Gangsterland

CHAPTER TWELVE

Rural southern Illinois had become one blurred grain silo and field of dirty snow. Jeff Hopper sat in the backseat of a black Chevy Suburban driven by Senior Special Agent Kirk Biglione, marking time by the distance between cities he’d never visit — Pontiac to Normal to Lincoln and beyond. A person could hide out here forever.

“You comfortable back there, Hopper?” Biglione asked. Jeff didn’t respond. “Be happy you’re not in cuffs,” Biglione said, which made the guy sitting next to him up front, an agent named Lee Poremba whom Hopper worked organized crime with years previous in Kansas City, turn and glare. Turns out no one found Kirk Biglione amusing.

They’d been driving south on I-55 for nearly five hours, headed for Kochel Farms, located between Divernon and Farmersville, the middle of the middle of nothing. The plan was to meet up with the U.S. Marshals to serve a warrant right around kickoff of the Super Bowl, hopefully ensuring that no standoff would occur, the FBI always preferring to do their raids on days when they knew family would be around — Thanksgiving, Christmas, Super Bowl Sunday — or when they knew even the worst dirtbag on the planet was likely to be home sitting on his sofa. Not that Jeff believed they’d roll up on the place and find the farm’s owner eating chips and salsa with Sal Cupertine.

Kochel Farms had been owned by a man named Mel Kochel Jr. since 1979. The farm and the thirty thousand head of cattle that were routinely slaughtered to fill up grocery stores and fast-food restaurants around the country had been around much longer than that, started by Mel Sr. back in 1959, but the day-to-day operations of the farm had been transferred recently to Mel Jr.’s son Trey.

There wasn’t a hint of criminal activity related to the Kochel family, unless one considered Trey’s speeding ticket in 1992 an act of domestic terrorism. In the weeks since Fat Monte’s suicide, every conceivable avenue into the Family’s involvement with the farm had been investigated, and all the FBI had been able to prove — and even this could be met with some reasonable doubt — was that one of the Family’s bars in Bridgeport, the Sidewinder, occasionally bought ground beef from a distributer who occasionally got meat from Kochel Farms. In essence, the only relationship was one of mere happenstance.

That didn’t mean there wasn’t something, Jeff understood, only that it was buried so deep it didn’t exist on paper. Fat Monte didn’t just throw out the name Kochel Farms because he saw it on the side of a truck and thought it would be a funny joke to play on the FBI, not after he’d already buried a bullet in his wife’s head, and not while he was working up the guts to put one through his. Jeff knew that much. What Kochel Farms really meant was another matter.

Could be Sal Cupertine was now a Big Mac, but that just didn’t make a lot of sense. He couldn’t see Ronnie Cupertine engaging the services of civilians to help get rid of one of his dead bodies. There was just too much risk involved in having some ten-dollar-an-hour farm employee shove a human being into the slaughterer, even if Ronnie had Fat Monte hand over a stack of bills in compensation. Could be it was Chema Espinoza or Neal Moretti who did the honors — not that they’d found Neal’s body in that landfill, nor did Jeff think they ever would — but, still, why would Ronnie bother making them do it all the way out here, when they could have used whoever was doing the job Paul Bruno used to do? Not that they’d found his body, either.

If Kochel Farms was somehow involved in the disappearance of Sal Cupertine, Jeff thought it was a more passive experience. . a point he’d been trying to elucidate to the FBI for the last several weeks to little avail. Which also made perfect sense, since the leadership of the FBI in Chicago weren’t exactly charter members of the Jeff Hopper Fan Club, not after the Fat Monte suicide hit the Sun-Times and Tribune.

It took a few days for everything to come out due mostly to the fact that Chicago was more interested in dealing with the fallout of the blizzard that had drilled the city than the suicide of a gangster and the attempted murder of his wife. But once the city began to thaw and journalists could actually get to their offices, what had been a page 3 blip turned into a front-page embarrassment with “confidential sources” confirming that “Family enforcer” Fat Monte Moretti’s last conversation had been with an FBI agent, who, it turned out, was currently on paid administrative leave for misconduct. Those same “confidential sources” were happy to suggest that the agent in question was Jeff Hopper and that it was believed he would soon be relieved of his duties completely, particularly in light of the murder of four people under his supervision the year previous and his now questionable relationship with a known crime figure.

Jeff was pretty sure that the “confidential sources” named in all the stories was in fact Kirk Biglione, who at the moment was trying to explain to Special Agent Poremba how much he was going to enjoy Chicago once spring came around, now that Poremba had been hired ostensibly to replace Jeff. “Lots of great restaurants,” Biglione said. “And if you like to hunt or fish, it’s just a couple hours to some great spots in Wisconsin. I’ve got this place I’ve been dreaming about building in Fond du Lac.”

“I don’t hunt or fish,” Poremba said.

“What do you like?” Biglione asked.

In the time Jeff had worked with Lee Poremba, that was the one question everyone had about him: He didn’t seem to like anything other than his job, which made him, at the time, seem like one of those guys ready to stab you in the back. Except it just happened that he was a fairly boring guy who had a pretty firm vision of what his life would be like, one where he caught bad guys and then went home and tended to his three springer spaniels. This was information Jeff had learned only after being asked to do some background on him when he was up for a promotion in Kansas City, as the FBI was typically concerned with agents who didn’t seem to exist outside their jobs. It wasn’t normal not to leave some kind of footprint, somewhere.

