignored him and strode up the slate sidewalk to where the other guard stood. He walked over to the Explorer and bent over. There were two corpses in the back seat. Bishop didn’t recognize the faces, but he had a gut feeling he was staring at Rodney Strong and Zeke McCoy. He hadn’t heard from the killers and there had been no news about David Hood. Bishop straightened and backed away from the car.
“You recognize these guys?” one of his bodyguards asked.
“How the hell would I know who these people are?” Bishop responded. He pulled the lapels of his silk robe across his chest and tightened the sash. Then, with as much control as he could muster, he marched back to his home.
“What the fuck!” he shouted after he slammed the front door and collapsed into an armchair in the entryway. ‘Three up, three down.’ Then it hit him. He’d sent one hardened criminal, Montrose Toney, and two professional assassins, Rodney Strong and Zeke McCoy, after one businessman, David Hood. He hadn’t heard a word from Toney; and now Strong and McCoy, both dead, had been dumped at the threshold of his house. Three up, three down.
How in God’s name could David Hood have made all this happen? He remembered Hood as a quiet, almost reclusive young non-com, who did as he was told and never caused trouble. He knew Hood had extensive training as an Army Ranger, and had been decorated for bravery in action, but Jesus, that was a decade ago.
CHAPTER 24
Dennis O’Neil carried a large, hard-sided briefcase and a soft-sided overnight bag from the airplane and walked the length of the Jetway into the Philadelphia International Airport terminal. In the baggage area, he looked at people’s faces. Detective Ramsey had told him she’d meet him here. He spied a woman in her thirties who stood off to the side and held a piece of paper with “O’Neil” hand-printed on it. He walked over to her and asked, “Detective Ramsey?”
Ramsey stuck out her hand and smiled. “Yes,” she said. “I’m Jennifer Ramsey. Nice to meet you.”
O’Neil placed his briefcase on the floor and took her hand in his. He quickly looked her up and down and thought, nice package: five-eight, swimsuit model legs, drop-dead figure, blonde hair, and classically beautiful. O’Neil thought how nice it would be to be thirty again. He met Ramsey’s gaze and noticed the hard set of her hazel-colored eyes. All business.
“Call me Dennis,” he said and released her hand.
“Welcome to Philadelphia, Dennis.”
“City of Brotherly Love,” O’Neil said. “Seen any of that brotherly love since you got here?”
Ramsey laughed. “A little,” she said. “I left my car out by the curb. Found a friendly cop who offered a little professional courtesy.”
“See,” O’Neil said, “brotherly love.”
They took the escalator down one level and walked outside to a Crown Victoria parked by the curb. He tossed his overnight bag in the back seat, got in the front passenger seat, and placed his briefcase between them.
While she drove away from the terminal, O’Neil reached inside his suit jacket pocket and extracted a folded sheet of paper. “I got instructions here I’m supposed to follow.” He told Ramsey to take the highway to the downtown exit, then to follow Market Street across Broad Street to the Reading Terminal Market.
“I want you to let me out on the south side of the market, then circle the block. I was told to go through the market to the north side. There’s supposed to be a Cadillac waiting for me there. Follow that car.”
“What then?” she asked.
O’Neil raised his hands as if to say, who knows? He’d agreed to work with Ramsey because she’d been able to provide information about Hood he couldn’t come up with himself. Especially Hood’s relationship with Gino Bartolucci. The organized crime connection had intrigued O’Neil. First the CIA, now the mob. Besides, it was always better to have a partner to watch your back. He turned to look at Ramsey’s profile and said, “Just make sure you hang back. I don’t want whoever picks me up to know they’re being followed.”
When she stopped at the market’s south entrance, O’Neil got out, briefcase in hand, and entered the building. He walked through the sprawling complex to the north door, exited the building, and saw a silver-colored Cadillac with heavily tinted windows parked at the curb. He walked over to the right rear car door and placed his ID up against the window, just as he’d been told to do. The door opened and a man in the back told O’Neil to get in. The man slid across the seat, making room for O’Neil. Only a driver was up front. The man in the back seat took the briefcase from O’Neil, lifted it over the front seat, and placed it next to the driver.
