Gangsterland

CHAPTER TWO

When Jeff Hopper was still studying for his MA in criminology at the University of Illinois, he’d occasionally stuff his books and lunch into his backpack and jog the one mile to the FBI field office on Roosevelt to study between classes. It was a silly thing, really, since he wasn’t allowed inside. This was the late 1980s, and Jeff was already in his early thirties but still somehow felt like everything was possible, including working as a special agent for the FBI. He knew it wasn’t a glamorous job, not like how the recruiters who came to campus said it was; that it, in all likelihood, was just as mundane on a day-to-day basis as any job. But at least there was some grander purpose to it, which appealed to Jeff.

He’d been a cop in Walla Walla, Washington, for a decade prior, and while the work was steady and not terribly dangerous — he unholstered his gun once the whole time, to break up a fight between two drunk migrant farm workers — it also wasn’t the kind of heroic thing Jeff had imagined for himself while growing up in Seattle. He certainly never saw himself living in a city like Walla Walla, with its charming downtown and flowing wheat fields and. . that was about it. He’d made a life there, even bought a house over by the country club, had managed to find a little romance with the occasional visiting professor at Whitman College (Jeff liked knowing these affairs were on a clock, since no one visiting Walla Walla dared to stay in town very long). But when the city announced it had to cut its police force in half during a particularly ugly budget crisis, Jeff readily stepped forward to take the parachute the city offered. He had a bit of money saved, the result of being single and well paid in a shitty place, and he started looking at graduate schools.

He knew he couldn’t get into the CIA since he wasn’t ex-military and his undergrad degree from the University of Washington probably tabbed him as a tad too liberal for those guys. Age was likely a factor, too. The FBI, on the other hand, liked guys who were a bit older, more mature, happy to do investigative work from a desk if need be, and so that became Jeff’s goal. Not the desk, exactly, though Jeff figured that was where he might start out. And if the FBI didn’t pan out? Maybe the NSA. And if NSA didn’t work? Jeff had a full list of options written out on a yellow legal pad, and he even conceded that a job doing special investigative work for the IRS would be cool, maybe catching mob guys in tax evasion schemes or something. What Jeff Hopper wanted most of all was to wear a suit, a really nice suit that concealed a gun, and he wanted to stop bad guys and save America.

More than a decade later, though, standing in his office and staring out the window at that berm he used to sit on (even during clear days in the winter), Jeff wondered just what the hell he thought he was trying to prove. Did he think the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover would walk across the street and offer him a job? Did he think he’d assimilate some divine intelligence simply by breathing the same air as the agents he saw walking in and out every day? How did he not know that it would take him so long just to get into that building, that he’d bounce from Quantico to Kansas City to Cleveland to Rochester and then, finally, to Chicago, at which point his romantic vision of being in the FBI would be trumped by the hard understanding that he hated the feel of a tie around his neck? Had he even learned anything while sitting out there, what with all the exhaust from passing cars and trucks? It didn’t seem possible.

Few things seemed possible to Special Agent Jeff Hopper anymore. For the last six months, he’d spent more time in his therapist’s office than his own. He knew intuitively that he wasn’t responsible for the death of his three colleagues and their CI, that he hadn’t pulled the trigger on them, that legendary hit man Sal Cupertine had done it. If he knew anything about Sal Cupertine, it was this: If he wanted you dead, you were dead. And he understood that those men — Cal Hodel, Keith Baldwin, and Derek Lewis, he reminded himself that they were people and not just men—knew that working undercover came with its own unique set of dangers, including death. All that was clear to him. You deal with wild animals, you can’t be surprised when they act like wild animals, his therapist told him, and he agreed.