It had been several years since he’d done the background report on Poremba, but Jeff still remembered the most salient details of his life: a brother in Tampa, an ex-wife in Santa Fe, and, as far as Jeff could find, no one else. Incorruptible, Jeff had said about him in his report, because his tastes are so base. A good book, his dogs, a place to sit, a matinee movie every Saturday afternoon when he wasn’t working. And if he was working, he’d see a matinee on Sunday instead. Preferred romantic comedies and anything with talking animals.

“I like to read,” Poremba said.

“You still have springers?” Jeff asked.

Poremba turned in his seat and stared at Jeff for a few seconds. “Yes,” he said finally. “They’re still in Kansas City at a kennel. Can’t have them living with me at the Comfort Suites.”

“Last I knew,” Jeff said, “you had three of them. You’ll need a place with a yard in Chicago. Probably need to look out in the suburbs. Batavia is nice, I hear.”

“I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” Poremba said.

“Oh yeah?” Jeff said. “I thought you were permanent.”

“I have a feeling I’ll be moving around some in the next few weeks,” he said.

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Biglione said. “We may find what we’re looking for today, and then you’re knee-deep in moving boxes by the end of the week.”

“Maybe,” Poremba said. Biglione was technically Poremba’s equal in rank, but it was clear to Jeff that Poremba had been brought in to fix a potential nightmare for the FBI. Once word got out that the body in the dump wasn’t Sal Cupertine, or that there was another body somewhere in the dump that they couldn’t find, big questions about the FBI’s investigation into the Family would begin to be asked. The only reason the press hadn’t discovered this information already had a lot to do with the present situation Jeff Hopper found himself in.

As soon as Jeff heard Fat Monte’s body hit the floor, he knew that the rules had changed. In all his time working organized crime, he’d never run into a made guy killing himself outside of prison, and even then it was rare. That he tried to kill his wife, too? That didn’t happen, ever. He also knew the fact that Fat Monte was on the phone with him would be the sort of thing that the press would eventually discover, which meant it was the sort of thing the FBI would offer up to them in form of sacrifice — a juicy tidbit that might keep them from digging much further into the real story, namely why Sal Cupertine was allowed to disappear. As it happened, it wasn’t that much different than the Family offering up the body of Chema Espinoza. Tit for tat, everyone stays in business, and the world keeps spinning.

It was how business was conducted in Chicago. And it made Jeff Hopper sick to know he was going to need to cut a similar deal if he wanted to protect the one person with something real to lose: Matthew. The only way to do that was to push the FBI into a corner. Jeff knew he had the one thing that the FBI needed: information.

If the public learned about the FBI’s decision to let the body of Chema Espinoza stand in for Sal Cupertine’s, even to the point of having what was left of the body cremated and delivered to Jennifer Cupertine simply so they could solve the murder of their three agents and CI without compromising their long-term investigation into the Family, there was a good chance Roosevelt Road would be filled with people carrying torches. Worse were the families of the dead men, all of whom had been led to believe that justice had been served, even if it had been meted out on the streets. You couldn’t ask for more than having the man who killed your husband or brother or son found disemboweled and burnt. . particularly since Jeff was certain Special Agent Biglione had intimated to the families that it was more like vigilante justice that caused the body to be found versus the Family trying to smooth out a bit of salve. Let the families believe the FBI took care of the problem Old West — style, and everyone goes home feeling a little better. It was the sort of thing Biglione would do. Hell, it was the sort of thing Jeff would have done, too.

So, that frozen night, after Fat Monte blew his head off, Jeff made two calls. The first was to 911, to report a likely suicide, maybe a murder-suicide, all of which put Jeff on the public record. The next call was to Kirk Biglione at his home in Barrington. He could have called Biglione’s cell, but Jeff wanted to make sure his number showed up on Biglione’s home phone records, something easily subpoenaed, and wanted to make sure it showed up within minutes of Fat Monte’s death. Plus, there was a good chance Biglione’s phone calls were monitored, if not actively, at least passively, just like everyone else’s in the FBI. It was a fucked-up thing to do, Jeff realized even as he was dialing Biglione’s number, but if there was one thing Jeff Hopper knew, it was that the FBI would happily bury him alive. He needed to make sure he had a way to breathe underground.

“Who is this?” Biglione asked when he came to the phone.

“It’s Jeff Hopper,” Jeff said. “I wanted you to know that Fat Monte Moretti just killed himself.”

“What? How do you know this?” Biglione was just coming awake, and Jeff could hear the slow dawning of recognition in his voice. “Who is this?”

“It’s Special Agent Jeff Hopper,” Jeff said, “reporting to you that I was just speaking with Fat Monte Moretti on the telephone when he shot himself. It sounded like a.357, but I could be wrong. You’ll need to check ballistics. I suspect he killed his wife, too.” Jeff could hear Biglione’s breathing. It sounded somewhat labored, so Jeff continued. “I was with him earlier this evening, at a bar called the Four Treys in Roscoe Village, where he essentially admitted to killing Paul Bruno, not that I expect you care about someone as insignificant as him, not with Sal Cupertine allowed to run free. About that, incidentally. Fat Monte confirmed for me Sal Cupertine’s body was not disposed of in the landfill, and that, in fact, there were two bodies placed there, namely, uh, let me see here, one Neal Moretti and one Chema Espinoza. Seems like we found Espinoza but not Neal. Somewhere at the bottom of the landfill is another body.”

