The online FBI files identified Donald Romano as an old-line organized crime stalwart about a decade past his use-by date.
“He’s been hanging around forever, never important enough to get shot. He did a couple of short pieces in New Jersey for loan sharking and related assaults. Pretty amazing, when you think about it,” Weaver said, dragging his finger down the computer screen as he read the files; his finger left a trail like a garden slug’s. “They don’t allow payday loan shops in Jersey, so if they didn’t have loan sharks, you probably couldn’t get a loan... and he had a couple of small garbage- and trash-hauling companies thatsupposedly were connected to one of the New York Mafia families, but that was years ago. Decades, actually.”
“Nothing about drugs?”
“No, but loan sharks aren’t usually fussy about where their money comes from,” Weaver said. “Maybe he saw an opening—or maybe he’s the South Florida manager for one of the New York distribution systems. He’s got to have a significant distribution system if there’s as much heroin coming in as we think.”
“Why didn’t your Mafia guys know about him?” Lucas asked.
Weaver shook his head. “Don’t know. I’ve never heard of him myself, and I thought I’d at least heard about most Mafia groups. Listen, I need to think about this overnight and I need to talk to the OC guy down at the Angelus. He’ll know stuff about Romano that’s not in the files. I’m going to call all my people tonight and at the morning meeting, we won’t say anything—we’ll just send the non-FBI people on their way and then have another meet here in my room.”
“Worried about a leak?”
“No... but I want to talk about this only with people I’ve got a solid grip on. No Coast Guard, no local cops. FBI only. And you marshals.”
The general meetingwent as usual the next morning. There’d been no finds with the few dive boats out on the Atlantic and the agent at the Angelus Hotel was still compiling faces. His girlfriend, Weaver said, had picked up a jewelry shoot forTown & Countrymagazine and was pleased with the FBI.
“We’ve got two more dive-boat volunteers, but one will probably drop out,” Taylor, the Coast Guard cop, reported.
All but two of the hairdressers had been tracked down and interviewed, and three had agreed to look at photo boards. One of the agents said, “They won’t see anything. That woman that Lucas interviewed, Alicia Snow, called a couple of the girls to tell them that we’d be coming to see them. Those girls called around and they managed to scare the crap out of each other. Mafia shooters coming through their windows at midnight with silencers, that kind of movie.”
“What about the girl who disappeared?” Lucas asked. “Patty Pittman?”
“She has disappeared and I believe she’s probably dead,” the agent said. He nodded at Weaver. “Dale’s got the full report. We didn’t get back from Islamorada until after midnight last night, I gave it to him this morning. We talked to Pittman’s mother, who doesn’t want to believe it, but... she’s dead. Pittman had four credit cards, none are being used. Her telephone is gone. There’s money in her bank accounts, it’s still there. Here’s the thing—she talked to her mother about the guys on the Mako. She wondered if they might have been the ones who did the shooting. She was wondering if she should call the police. She didn’t, as far as her mother knows, but she disappeared within a couple of days of the two of them talking about the shootings.”
“She could have identified the guys,” Lucas said. “Then she did something stupid, like talk to one of them about it and they killed her.”
“That’s what I believe,” the agent said. “Maybe she was involved with one of the guys, couldn’t believe he could really do something like that, the murders, so she talked to him... and, she’s a naïve twenty-year-old hairdresser and he’s a fucking animal.”
“She was a pretty girl,” another agent said, and several of the agents nodded.
The agents agreed that they’d be taking around iPads with photo displays to show to the women who’d agreed to look at the mug shots, and they’d be looking for the last two. The two were not missing, they’d simply moved to different parts of Florida, out of reach on a day’s notice.
When the meetingended, the two non-FBI members went on their way. A half hour later, the FBI agents, with Lucas and Bob, met in Weaver’s room, dragging chairs around and sitting on his bed.
There was one new face, Jason Tennan, the agent working at the Angelus Hotel. He was a tall man with curly brown hair, freckles over a short pug nose, square jaw, tall and thin with bony shoulders. He was wearing a white shirt and a black bolo tie with a silver-and-turquoise slide.
“I don’t want anyone to think that there’s anything... wrong... with the other team members,” Weaver said to the group. “But they won’t be involved with the next issue we’ll be dealing with, and, well, I’m more comfortable with an all-FBI meeting. Plus the marshals.”
He turned to Lucas and said, “Tell them. I haven’t.”
“We’ve got a name,” Lucas said.
That created a stir, and Weaver opened a file and took out a photograph, and handed it to Tennan. Tennan looked at it and said, “Yeah, I know him, Don Romano. He used to live in Perth Amboy, but he moved out when the Hispanics got too thick in there. He’s been down here in Florida for quite a while—years—but his nameis still on some business licenses up in Jersey and on Staten Island. He’s never been one of the big dogs, but he’s always been around. Maybe he’s still around because he was never one of the big dogs. He’s old, by the way. Must be in his late seventies by now. Might be eighty.”
“Exactly what kind of asshole are we dealing with?” Bob asked.
“Routine asshole,” Tennan said. “He did loan sharking for years, had a couple of leg-breakers on staff. He worked through bartenders in northern Jersey, and across the water on Staten Island. He owned a couple of dry cleaners in Jersey, probably as money laundries.”
“How about drugs?” Lucas asked.
Tennan scratched his neck, then said, “Don was always sort of a smart guy. He stayed away from the high-profile stuff. I doubt he had any kind of moral problem with drugs, he just didn’t want the attention from the DEA and the local cops. But there’s one thing...”
Bob: “Like what?”
“Guns. There’s a rumor, only a rumor, that if you know the right guys, you can buy a decent handgun and they’re coming out of Romano’s loan-sharking operation. You know, a bartender is maybe the connection between a guy who needs a loan and one of Romano’s loan managers. The same system can get you a gun.”
Weaver asked, “Is there money in that? Guns?”
