Death, Taxes, and a Chocolate Cannoli (A Tara Holloway Novel) Read Free

disappeared, you’re thinking there’s a connection?”
    “You got it.” She plucked a shriveled leaf from the potted ivy on her desk, ground it to mulch between her fingers, and dropped it into the dirt at the base of the plant. “My guess is the two men who disappeared were the ones who mugged the restaurant owner. Fabrizio probably offed them afterward and disposed of their bodies somewhere. He’s not the kind of guy who leaves loose ends.”
    “Did the locksmith or trainer have criminal records?” I asked.
    “The trainer had a couple of assaults on his rap sheet. He gave a previous girlfriend a black eye and he’d beat the snot out of someone who’d accidentally backed into his motorcycle in a parking lot. The locksmith had a theft charge. He’d made a duplicate key when installing new locks at a private home. He went back later and attempted to rob the house. The homeowners came home and caught him in the act. He covered his face and ran off, but they’d already recognized him.”
    It didn’t surprise me that the missing men weren’t exactly choirboys. Dirty work was done by dirty men.
    Booth went on to tell me that it had taken years for Dallas PD to connect the dots and realize Fabrizio had likely played a role in several unsolved crimes. “Too many crime victims have been clients of Fabrizio’s security company for it to be mere coincidence.”
    Most were too afraid to point fingers at Tino Fabrizio, to implicate him in extortion, but the detective surmised the victims suspected that the man who was supposed to protect them and their businesses was, in fact, the one who’d preyed upon them instead.
    “Fabrizio’s approach is typical,” Booth said. “He focuses his extortion efforts on people running mom-and-pop-type businesses. They’re easier to intimidate and they control their business’s finances.”
    I supposed it would be more difficult to extort money from a large business client, where the staff member working with Cyber-Shield’s salesman probably had no access to the company’s coffers and would be more likely to report the extortion attempt to upper management.
    “I’ve spoken with Fabrizio in person,” Booth said. “Strangely enough, the guy didn’t give off a single bad vibe. He seemed about as threatening as Barney the dinosaur.”
    I was familiar with the show, which was filmed locally at the studios in Las Colinas. Fitting, I supposed, since the oil Texas was famous for originated from the bodies of dinosaurs that had roamed the state millions of years ago before keeling over to take a permanent dirt nap. Many claimed a meteor did the big beasts in, but I speculated that perhaps they’d snacked on a few too many lantana, a native wildflower that was pretty but poisonous.
    Booth continued. “Of course when I spoke with Tino I didn’t let on that I suspected he might be involved in the crimes. I just asked for any evidence his security company might have. He provided me with copies of the camera footage.”
    I flipped to the next page to find a photograph of a very muscular, but very dead, man lying on a weight bench in a residential garage. A barbell loaded with what looked to be hundreds of pounds of weights rested across his neck. His right arm crooked back under the bar at such an angle it must have snapped under the pressure. My stomach squirmed inside me as I looked up at the detective. “What happened to this guy?”
    “Crushed windpipe. By the looks of it he was working out in his home gym without a spotter and got a little overzealous. But I think Fabrizio killed him. This guy had been on Cyber-Shield’s payroll for a while, driving one of the security patrol vehicles. He probably knew too much and became a liability.”
    I turned to the next page in the file and— gukh! —suffered an immediate gag reflex. A full-color photograph depicted a man folded over a wrought-iron fence, a pointy post—and approximately six inches of lower intestine—protruding