That didn’t change the fact that Jeff had lacked specific attention to detail — the billing information on the hotel bill, of all things — and that the result had been fatal. Four times fatal. And though his therapist told him not to blame himself, not to doubt his own abilities, the FBI had already made a few decisions for him: They’d knocked him down a grade, from senior special agent to special agent, and though they allowed him to stay on the task force looking into the workings of the Chicago crime families, he’d been completely shunned by the other agents. Not that Jeff blamed them. It had been his idea to get Cal, Keith, and Derek into the Family, and for the previous year that’s all he’d done, little by little, getting those three established locally.

Used to be the best way to get information was to hope for a snitch; the problem these days was that the Family was simply too good. They hadn’t made an arrest that stuck for almost a decade — at least not of anyone significant, just soldiers, the kinds of guys whose level of information was so limited they couldn’t snitch. So the only way in was to go that whole Donnie Brasco route. But Cal, Keith, and Derek were serious men. Jeff liked that. Liked that they wanted to get bad people off the streets. Liked that they didn’t think the FBI’s policy of staying away from the Chicago families since they were better than the Crips and Bloods and Mexican gangs was worth shit. A criminal enterprise was a criminal enterprise, and Jeff was proud that those three men agreed with him.

It had been Jeff’s idea to let them meet up with Sal Cupertine without a strike force in the next room. Jeff knew that Sal was a careful and considerate killer — if such a thing existed — that he wouldn’t shoot up a public place. It wasn’t his style, which is why on that day six months earlier, he was still a free man. Plus, if what everyone said was true and Sal had the memory of an elephant, it wasn’t safe to have a bunch of other guys waiting around in case something happened. If by chance Sal saw one of them and then saw him again on some later date. . well, it would be trouble. Besides, it was just an exploratory meeting. The guys went for it, and why not? There were three of them, after all, plus their CI, and all three were top-notch FBI agents. Sal Cupertine, at the end of the day, was just a man with a gun.

“Excuse me, Agent Hopper?” Jeff turned from the window and saw a young man in his doorway with a cart stacked high with boxes. Jeff didn’t recognize him, which probably meant he was one of the clerks who’d been hired in the last few months. Maybe even a criminology student like he’d been. “Where would you like these?”

“Just leave them in the corner,” Jeff said. He watched the clerk unstack the boxes, each one marked s. cupertine in black marker with a date starting from 1983, and wondered how it was that a guy who’d been killing people for the mob for over fifteen years had never spent even a night in jail, but had ten boxes of intelligence in an FBI office just down the street from his house. The last box the kid unpacked was the one Jeff was most interested in — marked 1998, it contained the report on what was purported to be Cupertine’s body. There were no dental records or fingerprint records to be found, because there were no teeth left in the head when it was located, nor even a jaw, and no hands or feet, either.

In fact, all the cadaver dogs turned up (conveniently in a garbage dump owned by the Family) was half of a head, charred to the skeleton, with a hole from a.38 in the back, attached to just the trunk of a body, also burned to the bone. Helpfully, Sal Cupertine’s wallet was also found nearby. His driver’s license, which Cupertine inexplicably kept current, contained the only verified description of the man in the last decade: six foot, 215 pounds, brown hair, hazel eyes. He had an olive complexion, which made him look a bit more exotic than he was, since both of his parents, and their parents, too, were born and raised in Chicago. His file said he had a tattoo on his arm of an eight ball, which would have been a good identifying mark if the corpse happened to have had an arm.

It was all too convenient, though not without precedent, that the Family would kill one of their own and make his body so easy to discover. The Family hadn’t done business in Chicago for the better part of a century without knowing how to make amends, even to the authorities. How many dead crooked cops had turned up over the years? Twenty-five? Fifty? Enough to be both a shame to the city as well as a tidy solution. Yes, there were bad cops. . and this is what happened to them. So here was the body of Sal Cupertine, offered up as a peace offering to the FBI. The FBI hadn’t bothered to investigate much further to see if it really was Cupertine — Jeff knew it wasn’t, it just wasn’t possible — because the point was clear enough: We’ve given one back to you.

