Sleeping Dogs

Eddie Mastrewski had shown him what to do in a variety of situations that arose in their business. He remembered Eddie waking him up in the middle of the night in a hotel in Milwaukee. At first the boy had been terrified because he thought the only reason to get up in the dark was that the police had somehow found out about the man Eddie had killed by the lake. His name had been “Good Eye” Fraser. Eddie had told him it was because Fraser had lost an eye in a fight years before, and it had been replaced by a very expensive and well-crafted glass sphere. That was the good eye. The other was small, red and piercing, and Fraser moved his head like an enraged turkey to bring it to bear on his enemies, a group that seemed to include everyone it looked at. The boy had assumed the police were now moving up the two stairways quietly because only a few hours before the satisfied customers had paid Eddie in a room behind an old pool hall a mile from there. They had scarcely been able to contain their joy at Good Eye’s demise. There could be no question of Good Eye’s friends seeking vengeance, because his friends had been the customers. They had literally stopped a game of rotation on the back pool table and passed a hat around to collect the money.

The boy had leaped out of the bed, snatched his revolver out of the drawer of the nightstand and groped for his pants. At this point he had seen Eddie’s grin. “Don’t get excited. Everything’s fine,” he had said. “It’s just time to go home.” The boy had been puzzled, but Eddie was busy packing his suitcase. “We did the job and we got paid for it, but if we’re still around after a day, those guys in the pool hall are going to start wondering why. We’re dangerous now. The police might find us, and that’s bad enough, but we also showed them we could take out a man they were afraid of, and that’s even worse. They might get scared that we’ll take over and bully them the way Good Eye did, and then they’d be even worse off. Or they might get to feeling ashamed that they had to hire us, and that we did it so easy. They’ll think, If it was that easy, we should have done it ourselves, so we wasted our money. No matter what they think, it’s bad for us, so we won’t give them time to think. Anyway, it’s part of the contract. If you hang around after a job and get the customers into an uproar, you’re denying them the peace of mind they paid for, and you deserve to die. It’s only fair.”

“Fair?” The boy was still groggy from sleep, and Eddie’s reasoning was hard to follow even in broad daylight. “To kill us for that?”

“Sure,” Eddie had answered. “In this life you always get a little bit worse than you deserve, so you have to take that into account.”

He had been a child then, and some of it was vague in his memory, but as he thought about it now, the rest of it began to come to him. It had been easy, as Eddie had said, and he realized that Eddie had probably just approached Fraser from his glass-eye side. But the part that seemed different now was the payoff in the pool hall. It hadn’t taken place in the back room, really. That was where they had made him wait while Eddie had accepted the money. His memory of it was the loud laughter and hooting coming from the men around the pool table in the front. For the first time, he remembered it as though he had seen it. Eddie sends the boy into the back room and closes the door, then walks up to the pool table and reaches into his pocket. When his hand comes out, the glass eye rolls the length of the table, looking as though it’s winking at the men gathered there. What other proof would they have asked for?

He knew what Eddie would have said about his situation at this moment: it was his own fault, so he deserved it. It was the result of what Eddie would have called a lapse of professionalism, and he would have said that it had started with The Honourable Meg. Eddie had been the ultimate pragmatist, with little time for sentiment. He had never married because it would have been foolish to imagine he could keep his second profession a secret from anyone who lived with him. He had had a series of liaisons with married women in the neighborhood whom he referred to as his “home-delivery customers.” He would go to their houses on slow afternoons, bringing some lamb chops or a roast for their husbands’ dinners, then return in a couple of hours and go back to work behind the counter. He would not have approved of The Honourable Meg.

But as Wolf searched through his memories of Eddie, he could recall nothing that would help him out of this mess. Eddie had never worked in the league where the customers were more dangerous than the jobs; he had known his limits.

Wolf realized that everything he did now would take on huge proportions in the future. There could be no more mistakes. It was time to lose the rented car. If he turned it in, he faced the risk that somebody would have had it traced through the credit card.

Just outside Cleveland, in the fringes where car lots, carpet stores and furniture warehouses marked the farthest reaches of the city, he found a huge new apartment complex. He parked the car on the street in front of it, then walked two miles down the road to a big motel and called a taxi to take him to the airport. Eventually, the people in the complex would realize that the car did not belong to somebody visiting their neighbors, or the cops would notice that it hadn’t been moved and would tow it. But that process would probably take a week. If he wasn’t out of the country by then, he would probably be dead. It was time to go see Little Norman.

