Death, Taxes, and a Chocolate Cannoli (A Tara Holloway Novel) (7 page)

My boss and I escorted the men back to the elevator bank and pushed the down-arrow button for them.

As the car arrived, Jeb reached out and took Lu’s hand, raising it to his lips for a kiss. “I’ll be looking forward to seeing you again, Miss Luella.”

He gave me only a “Good-bye,” no hand kiss.

“I’ll be in touch as soon as I know something,” I told the men.

When the doors slid closed, Lu turned to me and sighed. “Harold’s white bucks remind me of Carl.”

Carl was a man Lu had met a few months ago via an online dating service. He not only wore outdated leisure suits and shiny white patent leather bucks, but he sported the world’s worst comb-over, which lay in an intricate basket-weave pattern across his scalp. But what he lacked in fashion sense he more than made up for in personality. He’d been sweet and doting, catering to Lu’s every whim. But when he’d begun to talk marriage, it scared Lu off and she’d broken up with him. Looked like maybe she was regretting her decision to call it quits.

“You miss Carl?” I asked.

“Horribly,” she admitted. “But I heard he’s dating some young floozy now. She’s only fifty-eight. That’s practically robbing the cradle!”

“Have you told him how you feel?”

“No. I’ve got too much pride to go crawling back to him.”

“There’s no shame in admitting you made a mistake, Lu.”

She sighed. “Maybe not. But if he’s happier with the floozy and didn’t take me back, I…” She paused as if collecting both her thoughts and her emotions. “I just don’t think I could handle it.”

“Come on.” I waved a dismissive hand. “You’re Lu Lobozinski. The Lobo. You can handle anything.” After all, the woman had run herd over a dozen or more federal agents for years now and overseen the collection of hundreds of millions of tax dollars. She’d also battled lung cancer and won. And not just anyone could pull off a pink beehive. A minor setback in the romance department couldn’t derail her, could it? I told her as much.

She sighed again. “Tax collection is a cinch compared to matters of the heart.” With that, Lu turned and headed back to her office.

As I watched her walk off, I realized I had three missions now. One, take Tino Fabrizio and his violent empire down. Two, do what I could to track down the scammer who’d ripped off the residents of Whispering Pines. And three, reunite Lu and Carl.

chapter eight

T
eam Tara

I spent the rest of the morning snooping on my computer for information about Tino Fabrizio and Cyber-Shield.

According to the IRS records, Cyber-Shield Security Systems, Inc., had brought in a little over two million in gross billings last year. Tino had been paid $200,000 in salary. Respectable, but not excessive given that he owned the business and oversaw its operations. A look at the W-2 filings told me that twenty-two men, presumably salesmen, installers, and security patrolmen, had been paid amounts ranging from forty to seventy grand each. The only woman on his payroll earned a relatively modest $35,000. My assumption was she worked as Tino’s administrative assistant. I wondered if she also handled his bookkeeping, and if she did, whether she was involved in laundering money for him. Eric Echols, the tech expert Agent Hohenwald had referenced, had earned a cool $150K.

I spent some time looking further into each of Cyber-Shield’s employees, snooping online to determine whether any of them owned unusually expensive cars, boats, or homes relative to the income they’d reported on their individual returns. When people lived beyond their visible means, it often meant they had received unreported cash income. If one of Tino’s staff owned assets that were out of line with his reported earnings, it could mean Tino was paying the employee cash under the table to coerce and threaten his clients, or maybe splitting the protection payments the employee collected on Tino’s behalf. If I could find such telltale information, it would help us to know which Cyber-Shield employee we should focus our surveillance on.

A preliminary search indicated that one of Tino’s installers owned a suspiciously pricey home in the Lake Highlands area. A little further digging revealed that he’d inherited the place from his deceased grandmother, and that he owned only a one-third share, with his two siblings owning equivalent shares. No other immediate red flags caught my eye. Either the men doing Tino’s dirty work weren’t officially on his payroll, or they weren’t spending their dirty money conspicuously. Perhaps they were using the cash to pay for everyday things like groceries and clothing and entertainment, or maybe they were stockpiling it, saving it up for something special.

