Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) (2 page)

“That’s
bullshit. Not like they have their own ME or lab.” DiSanto shrugged and went
for the last wedge after all.

“Thought you
didn’t like the sauce,” Lupo pointed out. DiSanto never gained an ounce, so he
was jealous.

“Didn’t say
I didn't like it, just that it’ll probably mess with me later,” DiSanto said,
chewing. “And the crust is fucking fab.”

“Secret to a
great pizza, the crust,” agreed Lupo, and they clinked their tea glasses.

The waitress
brought their check and Lupo handed her his Visa card. “Wait till I tell you
the rest,” he said after she’d left to process the payment.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.
Sounds like a weird one.”

The guitar
solo started again and he tapped the screen.

“Yeah? Okay,
get the ME people on their way, and the Crime Scene techs. We’re rolling too.”

“You gonna
let me in on this?” DiSanto said as Lupo smugly slid the phone out of sight.

Lupo ignored
him and smiled at the waitress when she brought his card back. “See ya later,
Nick,” she said with a bashful wave.

“ ‘See ya
later,
Nick
?’ ” DiSanto blurted out
as they hit the street and popped the doors on Lupo’s old Maxima. “That’s
sweet.”

“So I eat
here kinda often enough they know me. It’s what’s known as being a regular, DiSanto.
Got a problem with that?”

“Not a
thing," his partner said as he belted in. “Not at all,
Nick
,” he mimicked the waitress. “
See ya later, Nick!
” He snickered.

Lupo
grunted, otherwise ignoring him, and turned over the engine. “Since you asked,
what’s weird about this one is that, according to Dispatch, the casino cops say
the vic got it with a crossbow.”

He got the
desired effect – a comical open mouth double-take. “The fuck –
really? No way.”

“Yeah, fuckin’
crossbow.”

Lupo floored
the accelerator. Now that word had come down they were welcome, he wanted to
beat the ME’s crew to the scene. It was likely. They were closer and getting
closer by the minute.

“Who gets
killed with a crossbow arrow these days?”

Lupo smirked
as he shaved a corner ahead of the light. "That would be crossbow
bolt
.”

“Bolt?
What—”

“They’re not
called arrows,” Lupo explained. “Properly, they’re called
bolts
. Shorter, heavier. Fuckin’ deadly, when they’re accurate.”

He didn’t
tell DiSanto, but he knew a few things about crossbows. Hadn’t been all that
long before that he’d watched Jessie Hawkins drill a psychopath through the
head with a crossbow
bolt
. It had
scrambled his brains just as well as a bullet, fortunately for them both.

“Crossbow,”
DiSanto muttered, shaking his head. “Really? The fuck is that all about..?” He
continued to mutter.

They met the
crime lab people and a group of casino security guys at the scene. The street
was still mostly empty, though the occasional car was slowing down to gawk at
their light trees strung across the crime scene.

Lupo flashed
his badge and a surly casino cop nodded at a tall Native American who wore an
expensive gray suit and sported a graying pony-tail. “He’s in charge.”

They walked
up to him, their badges in view. The tall guy seemed relieved to see them.

Lupo
introduced himself and DiSanto.

“Charlie
Bear, head of casino security,” the pony-tailed guy said, shaking hands with
them both. “Technically it’s Charlie Black Bear, but I usually drop the middle
part. Indians make people nervous.” His glance turned back to Lupo and he
flashed a crooked grin, as if apologizing.

Lupo was
stroking his chin, squinting a little. “You look familiar,” he said, his head
slightly tilted.

Bear shrugged. “Ever been up to Watersmeet?”

“Yeah, sure,
all the time.” Just over the border in the Upper Peninsula portion of Michigan,
north of Vilas County, Watersmeet had been the only nearby Indian casino for a
few years. Wisconsinites wore out the roads getting there, until the recent
Eagle River project.

“I started out
in casino security up there
where the
waters meet
. But I did the cop thing in Minneapolis for years before that.”

