Chapter Twenty-Nine
Special Agent Luis Rivera
I don’t need to be at this California anti-trafficking task force meeting.
I do enough of this kind of community-building stuff back in New York.
But, since surveillance warrants are somewhat hard to come by without some evidence of wrongdoing, I had to think outside the box a little.
When I told my L.A. counterpart what was up, she greased the wheels and here I am.
I go through the whole song and dance. “Hi there, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Special Agent Lou Rivera with the FBI’s Manhattan Field Office…
” Blah, blah, blah. I give a pretty basic overview of the intersection of organized crime and human trafficking, take some questions, and hand it off to the do-gooder nonprofit lady who seems to be in charge of this thing.
The real reason I’m here is seated at one of the tables, laptop open, occasionally taking notes but mostly listening.
I’m surprised at the sharp look about her.
She meets the McDaniels kid’s description to a tee—silver hair with purple streaks, blue eyes that are a damn good lens job if I’ve ever seen one, and a tall drink of water like her pops.
After two excruciating hours of reports, brainstorming, and God only knows what else, the meeting comes to an end. Angelina starts to head out with a pretty young Latina sister in a shapeless suit, but I intercept them.
“You mind if I borrow your colleague there for a minute, ma’am?” I ask Angelina’s friend.
The friend looks surprised but unconcerned. “Sure. No problem. I’ll wait next door at the coffee shop, Angela.”
“We won’t be long,” I promise her.
Angelina is looking at me without any kind of expression, like getting pulled aside by an FBI agent happens to her every day. I wonder if she’s been groomed for this kind of thing. Usually the girls just learn to be loyal and keep their mouths shut, but who knows? Times are changing, you know?
The meeting had been held at a family justice center facility, where police and social workers work together and take care of victims needing assistance and sing kumbaya.
They happily open a sparse but nonintimidating interview room for me, a place where victims probably meet with their caseworkers.
“Have a seat, Ms. Pini,” I say after closing the door behind us.
Angelina freezes and stares at me. “What?”
“Angelina Pini,” I say. “That’s your name, isn’t it?” I gesture for her to sit in one of the overstuffed chairs, but she doesn’t move toward it.
“What is this about?” she says, and I instantly recognize the signs of fear—thickened voice, wide eyes, loss of color.
“I’m here to ask for your help, ma’am,” I say, taking a seat.
She stares at me, seeming paralyzed. “Are you really FBI?”
“I’m going to hand you my badge, okay? You can take a look.
” I reach inside my jacket pocket and see her flinch.
Yep, this is definitely a girl used to being around weapons.
I slowly pull out my badge and slide it across the table.
She picks it up, never taking her eyes off me.
Then she peruses it like it holds the answers to the mysteries of the universe.
“I’m just curious,” I say when she hands it back to me. “If I wasn’t FBI, who exactly would I be?”
She sits down across from me. “Someone my family sent,” she says. “For all I know, my dad has plenty of you people on his payroll.”
Ah, okay. Now it makes sense.
“I don’t have a thing to do with your family other than working my ass off to put your pops away where he belongs,” I say.
She shakes her head. I note that her fingers tighten on the arms of the chair, her knuckles turning white. “I can’t.”
“You can’t what? I haven’t even made a request yet. How do you know?”
“I can’t help you put him away.”
“Daddy’s little girl, huh?”
“Not even close, no,” she says flatly. I had expected a flare of temper or something, but this one is a cool little cucumber, her fear and white knuckles notwithstanding.
“Then what’s the issue?”
“I value my life,” she says, a sarcastic edge to her voice. “I assume, Agent Rivera, that you know what my family does to snitches.”
“Well, if it came to that, my friends over at the U.S. Marshals Service run a nice little program commonly known as witness protection.”
“Not happening. No way.” She stands up, trying to take control of a situation that she now knows is way over her head. “I can’t even have this conversation with you.”
“Angelina,” I say.
“It’s Angela now.” She picks up her tote bag and starts to leave.
“Why are you here at this thing, doing this work, Angela?”
She pauses on her way out and turns back to look at me. “You probably know why.”
“I know about your father’s business. I know his sidekicks run it for him so your pops can focus on keeping the other associates in line. You doing this out of guilt?”
“Guilt?” she says, and the door clicks shut again as she leans against it and glares at me. “Guilt would imply I’ve done something wrong. No, Agent Rivera, I don’t feel guilt. I feel this other thing called responsibility. My family has a debt to pay to society, and this is my small contribution.”
That’s interesting. She’s an interesting girl. I hadn’t really expected that. I had also not expected her to tell the truth, but the only lie I see in her eyes is their fake color. Okay, so daddy’s little girl is a goody-two-shoes. I can work with that. “You can make it a bigger contribution.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know anything. I can’t help you.”
“Now that I know isn’t true.”
“I’m his daughter. He didn’t tell me anything. Like you said, he’s got his sidekicks. They’re the ones he trusts—”
“Club Tesoro and The Gilded Cage.” They’re the names of the “strip clubs” her father owns that are actually fronts for the prostitution of trafficked women. The strip clubs she tipped us off about.
She pales again. I indicate the chair she recently vacated. This time, she sits down.
“You were smart to use a burner phone,” I say. “I couldn’t trace it to you. But we used voice recognition.”