“Hopper,” Biglione said, “I’m going to hang up.”

“Also,” Jeff said, “I might have beat this information out of him. When you get his body, if there’s not a hole in the middle of his face, you’ll probably want to know how his nose got broken. That was me. I did that.”

“Hopper,” Biglione said again. This time it sounded more like a plea. “I’m hanging up. Do you understand? I’m hanging up.”

“One more thing then,” Jeff said. “Fat Monte indicated to me that Kochel Farms is somehow related to Sal Cupertine’s disappearance and that we should begin investigating them in earnest.”

“You’re fired,” Biglione said.

“I know,” Jeff said, “so I’m going to go ahead and call some friends at the Tribune and see if they might like this information.”

“We have an investigation, Agent Hopper,” Biglione said. His voice was oddly calm now, and then Jeff remembered he used to do hostage negotiation back in the day, that he’d risen up in the ranks quickly after managing to get some lunatic in a Memphis bank to let twenty-two hostages go without anyone getting hurt. “If the Family finds out we’re still investigating Sal Cupertine, it has the potential to ruin nearly a decade of work. You know that. And if the Family knows we’re looking for Sal Cupertine, it will make it that much harder to find him. You know that.”

Of course Jeff knew that. This was all for the public — and private — record, Biglione likely coming to the same realization Jeff had in making the phone call in the first place. Asses needed to be covered.

“See, that’s the problem, Kirk,” Jeff said. “You’re not looking for Sal Cupertine. No one is. Or was. But I have been. And do you want to know what I’ve found out? Or do you just want to read about it in the paper?” Biglione didn’t respond, but Jeff’s call waiting beeped. He pulled the phone from his ear and looked at the display — it was Biglione’s cell phone. Jeff didn’t bother to click over and instead just hung up. He’d expressed what needed to be expressed. They both knew he wasn’t going to call the Tribune. At least not yet.

It was 4:42 in the morning, sunrise not for another two hours at least, when Jeff got into his Explorer and headed along the snow-packed streets of Chicago toward Matthew Drew’s apartment building. It was one of the first times having a four-wheel drive SUV in the city actually made any practical sense, one of the few things that morning that did. As he drove, he tried to take stock of where the last several months had taken him. Had he committed any crimes? No, he had not. Had he done anything morally reprehensible?

He slammed his hand against the steering wheel. He was sure he had. He’d caused another human being to kill himself. It didn’t matter that Fat Monte was a criminal. Jeff had to hope Fat Monte hadn’t shot his wife. He slammed his hand again. What was he thinking? What the fuck was he thinking? An innocent woman was probably dead because he got it in his mind that he was going to do the right thing, that he was going to catch Sal Cupertine, who murdered four innocent men.

But, no. That wasn’t true. Those four men weren’t innocent. Those four men had taken part in a sting. For three of them, it was their job to be put in that situation. For the fourth, it was a result of getting caught being a criminal. No one was exactly innocent in that situation. It was a point Jeff had started to believe — an implied risk of doing this business was that they might very well die. The fault didn’t rest with Jeff for leaving his name on the bill. And the fault hardly even rested with Sal Cupertine, when you really thought about it. No, he’d tried to convince himself, the fault resided in the implicit rules of the game. People die doing illegal things.

It took Jeff nearly thirty minutes to make the ten-minute drive to Matthew’s building, and by the time he got there, he realized what a bad idea it would be for all involved if he was found on the apartment’s closed-circuit security cameras, so he continued up the street to the White Palace and called Matthew’s cell from the pay phone inside.

“What time is it?” Matthew asked when he answered.

“A little after five,” Jeff said. “Do you know who this is?”

“No one calls me but you,” he said, already catching on and not saying Jeff’s name. Not that Jeff thought Matthew’s cell phone was tapped, but you never knew. Matthew cleared his throat. “What’s the problem?”

“Fat Monte is dead,” Jeff said.

“Did you kill him?”

It was a reasonable question. “No,” Jeff said.

“Did I?”

“Not unless you forced him to shoot himself in the head.”

Matthew didn’t respond for a long while, and then, when he did, all he said was, “Where are you?”

“The White Palace.”

“I’ll need to get a cab. My car is under three feet of snow.”

“No,” Jeff said, “wait, listen. You need to pack some clothes and get out of town for a few weeks. Your sister, too.”

“That’s not going to work,” he said. “My sister can’t just leave school. Do you hear what you’re saying? Jesus. What’s going on?”

Jeff told him what Fat Monte had said, told him about the phone call Jeff made to Biglione, told him that maybe Fat Monte’s wife was gone, too. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Jeff said. “We could all be in danger if the Family decides to make a move.”

“Give me thirty minutes to get my sister up and fill her in,” Matthew said. “Order me a shake.” Before Jeff could protest again, the phone was dead. Jeff made his way to a table and sat down. When the waitress came by, he asked her for a chocolate shake and if she might have a piece of paper and a manila envelope somewhere in the place that he could borrow. The waitress looked at him strangely, but it couldn’t have been the most outrageous request anyone had made of her, particularly since she had a tattoo on her throat that said Robert and one on the back of her hand that said Fuck All Men.

The waitress came back a few moments later with the shake, a padded mailer, and a piece of college-ruled paper. “The manager says I have to charge you for the envelope,” she said.

