Page 43 of Dark Romeo

Around the alley, three crime scene techs scoured the area, one of them with a camera in her hand, snapping pictures.

“So…he was tied up, beaten, tortured, then killed with a single gunshot to the forehead, execution-style, then dumped. This was a professional hit. They wanted something from him before they killed him.” I spotted something. “He has a tan line on his left ring finger. A ring was there. He was married.”

Lacey let out a whispered curse. “I hope he doesn’t have kids.”

“Let’s hope not.” A heaviness descended on me. I knew what it was like to lose a parent like this. “Hey, Espo,” I called over to him. He was standing over at a dumpster talking to a crime scene tech who was digging around inside. “Any luck with I.D. in the dumpster?”

“No.” Espo jogged back over and walked around the body so he could see the victim’s face. He scrunched up his nose and tilted his head. “This badly beaten, it’s going to be a bust trying to do facial recognition against the missing person database. I doubt his own mother could recognize him now.”

“I had his fingerprints scanned,” Lacey said. “Or at least, what fingerprints he had left. One of the techs is running them now.”

“So far no gun in the dumpsters either,” said Espo. “Though I doubt the boys will find anything there.

I nodded. “This killer was too smart to throw the weapon away near where the body was dumped.”

“No casings have turned up either.”

“And there’s about a million pieces of trace evidence around him,” I said, pointing to the grit, oil, and food waste around him. “Maybe forensics will find something on the body.”

My phone beeped in my pocket, so I pulled it out.

Dad: Don’t let me down.

He’d specifically assigned me to this case. Determination knotted in my throat as I tucked my phone away. I would not let him down.

“We’ve got a hit off the database,” someone called. A crime scene tech, a young man, came jogging over with a palm-sized machine. “He’s in the system.”

“Vincent Torrito, or Vinnie to his friends,” Espo read off the screen. Above the text was a small arrest photograph showing a rough-looking man, mid-thirties, with hair cropped close to his skull, a disfigured nose from being broken several times, and a stud showing in his ear. “And boy, does he have some bad, bad friends.”

“Now I recognize him,” I said. “He’s one of Veronesi’s men, a known mid-level dealer. Vice picked him up a week ago on drug charges and captain got a chance to interrogate him about the murder of Tyrell’s son.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Espo. “The massacre down at the docks at the Tyrell’s warehouse? Vinnie didn’t say shit as far as I remember.”

“Of course, the Veronesis are denying any involvement.” None of the mob members would talk to the police, not even about a rival family. They had their own style of justice and judgment. I stared down at the dead man. Whatever he knew, he was truly silent now. “Vinnie didn’t talk to us, but…somebody thought he knew something.”

Espo cursed. “Two weeks ago the Veronesis supposedly gun down Jacob Tyrell. Now a Veronesi body turns up. This fucking thing is going to blow up into an all-out war.”

* * *

The canvas of the neighborhood turned up nothing, as expected. Nobody heard or saw anything Sunday night.

Once the body was back in the morgue, Lacey narrowed time of death down to between seven thirty and ten o’clock Sunday night. The body hadn’t been there when a restaurant worker had gone out for a cigarette at eleven p.m. Sunday night. When another worker had taken out the trash first thing Monday morning at seven minutes after five, he’d found the body, so it’d been dumped between those hours.

During a tearful interview with Mrs. Torrito at her home, a one-bedroom apartment in a rough Verona neighborhood, we’d found out that Vinnie had left the apartment on Friday night without telling her where he was going. He hadn’t come back.

When I asked her why she hadn’t reported him missing, she shook her head. “He goes off sometimes. Comes back a few nights later, sometimes banged up, but he always comes back. He wouldn’t just leave Jimmy and Jake.”

His kids.

Jimmy and Jake clung to their mother’s side as she cried, both watching me with solemn round eyes. The boys were seven and nine, and I prayed to hell they didn’t know what their father was when he had been alive.

Vinnie’s car, a black sedan, was also missing and currently unaccounted for.

I came into the station early Tuesday morning to find the place a hive. A canvas of the nearby traffic cameras turned up footage of several vehicles driving around the area between eleven p.m. and five-oh-seven a.m. We ran the license plates on the vehicles. Only one name stood out. A black Escalade was seen driving into the area in the body drop window, at around two a.m. The Escalade’s windows were tinted and the security footage was grainy, so we couldn’t get a visual on the driver and passenger. It was registered to none other than Tyrell Industries, a company owned by the Tyrell family, one of the ruling mob empires this side of the country.

“Let’s round up Giovanni Tyrell,” I said as I stared at the still of the black Escalade on the large screen in the tech room.

“And his son,” said Espinoza, standing beside me and chewing on a lollipop stick.

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