Little Norman was the longest-running lounge act in Las Vegas. Each day at four o’clock in the afternoon for eighteen years, he would eat his breakfast in the back bar at the Sands, then place a two hundred percent tip on the table, stand up to his full six feet six and stroll out in a pair of cowboy boots that added two inches to his height. Today’s boots were hand-sewn iguana with carved silver toe caps and little silver imitation spurs at the heels, selected because the iguana hide went well with the Armani suit he was wearing.

As Little Norman stepped out of the bar and across the casino toward the door, the throngs of gamblers looked only at the clicking, buzzing, jingling displays on slot machines, or the brightly colored playthings on green felt tables. The only people who really watched Little Norman were some men on the walkways above the mirrors in the ceiling because they were paid to see everything, and a couple of women in the cashier’s window because they were bored. Their eyes settled on him for only a second and moved on. Little Norman was a regular, part of the garish sameness that they looked at every day.

There are places in the world where a man nearly seven feet tall, blacker than the king of the Zulus and weighing two hundred eighty pounds might well cause eyes to linger, but Las Vegas isn’t one of them. Little Norman was a familiar sight, and he never caused any trouble. If he had, it would have been very quiet and ended very quickly, because there were not many people who could have offered more than negligible resistance.

Little Norman had discovered Las Vegas in 1958, when he arrived there as the bodyguard of a boxer named Walt “The Animal” Homer. A convincing bodyguard for a celebrity who made his living beating other celebrities senseless had to be big, ugly and mean. Anyone could see that Little Norman was big and ugly enough, and the rest of his credentials came to the Las Vegas Police Department by way of his parole officer in Kansas City. Walt Homer turned out to be a bad ticket. He had his nose moved half an inch to the right in a match in Florida later that year, and the promoters decided not to invest any more in his doubtful future, so it was left in doubt no longer.

But in those days Little Norman was a warm, comforting presence for people in certain professions to have around. He met some friends of the promoters, made himself agreeable, did some favors and eventually built a place for himself in the world. By the time he returned to Las Vegas fifteen years later, it was in the position of responsibility and trust he now held.

After breakfast Little Norman always promenaded along the Strip, stopping in each of the casino lounges he passed. He would spend a few minutes in each bar, conferring with various consultants he kept on retainer—waitresses and dealers who worked in the casinos, chambermaids who worked above them and people who simply made it their business to be there because Little Norman had told them to. Whenever he had heard enough, he would reach into the pocket of the tailored suit, pull out a wad of twenty-dollar bills and strip off one note or several, depending upon the freshness and weight of what he had been told.

What Little Norman was doing was checking the weather in Las Vegas. For a number of years now—ten, to be precise—the weather had been fine. The money he paid for the recitations he heard each day came to him indirectly from fourteen old men, none of whom lived within five hundred miles of the city, who had gotten into the habit of depending on Little Norman. His job was to ensure that nothing ever happened to disturb the tranquility that had prevailed with few interruptions since their predecessors had formally agreed to it forty years ago.

Today, as Little Norman sampled the weather, he stared particularly intently at his observers and listened for mistakes. It wasn’t that any of them would be so foolish as to tell him a lie, but after so many days of clear weather, they might have missed something. As usual, he asked them who had checked in that they recognized, and who had played with a lot more money than his clothes indicated he should have. But today he also asked if there was a man of average height and build, with sand-brown hair, who seemed to be looking for someone. He would have sat watching at a remote table in the bar, or passed through the casino slowly, never gambling or talking to anybody. None of Little Norman’s people had seen such a man, so by the time he had finished his rounds at eight, he was satisfied that the weather was still fine.

At nine P.M. Little Norman’s long strides took him into Caesars Palace, where he had a light lunch with a girl named Yolanda. She claimed to be nineteen but provided him with evidence that was ambiguous. When he went to the men’s room, she tried to steal some of the money he had left under the check for the waiter. This meant that she was old enough to be squeezing each opportunity to put something away for the future, so she might have seen a sag or a wrinkle already, which argued twenty-five. But doing this also meant that she was young enough not to realize how bad that sort of behavior was for her future, because until the waiter picked it up, that money still belonged to Little Norman. He explained the distinction to her patiently, with a reassuring smile on his face, and she listened with the alertness of a rabbit. For her benefit he added that Las Vegas was going to be a cold, hard place for her if she didn’t value the goodwill of people like waiters and doormen. She demonstrated her native intelligence by openly taking the money out of her sleeve and putting it back on the table—not on the check, but under her own plate. Little Norman liked her for that.