“Okay,” Jeff said.

“You look familiar to me.”

“I used to come here a lot,” Jeff said.

She cocked her head. “Are you a cop?”

“FBI,” he said, for what would be the last time in his life.

“Are you allowed to say that? Isn’t that supposed to be a secret?”

“Nope,” Jeff said. “That’s the CIA.”

“You all look alike, I guess,” she said. “Enjoy your envelope.”

Jeff took his car keys and cell phone out of his pocket and shoved them into the envelope, then scrawled a note to Matthew:

My truck is parked behind the restaurant. Take it. Pack your stuff up and be out of town before the morning news, if at all possible. Only use my phone. The charger is in the glove box. I’ll call you tonight. Get out of Illinois. Tell your sister I’m sorry and that she’ll be home in a week.

Jeff looked over the note, tried to decide if it was absurd or cautionary or just honest. It didn’t matter in the long run, Jeff supposed, since what was most important here was that Matthew and Nina be safe, but also that the FBI had no ability to scapegoat Matthew. This was weight Jeff was willing to carry, and he had a plan.

He gathered up his heavy winter coat and gloves and walked to the cash register, where he waved the waitress over and handed her the envelope. “In a couple of minutes, another FBI agent is going to walk in here with a young woman. Give him this envelope,” he said. “And the shake, too. That’s for him.”

“Am I on some hidden camera show?” the waitress asked.

Jeff looked around the White Palace. There was a camera above the register, another over the door, most likely a few around the outside of the building, too, everyone and everything captured, just in case anyone wanted to take a look. “Probably,” Jeff said.

He walked out of the White Palace then and stood on the corner of Canal Street and Roosevelt. The FBI’s offices were just two miles away down Roosevelt, a good twenty-minute walk in perfect weather, probably an hour through the snow-drifts that lined the street. Just enough time to get everything straight, so that when he stepped foot back inside the bureau, he’d know exactly what kind of deal he was willing to take.

It occurred to Jeff now, in the backseat of Biglione’s Suburban, that he probably should have held out for a better deal. One that didn’t involve him spending time with Biglione. As it was, agreeing to be fired — he didn’t agree to be excoriated in the press, though he should have expected it — and hired back as an independent consultant with the proviso that the bureau would investigate the leads he’d found into Sal Cupertine’s disappearance was probably more than he could have hoped for, but that was the agreement he made in exchange for not going to the press with any of the information he’d gleaned while on leave. Biglione didn’t even mention Matthew while they negotiated the terms. In fact, it wasn’t until three days later, when Biglione was going over the report Jeff had typed up on the information he’d learned (or, rather, the information he decided to share; Jeff had made a promise to Dennis Tryon regarding Neto Espinoza and he intended to keep it) that Matthew was brought up.

“So, where was Agent Drew in all of this?” Biglione asked. He had his glasses on and was still looking at the report, though Jeff could see he wasn’t really reading it. Jeff knew that Biglione couldn’t afford to find Sal Cupertine yet, which meant unless Cupertine showed up on their doorstep, they weren’t going to go above and beyond to get him into custody. They’d follow the leads they had, because they had to. Fat Monte’s wife was sitting in a hospital with a bullet wedged into her head. Alive, but only barely. Her eyes were open, she was breathing, but there wasn’t much else going on. Just enough for her family to keep her alive and to keep the pressure on the FBI about Fat Monte’s last hours alive.

“I’m not sure I get what you mean,” Jeff said, though he was certain he knew exactly what he meant. The bureau had likely combed through all his affairs from the last few months, and it wouldn’t have taken them long to see that he’d written Matthew checks every month.

“I got a witness at the Four Treys who says he overheard Agent Drew threaten to kill Fat Monte,” Biglione said. “You care to explain that?”

“You line up every person in Chicago who threatened to kill Fat Monte,” Jeff said, “you’d need to rent out Wrigley for the occasion.”

“Let’s not bullshit, okay?” Biglione said. “I know he was working with you.”

“So what?”

“The Family might like him dead,” Biglione said. “And I’m frankly not exactly comfortable with him threatening to kill people while in the company of an FBI agent.”

“Well, that’s been rectified.”

Biglione put the report down on the table and rubbed at his eyes. “I know he was impersonating an FBI agent,” he said. “I could get proof if need be.”

“What would the need be?”

“Newspapers are starting to pile up in front of his door, and his sister is about to miss an important test in her Western civilizations class. She gets below 3.0, could be a problem with her federal student loan,” Biglione said.

“He’s safe,” Jeff said. “He and his sister are on a road trip.”

“Is he looking for Cupertine on this road trip?”

“No,” Jeff said. In fact, Matthew and Nina were already safely at the Marcus Whitman Hotel in Walla Walla, the one town in America Jeff was reasonably sure did not have a tendril of the Family in operation.

“I can’t protect them if I don’t know where they are,” Biglione said. “The Family decides to send a blackout team for them, they’re on their own.”

“Matthew can handle himself,” Jeff said.

“How do you handle yourself when ten guys shoot automatic weapons into your house?”