I turned my attention back to Cyber-Shield’s return. After salaries, much of the company’s remaining income was paid out for auto maintenance, utilities, supplies, and other standard office expenses, leaving a small net corporate income. Nothing about the return raised any immediate questions in my mind.

I took a second look at the restaurant’s tax returns next, willing the numbers to talk to me. Alas, they were silent. Did the return include only the restaurant’s earnings? Or was Tino’s dirty money being funneled through the bistro? I hoped to figure things out soon so we could quickly nail the guy.
Nail. Ugh.
There was that word again. The thought of that nail-gun incident had me cringing with phantom pain.

I took a look at the Fabrizios’ personal tax returns, too. Interestingly, Benedetta and Tino filed separate tax returns. Because spouses filing separate returns were denied a multitude of tax benefits, most married couples filed a joint return. Those who didn’t were generally couples who were having marital problems or who’d married later in life and kept their finances separate. On occasion, a taxpayer who suspected his or her spouse of financial shenanigans would file a separate return so as not to be implicated in any tax fraud that might be committed by the spouse.

Did the separate returns in this case mean that Benedetta suspected Tino was up to no good? Or had Tino insisted on separate returns to distance himself from his wife and her bistro so that there’d be one less connection between him and laundered funds?

Of course some couples could benefit from separate returns because splitting their income would allow them to avoid the so-called marriage penalty that applied at the higher income levels. Perhaps their reason for filing separate returns was as simple and benign as that.

I stared at the information on my screen. “If only you numbers could talk.”

I looked over both of the personal returns. Other than the fact that the two had filed separately, nothing seemed out of the ordinary or raised any immediate suspicions. Perhaps Tino Fabrizio had properly reported all of his income, even the dirty funds generated through threats and shakedowns. Still, I had my doubts. People who were shady in one area were often shady in another. And if he had reported the extorted funds, he hadn’t identified them as such. There was no entry on the “other income” line of his tax return identifying “extortion earnings.”

Though my role in this joint investigation was to search for evidence of Tino’s financial crimes rather than his violent ones, the two were inextricably linked. I decided to do a little more digging into Eric Echols. If someone had truly doctored the video footage recorded at the bar owned by Alex Harris and his wife, it could have been Echols. While Tino himself might have the tech skills to tamper with the video, I suspected he had someone else do his technical dirty work just as he had someone else do his physical dirty work, at least where his clients were concerned. That way he could maintain plausible deniability if law enforcement came sniffing around.

I logged into the Texas DMV site and pulled up Echols’s driver’s license. According to the data, Echols was twenty-six years old. Given that four years of W-2s had been filed by Cyber-Shield, reporting wages paid to Echols, Tino must have hired him right out of college. The address on the license told me Echols lived in an apartment a few miles north of Cyber-Shield.

I clicked the mouse to enlarge his photo. Staring back at me from the screen was the king of all nerds. Echols had messy hair in a bland color akin to Parmesan cheese. He could really use a trim. His skin was pale, too, his eyes were bulbous and buggy, and his chin was so weak it appeared as if his mouth were simply part of his neck. He wore a wrinkled shirt, one side of his collar bent at an odd angle.

Though Echols appeared to be a classic computer geek, he did own that nice car. A search of the vehicle registrations confirmed that the ’65 Mustang Fastback was listed in his name. Looked like the nerd had an inner bad boy.

A quick peek at his Facebook page told me he had a degree in computer science from the California Institute of Technology, one of the top-rated programs in the country. Some kind of supergeek genius, probably. It also told me he had only three friends, and one of those was his mother. An introvert, apparently. He’d posted nothing new since graduating from college. His posts before then were few and far between, and consisted solely of links to photos or articles featuring new technologies.

The smell of tomato sauce, melted cheese, and garlic preceded Nick when he came to my office a few minutes before noon with three large pizza boxes stacked in his arms. “Good news,” he said, setting the pizzas on my desk and pulling a set of keys out of his pocket. “I got the lease.”

“Great!” So far so good. Things were going according to plan.