By eleven P.M. Little Norman was making his second circuit of the casinos. He couldn’t be everywhere, but he could seem to be. He made eye contact with everybody he saw whom he knew, so that if they had seen anything he might like to hear, they wouldn’t need to wonder where to find him.

Little Norman returned to his car in the lot at the Sands at six in the morning. It was a bright red Corvette with an engine that could do a hundred fifty if he had been reckless enough to try it. He had bought the first one he could afford in 1960, and kept trading them in ever since, always bright red, because that was the color of the first one he had seen in Kansas City; it was the color Corvettes were. He always had experienced a comfort in having more car than anybody he was likely to have to chase down.

Little Norman had lived in some of the big hotels downtown when he had first come to preserve the good weather. The fact that he could afford this luxury had appealed to him then. Now he lived in a three-bedroom house on the edge of town near an entrance to the Interstate. The fourteen old men were deeply conservative in their souls, and they didn’t trust a man who lived as though he didn’t intend to stay.

The traffic was sparse, and Little Norman drove home with only a couple of almost-stops at corners where he had mistimed the lights. He unlocked the door of his house and entered, punched the buttons on the panel in the wall to let his security system know who he was. Then he locked the door and walked into his bedroom.

Outside the window at the back of the living room that looked out on the empty swimming pool and the cactus plants, Wolf ducked into the darkness. “One-five-two-four: fifteen twenty-four.” He waited, then moved to the bedroom window, stooping to look through the crack in the blinds at Little Norman’s bedtime ritual. The big man carefully took off his clothes and boots and put them in the closet, then opened the drawer on the nightstand, pulled out a .45 ACP pistol that Wolf judged was a Beretta and slipped it under the pillow beside him. He disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes, then returned, climbed into bed and turned off the light with a remote control on the nightstand.

Wolf waited for a half hour, lying on the still-warm weeds beside the house, then stood up and began the walk to his motel. It was a couple of miles away, and he was tired.

The next day, Little Norman was pleased to learn that the weather in Las Vegas was still fine. He made his rounds wearing boots of crocodile and ostrich hide, and celebrated with an evening meeting with Yolanda in a room he had rented for her at the Frontier. It was after five A.M. when he compressed himself into his Corvette and drove back to his house. It wasn’t until he reached his bedroom that he learned the weather had changed. “Hello, Norman.” He didn’t have to turn his head to know who it was, but he did it anyway. He wasn’t going to go into the darkness without being man enough to look.

“Hello, kid.”

“You’re not surprised to see me.”

“I’m surprised you let me see you.” Little Norman stared at him. He looked almost the same. He wasn’t that much older-no big gut, no less hair, maybe a few wrinkles. Little Norman’s mind was full of irrelevant impressions now, each setting off thoughts that would have been distractions if it had mattered what he thought. The Butcher’s Boy would kill him, and they both knew that he wasn’t going to stand around and wait for it to happen. He would make an attempt to get to a weapon because he was Little Norman. But he wouldn’t make it in time because the man sitting in his chair holding a .45 on him was who he was. Little Norman also knew that the gun wouldn’t jam or misfire because it was the one he kept under his pillow.

The Butcher’s Boy had fooled the alarm system and sat here in the dark waiting for him. This didn’t surprise him either. Alarm systems weren’t for people like them; they were to keep out some junkie who needed your stereo. He let his eyes dart to the nightstand for the remote control, but it wasn’t there. He could have turned out the lights and taken his chances in the dark, but of course this man knew that. So it had to be the lamp itself, quick and low and hard.

“I’d like to talk to you for a minute,” said the Butcher’s Boy.

“About ten years ago? I know why you’re here. I’d be here too.”

“Okay, let’s start with ten years ago.”

“I didn’t think I was setting you up. I thought they really were going to pay you. If I’d known they were going to take you out on the Strip and kill you …” He stopped and shrugged. “You know me.”

The Butcher’s Boy nodded. “You would have made sure they didn’t fuck it up.”