“And how exactly do you legally have my voice on tape?” she says, her eyes and voice ice cold.
“Routine surveillance on your parents’ house. Perfectly legal. Don’t worry, it’ll all make sense when you get to Evidence and Constitutional Law next year.” I smile. She doesn’t.
“Does my father know where I am?” For the first time, I hear real fear in her voice.
“I sincerely doubt it. Your father, or whoever he may have hired to look for you, doesn’t have my resources. Are you afraid of him?”
She narrows her eyes and regards me like I’m an idiot. “Of course I’m afraid of him. He’s Angelo Pini.”
“He’s an asshole, but he’s not a psychopath. He wouldn’t put a hit out on his own daughter.” Actually, I’m not so sure about that, but first things first.
“There are other ways he can hurt me,” she says. “Other people he can hurt to punish me. I can’t live my life like that.”
“So you’re going to live life on the run? Look, I can bring your father down so that he can’t hurt you or anyone else. But I can’t do it without you.”
“You have his managers!” she says. “They know a lot more than I do.”
I shake my head. “If they do, they’re not talking. And I think your dad was smart about them. My gut tells me they don’t know the things that would tie him to the shadier aspects of his clubs. We can’t get to his lawyer, either. Lawyer-client privilege and all that crap.”
“It’s too risky,” she says.
Finally. An acknowledgment that she knows something. “We’ll protect you. Your safety is paramount to the Bureau.” I pause, realizing she doesn’t believe me. I try a different tack. “I have a daughter your age.”
The look of pure “Yeah, right” she gives me could make hell freeze over.
I sigh and pull a picture up on my phone.
Me with my daughter Giselle. I slide it across the table.
She leaves it there but stares at it for a long time, touching the screen once to zoom in on my neck for some reason and staring some more before zooming back out.
She sits back in her chair and crosses her arms.
“How did you find me?” she asks. Something in her tone suddenly seems off, so I tread carefully.
“Your name came up on a lead I got before you called in the tip. The name Angela Pines was too similar to Angelina Pini for me to let it go. Pini is Pines in Italian, right? Anyway, I did a little digging and there you were.”
A couple of weeks before Angelina Pini disappeared, she’d been in the Bronx with her driver, a twenty-year-old kid named Paul Centanni.
I know this only because, as a low-level Pini associate, Paulie was under surveillance.
They visited Connor Quinn, known to us as a producer of fraudulent documents for undocumented immigrants.
We’d never moved on the guy, mostly because he’s small-time and strictly not for profit.
He only helps out a few families from his church now and then, good people who clean houses and work in school cafeterias.
Also, he’s a friend of mine from back in the day.
But this time, we made a move. That’s how I found out about Angelina Pini becoming Angela Pines.
It was a little harder to figure out where she’d gone with her new name.
A few weeks later, our surveillance of the Pini house picked up the daughter leaving with a single suitcase in the middle of the night, and some furor inside the house when Ma and Pop woke up and learned she’d supposedly headed to India.
A few hours later, we received an untraceable phoned-in tip about a couple of clubs we’d been watching but hadn’t been able to tie to Angelo Pini.
No one named Angelina Pini or Angela Pines traveled abroad that day or the next.
Then I got word that a woman traveling on a California ID in the name of Angela Pines had paid cash for a same-day flight to California.
At some point we learned that Angelo Pini had paid an initial tuition deposit to Columbia Law School.
On a hunch, I checked out California law schools, and the rest of the “where” pieces kind of just fell into place.
I just didn’t know why. Why would the mafia princess jump ship and head out to California under an assumed name? Then the forensics report came in. The tipster’s voice was a 90 percent match to that of Angelina Pini.
“You did a good job covering your tracks,” I say, retrieving my phone. “A great job, actually. You’re way off the grid.”
“Yes,” she says faintly, her eyes staring beyond me and looking like her dog just died. “I’ve been doing everything right, not telling anyone anything about me. Except for one person.”
She focuses her gaze on me and regards me for a moment with unimaginably sad eyes, and I sit there, wondering where she’s going with this, wondering what changed. Because ever since she zoomed in on that picture, there was a shift in the air that I can’t put my finger on.
“You’re from the Bronx,” she finally says.
“Yeah…” My accent is a dead giveaway to anyone from New York. I’m not sure what that has to do with the price of tea in China, though.
“You’re wearing a St. Florian medal in that picture,” she says quietly, her voice wavering slightly. “Patron saint of firefighters, right?”
“Yeah. I was a firefighter until 9/11.” I wear that medal everywhere. I have it on right now under my suit and tie. “How’d you know that?” And why do you care?
I watch as her face goes even paler and her eyes fill with tears. When she speaks, her voice is just above a whisper. “My boyfriend has the same one.”
“Your boyfriend, huh?” You gotta be kidding me.
She nods her head slowly, and the tears spill over. “A sweet, green-eyed Irish firefighter from the Bronx. Likes the Yankees.”
Oh, damn. The McDaniels kid has seriously taken one for the team.
She stands up and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her.
Well, this sure changes things. I thought I was out of aces, but Ms. Pini might have just dealt me one.
I pick up my phone. I’d better do Brady a favor and let him know he’s in the doghouse.