“The previous tenant must have been a Cyber-Shield customer,” he said. “There’s a Cyber-Shield sticker on the front window and a camera mounted on the back wall.”

Damn.
Tino Fabrizio had eyes everywhere. The fact that Tino could so easily spy on us would make it harder to spy on him, but disconnecting the camera could raise his suspicions. The members of our joint task force would have to be careful not to be spotted.

“Assume the camera is still functional,” I said. “Better to play it safe.”

“We will. Luckily, the back office looked clean. I didn’t see any cameras there. Josh can operate from that space.”

“Good.”

A minute later, Josh stepped into my office.

I looked up at him. “Did you call the tech guy at the FBI?”

He nodded. “Once everyone gets here I’ll fill the team in.”

Hana Kim arrived next, bringing her usual anything-boys-can-do-girls-can-do-better attitude. A Korean-American with a stout build, Hana boasted a batting average that would not only make a minor league baseball player proud, but also made her a star on the IRS softball team, the Tax Maniacs. She could be brash and outspoken, like me, but her record of successfully resolved cases showed that she had the smarts and tenacity to get the job done, also like me.

Eddie and Will were the last of the team members to arrive. Both men were African-American, both were family men with wives and children, and both were very intelligent. Eddie was taller and thinner, though, and could on occasion be a real smartass. Will, on the other hand, tended to be more polite and professional, which meant he was a little less fun though every bit as capable.

Nick rolled his desk chair across the hall from his office, while the rest of the group gathered in the chairs we’d rounded up earlier for the gang from Whispering Pines. We ate pizza straight from the box, drank sodas straight from the can, and discussed tactics.

After filling them in on Tino’s violent background, both in Chicago and Dallas, I looked around the group. “Although it’s clear Tino sometimes hires outside help, the FBI has speculated that the security firm’s patrolmen might have committed some of the crimes against Cyber-Shield’s clients.”

I told the group that if the discussion Hohenwald and I had with Alex Harris was any indication, Tino’s typical tactic was to first send a salesmen to the targeted client to recommend they sign on for additional services …
or else.

“If what happed with Harris is Tino’s standard MO, then the salesmen are the ones who make the threats and demand the protection payments. Since Harris refused to pay and none of the other victims were willing to rat out Tino to the police, we can only speculate how much Tino’s bringing in and how the payments are collected. But my guess is that the salesmen or patrolmen collect the protection money. We need to keep a close eye on Tino, but we’ll also need to focus surveillance efforts on both the patrol units and the salesmen. Any of them could be shuttling cash for Fabrizio.”

My eyes scanned the group, each of whom nodded or raised a chin to indicate understanding.

“If a salesman visits a business or person who isn’t yet a Cyber-Shield client,” I pointed out, “chances are the salesman is just trying to get them to sign up for a standard security package. But if the salesman goes to a business or individual who is already a client, he might be trying to extort money from them or collecting protection payments.”

Of course it was also possible that the salesman could simply be checking up on things, making a courtesy call to promote goodwill.

I told them about the tax filings for the Fabrizios and Cyber-Shield. “The couple’s personal income tax return and security company’s earnings didn’t seem out of line, so it looks like the extorted funds aren’t being reported on either of those returns.”

Eddie cocked his head. “So this is an evasion case? Failure to report?”

“Possibly,” I said. “But the bistro’s tax returns reported at least twice what a successful restaurant its size could be expected to earn. I suspect that Tino might be laundering the extorted funds through the bistro.”

Of course Benedetta Fabrizio might have earned her pennies with her penne, but the only way to find out for sure was to get inside.

“I’ll apply for the job at Benedetta Fabrizio’s restaurant,” I continued. “If I don’t get it, Hana can try.” Hana was in her late twenties, like me, but could likewise pass herself off as an older college student looking for a part-time gig. “Eddie and Will can coordinate with the FBI surveillance team to follow the installers, salesmen, and patrol cars. Depending on whether Hana or I get the job at the bistro, we can help with surveillance, too. Josh and Nick will operate from the gallery space. Nick will keep an eye on Tino and his men, and can let the others on the task force know when they see Cyber-Shield’s cars leaving the office.”