“I was the best. Maybe not ten years ago, but before that.”

“You were the best once. Not a lot of people can say that, especially the ones who were.”

Little Norman nodded. “I might have been able to talk them out of it, too. I always liked you. You were the only one in the trade that seemed to really be alive. Besides me.” Little Norman kept the lamp in his peripheral vision. He was too far away to grab it; he would have to bat it at the Boy. “I’m curious, kid. I know you’re not going to tell me where you’ve been.”

“No.”

“But tell me this: did you have any fun?”

This seemed to take the Boy by surprise. “Fun?”

“Yeah. I mean, was it worth it? Ten years is a hell of a lot of time to be hiding in a hole somewhere. Did you put together any kind of a life while you were gone?”

“I liked it. It was a hell of a lot better than I thought it would be. I’d have stayed forever. It doesn’t make me any happier to be here, but at least I didn’t waste the time I had.”

“I’m glad. At least old Eddie taught you something that did you some good. Don’t tell me when you’re going to do it. Just make it in the head.”

“I’m not here for that. I’m not taking you this time, unless you can’t stand good luck and go for the lamp or something. I want you to talk to the old men.”

There was no question of who the old men were. “What for? What do you want to say to them?”

“Remind them of what happened ten years ago. I behaved like a professional. I did the job, I came here to get paid and the customer tried to chew me up.”

“They don’t give a shit about any of that. They didn’t then. They cared because of what you did after that. You buried a lot of people. It took them years to clean everything up.”

“I want them to remember that too. You understand what I’m saying.”

“You want to scare the old men? Has it been that long? You don’t remember who they are?”

“If they kill me, they get nothing. If they leave me alone, they can forget about me. I’m not working anymore.”

“You did Talarese and Mantino and Fratelli. Three medium-big fish in one week.”

“Talarese is the one who found me. Mantino had a specialist waiting for me when I tried to get out on a plane. Fratelli had people looking for me. I guess he was doing Balacontano a favor.”

“That ain’t the story they’re telling.”

Little Norman could tell that this wasn’t what the Butcher’s Boy had expected to hear. “What are they saying?”

“Talarese was wearing a police wire when you got him.”

“Talarese? Bullshit.”

“You wanted to know what they’re saying. That’s it. A lot of people think somebody who had problems with what was on the recording hired you to get all three of them. Some people think you just went crazy from hiding: you figured it wasn’t enough to put Carl Bala in jail. You had to cut down the ones he left in charge, so his family would fall apart.”

“I did them because it was the only way they left me to stay alive.”

Little Norman watched him for a reaction. “Then you made a mistake. If Talarese was wired, Mantino would be on the recordings. He’d be glad Talarese was dead.”

“I didn’t imagine that guy at the airport. When I left the cops were moving in on him.”

“Did you know his face?”

“No. A tall guy with blond hair and a mustache.”

“Did you ever let anybody take your picture?”

“No.”

“Couldn’t Mantino have found somebody who saw you in the old days? Think about it. You sure he wasn’t one of the cops?”

Wolf didn’t have to think. “Who did the wire belong to?”

“I won’t know unless they arrest somebody. Maybe they won’t. Maybe you killed everybody worth jail space.”

“I’m leaving now,” said the Butcher’s Boy. He stood up, the gun still trained on Little Norman. “Tell the old men what I said. Make sure they know what they’re doing if they decide to come after me.”

“You think Carl Bala’s going to leave you alone?”

“Carl Bala can’t do anything unless they let him.”

“What about the police?”

“I’m worried about the old men.”

“How do I give you their answer?”

Wolf shook his head. “This is the last conversation anybody’s going to have with me. If somebody is looking for me, watching me or waiting for me, I’ll know where they came from.”

“All you’re offering is that if they leave you alone, you’ll leave them alone?”

The Butcher’s Boy gave a little shrug. “It’s not a bad deal.” He stepped backward out the door and closed it behind him. Little Norman strained to hear his footsteps, then listened for the squeaking hinge on the front door, then waited for the rattle of a car’s starter. He heard none of them.

“No,” he said aloud. “Not a bad deal at all.”