It was a good question, but the larger issue was that Biglione seemed to know what was becoming more and more evident: The Family had a way to get the names of the FBI players. Jeff doubted there was mole in the bureau. That was some cloak-and-dagger shit that frankly was above the Family’s general purview. Nevertheless, Jeff was sure that there were CIs playing both sides, along with guys doing deep cover who would shovel a bit of helpful information to the Family if it meant keeping their own asses covered. And as it related to Matthew, his association with Jeff was enough to make him the sort of target they’d be willing to go a bit soft on if they didn’t think there was a good chance of him getting hurt. Give up the name of someone inconsequential, basically, just to have the act of giving up information. The same cat and mouse the bureau and the Family had been playing since Capone and Ness.

“He deserves another shot,” Jeff said.

“You renegotiating your deal?”

“No,” Jeff said. “This Cupertine thing, that’s it for me. When he’s in custody, I’m done. But Matthew, he did good work. He’s a real agent.”

Biglione didn’t say anything then, and now, weeks later, as they headed to Kochel Farms, and Matthew was still in Walla Walla, his sister back in Chicago but with an FBI tail, just in case, Jeff wondered if maybe he should have made Matthew’s rehiring a condition of all this. Even though Matthew wouldn’t let him, telling him that the only leverage Jeff had anymore was that Matthew was out there. . somewhere. . with all the knowledge Jeff had, including everything he hadn’t shared with the bureau. Sadly, it was true.

“Here we go,” Biglione said. Up ahead, parked on the side of the freeway, about two hundred yards up from an exit, were three black Lincoln Navigators and a black Lincoln Town Car, the marshals always good about keeping the nice-seized vehicles for their own use. Biglione slowed down and flashed his brights twice and then pulled behind the marshals and followed them out toward Kochel Farms.

“What’s that smell?” Jeff asked.

“The cows,” Poremba said. He tapped on the window. “They’ve probably got most of them behind a windbreak or in a barn, because of the cold, but with thirty thousand head, it would be hard to keep them all inside, even now.”

Jeff could see a few cows now as they drove, grazing on what looked like freshly dropped bales of hay. In the spring months, though, the field would be a solid black mass of animals, constantly walking and grazing, shitting and pissing on everything, the ground churned over and over by 120,000 hooves a day. A pretty good place to leave a body, Jeff thought.

Jeff sat stewing in the Suburban for forty minutes while the marshals and Agents Biglione and Poremba cleared the house, which proved to be a bit of a task since the Kochels were having a Super Bowl party for about twenty-five people, most of whom came walking out of the house looking as though they’d been kicked in the stomach. The marshals hadn’t bothered knocking on the front door, opting instead to burst in using a door ram. That’s how it always was with them — always with the Wyatt Earp shit. Jeff was of the opinion that if you wanted to achieve anything with a suspect, you had to make sure you didn’t start off at an escalated emotional level. It’s what concerned him about Matthew, how quickly he’d gone from having a conversation with Fat Monte to beating him. How easy it was. How much he’d liked it.

Biglione left Jeff with a radio so he could hear everything that was going on — a nice concession on his part, since Jeff wasn’t allowed inside during the raid — and, after the chaos, they began going through every person at the party to determine who was who and if anyone happened to be Sal Cupertine, which, of course, none were. Most were business associates or employees of the farm — a meat distributer (and his wife) in town from Chicago, the operations manager of the slaughterhouse, the farm’s marketing director and her husband and newborn — or just friends of the family. Once the marshals and Biglione and Poremba managed to sort the players, letting all the guests go on their way, Agent Poremba walked outside and stood in front of the main house and took several deep breaths, his frozen exhalations rising up in plumes and disappearing into the air.

Poremba took a handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose, and then absently waved Jeff out of the car. As Jeff made his way over, four marshals came strutting out of the house, one holding the ram, the other three holding shotguns, each wearing Kevlar vests that said U.S. MARSHAL across the chest and back.

By the time Jeff reached Poremba, the marshals were already in one of the Navigators and pulling away.

“They find Jimmy Hoffa in the guacamole?” Jeff asked Poremba.

“Not today,” Poremba said. He blew his nose again and pointed at the warehouse-size barn that stood about fifty yards away. “That’s where they keep the packaged meat. They move three, sometimes four truckloads a day, every day, except Super Bowl Sunday and Christmas.”

“What about Thanksgiving?” Jeff said.

“One shipment,” Poremba said, “to a local food bank.”

“You find that all out in forty minutes?”

“No,” he said. “I got all that before I came out from Kansas City. Meat industry in KC is just as corrupt as ever. This place is a model of efficiency.”

“Still the Sicilians out there?”

“Almost seventy years they’ve been running the meat business in Saint Louis and KC, running the unions, and here we are, freezing to death at a cattle farm on Super Bowl Sunday.” Poremba laughed in an unfunny way. “These are working people,” Poremba said, “and we just crashed into their house. This isn’t even a union farm, Jeff.”

“I know what Fat Monte told me,” Jeff said.

Poremba folded up his handkerchief and examined it for a few seconds. “Your father keep a handkerchief?”

“My dad was military,” Jeff said. “He blew his nose on his arm.”

“Mine didn’t either,” Poremba said. “It’s like something from antiquity, right?” In the distance, Jeff could see a white paddy wagon heading toward the farm. Poremba noticed it at the same time. “Wishful thinking on Special Agent Biglione’s part, no doubt.”

“You need to let me in to interview these people,” Jeff said. “I know I can get. . something. Fat Monte wouldn’t have spent his last breath telling me I needed to get out to this place for nothing.”