“Can I get you anything else?” the clerk asked.

Jeff looked up from the paperwork and saw that the clerk had arranged all the information into a kind of order — boxes containing information on Cupertine’s presumed victims were put into a nice pyramid, boxes about his close family members in another, boxes of general information in another — which Jeff rather appreciated. “What’s your name?” Jeff asked.

“Matthew Drew.”

“You a student?”

“I graduated UIC last December,” he said. “Quantico sent me back here to see if maybe it would be a good fit. So I’m just waiting to see where I’m assigned.”

“So you’re an agent?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I am.”

“What’s your specialty?”

“If it were up to me, I’d be on Hostage Rescue,” he said. “I qualified for an assault team.”

“Why are you running boxes for me?”

Matthew shrugged. He was young — maybe twenty-five, Jeff guessed — but big through the shoulders, maybe played small college football. “I guess I’m the guy who runs your boxes until I’m otherwise directed.”

“This case,” Jeff said, “what do you know about it?”

“Just what I saw on the news.”

“C’mon,” Jeff said. “You spend the whole morning hauling up boxes on big, bad Sal Cupertine, and you don’t stop to read one or two files?”

This got the kid to smile. “I might have looked over some stuff,” he said.

“What do you think? You think that body was Cupertine’s?” Jeff handed the file he was reading to Matthew, but he didn’t open it right away, which told Jeff he’d probably spent some time with it already.

“You want my opinion or an educated guess?” Matthew asked.

“Both,” Jeff said.

Matthew opened the file and started thumbing through the documents. “Body was found three days after the killing, but with garbage that had been picked up five days earlier,” he said. “So he was stashed, I’d say, not put in a garbage can somewhere. They actually carried him and pushed him under a bunch of trash. No teeth. No hands. No feet. I mean, no nothing, really. It’s a pretty brutal way to kill a guy who’d done a lot of good work for you, isn’t it?”

“You tell me,” Jeff said.

“Seems excessive. I mean, he was their top muscle. So he messes up and kills a couple good guys. . bad news, right? But not as bad as if he was skimming or planning a coup. If they killed him for messing up, my guess is that they’d do him decently. The wallet? That’s too sloppy for them. No way they’d let his wallet get into the mix.”

“So?”

“So that’s not him.”

“Why fake his death? Why kill another guy?”

Matthew closed his eyes for a moment. “Maybe his cousin Ronnie’s influence. Maybe as an appreciation for his services. Maybe they were scared to go after him. Maybe all that. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think that’s the problem. Easier to just make it him and get on with things. Easier for the families of those guys and for us, too.”

Matthew was right about that, but the thing that niggled at Jeff had nothing to do with the four men Sal Cupertine had killed at all. Certainly their deaths mattered. Certainly. What got to Jeff was that he knew Sal Cupertine believed the agent named Jeff Hopper was dead. That he saw Jeff’s name on the bill and decided he’d go upstairs and take Jeff Hopper out, put a bullet in his face, or choke him to death like he did Cal, and how, in his mind, that was an okay thing. How wherever he was now — and Jeff was certain he was out there somewhere — he thought he’d killed Jeff Hopper.

And maybe he had killed Jeff Hopper for a while. Six months, give or take. Now Jeff Hopper wanted Sal Cupertine to know: He was alive, and he was coming for him.

“You have a sport coat or something in your cubicle?” Jeff asked.

“No,” Matthew said. He had on a pair of tan slacks — probably Dockers — and a nicely pressed white polo shirt that now was dotted with smudges of dirt and dust from unloading the boxes.

Jeff checked his watch. It was a little past two o’clock. “You live nearby?”

“Yeah,” he said, “just down by the college.”

“You got a suit there?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Okay,” Jeff said. “Go change your clothes and come back. We’re going into the field.”

“Sounds good,” Matthew said calmly, though Jeff could tell he was excited. He apparently didn’t know yet that Jeff Hopper was a pariah. “Where are we headed?”