He gave O’Neil a squint-eyed look and said, “No luggage?”
Damn! O’Neil thought. I left my bag in Ramsey’s car. “Uh,” he said, “I left it in a locker at the airport.”
The guy just nodded, faced forward, and told the driver to take off. Then he turned back toward O’Neil and said, “I’m going to frisk you, then I’ll blindfold you.”
O’Neil cooperated. Then he asked several questions, but got the same response each time: “Mr. Hood will explain everything to you.”
O’Neil tried to count left and right turns, but after five minutes lost track of them. He guessed the car was soundproofed because he couldn’t hear anything outside the vehicle.
Just past a sign that read Chestnut Hill Cricket Club, Jennifer Ramsey watched the Cadillac make a left turn onto a residential street, slowly pass two gated entrances, and then pull into a driveway blocked by an imposing wrought-iron gate anchored on both sides by seven-foot-high stone walls that appeared to front a very large estate. She continued up the tree-shaded street past the entrance, turned left at the first corner, parked on the street, and waited.
Cornelius Capital Resources owned the three-and-a-half-acre estate the Cadillac turned into. CCR operated several hundred consumer loan offices in twenty-seven states and Washington, D.C. The company was, in turn, owned by
Credit d’Or-Belgique
, headquartered in Brussels.
Credit d’Or-Belgique
was a wholly owned subsidiary of
Societa Financiaria
, a Milan-based investment firm. Gino Bartolucci owned
Societa Financiaria
—lock, stock, and barrel.
Located in one of Philadelphia’s oldest and most exclusive suburbs, the Chestnut Hill estate was spectacular. If the founder of the merchant banking firm who built the mansion on fifteen acres in the latter part of the nineteenth century could have known his dissolute great-grandson had forfeited the property to a notorious Italian gangster, he would have risen from the grave for revenge. The crack-addicted great-grandson had borrowed massively from Gino’s loan-sharking operation. But the deed to the mansion had squared all debts between the two men.
Jennifer heard the Cadillac’s driver honk his car horn and saw him open his window. A guard, an enormous man with muscles that threatened to bust the seams of his sharkskin suit, stepped out of a shack on the other side of the gate. He eyeballed the car and driver, returned to the guardhouse, and opened the electric-powered gate. The driver steered through the gateway and it closed as soon as the Cadillac’s rear bumper cleared the gate.
The man in the Cadillac’s back seat removed O’Neil’s blindfold. O’Neil turned his face away from the glare coming through his window. When his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw they were slowly moving up a long, curved driveway bordered by dense trees and shrubs. The car stopped in a circular courtyard with an enormous fountain at its center.
The driver took O’Neil’s briefcase inside the house, while the second man ran around the car and opened O’Neil’s door.
O’Neil looked up at a three-story stone mansion. Several dormers with large windows punctuated its steeply-pitched gray slate roof. Expansive, perfectly-manicured lawns extended from the house to a narrow strip of trees that separated the grass from the exterior walls. Flower gardens bordered the walls of the house. A man came out of the mansion’s big front door and walked down the steps.
He extended his hand and said, “Detective O’Neil, my name is David Hood. I understand you want to talk with me.”
“Do I ever, Mr. Hood.”
Hood led O’Neil into the mansion and took him to a small but lavishly furnished drawing room, with carved crown moldings, floor-to-ceiling built-in book cases, and plush leather furniture. Hood pointed to a stuffed chair. After O’Neil sat down, Hood sat across from him on a sofa. Almost immediately, a maid carried in a tray laden with a pitcher of lemonade, a bowl of ice, ice tongs, and two large glasses. She filled the glasses halfway to the top with ice, and poured the lemonade. She left without a word.
“My friend tells me you are investigating several murders that could be connected to the death of my family. Is that true?”
“Is your friend the man who called me in Chicago?” O’Neil asked.
