Ginny Aiken - Mistaken for the Mob

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “…plans to give you hope and a future…and [I] will bring you back from captivity.”

—Jeremiah 29:11, 14

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Mary Margaret Muldoon was terminated.

As were Helmut Rheinemann, Toby Matthias and Muriel Harper. J.Z. Prophet held the death certificates of the well-to-do seniors in his left hand. On a neat pile before him sat autopsy reports that identified the cause of death as natural in all four cases. But the papers in his right hand belied those certificates.

“E-mail,” he muttered to his partner, Dan Maddox. “What self-respecting mobster orders hits through e-mail? But here they are: Terminate Mary Margaret Muldoon, and Terminate Helmut Rheinemann.”

J.Z. could have read the others, too. But why? They said the same thing. And the same woman had sent them all: Maryanne Wellborn.

He flung the pages onto his desk and rose from his chair. He went for his coffeepot, which he’d brought to the office when he got tired of FBI sludge, and poured himself his fourth cup of the morning. It was only seven o’clock.

After another hit of caffeine, he asked, “What kind of librarian would order a bunch of hits?”

Dan, an easygoing guy, shifted in his chair and shrugged. “Hey, it’s a great cover—if they were hits.”

“Okay. It is. But I want to know how she’s offing them. Pathology found no evidence of foul play. The causes of death are listed as asphyxiation from emphysema, congestive heart failure, liver cancer and pneumonia. We might be able to pin the asphyxiation on her, but how’d she kill the others?”

“I think it’s our job to find that out.”

“It’s our job to get the evidence that’ll lock her up.”

“Hmm…a librarian. Maryanne Wellborn, you say?”

“She’s behind these hits.”

“Sure of yourself, aren’t you? And letting it get personal.”

The accusation slugged J.Z. in the gut. “Not at all. This is business. The other’s past history.” He set his coffee mug on the corner of his desk, then jabbed a finger toward Dan. “Don’t forget. You were right at my side the last six months. You helped me track the Verdis and their mob pals as they scammed their way through these ritzy retirement homes. You counted the bodies they left behind, just as I did, and looked just as hard as I did for something to stick on them—”

“Something stuck. Joey-O’s behind bars.”

“Not for this. He shot Carlo Papparelli. Aside from those shaky connections to Joey-O and Tony the Toe Verdi—scum, if ever there was scum—we didn’t come up with a single solid thing to nail the deaths of the old people on them. But I know their game. And this perp in New Camden is just the latest in the string of killers we’ve been after. The only difference is that this one made a mistake. She left us these e-mails. How generous of her.”

His partner’s hands went up in surrender. “Okay, okay. Lay off the lecture. It was just a friendly warning I gave you. Can’t let your old man’s troubles mess with your mind on a case. My future’s in your hands.”

J.Z. snorted. “Last time I looked, there was a line of ladies wanting to take it in theirs.”

Dan winked. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

“This man’s—” J.Z. tapped Dan’s chest then glanced at the papers on the desk “—got a job to do. He can’t be thinking about his next date, and do it right.”

“You complaining about my work?”

“Warning you against dropping your guard.”

“That’s uncalled for,” Dan countered, his voice tight.

“Just put your social life on ice while we’re on this one.” J.Z. knew he was out of line but couldn’t back down. Dan’s reminder of the skeletons in the Prophet family closet rankled. “It’s clear Wellborn’s got brains and more guts than most. Takes a cocky crook to send this kind of message out for the world to read.”

“Weeeell…,” Dan drawled, “e-mail’s not exactly out there for everyone to read.”

“We got copies, didn’t we?”

“Sure, but it took Zelda—computer geek extraordinaire—days to track them down. It’s not as if Wellborn posted them to a bulletin board or announced them in a chat room.”

J.Z. rolled his eyes. “Don’t give me that Internet junk. If we can get the stuff, anyone can. Maryanne-the-library-anne is one arrogant cookie. It’s time to wrap up months of paper trails, bank-and account-hopping fortunes that then disappear without a trace, if you’ll remember. We did interviews, surveillance and pored over autopsy reports that coughed up nothing concrete. We even planted an agent at the nursing home in New Jersey. The pattern’s the same at Peaceful Meadows—cushy retirement home, dead seniors, buckets of money. Wellborn’s in the thick of it, ordering hits, and I’m going to bring her down.”

Paperwork in hand, he stood. “Come on. We have to get a judge to sign the permits so we can bug her office and tap her home phone. Then we can head out to New Camden.”

“I’ll have Zelda come with us—you know, for the computer stuff. We’ll probably get more from that than the other.”

J.Z. grimaced. “That Internet stuff is garbage. This is going to take the usual: surveillance, taping, interviewing witnesses. Not that e-mail business.”

“Still an Internet-phobe, huh?”

“And proud of it.”

“Have it your way, but I want Zelda’s magic fingers on our side. From the looks of it, we’re going to need all the help and evidence we can get.”