“Okay, we
must’ve crossed paths in the UP. I’ve had, uh, some
things
going on in Eagle River that I’ve been involved with over
the years.”

“Bit of an
understatement, isn’t it, Detective Lupo? I know you by reputation.” Now
Charlie Bear smiled widely. “Quite the rep, really, since this mercenary thing
blew up down there. Sounded like a James Bond flick from what I read.”

Lupo
chuckled, nodding. Uncomfortable. Wanting to change the subject, but… “You
remind me of somebody I knew.”

“Hope that’s
a good thing."

“It is,
believe me.”

“Why the
past tense?”

Lupo
frowned. “He was killed in that firefight down near Eagle River a while back.
His name was Sam Waters, one of the tribal elders on the rez. One of the great
ones. I’m sure you remember what went down.” He still couldn’t quite
acknowledge what had really happened on that beach. Bear nodded. Silence hung
between them awkwardly. Lupo looked at where the crime scene techs were
clustered, then changed the subject abruptly. “What you got?”

Bear shook
his head once more in commiseration, but then got on task. “Strange, is what I
got. The vic’s name is Tanya, uh, Rosskov. She’s a blackjack dealer. Pretty
good at it, kept herself in shape and out of trouble. Coming to work, normal
shift, and some asshole killed her with a fucking crossbow.”

“How’d you
know it’s a crossbow?”

“I was
military before the cop phase. Rangers. I may have come across a black crossbow
or two in my time. Between you and me.” He chuckled. His guys were hanging
around in a knot. “Hey,” he called out, “keep sweeping the area for anything
out of the ordinary.” He turned to Lupo and DiSanto. “Novices. They don’t go
through hoops like they used to. Once you had to have been a cop before they’d
hire you here, or any Indian casino. Then they got popular and started hiring run
of the mill security guards, no experience necessary.”

“
Rosskov,
huh?” DiSanto said. “Russian?”

“Yeah, it’s
like Smith over there. She was off the boat, maybe three years.”

“So… you
figure it’s a Russian mob thing?”

Charlie Bear
smiled crookedly and tilted his head. “This guy for real?” he said to Lupo.

Lupo
grinned. “He’s educated by way of TV cop shows.”

“Very
funny,” DiSanto said. “You watch, I’ll be right. Wanna bet?”

“Let’s take
a look.” Lupo led the way, and they filed over along the well-traveled route
that would contaminate the scene the least.

Rosskov was
a looker, at least under the lights. Her hair was a rich blond, maybe enhanced
or maybe not, and it fanned out around her tilted head as if she were taking a
nap. Her face was composed, just a bit stunned, eyes half open. A tiny grimace
on her lips indicated quick, sudden pain and quicker end. Her chest was soaked
where the wound had bled out along the shaft of the thick bolt that protruded
from her chest wall. A perfect heart shot, apparently. The ground beneath her
was a pasty pool of coagulating blood. The longer you looked at her features,
the more you realized she was pale, bloodless.

“From how
far?” Lupo turned to look at the blocked-off street.

“Maybe
thirty, thirty-five feet. Maybe less. Twenty-five?”

“Car?”

Bear nodded.
“I think so. That’s why I doubt they’ll find anything out there.”

“Damn good
shot.”

“Or lucky,”
DiSanto added. “But who walks around with a crossbow? Kinda hard to hide.”

“They make
smaller ones, ’bout the size of a handgun. This one did a lot of damage, so I’d
say it’s a hunting model with a heavy pull.”

Lupo straightened
and looked around. “Surveillance cameras?”

“Yes and
no,” Bear said. “Got’em, but this is a dead area. There’s cameras in the
parking lot, and there’s cameras sweeping the employee entrance –
actually
all
entrances – but
right here, right here’s a spot not covered by any. And she was unlucky enough
to have been assigned this faraway lot, not one of the closer ones.”

“Still
should be able to spot a car traveling the route, maybe going from camera to
camera,” DiSanto mused. “Got time code on the recordings, right?”