“That’s right.”
“Well, your friend has a strange way of doing things. But what he told you is correct. Except the word ‘several’ is an understatement. As best as I can make out, eight men have been murdered in the past month or so. Their deaths look like the work of a professional killer or killers, and each and every one of the victims served with you in Afghanistan.”
Hood’s mouth dropped open.
“I won’t go into how I originally stumbled on this whole business, but I
will
tell you that of the fifteen men assigned to the Special Logistical Support Detachment, including the unit commander, only two are alive today. You and Rolf Bishop, the new CIA Deputy Director.”
“You know all this for a fact?”
“Yeah.”
“So, what are you doing here?”
“I started out wanting to find out why three Marines were murdered. But it’s gotten much bigger than that. About half of the men you served with in the SLSD have been murdered. Mob style.”
O’Neil watched Hood’s reaction, alert for a “tell.” Hood’s eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened.
Hood said, “If you’re suggesting Gino Bartolucci had anything to do with these murders, you’ve got your head up your ass.” Surprise suddenly showed on Hood’s face and his mouth formed an “O.” “You think I might be involved.”
“I’m a good detective, Mr. Hood. I always consider every possibility. But unlike some of my colleagues, I never pre-judge a suspect. I work on the facts. Even you have to admit that your name should be on any list of suspects.”
“I’ll give you that, Detective. But if you’re here to undermine my efforts to find the man who killed my wife and children, I’ll have your ass thrown off this property.”
“I’m not here to undermine anything. Just being here has put my job and pension in jeopardy. But I’m not going to stop trying to discover who murdered those men. It’s become personal to me.”
“Have you shared your information with the Feds?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
O’Neil hesitated a beat. “I probably should have, but my instincts told me to hold off. Candidly, I don’t know who to trust. On the off chance Rolf Bishop is involved in these murders, reporting this to the Feds would have brought the power of the CIA down on me. But even if Bishop is involved, I can’t come up with a motive.”
David had heard the tape of Montrose Toney’s “interrogation” and knew Bishop was behind the attempts on his life. But why would Bishop have put into motion a killing machine responsible for the deaths of so many people? And what had he or the other men he’d served with done to cause Bishop to come after them? “Even with the facts laid out in front of me, I find this whole thing unbelievable, Detective,” David said.
“I find it all pretty fantastic myself—and believe me I’ve seen and heard some mighty grotesque things since I became a cop. I came here because I hope you might shed a little light on this assignment you had in Afghanistan. The Special Logistical Support Detachment. The only thing every one of the murdered men had in common, as far as I’ve been able to determine, was they served in that unit. What in the name of God did you guys do over there that would make someone try to wipe you all out? And why wait ten years to do it?”
“You got me, Detective.”
It took an hour for O’Neil to brief David on all he’d learned about the murdered men. They shot questions at one another for another thirty minutes. The problem for both men was that the only tie between the dead men and Rolf Bishop was the SLSD. David swore there was nothing the unit had done, as far as he knew, that would be reason to commit murder.
“Sure,” David said, “the unit’s mission was Top Secret, and we stretched the logistical and budget rules, but not to the point someone would want us dead. At least, I don’t think so.”
They sat in silence for a minute. Then David went to a DVD player and inserted the Montrose Toney interrogation disk. “I think you’ll change your thinking after you watch this.”
O’Neil sat through the recording without saying a word. When the disk ended, he stared at David Hood and slowly shook his head. “Who the hell produced that disk?”
“None of your business.”
“I guess I already knew the answer.”
“Let’s take a break and eat something,” David said to O’Neil. He used his foot to depress a buzzer under the carpet beneath the coffee table. The woman who’d served the lemonade returned to the room.
“What can I do for the
signori
?”
“Rosa, could you bring us something to eat? And perhaps now would be a good time for Mr. Bartolucci and my father to join us.”
“
Si, signore
, I will have food for you soon in the dining room. And I will call
i signori Bartolucci e Hood prontamente
.”