Elizabeth cradled the baby in her arms. Amanda was asleep, but every time Elizabeth tried to ease the bottle out of her mouth, she would suck on it a few times to reassure herself that it was still there. Elizabeth stared across the baby’s room at the wall. It had occurred to her a few seconds ago that if she were the Butcher’s Boy, right about now she would be on her way to Boston to get Giovanni Bautista. It would have to be done right, though, a virtuoso performance, because Bautista would be expecting him. He was the last of Balacontano’s old stalwarts, and if the Butcher’s Boy killed him now it would accomplish two things: it would cut off, at least for the moment, Carl Bala’s most potent remaining means of finding him; and it would scare the hell out of everybody outside the family who might consider hunting him. This was the part that nobody else had ever understood about the Butcher’s Boy ten years ago: in order to survive, he’d had to remind people of their mortality. That would be what was on his mind now—surviving by convincing people that if they didn’t leave him alone he would kill them. What else did he have?

Now she slipped the bottle out of Amanda’s lips, jammed it upright beside her in the padding of the chair, then carefully eased her weight forward and straightened her legs to stand. So far, so good; Amanda was still limp and sleeping, a little gurgle in the back of her throat coming in slow, regular intervals, like a snore. Elizabeth stepped carefully on the boards of the hardwood floor that she remembered didn’t creak much, and made her way to the crib in her stockings. She leaned over the bars with Amanda in her arms, setting first the little heels, then the bottom, then the back, and only then, very slowly, the head on the mattress. She pulled the soft blanket up to the baby’s armpits, and was turning to sneak out of the room when she heard the telephone down the hall ring. She froze and looked at Amanda, then tried to step toward the doorway more quickly, each step now landing unerringly on a board that cracked like a rifle shot, and the phone growing unaccountably louder.

She slipped out, quickly closed the door and skated on her stocking feet to the telephone in the office. “Yes?” she said into it. She knew her voice sounded angry, and how could they know?

Richardson’s voice had a stupid cheerfulness. “Hi, Elizabeth. Hope I didn’t get you up.”

“No,” she said. “You know, I never asked you. Do you have any kids?”

“Sure.” She could hear him beaming, probably looking at a picture that he kept somewhere out of sight. “Dan’s twenty-two and Brenda’s nineteen. She just transferred to Northwestern.” Of course the question had been a mistake. She had wanted to know whether he had any idea what time one-year-olds get up, or whether he had simply forgotten, but the instant she had asked she realized that Richardson wouldn’t have been the one to get up with a baby.

“Actually, I was going to call you before work anyway. I’d like to have the Boston office watch Giovanni Bautista as closely as possible, starting now-I know it’s expensive—and also get the people who watch airports and borders to step up security on the major routes from Boston into Canada.”

“Why Canada?”

“That’s in case the ones who are watching Bautista make a mistake. The Butcher’s Boy is ready to leave. I can feel it. He’ll do something to get them off his back so he can disappear. Killing Bautista is one possibility. There are others, of course, but that one just struck me. Can you do it?”

“I’m not sure what we can do. We’re going to have a meeting. The deputy assistant wants to talk about the case.”

“Which one?”

“Hillman’s in charge of us. How soon can you get here?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve got to get Jimmy up and give him his breakfast; then I’ll call the baby-sitter and ask her to come early. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

As soon as she let the receiver’s weight press down on the button it rang again, as though it were alive. She snatched it up. “Yes?”

It was Hamp. “Hi, Elizabeth. I’m sorry to call you before work, when the baby’s probably getting ready to nod off.”

“How did you know? Do you have kids?”

“I just have a knack for waking people up. Can you talk?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“Cleveland. They found the car he was using. I can see it from where I’m standing. He abandoned it in the parking lot of a big project. He left it clean.”

“I hope you’re not waiting for me to sound surprised. Did you get anything out of it?”

“Dead end,” Hamp said. “He rented it on the Ackerman credit card. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t let anybody run the card through a machine since then.”

Elizabeth sighed. “Great. Jack, I think the place he’s going might be Boston. He could be after Giovanni Bautista.”

There was a long silence on the other end, and she could hear the sounds of traffic. Finally he said, “I don’t think so.”

“Why not? Maximum trouble, maximum confusion. Bautista’s the logical one to hit.”

“That’s right. It’s practically a straight line. L.A., Santa Fe, drop off the car in Cleveland, then Buffalo. There’s not much left in that direction but Boston.”

“I see your point: too obvious for him. What’s your theory?”