“Absolutely.”
Bear nodded. “Yeah, I figure we should be able to piece together something from
when she left her car to when she got hit. I’ve already got my tech guy piecing
it together. Might take him a couple hours. Don’t worry, we’ll share.”

Lupo raised
an eyebrow. “You
want
the case?
Usually from my experience you people — um, tribal councils, want to get
as far away from crime as they can.”

Bear grinned
humorlessly. “They don’t usually have
me
in charge. See, I take responsibility for everyone in the tribe, including every
employee whether they’re Native or not. This happened on my watch. I take it
personally. We just wanna catch this asshole before he hurts anyone else.”

Lupo agreed.
This one felt like a beginning rather than an ending.

No idea why, but it does, doesn’t it?

Almost like
a voice was whispering in his ear, but that was ridiculous.

Lupo
surveyed the scene.

The Milwaukee
PD lab guys had finished setting up and were descending on the body, going
through the usual routines. Bagging hands, checking for obvious fibers, taking
photographs. Lupo figured none of it would help, because the shooter never came
close enough. Unless there was something on the bolt, the body would yield next
to nothing. Then again…

Lupo nodded
at one of the lab guys. “You have any ideas, Brian?”

Brian nodded.
“Hey, Detective Lupo.” He was tall and lanky and hunched over the body like a
geeky vulture. “We’re probably wasting our time doing the close sweep,” he said
after a moment’s thought. “Looks like the guy with the crossbow was definitely
too far away to leave anything here, unless he walked up afterwards.”

Lupo tilted
his head. “I was just thinking the same. But maybe – just maybe –
they knew each other and had contact before.”

“Right, if
it’s not random. Anyway we’ll do the usual bit.” Brian said. “We’re sweeping
wider, too, just in case. It looks like he was in a car, though…”

Lupo turned
to Bear. “We're gonna want a list of her coworkers. All shifts, and a list of
her friends you know of.”

“Shit,
coworkers, that’s probably a couple-three hundred names. But yeah. I’ve already
asked around about friends and she didn’t seem to have any on staff.”

“None at
all?” DiSanto said. “Not even guys who liked her looks?”

“She was
known as a
cold one
. Rumor mill stuff.
But the customers liked her. She always had people backed up at her tables,
waiting to get a seat. Looked good dealing, you know.”

Lupo stroked
his chin. He examined her face, the stunned look somehow making her seem more
alive than the typical corpse. He could see why they’d liked her.

“Disgruntled
gamblers. She clean anybody out lately? Disgruntled coworkers?”

Bear shook
his head. “I'm not aware of any incidents. I’ll check the logs again, but
nothing comes to mind. And she usually worked the lower stakes tables.”

Brian
straightened and came over to where they were standing. He hulked over all of
them except Bear. “We’re being careful with that arrow,” he said. “Not removing
it until we have her in the morgue. It’d be too easy for us to mess up any
evidence left on it.”

“It’s called
a
bolt
,” DiSanto said. Brian stared
at him.

Lupo
grinned. “He’s a stickler.”

“Whatever.”
Brian stepped back to the body. “We’ll flip her halfway, if you wanna get a
look at her back.”

“Let’s do
it,” Lupo said, not sure they would learn anything.

Brian
directed his three gloved assistants, and carefully they took hold of Rosskov's
body and gently rolled her onto her left side. Lupo, Bear and DiSanto leaned
over to stare. Sticky blood had soaked her clothing. Now it looked like tar.

DiSanto
whistled. “Shit, the fuckin’ thing went through her.”

The bolt’s
tip, blood-flecked metal that was probably steel, protruded obscenely from
Rosskov’s coat. The fall backward had likely driven the bolt partially back forward
through her chest, but it was hard to tell. There was a slight indentation in
the sidewalk where the tip had struck, her body almost enveloping it.

“What about
tracing the bolt?” DiSanto said. “See where it was bought?”

“Not gonna
work,” said Bear. “Crossbows are popular with hunters. You can buy bolts in
hundreds of shops and on-line. Nothing much to distinguish a factory made one.
Now, if it was handmade…”