Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) (5 page)

The Archer
thought his muscles were going to pop.

He stood
alone in the crowd, his tendons stretched like rubber bands, sweat dribbling
like acid into his eyes.

CHARLIE
BLACK BEAR

    
He watched Lupo and his partner walk away
and waited until they reached their car. The Milwaukee County crime scene techs
and ME’s staff were about ready to roll with the body of Tanya Rosskov. But his
mind was split.

What had
happened to Tanya was unspeakable. As a representative of the casino management
and the tribe, he was completely committed to bringing the murdering bastard
–
whoever he was
– to
justice.

But he was
suddenly torn and his attention was split. Now he had a face to attach to the
name he’d heard for the last few years, but most importantly that he’d heard on
the phone just after the news of this murder had hit. The call had come
strangely out of the blue, as if he was on someone’s speed dial and unaware of
it. The cold, steely voice. The instructions, as if he was on that same
someone’s payroll. He glanced at Lupo’s taillights and waited for them to
disappear behind the other traffic on Canal. From what he could tell, these
weren't people to mess with.
Better to
cover my ass
.

It would be
harmless, wouldn’t it?

He punched a
key on his phone and waited for it to ring and go to voice mail. He stepped
away and turned from the crowd.

“Charlie
Bear here. I just met the guy you asked me about. His name's come up on
occasion, up north. So he and his partner caught this murder down here. You
requested a call-back. That’s what this is.” He tucked the phone into his large
hand, wondering where all this would lead. Feeling uncomfortable.

Shaking his
head as if he could clear it of the bad taste and smell of what he had done, he
went back to work, circling the crime scene, putting himself in the point of
view of the guy with the crossbow, trying to
feel
what he’d felt. Sometimes this worked for him. Most often it
didn't.

His phone
bleated and he flicked it on.

“Yeah,” he
said curtly, glancing at the display.

The voice was
nondescript. “You mean Detective Lupo?”

“Yes.”

There was a
long pause. “Are you ready to share your thoughts about him?”

“Thoughts?”
He wasn’t sure what the guy meant.

“Your
opinion. An assessment of the type of officer he might be.”

“I’m not
quite—”

“Your
professional
opinion?” Was the tone of
the voice mocking him?

Charlie
thought for a second. As distasteful as it was, this kind of general
information seemed innocuous enough. Hell, it wasn’t any different than doing
watercooler talk with a coworker – although this was someone he did not
know, and likely never would.

Well, they
had offered to pay well for his opinions, and he had kids to feed and colleges
to pay for. It was time to ante up. Give his opinions, cash the checks, move
on.

He said, “He
seems
careful
. He’s intuitive. He’s
got a natural talent for crime reconstruction. He’s reticent about himself, but
he’s got a feel for the perpetrator.” He cleared his throat, feeling a bit
silly for making such assessments. “Like he’s the perfect cop.”

“And...?”
the voice said. “What about the rest of it? Regarding what was mentioned to
you, about the rumors among your people?”

Charlie
rolled his eyes. “I think it could be… uh, those rumors have been around for
years.” He breathed out in a rush. “I think there may be… something there, but
I don’t know what.” Was he telling them what they wanted to hear? “It’s pretty
farfetched, isn’t it?”

“We need
more from you than that.” A flat statement.

“Hm,
really?” Charlie almost cursed at the speaker but caught himself. It had
started with an innocuous request not long ago, just talk in a bar. The guy had
been friendly, chatty. He’d implied someone would contact him someday and pay
him for a few minutes of his time. Now the guy, if it was the same guy,
sounded…
dangerous
. Bear felt
trapped.

“We would
like you to try several… let’s call them
tests
,
when you’re with Detective Lupo. We’ll let you know what and when, and you’ll
do the rest.”

Charlie
didn’t like the sound of that. Besides being farfetched, what they were asking
was just strange. Didn’t matter how much they would pay him.

“I’m not
sure I can—”

“Sure you
can. We’ve paid you. We are paying you. Your job is to find out a few things
about Lupo.”

He sighed
silently. “All right, I’ll see what I can do. He has to liaise with me on this
homicide, so I can try to stick close.”

“See that
you do. We’ll be in touch.” They clicked off.

The sudden
silence was accusatory.

His
discomfort increased to a fever pitch, suddenly. He didn't like being a pawn in
anyone's game. He didn't like selling himself, but it was too late.

He wondered
what was brewing. What did they want to know? What had he set in motion?

Charlie
looked up into the night sky as if answers might be written there. According to
various tales in his heritage, some might be. But he didn’t think he would like
the way they turned out.

LUPO

Charlie Bear had given them Rosskov’s address from her file,
so they left a couple uniforms to take more statements from casino staff. Lupo
was convinced it wasn’t likely anything would come from it, as most people said
they barely knew their coworker. Meanwhile Lupo scooped up DiSanto and they
headed back to the Third Ward, where they’d started the night. Turned out
Rosskov lived there – a loft in a converted warehouse that housed an art
store and a day spa and various curio shops on the first floor. They walked up
the three flights, hoping the roommate they’d been told about was home.

Lupo hated this part of the job. Most cops do. He wasn’t
very good at it.

As they reached the apartment door, DiSanto said: “This
isn’t one of your high-end remodels, is it?” There was dust and grime on the
steps, and the elevator was broken and stuck on the second floor.

Lupo smirked. “Guess not. Seems like she didn’t have any
money, really, so we can scratch that as a motive.” It was starting to look
like a premeditated random killing, a weird hybrid. Like the killer just wanted
to kill
somebody
, and Rosskov came
along at the wrong time. Both premeditated and random – Lupo figured that
kind of killer would be hardest to catch.
Unless
he continued his streak in the same general location
.