“I think he’s someplace in the Midwest. I think he’s laying low and looking for a way out.”

“What are you going to do?”

“The best place to wait for him to poke his head up is Chicago. I can get just about anyplace from there in an hour or two.”

“Jack, there’s something I just found out that I ought to tell you about. My boss has called a meeting. The deputy assistant is going to be there, so it’s got to be about money or resources or whatever you want to call it, so—”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m independently wealthy. I have a pension from the LAPD. I’ll call you with my new number when I get to Chicago.”

The conference room looked different, even though it was another dark, rainy dawn. It was because the last time she had been here she was alone, laying out printouts on the big table and sitting in one chair, then another, and looking at each corner of the room without knowing she was seeing it, because the front of her mind was thinking about the way he would be traveling. People in the room changed it, and even though it was their place, it wasn’t an improvement.

Hillman, the deputy assistant, was already seated at the head of the table. It was typical of Richardson to relinquish his space to a visiting potentate. In a subtle way, this made it the deputy assistant’s meeting, and he obviously knew it. He sat back and watched her enter and look around at the others, then take a seat at the opposite end of the table. If it was going to be that kind of meeting, then she would take a place where she could face him. Elizabeth studied him without letting her eyes rest on him. He had thick brown hair that had begun to recede, and he had allowed some hairdresser to convince him to comb it forward in the front, so that at first it appeared to be a hairpiece. When she had come in, she had assumed he was tall because he had wide shoulders. But now he lifted his arms and rested them on the table, and they were so short that she thought that she must be taller than he was, and that he had probably arrived early enough to be seated before anyone saw him. He was going to interfere, just as his predecessors had ten years ago. Simply by being here and asking questions for an hour or two, he would cost them half a day. In half a day the Butcher’s Boy could put them another ten years behind him.

The deputy assistant looked down at his watch, then at her. “Miss Waring?”

“Hello, Mr. Hillman,” she said. There were three other women in the room, and all of them were in their twenties and wore designer glasses that had been chosen as accessories to outfits of the sort that nobody in this office used to wear except in court. From the looks of their hair, all of them had gotten the call hours before she had.

“It’s nice to see you again.” She could tell that Hillman wasn’t sure if he had seen her before, but if she had been in the Justice Department for more than ten years, she had a right to expect that the upper echelon at least knew her by sight. “I understand you’ve been transferred from Fraud. What’s your first impression?”

“I’m not exactly new,” she said. “This is where I started, And I’m not transferring back; I’m just on loan for this case.”

Hillman nodded sagely. “That’s right.” It was as though he had been testing her hold on her sanity. “The reason we’re having this little get-together is that this case came as a surprise upstairs. I’d sort of like to get up to speed. I understand that this Butcher fellow assassinated one of our informants in New York so that the wire was discovered; then the theory is that he flew to Santa Fe and killed a boss named Peter Mantino, and then went to Buffalo and killed the boss there.”

Elizabeth nodded. “That’s one possibility.”

Richardson looked alarmed. “Just a day ago you were sure of it.” He glanced at the deputy assistant as though he were checking to see if he was on fire. “Has something changed?”

Elizabeth answered him but looked at the deputy assistant. “The Buffalo police pointed out to me that it’s a lot of work for one person, no matter who he is. It meant he had to kill several other people in Buffalo—at least three—in different ways in a few hours. Not that he couldn’t do it, but it leaves the question of why.”

“Why?” This time it was the deputy assistant. “I understood that this is what he does.”

“It’s easy to think of reasons why a boss is murdered. Somebody hires the killer, or he has a personal grudge to settle. It’s not as easy to imagine why one man would come in and shoot two or three soldiers in one part of town, then go shoot the boss and three more soldiers afterward. Nobody would hire one man to do that, and the only reason anyone would want that sort of massacre is an unfriendly takeover. The Butcher’s Boy isn’t eligible for management.”

Richardson smirked. “I don’t think we really need the advice of the Buffalo police on this sort of thing, do we?”

“I didn’t ask for it, but it makes a certain amount of sense.”

Richardson prompted her. “But you aren’t buying it, are you?”

“Some of it.”

The others waited, but she didn’t go on. Finally Richardson prodded her. “Which parts?”

