Twisted Twenty-Six (Stephanie Plum 26) Read online

  “All these years I wanted to kill her, and now someone might do the job for me and I don’t like it,” he said. “Go figure that.”

  My mom was in the kitchen, sitting at the table.

  “You aren’t ironing,” I said.

  “I can’t find the energy to iron. I’m heartsick. My chest aches with it.”

  I made coffee for us, and I laced my mom’s with whiskey. “She’s strong,” I said. “She’ll come out okay. We’ll find her.”

  My mom nodded and sipped her coffee. “This is good,” she said. “Thank you. I feel like I should be doing something, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “Stay here in the house in case she tries to contact you or manages to get home. I’m working with Ranger to find her, and Morelli is doing his cop thing.”

  I finished my coffee, rinsed my mug, and went outside to wait for Ranger. I had my messenger bag with me, stuffed full of all the information Connie had printed out for me on the Lucca case.

  Ranger cruised down the street and idled behind the Rangeman SUV. He was driving a new black Porsche Cayenne Turbo, the big brother to my Macan. I slid in next to him and saw that the instrument panel had been tricked out so he could communicate with his control room.

  “I don’t think your passion is fighting crime,” I said. “I think you have a passion for expensive James Bond toys.”

  “Success has its rewards. Where would you like to begin?”

  “Someone hired Lucca and Velez to kidnap Grandma. We need to find that person. I have two potentials, but I’m only lukewarm about them. Barbara Rosolli and Sidney DeSalle.”

  “I know DeSalle,” Ranger said. “He’s a bad guy.”

  “He owns Miracle Fitness, and Lucca was a trainer there.”

  “Motivation?”

  “Greed? Or maybe they have something on him and he’s afraid of a document dump. Barbara Rosolli was Jimmy’s first wife. She lives on Chambers Street next to her daughter Jeanine. Her motivation is clear. She wants the money. She also has a lot of anger, and she knew Lucca from Miracle Fitness.”

  “What about the sisters?” Ranger asked.

  “I couldn’t find a connection to Lucca, and they have a different agenda. I think they’re just enjoying the feud. It’s like the Hatfields and McCoys for them.”

  “Let’s do the ex-wife first,” Ranger said.

  Barbara Rosolli lived in small two-story house that had a postage stamp front yard and a narrow front porch that ran the width of the house. The house was painted white with black window trim, and some of the trim was beginning to peel. Jeanine’s house, next door, was similar. The two were separated by a driveway that led to a single-car detached garage that sat at the back end of the lot.

  Ranger parked on the opposite side of the street from Barbara’s house, and we watched for activity. Shades were up on the front windows. A car was in the driveway. I saw no flicker from a television. No one peering out a window at us.

  “Let’s do it,” Ranger said.

  We crossed the street, I rang the bell, and Barbara answered.

  “Stephanie,” she said, “I just heard about Edna.” Her attention turned to Ranger, and her eyes got wide. “Well, hello! Who do we have here?”

  “This is Ranger,” I said. “We’re working together to find Grandma. May we come in?”

  “Is it necessary?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Barbara rolled her eyes, stepped away from the door, and made a sweeping enter motion. I hadn’t been in her house before, and I was surprised at the decorating. It was very neat and quietly pleasant. Comfortable, basic furniture in neutrals. Fresh flowers on the coffee table. It looked like a nice person lived there.

  Jeanine came in from the kitchen. “Stephanie, I thought I heard my mom say your name. We were just having lunch and talking about what happened at the church. We were at the bake sale earlier. We must have just missed your grandmother and your mom. What happened? Did Edna just wander away? It’s not like her.”

  “We think she might have gone off with someone,” I said.

  “A friend?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe someone who was unhappy with her.”

  “Oh gosh,” Jeanine said.

  “Did you see anyone who might fall into either of those categories?” I asked her.

  “There were a lot of people there. There was a late Mass and then the bake sale. There were certainly some people who could be considered friends. A bunch of the women from bingo. I don’t know about the people who might want to harm her.”

  “Any La-Z-Boys?”