“Yes?”

The woman who answered the door was average height, but
somehow almost elfin, with short dark hair and pointy bangs. Wearing a Packers
sweatshirt and tight jeans, she looked like a slightly too old college student.
Maybe a grad student or doctoral candidate.

Grimly, Lupo flashed his badge and introduced them, and her
eyes widened. And then she started to cry.

“What’s happened? What’s—” She took a breath and
gasped as if it hadn’t helped. “Oh, God, Tanya, what’s happened to Tanya?”

Was it as if she’d been expecting something, Lupo wondered,
or was she just a worst-case scenario kind of person?

“May we come in?” DiSanto normally took over at this point,
because he tended to come across more sympathetic than Lupo, who was gruff by
most people’s standards – at least on first impression.

She nodded and stepped aside, shivering and sniffling.

“Are you Laura Hastings? Tanya’s roommate?”

“Yes.” Her lower lip trembled and the tears flowed down her
cheeks. “And I’m her—we’re… we’re not just roommates, we’re
partners
. What happened?”

Ah fuck
. Lupo swallowed. “I’m afraid we have bad
news,” he said, trying to whisper.

“Something’s happened to Tanya,” DiSanto said. “I’m sorry to
tell you she’s dead.”

Laura stepped back once, twice, and half-fell onto a small
wooden bench tucked into the apartment’s foyer. Lupo and DiSanto grabbed her
before she could slip off. Her body had loosened into rubber, and her face
contorted into one of intolerable pain. Her crying turned into a keen.

She wasn’t involved
, Lupo thought, giving DiSanto a shake of
his head.
Too hard to fake this kind of
shock and pain.

DiSanto nodded and went for a glass of water while Lupo kept
an eye on her lest she faint.

Fuck, I really hate this
job today
.

They waited for her to regain her composure and stayed a
half hour, but it was obvious Laura didn’t know anything. She had seen her
lover off to work and that was the end of it. Laura said Tanya liked her job,
rarely complained about coworkers or bosses, enjoyed dealing cards, and only
occasionally had to shrug off a potential suitor. And no, as far as she knew,
Tanya had no connections to the Russian mob. “She hated her heritage!” Laura
said.

    
All
this came out in a rush whenever they asked a question, as if she could fill
the void just opened in her life with more words about Tanya. Lupo thought
Laura would collapse after they left.

“Do you think we can look around, see if there might be an
indication of some motive for what happened?” he said. There was no reason to
think so, but it was worth a try. A bagful of cash, some kind of illicit
information, a drug stash. A stash of any kind.

Laura looked at him, wide-eyed. “Like if I had something to
do with it? I would n-never—” She began to sniffle again.

“No, no,” DiSanto jumped in. “In case she knew her killer,
maybe had gotten some questionable correspondence from him, like a threat, or…
just something – anything – out of the ordinary.”

“Informally,” Lupo added, “so there’s no need for a warrant.
If she lived alone, we’d be searching through her things.”

“For clues?”

DiSanto said, “Right.”

“You don’t know of any threats?”

Laura fixed Lupo with her puffy eyes, wiping moisture there.
“No, never. Tanya was very quiet.”

Lupo didn’t bother to point out that a threat didn’t have to
be solicited. "So we’ll take a quick, informal look through her things, if
you don’t mind."

She nodded, and led them to a home office squeezed into a
tiny den, then pointed at the connecting bedroom. She stood nearby as they
gently flipped through papers and bills and credit card statements. They
repeated the procedure in the bedroom, but there were no hidden caches of
stacked bills or packets of drugs, or anything that pointed at anything out of
the ordinary about Tanya Rosskov. No weird floorboards, or likely hiding
places. DiSanto even checked for dummy outlets by plugging in a small lamp at
random.
 

Lupo pointed at a row of photographs framed over the desk.
“This her family?”

    
“Yes,
back home. None of them are here. She was lonely… until we got together.”

“She hated her heritage?” Lupo prodded. “You said
hated
?”

“Yeah, the whole melodramatic Russian thing. But she loved
her family, as far as I could tell. They talked on Skype all the time.”

“I didn’t see a computer,” said DiSanto.

    
“She
used my laptop. Want to see it?”

Lupo shrugged. DiSanto nodded. “Sure.”

Laura retrieved it from a closet, fired it up. A three year
old Dell, bare bones student model. They let her take them through some
correspondence, both her own email account and even Tanya’s, and they just
glanced at some random emails. Nothing jumped out at them.

“We can always come back.” Lupo figured she’d been
forthcoming enough that she didn’t know anything, and if there was any further
reason they could always get the techies to check the laptop for hidden or
deleted files. Since she’d worked at the casino, there was always the chance of
theft, extortion, blackmail, embezzlement…

“Anything else you can tell us?”

They’d been together two years, almost three, she said.

“In that time, Tanya ever get into some kind of trouble?”
Lupo already knew she had no record, because they had run her ID. But you never
knew. Trouble comes in different packages.

She barely thought about it. “No. She’s – was just a
lonely immigrant, no friends other than me, no drama…” Then her voice hitched,
and she started bawling.

“We’re very sorry for your loss,” Lupo said as softly as he
could, feeling like an asshole.

They helped her gently to the sofa and left her there, a faraway
look in her red-rimmed eyes.

Downstairs, Lupo said: “No way is she acting.”

DiSanto nodded, agreeing. “Nothing stuck out up there. No
fancy stuff, recent purchases, anything to indicate she had any kind of a
problem. Bank statements are bare bones.”