“If the Family were connected to this farm, that would mean war with the Missouri boys by now, don’t you see? These people, they’re too successful to be connected. Can you imagine Ronnie Cupertine standing out here in one of his mohair overcoats, filling his nostrils with this lovely aroma?”

Jeff couldn’t. It was true. But there was something in all this that kept worming in his mind, had been for weeks now. There was no evidence anywhere that the Family was in the meat business. They’d gotten out of it in the 1920s, when John Giannola moved down to Saint Louis to be with his brothers and started up the Green Ones, the only decent agriculture-based organized crime syndicate in the country, which is why the Missouri families still were in it, presumably, even in a minor way.

“If there’s so much money here,” Jeff said, “there’s no good reason the Sicilians in Missouri wouldn’t move up a few miles and at least get in on the trucking, right? We’re ninety minutes from their operation in Saint Louis. What reason would they have for not being in this place? This farm has been here since the 1950s, and you mean to tell me no one in Missouri has ever tried to get their hooks into it?”

Poremba started to say something, then stopped. It was a simple question. “Saint Louis is weak,” he said finally. “Lucky to hold on to what they have.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said, “but if they have the meat industry, and the Family doesn’t give a shit about it, wouldn’t they cut a deal? Isn’t that what they do now? All one big happy crime family?”

The paddy wagon pulled up in front of the house then, and a young marshal got out and looked around, as if he expected to see all the original Five Families lined up and cuffed, the history and future of organized crime snuffed out on a farm in southern Illinois. “Am I in the right place?” he asked.

“You can go home,” Poremba said.

“I drove for five hours,” the marshal said. “From Chicago.”

“You can go home,” Poremba said again. “Or you can go inside and talk to your superior officer and have him tell you to go home.”

The marshal didn’t say anything. He just walked back to the paddy wagon and got inside but didn’t bother to pull away.

“I think someone in the bureau is giving the Family information about this case,” Jeff said. “I think from the beginning, from before Sal Cupertine took out my guys. Because the more I learn about Cupertine, the more unrealistic it seems to me that he’d have been the guy to be meeting our people. It just doesn’t make sense. I think somewhere down the line, someone tipped Ronnie Cupertine that we were getting close to his operation, and he put his cousin up for sacrifice, and then everything turned upside down. Everything has been too convenient. Even this, here, today.”

“Probably,” Poremba said.

“That’s it?” Jeff said. “Probably?”

“When you were running your unit,” Poremba said, “how many CIs did you have?”

“That I trusted? Maybe two.”

“So why should any of this be a surprise? The guppies have always been sacrificed so the big fish could swim.” Poremba took his handkerchief back out of his pocket, blew his nose again, then wadded it up and threw it into the snow.

The door opened behind them, and a young woman stepped out, a little boy in a Bears winter coat holding her hand. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, which meant it was probably Tina Kochel, the elder Mel Kochel’s niece. A college student out in Springfield, if Jeff was remembering the files correctly. Jeff didn’t know who the kid was but immediately felt terrible that this whole day was going to be something he’d possibly remember: the day men with guns showed up during the football game.

Tina took a few steps forward with the boy, but when she saw that Poremba wasn’t going to let her pass, she said, “Am I allowed to walk out of my own damn property?”

“Is this your property?” Poremba asked.

“It’s my family’s property,” she said. “You don’t have any right to do this, you know.”

“Actually,” Poremba said, “we have all the rights we need, or else we wouldn’t be here. That’s how the federal government works. You can rest assured that if we show up somewhere with a bunch of guns, we have the right to do it. The warrant helps, too.”

Jeff was surprised to hear Poremba’s rather snippy response — the girl was obviously scared and of no concern to the FBI, so he was just doing it to keep up appearances. Unlike Biglione, Poremba still appeared to wear human skin, so this all seemed unneeded.

“My son is scared out of his mind,” Tina said. “I’d like to get some of his toys out of my car. Is that against the law? Do I have the right to do that?”

“Sure,” Poremba said. “Where’s your car?”

“The carport,” she said. She pointed to a covered area adjacent to the barn where there were five Ford trucks parked.

Poremba took a step to one side, but just as Tina was about to pass, Jeff put a hand on Tina’s arm and stopped her. “For security reasons,” Jeff said, “why don’t you leave your son with us.”

“This is infuriating,” Tina said.

“Policy,” Jeff said, which wasn’t true, because outside consultants didn’t have any policies. What was true, however, is that he was certain he hadn’t read anything about Tina Kochel having a kid. He would have remembered that. What was also true was that it wasn’t illegal for him to question the kid, but it was illegal for Poremba to do so. The FBI couldn’t interrogate a preschooler — Jeff thought the kid was maybe four — but there was nothing wrong with a stranger doing it.

“Fine,” she said. She kneeled down and took her son’s face in her hands. “I’m going to leave you with these nice men for two minutes. I’ll be right back. Be a good boy and don’t bother them.”

“Okay!” the boy said. Or, essentially, shouted.

Tina stood back up and glared at both Jeff and Poremba. “I know you’re just doing your job, but this is bullshit,” she said.

“Federal agents were killed,” Poremba said, “so we need to follow all leads. As a taxpayer, I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

“It’s the Super Bowl,” she said.

“So imagine how little we want to be here, too,” Jeff said.

Once Tina was out of earshot, Jeff said to Poremba, “Don’t listen to this,” and then he kneeled in front of the boy, so that he was at eye level, and said, “What’s your name? Is it Mel?”