  Jeanine looked over at her mom. “Did you see any?”

  “No,” Barbara said, “but one of Benny’s wiseguy caregivers was there. He bought a coffee cake.”

  “I guess you know that one of the men who tried to kidnap Grandma was a trainer at Miracle Fitness,” I said.

  “Of course,” Jeanine said. “What happens in the Burg is instantly known by everyone in the Burg.”

  “I know you both take classes there. Did you ever hear anything that would make you suspicious? Was Lucca ever especially friendly with anyone who might be interested in the keys?”

  “Sidney DeSalle, the gym owner, is a little sketchy,” Jeanine said. “I didn’t take any of Lucca’s classes. I couldn’t keep up. He was hard-core. Bernie took some of Lucca’s classes, but Bernie hasn’t been there lately. Things got too busy at the concrete plant. He’s there now. Some sort of a breakdown.”

  We left Barbara’s house and sat in the Cayenne for a couple minutes.

  “What do you think?” I asked Ranger.

  “Barbara didn’t say much.”

  “Does that mean something?”

  “Just that she strikes me as the sort of person who would dominate a conversation. And Jeanine, not so much.”

  “Jeanine can be very chatty.”

  “Her husband works at a concrete plant?”

  “I think that might be the name of it, the Concrete Plant. It’s a family business. Bernie’s father started it, and when he retired Bernie’s brother took over. Bernie works there too, but I’m not sure what he does. Some sort of managerial thing. Word in the neighborhood is that he isn’t real bright. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve always found him to be a nice guy. He’s not Italian, and I don’t think he was ever accepted by Jimmy and the rest of the Rosollis.”

  “Do they have kids?”

  “Adults. Living out of state.”

  “Next up, Sidney DeSalle,” Ranger said.

  “I have multiple choices for him. He has an office at Miracle Fitness, an office in a building downtown, and a house in Hamilton Township. He has three adult children. They all live out of state. He’s divorced. Ten years ago.”

  “It’s Saturday. Let’s try his house.”

  “It’s north of town, toward Pennington. And I hate to say this, but I’m starving. I need lunch. Go back to my parents’ house, and I’ll get some fast food.”

  I called my mom and asked her to pack us lunch. When we pulled to the curb five minutes later, she was at the door with a grocery bag. I ran up and got the bag from her. Her eyes were red as if she’d been crying, and she looked exhausted.

  “You need to iron,” I told her. “Everything is going to be fine.”

  Back in the car, Ranger glanced at the bag as we drove away. “I have a feeling this is going to be good.”

  I pulled out two pot roast sandwiches and handed one to Ranger. The sandwiches were made on perfectly sliced bakery rye bread. They had the perfect amount of mustard, a dab of horseradish, a crisp romaine lettuce leaf, a thin slice of onion and tomato, and a couple slices of my mom’s amazing pot roast. They were each cut in half to form triangles. On my best day I couldn’t make a sandwich that would come even close to these masterpieces of deliciousness. She’d also packed a couple bottles of water. A cookie tin was at the bottom of the bag. I choked up when I saw the cookie tin, because I knew Grandma had made the cookies to make the house smel
l happy. I took a breath and swallowed back the emotion. No negative thoughts, I told myself. Everyone has to believe that she’s okay and this will end well, and that energy will make it happen. I mentally repeated the thought until I convinced myself it was true.

  We ate while Ranger drove. DeSalle lived about a half hour from the gym if traffic cooperated. At midday Saturday there was almost no traffic at all. I was working on the cookies when Ranger cruised into an area of obvious wealth.

  DeSalle’s house was one of the largest on a street of very large houses. It sat on about an acre of land. A small metal sign was attached to the elaborate mailbox at the entrance to the driveway. PROTECTED BY RANGEMAN.

  “It doesn’t get any better than this,” Ranger said.

  He called his control room and asked them to check if the alarm system was on. The answer came back yes.

  “Does he have video?” Ranger asked.

  “Yes. Inside and out.”

  “Check the video to see if anyone is in the house.”