“Sal’s house,” Jeff said.

Jeff Hopper was always surprised by the houses bad people lived in, since they tended to look just like the houses good people lived in. In the case of Sal Cupertine’s house in Lincolnwood, there was even a white picket fence out front, which went along nicely with the brick driveway shaded by a towering blue ash. The blue ash even had a tire swing, something Jeff had always imagined he’d have one day, too, if he ever managed to have children, though at this point in his life that likely meant step-children. Turning forty-five without a wife, and with no clear prospects in sight, had confirmed that.

Hopper had Matthew make another drive around the block so they could rendezvous with the surveillance car at the end of the street, which was a peculiar place to watchdog a house, since they had to spend their whole day looking through their rear and side mirrors. Jeff couldn’t help but wonder how long that detail would last. Maybe another month? Two months? The house was likely bugged, and Jennifer Cupertine’s car had a tracker on it, so there was no real cause for concern that she’d skip out of town to find or meet up with her husband without the FBI being aware, though there was still the small chance that Jennifer and her son were in danger from the Family, an idea Jeff found unlikely. That was some Russian mob shit that even the Italians looked down on.

Matthew pulled up next to a black Chrysler, and Jeff rolled down his window so he could talk to the agents inside. There were two of them, both about Matthew’s age and build, which meant they were probably spending their free time cursing the recruiter who’d told them they’d be on the front line in the war on crime.

“Anything we should know?” Jeff asked. He didn’t recognize either man, which meant they probably didn’t recognize him, either. Better all around.

“Been pretty quiet,” the one in the driver’s seat said.

“How long?”

He looked at his watch. “I don’t know, maybe ninety days. Coop, that sound right?”

Coop, the agent in the passenger seat, had a row of playing cards spread out on the dashboard and was too busy playing solitaire to even look at Jeff. “Yeah,” he said. “Give or take a month.” He flopped down a nine of hearts but didn’t seem to know where to put it.

“Okay,” Jeff said. “When was the last time anyone from the Family stopped by?”

“Never,” the driver said. “It’s all wives and girlfriends. Ronnie Cupertine’s wife came by with two little ones about a week ago. Stayed about ten minutes and left in tears. That was a fun day.”

“Yeah?” Jeff said.

“Yeah,” the driver said. “The next hour, Jennifer stood out on the front lawn with a hammer and beat the shit out of that big tree next to the driveway. When she got tired of that, she came out into the street with a picnic basket filled with food and spent the next, I dunno, twenty minutes throwing fruits and vegetables at us.”

“She has a pretty good arm,” Coop said.

That explained why they were parked so far down the street.

“Okay,” Jeff said. “We’ve got some questions for her, so if Al Capone shows up, call me on my cell.”

Jeff handed the driver his card, and when the agent looked at the name, it was clear he recognized it. “Yeah,” the driver said, “I’ll do that,” and then he crumpled the card up and dropped it onto the pavement between the two cars.

Matthew didn’t give Jeff an opportunity to say anything, hitting the gas fast enough to make it clear he was polite enough not to say a word. He drove their same black Chrysler down the block and then pulled onto the Cupertine’s driveway, just as the manual suggests. Let the suspect know that you’re comfortable enough to park on their property. . while also, obviously, blocking their ability to drive away. Matthew took off his seat belt, but Jeff put a hand on his chest. “Hold up,” he said to him.

“What are we doing?” Matthew asked.

“Waiting for Mrs. Cupertine to come outside,” Jeff said.

“What if she never comes?”

“She’ll come,” Jeff said. “And when she does, feel free to ask questions.”

“I don’t feel comfortable doing that,” Matthew said. “I’m not familiar with all the particulars of the case.”

“You know that this lady’s husband killed three agents and a CI,” Jeff said. “Isn’t that enough?”

“I guess so,” he said. “Should I turn off the engine?”