“No!” the boy said, and he stomped his foot. He didn’t seem exactly terrified. What he seemed, in fact, was fairly entertained. Either that, or shouting was his default setting. “That’s my uncle! I’m Nicholas!”

“That’s right,” Jeff said. He looked over his shoulder at Poremba, who was watching this unfold with something like curiosity mixed with horror, but knew enough not to say a word. “That’s right. Your uncle is Mel. Who is your daddy?”

Nicholas stomped his foot again, “My daddy is my daddy!”

“That’s right,” Jeff said. “But do you know his name?”

“Daddy,” Nicholas said, but he didn’t sound terribly convinced that this was true. Odd.

“Where does your daddy live?” Jeff said.

“Heaven,” Nicholas said.

Jeff thought it was somewhat possible that he’d forget Tina Kochel had a kid — she didn’t matter to him in the least, so maybe he’d just seen that she was going to school in Springfield and left it at that — but there was no way he would have overlooked a dead husband. Twenty-five-year-olds didn’t have dead husbands anymore. Or dead fathers of their children, at least.

“Finish up,” Poremba said calmly. “She’s at the car right now.”

He needed about thirty minutes with the kid, really. Maybe with a good child psychologist. But that wasn’t going to happen. “How long has your daddy been in heaven?”

Nicholas shrugged. “Ten years!” he said.

Shit. Shit. Shit. The problem with kids and time is that until they’re about six or seven, the concept of past, present, and future can get fairly muddled. Nicholas was maybe four. Nothing he said was reliable. Nothing he said was admissible, either.

“What did he get you for Christmas?”

“Nintendo,” Nicholas said, “and G.I. Joe and five games and popcorn.”

“Was that the last time you saw him?”

Nicholas nodded once.

“Can you tell me what your daddy looks like?”

“He’s big!” Nicholas said.

“Bigger than me?”

“Bigger than everybody!”

“Taller than me and bigger than Santa?” Jeff said, and he stood up and pushed out his belly.

“Bigger than Santa!” Nicholas said.

“Is your daddy’s name. .” Jeff paused, tried to decide if this was what he really wanted to do to this kid, if this was what he wanted to do to Tina Kochel, if this was what he wanted to give the FBI. Could Fat Monte be this kid’s father?

“Lucy is in heaven, too,” Nicholas said before Jeff could finish his sentence.

“Who is Lucy?”

“My cat,” Nicholas said.

Poremba tapped Jeff on the shoulder once. Jeff turned and saw that Tina was only about thirty feet away now. She was smoking a cigarette and had a small backpack shaped like a tiger slung over one arm. She was pretty, Jeff decided, but not overly so. Her hair was blonde — a dye job, Jeff guessed, since her kid had reddish-brown hair — and she was skinny, with long legs. What did Jeff know about Tina? Nothing, really. Just that she lived and went to college in Springfield. But she was twenty-five. Shouldn’t she have been out of school by now?

“Were you good?” Tina asked Nicholas when she got to the porch.

“He was,” Jeff said. “He told us all about his father.”

Jeff watched the color drain from Tina’s cheeks, which was quite a feat, since it was freezing outside, and her face was flushed red from the wind. “He doesn’t know his father,” she said.

“No?” Jeff said.

“I don’t know who his father is, either, if you have to know,” she said. “And I’m sorry, how is this any of your business?”

“He volunteered the information,” Poremba said. There was nonchalance in his voice that Jeff found oddly comforting. He liked that Poremba understood what was at stake here, too, without anything being spoken.

“He said his father was dead,” Jeff said. “That seems like a strange thing for a kid to say, don’t you think?”

“That’s what I’ve told him,” she said. She reached down and took Nicholas’s hand and started to make her way inside.

“Wait,” Poremba said, and Tina did. He lifted his chin at Jeff. “He has a few other questions for you.”

How could Tina Kochel have any connection to Fat Monte? Jeff had about two minutes to figure this out before it became obvious he was fishing.

“Where do you work?” Jeff asked.

“Why?”

“Because I’m asking you. I know you’re a student at the university in Springfield. Now I just need to know where you work. You can either tell me, or I can just run your social. It’s up to you how much you want to cooperate. What kind of example you want to set.”

Tina looked down at her son and sighed. “The Kitten Club,” she said.

“That a strip joint?” Jeff said.

“I’ve been trying to pay for school, okay? I don’t want to be a farmer, so here I am.”

“What are you majoring in?”

“Social work,” she said.

“Okay,” Jeff said. “Who watches your son when you’re dancing?”

“I bring him here some nights,” she said. “Some nights a girlfriend watches him. Are we done?”

“Your family know about the dancing?” Jeff asked.

“No,” she said. “They think I’m bartending. I’d like to keep it that way, okay?”

“Sure.” He smiled at her. “Your son is very sweet. You must be very proud of him.”

“Are we done?” she said again.

“Sure.” Jeff reached over and opened the front door, and Tina and Nicholas started back inside, where the marshals and Agent Biglione were going through the house, room to room, looking for evidence Jeff was pretty sure they weren’t going to find.

Special Agent Lee Poremba stood beside Jeff and watched Tina and Nicholas disappear as the door closed.

“Who runs the Kitten Club?” Poremba asked.

“Last I knew, a guy named Timo Floccari,” Jeff said. “If he’s not dead, he’s in prison by now and will soon be dead. If he’s alive, you might want to get him into protective custody, wherever he is.”