  After several minutes the control room came back on. “We can’t pick up anyone in the house. Twenty minutes ago, a single male got into a car and drove away. This was the same time the alarm was set.”

  “Turn the alarm off and shut the cameras down,” Ranger said. “And go back over video starting at eight o’clock this morning. I want to know who was in the house.”

  “Lucky us,” Ranger said to me.

  He parked in the garage area, where his SUV wouldn’t be visible from the road. He unlocked the side door and announced himself as Rangeman Security. No one answered.

  We went room by room through the house.

  “This guy has nine bathrooms,” I said. “And I counted twelve televisions. So far as I could see he’s the only one living here. What the heck does he do with all the bathrooms and televisions?”

  The control room got back to Ranger. “The one male that we saw leave is also the only one we picked up on the interior monitors.”

  We returned to Ranger’s car, and reinstated the alarm and cameras.

  “I’d still like to talk to DeSalle,” Ranger said. “Let’s try Miracle Fitness.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  MIRACLE FITNESS WAS PACKED. There were classes going in every room, and a lot of people in varying degrees of fitness were walking around in spandex. They were clustered at the healthy juice bar, chugging bottles of healthy water, stretching tendons while they chatted about trendy diets.

  All this healthiness had me regretting that I’d just eaten half a tin of cookies made with genuine butter and a ton of sugar. I looked down at my jeans and didn’t see anything hanging over the waistband, but it was only a matter of time before the butter and sugar turned to fat. And God knows what my arteries looked like.

  I glanced at Ranger. He’d eaten one cookie. One. How is it possible to eat only one cookie? What kind of a weirdo can do that? He wasn’t in Rangeman tactical gear today. He was wearing black slacks, a black dress shirt with RANGEMAN embroidered in black on the pocket, and a black blazer. It all fit him perfectly, and he looked like money, and muscle, and not someone you would want to mess with.

  Ranger approached the woman at the desk and asked to see DeSalle. She said Mr. DeSalle was in conference and not to be disturbed.

  “He’ll see me,” Ranger said.

  “He doesn’t like to be disturbed when he’s in conference,” the woman said. Nervous. Probably making minimum wage and told never to think.

  “No problem,” Ranger said.

  He called his control room and asked where DeSalle’s office was located. He turned and walked left, down a corridor, found a door that said PRIVATE, and knocked.

  DeSalle opened the door.

  “Aphrodite called and said you were on your way,” DeSalle said. “She thought you might be a hired assassin or CIA. She’s very fit but not very smart. If this is about increasing my security, I feel like I’m sufficiently covered. If you’re here to tell me my house burned down, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “I’m working with Stephanie,” Ranger said. “I’m sure you’ve heard that her grandmother was kidnapped this morning.”

  “No,” DeSalle said. “I hadn’t heard. I know an attempt was made a couple days ago. The police were here, asking about the old Zeus. I believe he was involved.”

  “How well did you know the old Zeus?” Ranger asked DeSalle.

  “Not all that well,” DeSalle said. “I employed him. He had a following. Hard-core workout junkies and hard-up women. He had a reputation for making needy women happy. Not any of my business as long as it didn’t take place on the premises.”

  “Someone hired him to do the kidnapping,” Ranger said. “Do you have any ideas?”

  “I imagine it would be someone who wasn’t connected and wasn’t real bright. The old Zeus had muscle and that’s where his talent ended. I’ve been told that Marion Beggert was one of the women he regularly made happy enough to pay off his credit card. Have you seen Marion Beggert?”

  Ranger shook his head, no.

  “If you’d schtupp Marion Beggert for a couple bucks, you’d do most anything,” DeSalle said.

  “Have you talked to any of the La-Z-Boys lately?” Ranger asked.

  “I used to play poker once a week with the La-Z-Boys, but poker night was discontinued when Charlie took off and Benny got too fat to fit at the card table.”

  “If you hear anything, let me know,” Ranger said.

  DeSalle nodded. “You bet.”

  “Did we get anything out of that?” I asked when we were back in the car.

  “Not a lot, but I agree that an amateur hired Lucca.”