“No, let it run,” Jeff said.

Matthew sat there quietly for ten minutes, didn’t even turn on the radio, didn’t roll down the window. Jeff was impressed. It wasn’t like an FBI agent, even a new one, to sit quietly by. But the kid did fidget in his seat a few times. Then he cracked his knuckles.

“You play a sport? In college?”

“Lacrosse,” Matthew said.

“Some place with a bunch of ivy around it?”

“Tufts,” Matthew said.

“That a good school?” Jeff messing with him now.

“Better than some,” Matthew said. “More expensive than most.” He cocked his head and then did roll down his window. “I think the venetian blinds are moving.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said, “Mrs. Cupertine has taken a couple looks.”

“You know,” Matthew said, “it’s not like she killed the agents.”

“I know that,” Jeff said.

“Then why are we sweating her to come out? Why not just go to the door?”

“I want her to get a good look at us,” Jeff said. “That way she won’t be scared to come outside and talk. We go knock on the door and badge her, maybe her kid gets all flustered and starts screaming and crying and throwing a tantrum. Then the dog starts barking and it’s all gone to shit. I don’t want that. When she’s ready, she’ll come outside and ask us questions.”

“That standard procedure?”

“No,” Jeff said. “Standard procedure would be that we just go about our business and pretend that body in the dump was Sal Cupertine.”

“Those guys back there,” Matthew said. “Did that bother you?”

“A little bit,” Jeff said.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Matthew said. “And I mean no offense in this. But how do you still have a job?”

“Because I haven’t quit,” Jeff said.

Matthew rapped his fingers on the steering wheel. Jeff liked that the kid wasn’t scared to ask a question. Didn’t seem worried that he might say the wrong thing, or if he was, had determined that Jeff wasn’t the kind of guy to pull rank on him. Truth was, six months ago, he was that guy. He was that guy going all the way back to Walla Walla. Maybe all the way back to his crib in Seattle. Raised like that by his father, a man he despised until he died. Then just as soon as his dad was six feet deep, their relationship improved markedly.

“Here we go,” Matthew said. The front door opened, and a young boy ran out, followed in short order by his mother. William was just a small child, Jeff could see, no more than four or five. He had Jennifer’s blonde hair but his father’s olive complexion and deep-set eyes. If William was lucky, Jeff thought, his mother would get rid of all remnants of his father and let him start fresh. Move to Nebraska or something and live his entire life thinking his father had never been a part of his life. Could you do that to a four-year-old? Probably. At three, for sure. But by five, they’d retain too much. The kid still had a chance not to be infected by the Family.

Jennifer stood on the front porch and watched her boy. He ran around the side of the house and came back riding a Big Wheel. He pedaled past the car and out into the street and then turned back around and cut up the passenger side and down the long driveway, before banking left and disappearing. A few moments later, he came shooting back around the house. Jennifer stepped off the porch then, sidestepped what looked to be several dinosaurs engaged in battle with each other on the front lawn, and came over to the Chrysler. She was tall — maybe five feet nine — and her long blonde hair spilled into the car. She had green eyes, though they were mostly red on this day, and the deep, dark circles around them weren’t doing her any favors, either.

“Please get off my property,” Jennifer said. Polite. Nice. Like it was just another inconvenience in her life, like having Jehovah’s Witnesses showing up when you’re watching television.

“I just have some questions for you,” Jeff said.

“Who are you? FBI or cops? Not the press, that’s clear enough by your nice ties.”

“FBI,” Jeff said. Jennifer gnawed at the skin surrounding her right pinkie nail. It looked raw, and Jeff wanted to reach across Matthew and pull it from her mouth, as if she were a child. Jeff couldn’t remember everything they had on her in their files, but what he did recall indicated to him that she wasn’t the average Family wife: the former Jennifer Frangello was in art classes at Olive-Harvey, getting good grades, parents were both dead — cancer and heart disease — and neither were related to any known crime families. She was just a person who happened to fall in love with a sociopath. Happens every day, and if he could figure out why, well, he’d retire and get his own afternoon talk show. “If this is a bad time for you, we can come back.”