“Soldier?”

“Yep,” Jeff said. “Moved oxycodone for Fat Monte.”

Poremba looked at his watch. “Why don’t you get a ride back in the paddy wagon. We’re going to be here a while.”

“Okay,” Jeff said.

They were both silent for a few moments, Jeff working out the math of it all, trying to figure out what Poremba’s move would be.

“I can give you a week. Ten days at the longest,” Poremba said. “And then I’m going to need to act on this. What do you need from me?”

“A shipping manifest for all the trucks that left here the night of the killings,” Jeff said. “And then any payload transitions those trucks made. I want to know where every single piece of meat this farm shipped out that day ended up. Someone saw something.”

“What else?”

“That kid,” Jeff said, “doesn’t need to know his father was a gangster.”

“That’s out of my hands,” Poremba said.

“His birth certificate is probably clean,” Jeff said. “It can stay that way.” Poremba didn’t say anything, so Jeff continued. “Get a deal for the girl,” Jeff said. “You can do that.”

“I’ll try,” Poremba said. “You get Cupertine, you can probably dictate all the terms.”

“Then I guess that’s what I’ll do,” Jeff said. He measured his next words out in his head before he said them, certain he needed to know the answer. “Why are you doing this for me?”

“What happened with those men at the Parker House,” Poremba said, “that could have happened to any of us. It was a clerical error.”

“It was my error,” Jeff said.

“Are you in charge of the accounts payable section of the FBI now? Come on.”

“As soon as I knew it was Sal Cupertine they were meeting with, I should have known to call it off. The only reason the Family would send Sal Cupertine anywhere, in broad daylight, would be to have him blow up. That’s on me. That will always be on me.”

“You can’t think like that,” Poremba said.

“Yeah,” Jeff said, “my therapists have said the same thing.”

This made Special Agent Lee Poremba laugh. Jeff was pretty sure it was the first time he’d ever seen the man show any emotion other than basic placidity and occasional irritation. “Did I catch a plural there?” he asked.

“It’s been a hell of a year.”

“A week,” Poremba said. They shook hands, and Poremba went back inside, an agreement sealed.

It took Jeff another hour, sitting in the back of the paddy wagon, before he had reliable enough cell service to call Matthew in Walla Walla. “Pack your bag,” Jeff said after filling him in on the details.

“Where am I going?” Matthew asked.

Jeff looked out the window of the paddy wagon. To the east, he could see nothing but fields of white, to the west, the same thing. Where would they ship Sal Cupertine? Where could a man like him, the most proficient killer the Family had ever employed, be comfortable? Where would they send him where they knew he couldn’t just come back, kill them all, grab his wife and kid, and run away? Somewhere they had a connection, where they weren’t competing for the same dollars. Far enough away that he’d need to fly home, most likely, since the Family wouldn’t risk the idea that Sal Cupertine might decide to sneak out of wherever he was living at midnight and show up on their doorstep at 6 a.m. with a pipe bomb. That ruled out Detroit, Cleveland, and Nashville.

If the Family had really sold Sal Cupertine, as Bruno had suggested, the only likely trading partners were families who had the capital to spend and the ability to keep Cupertine either confined or busy or both. Where did the Chicago Family still have pull? They were getting pushed out of Miami by the New York families, none of whom needed help. They still had connections in Las Vegas and Reno, for sure, and in Los Angeles, where they had tendrils in pornography, strip clubs, and some of the entertainment unions, as well as in the burgeoning Indian casinos that dotted the desert outside Palm Springs, where regulation was difficult to manage in light of the Indians’ sovereign status. Nothing to speak of in San Francisco, where the organized crime element had shifted to the Russians and Asians.

Palm Springs was a possibility, but Jeff didn’t see that sticking for long, not with the corporations taking over all the golf courses and resorts, leaving the Italians with the restaurants and clubs, but that was little more than skim money, and the gambling money was a split, if that, with the Indians. The cartels and Mexican Mafia coming up with the cheap cocaine and weed had pretty much everything from the border up into L.A. locked down, drug-wise.

The Family’s union juice in L.A. couldn’t last much longer, either. Their best shot for long-term survival was in their bankrolling of skin flicks, provided they could keep AIDS under control, not that Jeff thought the Family was likely to run a clean shop.

Las Vegas was an open city, but they still had some historical allegiances to Chicago, even with Splitoro dead and Angelini doing time. But on the whole, Las Vegas was weak, unconnected guys working the streets and talking like they were big guns but who were really just idiots at cell phone stores trying to act tough. All the big business in Las Vegas was being run through the strip clubs, though Jeff didn’t see that as a place Sal Cupertine could exist in. What was he doing? Working as a DJ? Chatting up the drunks? Working the door in a tuxedo, shaking down bachelor parties? That wasn’t Cupertine’s scene. There hadn’t been a significant mob hit in Las Vegas since Herbie Blitzstein got his in 1997, and it took four guys from Buffalo and L.A. to do the job. Cupertine wouldn’t work like that. It had to be a small outfit, not too flashy. The sort that needed a middle manager who could also do some contract work. Someone who knew about the Rain Man and saw the potential he possessed.

An outfit, too, that just so happened to need a lot of frozen meat. The manifests would be key. This was going to take some finessing, and they didn’t have much time. He wanted Sal Cupertine alive.

“Somewhere warm,” Jeff said.