  “Barbara?”

  “Maybe, but there are a couple issues that make her a long shot. She would have to assemble another kidnap team on short notice, because I don’t think she’s capable of actually doing the kidnapping herself. And she would need a place to hold Grandma. Does she own any other properties?”

  I called Connie. She was closing up shop for the day, but she ran a property check on Barbara for me.

  “I’ve got two properties,” Connie said. “A house and a storage locker. The house is rented. It was Barbara’s house before she moved next door to Jeanine. The storage locker is on the road to White Horse.”

  “We’ll take a look,” Ranger said. “We’ll do the house first.”

  I called Morelli on the way to Barbara’s rental.

  “I talked to Benny,” Morelli said. “He’s in the hospital with heart issues. Between gasping for breath, he told me to go fuck myself, and that was about the extent of our conversation. Charlie Shine made bail and was released an hour ago. I just missed him, and I haven’t been able to find him. I also haven’t been able to find Lou Salgusta.”

  “We’re running down Lucca leads,” I said. “Let me know if you want us to change direction.”

  The house in Hamilton was in a family-oriented neighborhood of nice middle-income homes. Lots of swing sets visible in backyards. An occasional basketball hoop attached to a garage.

  Barbara’s rental house had a red and yellow Big Wheel tricycle parked on the short sidewalk leading to the small front porch.

  Ranger and I walked around the tricycle and stepped onto the porch. A young woman carrying a baby answered the doorbell. Two toddlers and a dog were running around behind her. The kids were laughing and yelling, and the dog was barking.

  “I’m looking for Barbara Rosolli,” I said to the woman.

  “We rent the house from her,” the woman said, “but she’s never here. I’ve only seen her once, a couple years ago.”

  One of the toddlers turned and ran past the woman and onto the porch. Ranger snagged him and redirected him back into the house.

  “Thanks,” I said to the woman. “Sorry to have disturbed you.”

  We returned to the Porsche, and I buckled myself in. “You’re good with children,” I said to Ranger.

  “You’ve seen my family in Newark. Lots of kids. Even mo
re in Miami when I lived with my grandmother. I can change a diaper, make an omelet, and dance the salsa without my Hispanic machismo being threatened.”

  “Do you miss Miami?”

  “Less as time goes on.”

  Thirty-five minutes later we were riding through two acres of storage lockers, looking for number 3175. Ranger found it and parked in front of it so that the SUV would shield us from view if other cars drove by. We got out, he picked the lock and unholstered his gun. The locker itself was the size of a small single-car garage. We rolled the door up and looked inside. No Grandma.

  “This would have been too easy,” Ranger said. “Now what? Do you have any other suspects?”

  “I have a long list of people who belonged to Miracle Fitness. Drop me off at my parents’ house so I can check on my mom and dad, and I’ll comb through the list one more time.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll go back to Rangeman and see what I can find.”

  My dad was in front of the television. The baseball bat was beside him, leaning against his chair. My mom was in the kitchen, staring into the refrigerator. No ironing board in sight. No Big Gulp of iced tea on the counter.

  “Hey,” I said to my mom, “how’s it going?”

  “I was just going to pull out some leftovers for dinner. Will you be eating with us?”

  “Yep. I thought I’d grab something here. Why don’t I order pizza?”

  “Pizza would be great. Your father would like that.”

  I called Morelli to see if he wanted to join us.

  “No,” he said. “I want to keep on this. Shine and Salgusta are holed up somewhere. I know something is going down with them. We’re looking for their cars, and we’re talking to relatives and neighbors.”

  “What about Benny?”

  “He’s in St. Francis. Looking at getting a stent tomorrow. I think he’s already got a bunch of them.”

  There’s my weak link, I thought. I hung up with Morelli and called Pino’s. Twenty minutes later we got pizza delivery. One large pie with extra cheese, one large pie with the works, one small pie with the works.

  “I’m taking the small pizza to a friend,” I told my mom. “You and Dad go ahead and eat without me. I’ll eat when I get back. I won’t be long.”