“This is a good time,” she said. “Most of my neighbors are still at work, so they won’t come outside to watch the freak show.” She stopped to examine her finger. It had begun to bleed, so she gathered up the hem of her T-shirt and squeezed it around her hand. “I’m sorry about whatever you think my husband did,” she said. “I mean, I’m sorry about your friends. Were they your friends?”

“They were,” Jeff said.

“No one deserves to go out like that,” she said.

“That’s where we agree,” Jeff said.

“My husband,” Jennifer said, “he’s a good person. I know you don’t believe that. He loves his son. He’s a caring person. A very caring person.”

For some reason, Jeff didn’t doubt that. He’d listened to all the wiretaps they had on him from his meetings with the boys — even the last one — and what Jeff took away was that he seemed. . professional. Had an okay sense of humor. They’d even caught him briefly, and unexpectedly, on a wire a few months earlier, when they were working on the Russians, and he’d spent a good fifteen minutes standing outside a Subway near the college talking on his cell phone about cough medicine. Called his wife “baby.” Told her that he loved her before he hung up. Went inside and ordered a tuna fish sandwich. Just like a normal person.

“Your husband,” Jeff said, “is a hit man for the Family.”

“He’s never been arrested, do you know that?”

“Of course,” Jeff said.

“You know these people you call the ‘Family’ threw his father off of a building? So why would he work for people who did that to him?” Jennifer began to tear up, and Jeff wondered how hard it would be to live her life for one day. He didn’t try to empathize with the people he investigated, generally speaking, but then Jennifer wasn’t someone he was investigating.

“I’m not here to harass you,” Jeff said.

“The cops keep showing up whenever I go out. They don’t come here, because they probably know you guys are listening to everything, but they’ll roll up behind me when I’m out getting groceries. William, he loves it. But you know Chicago cops. They aren’t investigating anymore. The ones that stop me now, they think Sal is off somewhere going state’s evidence, so they’re here making sure I’m doing okay, asking me if I need anything, offering me money or whatever. Last guy? He came up to me at Tino’s pizza down the street, asked me what I needed, so I told him the best thing he could do would be to pay my electric bill. I was just joking, though I wonder if he did it, you know? Maybe next time I’ll ask him to get my cleaning.”

“Is that what you think?” Jeff asked. “That he turned state’s?”

“I think if I sit out here and talk to you, Ronnie will send his wife over to talk to me again.”

“Would that be why you didn’t hold a funeral?” Matthew asked.

Jennifer cocked her head and regarded Matthew with a look that Jeff thought was a mix between amusement and utter sadness. “Look at you,” she said. “Have you ever wanted for anything in your life?”

“Everyone wants something,” Matthew said, the young agent composed, cool, maybe a touch condescending, which was okay; he was FBI, after all. Then Jeff saw for the first time that Matthew had a wedding ring on his finger, and it all made some sense. He might have been a young agent, but he still had a life, still had more shit going on than Jeff, really. “It boils down to how they go about getting what they want, doesn’t it? For me, anyway.”

“Aren’t you smart, with your Brooks Brothers suit and your class ring. You think that gives you the right to talk to me like that? You’re not even old enough to valet my car.”

“Let’s take it easy,” Jeff said.

“No, to answer your question,” she said. “I didn’t have a funeral because I don’t want to believe he’s dead. Don’t want his son to believe he’s dead, either. Maybe he did turn state’s and he’s living out in Springfield or something, eating steak every night and telling you everything he knows about his cousin Ronnie’s used-car business.”

“Is that what you want?” Jeff asked.