“The last time we heard of the Butcher’s Boy, ten years ago, he did something very similar, only we didn’t know what was happening until later. I think that something went wrong that made his clients turn on him, so he was on the run and did it to churn up the water so he could get away. I can’t be sure why he’s doing it this time, but I don’t think it’s for money.”

“All right, Elizabeth,” said the deputy assistant. She noted the change to her first name. “You’ve just come from Fraud, so you know something about revenue-center budgeting. That’s what I’m here about. We have limited resources to work with. This is one case, one man. What do we get if we catch him, and what does it cost?”

Elizabeth thought for a moment, then decided. She was going to have to defeat Hillman by tunneling under whatever position he took so that she got there before he did. “In Fraud that wasn’t hard to answer. We were recovering money stolen from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. We just figured out who took the most who was likely to still have it, and we went after him. This is different. I don’t have the slightest idea what it would cost to catch him, and I don’t know what we get.”

The deputy assistant nodded again, and this time he was smiling in contemplation of the triumph he was about to savor. “You have to look at this from the Malthusian point of view. I have to go upstairs and tell our bosses what I think we should do with our finite resources that will result in the greatest good. Or the maximum damage to evil, if you will. The range of options is staggering, and we’d like to do it all. But you have to be hard-nosed about this Is this something we should pursue on a federal level?” He smiled as though he knew the answer, then added, “Of course, you could tell me that this is the kind of decision I get the big bucks for making.” He looked around, and the people at the table chuckled on cue. He seemed pleased. “But I’ve got nothing to go on unless you help me.”

“All right,” said Elizabeth. What a loathsome little man. She would have to argue his position for him, and let him see what was wrong with it. “As I said, I believe that the Butcher’s Boy fell out with his employers ten years ago, and as a result killed a number of organized-crime figures—some important, some not—in order to create the maximum chaos so that he’d have time to get away. I think that he’s an evil man, and in a perfect society would be forced to suffer some punishment. But if you’re asking if you should take, say, two million dollars from enforcing civil rights laws to spend on getting him, I don’t know. I doubt it.” The current administration had spent virtually nothing on enforcing civil rights laws, and everyone at the table knew it.

Richardson looked faint, but the deputy assistant seemed to relish the conversation. “Give me your reasoning, Elizabeth.”

“The reason we wanted him ten years ago was that we believed he knew a great deal about the men who ran organized crime and their activities. He’d have to. He was a sort of contract exterminator for people at a very high level. But I think he’s been in hiding for ten years. If that’s true, what he knows is mostly old news, which might make it hard to get convictions. There’s also the problem that his knowledge is pretty much limited to capital crimes. If we find him, we may not take him alive. If we do, he probably won’t tell us anything. I can’t assume many judges would grant him immunity to testify, or that immunity would be worth much without protection from the Mafia. Which would get us into the area of the Witness Protection Program. If he’s stayed alive while they were looking for him for ten years, he can do better on his own. And, of course, it would put the Department in the position of setting a man free who has probably killed dozens of people.”

“Dozens? Literally?” Hillman raised his eyebrows.

“That’s if the stories are true. It’s hard to tell.”

“And we won’t know unless we go out and catch him?”

Elizabeth didn’t take the bait. “I can’t guarantee we’ll ever know more than we do right now. I’m not qualified to tell you whether taking him off the streets will be of political value to the Department. I do know it probably won’t contribute much to the safety of the average citizen in his home; in fact, what he’s been doing all week is killing off some of the very people we’d most like to take out of the game. That includes the informant you mentioned. Tony T was a bad man.”

“I’m impressed, Elizabeth,” said the deputy assistant. “I asked for hard-nosed, and that’s exactly what I got. What’s your conclusion?”

“I think the opposition is more likely to get him than we are.”

“You do?”

“Sure. They would consider him a more serious problem than we do because his memory can put a lot of them away for life. They know more about him than we do, and they have an unlimited budget.” She hesitated for a second, not because she was considering not saying it, but to be sure he got it. “And they operate on utilitarian principles too.”

Richardson came out of the elevator and stalked directly to Elizabeth’s desk. “He likes you.”

“He does?”

“He thinks you’re the best thing that could happen.”

She shook her head. “I could see it from the minute I walked in there. We were made for each other. The electricity in the air, the—”

“Jesus, Elizabeth, you handled him brilliantly. You won. Now, be gracious in victory and stop fighting. He wants us to go for it.”