Momma Lupe, Book 1 in the Ty Connell 'Novella Series. A Mystery/Suspense Thriller. Cooking or killing -- Momma Had Her Funny WAys (8 page)

Then
she’d blow.

"My bet is that ten seconds after we're out
the door and down the steps she'll start in, ripping strips off to
those two sons. It'll be as good as a confession, and we'll catch
it all on tape from the van. Then we go back in with the
warrants."

The plan was approved.

If they brought in all three to the station
together, they felt certain that they could get one of the sons to
turn, to crack and spill. They weren't bright enough to withstand a
withering and prolonged Q and A session without getting tripped up
by their own lies.

So, that evening at six, Connell and Morgan
donned their Kevlar under their sports jackets and —backed by a
heavily-armed SWAT unit— they mounted the steps to Momma Lupe's
front door.

At the door, Connell paused and glanced back,
down the street. The police van was in place, the mike aimed at the
big window. To the left, just around the corner, one SWAT team was
in place and only steps away, hunkered low against the side of the
house. To his right, other SWAT guys were grouped behind the hedge
at the other side of the house.

Connell knocked on the door. And they
waited.

But no answer.

So he knocked louder.

They waited again.

Still no answer.

There were also no sounds of stirring from
inside. Just dead quiet.

John leaned over and peaked in the front
window next to the small porch. There were heavy shears drawn
across, but he could see vague shapes inside, just furniture and
doorways.

"No lights on," he said, cupping his hands to
the glass. "Aw, jeez, I don't think they's home."

They knocked several more times, still no
response.

"Aw, man. What now?" John said, disappointed.
"We sit it out here and wait for them?”

Connell deliberated briefly.

“No,” he said. “We’ve got a warrant. Let’s go
in and see what we find inside. We can wait in there. "

He signaled to one of the SWAT guys nearby
who moved up the porch stairs.

“Can you pop this door without breaking in
it?” he asked.

The man checked the door over quickly.

“No. There’s three slide bolts,” he said, and
pointed out the locks. One high, one middle, one low. “We’ll have
to bust it down.”

Connell deliberated for another moment.

“You know what? You guys go around back,” he
said. “Bust in through a window or kick in a door if you have to.
Anywhere where Momma can’t see it on their way back.”

The man returned to his unit and they went
around the house.

Shortly, Connell heard movement inside and
the deadbolts sliding across. They and the other SWAT unit moved
inside.

They fanned out quickly through the rooms of
the small place but found no sign of Momma or of the sons.

But there
were
signs of hurried
packing: empty closets, drawers empty and left open, bathroom
toiletries cleared out, and Connell got a sinking
feeling.

John called to him from the kitchen.

"Uh, Ty, better come have a look."

Connell walked in, and on
the kitchen table was a two-inch thick black leather bound
book:
A Digest of the Criminal Code of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
. It was
sitting, like a paperweight, on the corner of a note.

Connell glanced at the
setup.
Ma's perverse touch?

The note was hand-printed in pink day-glo
marker. It read: "Please water the plants and feed the cat. Gone
fishing. I. Lupanier."

At that moment, a cat wandered up from the
basement and made a small meow at the door.

Momma, it
seemed, had simply walked away from her operation and had left with
the
two sons to who-knows-where.

Maybe, Connell thought, with Ma no longer in
town, Emily Dumont would be willing to tell a court what she knew.
What they also really was a witness to one or more of the murders.
Emily might also be of some help there.

The next day he and John called on Miss
Dumont’s apartment, to advise her that they had recovered her
sister’s body, but that proceedings against Ma would not be going
forward until they could pull together more evidence. Maybe she’d
be willing to go to a secure refuge center for women while things
moved forward. She’d be safe there. She could maybe start a detox
from the junk.

But there was no answer.

They knocked repeatedly, but after five
minutes it was clear that Emily Dumont wasn't home.

They called the
Crazy Horse
to see if
she’d been there. They said she’d been sent home three days ago and
had no idea.

Had she gone back to Quebec? Gone to stay
with a friend?

Connell turned once again to Paul Geddes. If
he didn't know where she was, he could find out.

So Connell and Morgan drove once again to the
donut shop.

But this time Geddes wasn't there either.