“It’s what I hope,” she said. “It’s the best-case scenario. Otherwise I have to believe the shoe box of ashes in my hall closet is my husband, and I can’t handle that.” William came around the front of the house again on his Big Wheel, his legs pumping away on the pedals. Jennifer stood upright and watched as he spun around the car again before heading toward the backyard. “William, be careful,” she said, though it wasn’t loud enough for him to hear. It seemed almost reflexive.

“Your son has a lot of energy,” Matthew said. “My son is about his age. Never gets tired. My wife, Nina, is always looking for new ways to wear him out.”

“Get him a puppy,” Jennifer said absently. “Or a brother.”

“He’s adorable,” Matthew said.

“Right now he is,” Jennifer said. She shook her head just slightly, and then her pinkie went back into her mouth. She was only thirty-five, still a young woman, but Jeff wondered how much pressure she could take. Jeff took off his seat belt and got out of the car then, not bothering to put on his suit coat. He didn’t imagine she had a lot of allies in this world. He wanted to put an arm around her, let her know it was going to be okay, though of course he knew it never would be. So, instead, he handed her his business card. She looked at it briefly and then stuck it in her back pocket.

“Your husband,” Jeff said, “is not in state custody, and that body? That’s not him, either.”

“You have his DNA or something?”

“No,” he said. “But I don’t need it. I know the truth.”

“What’s that?” Jennifer said.

“We’ll get a court order and DNA your son at some point, compare it to the samples we have, and then it will be a big deal in the newspapers and such. It wouldn’t be good PR to do it now. Might not even be good PR for another year.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Jennifer said. “I don’t care if you believe me.”

“I believe you,” Jeff said.

“You do?”

“You’ve got no reason to lie,” he said, though of course she did. Everyone Jeff had ever known had a good reason to lie; it’s just that those reasons rarely panned out in the long run.

Jennifer Cupertine nodded twice and then took a deep breath through her nose and let it back out slowly through her mouth, then did it again. It occurred to Jeff Hopper that he shouldn’t have come here. Not because he didn’t appreciate the small amount of information he’d received, but because he was sure that this was another bad day Jennifer Cupertine would remember for the rest of her life. Another in a series of shitty days, this one featuring Special Agent Jeff Hopper and Kid Agent Matthew Drew, the lacrosse superstar who was now in the middle of his own career suicide, or would be once he got back to the office and was quizzed by the senior agents about what the fuck he was doing out at Sal Cupertine’s house when he was supposed to be running boxes.

“Why are you here?” Jennifer asked.

“I wanted you to know your husband was alive,” Jeff said. “And to tell you to keep away from Ronnie Cupertine and his people. They don’t have your son’s best interests, Mrs. Cupertine. This is a chance for you, for him. Make a different life. Get out of Chicago. This is your opportunity to get away from this gangster bullshit, Mrs. Cupertine.”

“No,” she said. “This house is paid for, and I’m going to stay in it until Sal comes back.”

“Sal comes back, he’s going to prison,” Jeff said. “If he’s lucky.”

“That’s fine,” she said, “but he’ll come here first, and I will be here, no matter when that is.”

“Fair enough,” Jeff said. He extended his hand toward Jennifer, and, surprisingly, she took it. “You hear from your husband, call me. I can help him.”

This made Jennifer laugh. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll be sure to do that.”

Jeff watched as Jennifer Cupertine gathered up the stray dinosaurs on her front lawn and then called for her son to put his Big Wheel away and come back inside. A simple domestic scene. And maybe what Jennifer Cupertine said was true — maybe Sal Cupertine was the most loving man on earth. It didn’t change the fact that he was also a murderer.

Something else Jennifer Cupertine said started to bother Jeff, so before she went inside, he said, “Mrs. Cupertine, just one more question.”

“What’s that, Agent Hopper?”

“How did you pay off your house?”

Jennifer Cupertine smiled. “Don’t you know?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be asking.”

“Cousin Ronnie paid it off,” she said. “An early birthday present for William.”