J.Z. crossed to his office door. “Do whatever you want. Bottom line, I’m going to nail Wellborn. Who’d figure a librarian as a mobster, putting out hits on old people in a nursing home? And for money…As if her breed—mobsters, not librarians—doesn’t have enough of the bloody kind already. Organized crime’s the worst form of scum, but this woman’s taken their usual a notch lower.”

Dan’s arm lay heavy on J.Z.’s shoulders. “Don’t let it get personal, okay? I know this is about the Verdis, but the past is past, and your old man’s locked up. He’s going nowhere.”

J.Z. shrugged off his partner’s arm and ground his teeth. “That was uncalled for. I wasn’t thinking of him. Wellborn’s the one who’s out there. In New Camden. With a bunch of seniors who can’t help themselves. Just like the ones who couldn’t help themselves and wound up dead. You know it, I know it, the department knows it. Disgusting scam.”

“Let’s go see what we can do.”

They strode down the hall and into a large room full of cluttered metal desks, the hub of the FBI’s Philadelphia organized-crime unit. On their way to the elevator, an unmistakable pair of high heels clicked toward them.

“Special Agent Prophet. In my office. Now.”

J.Z. groaned. Once upon a time, Eliza Roberts had voiced his name in sweet, loving tones. Not anymore. He’d never felt the truth of the old chestnut about women scorned until he broke up with her after she demanded more than he was ready to offer.

He shook his head and caught the glee in Dan’s brown eyes as he entered his superior officer’s cubicle. Eliza had clawed her way up to the position he turned down just before their breakup. The way he figured, she did it to spite him. But it didn’t bother him. He had turned it down first. Pushing papers appealed to him as much as a case of Montezuma’s revenge during a worldwide Imodium shortage.

When Eliza closed her office door, J.Z. gave up hope of a neutral encounter. She was out for bear. He might as well have Smokey, Yogi or Boo-boo written across his chest.

He couldn’t wait to get away. “What’s up?”

Eliza rounded her desk then sat in her expensive and very new leather chair. The Bureau didn’t provide that kind of luxury. She must have bought it to make it look as if she’d wormed the perk from the higher-ups. J.Z. was glad he’d noticed her less appealing attributes and cleared out of their relationship before he wound up with heel marks down his back—and heart.

“Well?” he prodded.

She handed him three pieces of paper. “Another nursing home hit.”

Great. As he scanned the pages, a familiar name jumped out. “Carlo Papparelli? As in Laundromat Jr.? Mat, the mob moneyman?”

“The one and only.”

“No way. The Gemmellis had him gunned down a week ago. The Philly P.D. got Joey-O behind bars for it, too. Didn’t they?”

“Read ’em and weep.”

He did—read the papers, that is—he’d never waste a tear on a mobster. “I don’t get it. I heard the family’d shipped the body back to the old country for burial.”

“Read on.”

He did. And frowned. “What is this? Papparelli was only fifty or so. What was he doing in an old folks’ home? Oh, who cares? What really went down?”

“That, J.Z., is the most intriguing detail.” She pointed to the paper in his left hand. “There’s Maryanne Wellborn’s e-mail ordering the hit. In your right hand, you have his death certificate—but not for a week ago. He died day before yesterday. And the cause of death is a stroke, not the bullets we know about. No autopsy. The family refused.”

“This clinches it. She’s as dirty as they come. She’s mixed up with either the Gemmellis or the Verdis and took out the Laundromat. But how’d Mat slither into the nursing home when he was supposed to be dead? How can this librarian get away with all this? Does she have doctors on the take? Is the coroner in on the kill-the-rich-old-folks-for-their-bucks scam, too?”

Eliza smirked. “Don’t you think finding those answers is a field agent’s job? Your much-loved field job. You know…what you’re paid to do.”

Something in her voice made him ask, “Do you doubt I can do it?”

She waved. “Of course not—ordinarily.”

“Ordinarily?” His stomach plummeted. “What do you mean?”

The back of J.Z.’s neck prickled at the gleam in her blue eyes. When she pursed her lips and tapped her polished nails on the desktop, his gut churned. When she stood and leaned toward him over her desk, his survival instinct compelled him to run.

But he couldn’t.

“There is one tiny thing, J.Z.,” his Supervising Special Agent said. “You know that problem you have with rules?”

Since he’d yet to meet the rule he wouldn’t get around for the sake of justice, J.Z. shrugged. He always got the job done. Nothing else mattered.

“Well,” Eliza went on, “we’re going to do things my way this time. This case will be investigated by the book. You got that?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That since you recently went off like a half-cocked shotgun—again—and this case involves your preferred target—the mob—I will yank your badge and gun if you pull one of your stunts on my watch.”

“Come again?”

Her eyes narrowed and her lips thinned. “I mean it, J.Z. You’re off the case if you cross the line. And if you’re half as smart as you like to think, you’ll believe me. I have the power now.”

Blood roared in his ears. She’d known just how to hit him.

How could he ever have found her attractive? These days, he only saw the spite in her glare; he only heard the gloating in her voice.