Connell had no idea where Geddes lived
because he had never had need to track him to his residence before.
But now he had to do so, so he called in Geddes' name over the SDR
band and he got back an address in Chelsea, the town just north of
the city across the Chelsea River. A neighborhood of with low rent
rooming houses and welfare apartments.

There was also the little matter of owing
Paul the final forty-six hundred dollar payment. Connell was always
good on his word to informants —how he kept their trust and
co-operation— and he knew that Geddes would forgive him tracking
him to his door when he handed over the little canvas bag.

His apartment was in a dreary, foul smelling
and rundown city owned tenement, but Geddes didn't answer the
door.

They knocked several times, but he, too, was
not home.

Was he out chasing a fix? Was he inside?
High, holed up, and not answering? Had he overdosed and was lying
dead or in a coma?

They decided to round up the super and have a
look.

Once inside, the first thing that hit them
was the stench. Rotting food. Geddes hadn't picked up a beer can or
a pizza crust in months and the place reeked of old food bits
scattered in all corners and all around the floor.

They made their way through a garbage
strewn living room and down a short hallway to the apartment's
single bedroom. Connell was braced for the worst: finding Geddes’
stinking carcass on filthy old bed sheets.

But Geddes wasn't there either. The bedroom
was also a garbage dump, with just enough space pushed aside on the
saggy old mattress for a person to lie down.

Still no Paul.

Then they went into the small kitchen: more
beer cans and pizza boxes, mixed in with other discarded bits of
molding food.

There was a small table in one corner, mostly
covered with dirty plates and fried chicken boxes. But the garbage
had been pushed aside so that one corner of the table was
clear.

On the corner was a note.

When Connell read it, it
gave him a chill: "Gone fishing with Ma.
Paul
."

It was hand-printed in pink day-glo marker.
In the same scratchy hand style as the note at Momma’s.

Isabelle
Lupanier, a.k.a. Momma Lupe, disappeared permanently from the New
England
area.

Emily Dumont and Paul Geddes also were never
heard from again.

State Police divers re-searched the spot
where they had found the original crates, but found nothing more.
They also began a scan of the entire lake. The Reservoir Lake is a
big lake, second biggest in the state, also inter-connected to a
series of smaller lakes and rivers around it. They kept the sonar
going for a week, but found no more crates.

For lack of hard evidence
—other than the hearsay statement of Emily Dumont— Momma Lupe was
never officially charged with murder and could not be compelled to
return to Massachusetts even if she
were
found. That seemed to be an end
to it. No charges ever brought against her.

But it wasn’t the end for Connell.

He kept making occasional calls and,
several years later, he heard rumors that someone sounding a lot
like Momma had surfaced in New Orleans. On the stripper/hooker
scene. Recruiting girls from small backwoods towns across
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Mississippi to work in mobbed-up strip
clubs along the Gulf states.

Connell made calls to the New Orleans PD and
to the FBI Regional Office there to see if anyone could verify the
rumors. But no one down there had even heard of any Momma Lupe. Or
of any Isabel Lupanier. Or about anything unusual from strip clubs
around the Gulf states. Women came and went from these places
almost daily. Who could track it?

Then, on a nagging hunch, Connell did a
nation-wide search of Isabel Lupanier, to see if there might be
relatives somewhere with whom she might have had contact.

But no Isabel Lupaniers popped up.

That was strange.

The no Lupaniers at all showed up.

That was
really
strange.

How was it possible that
there were
no
Isabel Lupaniers, and even
no
Lupaniers at all in all of America?

Connell then broadened his search to
Canada.

Again,
no
Isabel Lupaniers. And
no
Lupaniers at
all.

In frustration, and as a
last resort, he worked through an associate at INTERPOL in DC. A
man he’d gone to college with. He asked the man to do a world-wide
search for
any
Lupanier
any
where.

The man did.

There was
no
one named Isabel
Lupanier on planet earth, he said. There wasn’t even another
Lupanier.

“There are
no
Lupaniers anywhere,”
the man said. “It’s a made up name.”

Connell set the phone and could only shake
his head once more at the most evil and cunning woman he’d never
meet.

“Officially she never
existed,” he said to himself. “Still doesn’t.
Amazing
.”

He still makes calls. Still hasn’t given
up.