Sleeping Dogs

Wolf awoke in the big, hard bed and stared in the direction of the window. He wondered what had awakened him. The thick, opaque curtains were still drawn over the glass, so the room was dark, but at the side there was the tiny muted glow of a ray of light bouncing off the white lining of the curtain and onto the wall. It was daytime. He reached to the bedside table and held his watch close to his eyes. It was only seven-thirty A.M. It couldn’t be a maid who hadn’t seen the Do NOT DISTURB sign. He listened, then swallowed to clear his ears and listened again. There was no sound at all. It was almost eerie. He resigned himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to sleep again. He threw off the heavy covers and felt a kind of relief at the sound of the starched sheets sliding over one another. At least he wasn’t deaf.

He walked across the thick carpet to the window, pushed his index finger to the edge of the curtain and squinted to see what Rosemont, Illinois, looked like in the daytime. He started to breathe deeply in order to wake up and stop the shock before it made him slow and stupid. He stepped to the other side of the window and slowly moved the curtain a quarter of an inch. But when he looked out at the parking lot from the new angle, it was still the same. There were no cars in the lot. Last night there had been at least twenty, all in a row outside his window; now all he could see was black macadam, with the spaces marked in faded white paint. Somehow they had come in and evacuated everybody from the little motel without waking him, and now they were getting, ready to move in.

Wolf dressed quickly and threw everything he had brought with him into the little suitcase. It must be the FBI. They had come in with pass keys or even called every room on the telephone to tell them to get out quietly, and in a minute they would be coming through the only door with shotguns. There would be something like a SWAT team watching the only window. He had been lucky they hadn’t seen the curtain move, or there would be holes in it already.

He looked around him. There was the closet door, but there was also a sliding door on the side wall. It had to be a door to the next room, put there in case somebody wanted to turn both of them into a suite. He put his ear to it and listened. There was no sound of movement in the next room. If they were planning to come in that way, they would have it unlocked. He exerted a soft pressure on the door to see if it would budge, but it didn’t.

Wolf concentrated on dismantling the standing lamp. He cut the plug and jerked the cord through the long steel pole, pocketed it, and unscrewed the bulb and receptacle. Then he forced the motel’s bottle opener between the door and the jamb. Now he fitted the hollow steel pipe over the opener to extend the handle by six feet. When he pried with the long lever, the door lock gave a little groan, then popped. He slid the door open and saw an identical door on the opposite wall. Closing the one he had just come through, he headed for it.

Inside the third room, he decided it was time to try another way. He picked up a chair, tied the lamp cord around the back of it and carried it into the bathroom. Setting it in the center of the floor, he stood on it, then reached up to push the plywood hatch off the access hole to the attic. After shoving his little suitcase into the crawlspace, he reached up, grasped both sides of the cubbyhole and pulled himself up. Inside the crawlspace it was dark and dusty, and the sloping roof was only a yard above the floor of bare two-by-fours with layers of insulation between them. Here and there were wires for the light fixtures below. As soon as he had turned around on his hands and knees to face the hole again, he pulled the chair up with the lamp cord, set it aside and put the cover back on the access hole.

Wolf crawled carefully from one two-by-four to the next, at each advance setting his suitcase down ahead of him, quietly making his way down the long empty space. He could see the small louvered vent at the end of the building, and he used it as a goal.

In the hallway Cabell whispered to Sota, “Remember, anything that’s alive in there is no friend of yours.”

Sota grinned at the door and clicked the slide on his new MAC-10. “Lock and load,” he whispered. Sota’s dumb cheerfulness was beginning to wear on Cabell. The fact that the last time he’d had a weapon in his hand he had fired point-blank into a pane of bulletproof glass at a man selling lottery tickets didn’t inspire confidence.

Cabell and Sota were thieves. The difference was that Cabell knew it, and had been nervous about going along on something like this to begin with. But Sota seemed to think he was a badass. Puccio had decided it was some kind of weird Mafia justice that somebody should shoot this guy with the gun that Salcone had carried when he got killed. To Cabell it was just asking for trouble, so he had given the gun to Sota, who hadn’t figured out that if you found blood on a gun, it wasn’t from the guy it was fired at.

Puccio was calling in lots of markers today. Landsberg was only another thief like Cabell, but he had his own crew working out of a travel agency Puccio owned. Once in a while, when a whole family sailed for Fiji or someplace, Landsberg’s crew would come in with a moving van and take out everything but the plumbing. Everybody owed Paul Cambria the right to work in town, but Puccio was the guy who kept track. There were at least ten or fifteen guys around the motel right now, all of them called in the middle of the night.

Cabell kicked in the door, and when he brought his foot back to the floor he let his momentum carry him to his right and into the room, as Sota slipped in low and to the left. For a second, Sota’s mind didn’t allow the possibility that the room was empty. He fired a short burst into the couch, which seemed to be the only thing that wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Then he rushed into the bathroom, where there was nothing to point his weapon at but a couple of wet towels draped over the shower curtain. Cabell said, “You didn’t happen to slip out for a smoke while you were supposed to be watching the hall?”

“No way,” Sota protested, but Cabell hadn’t said it seriously. He was already checking to see if the window had been opened. He did it cautiously, without moving the curtain, so that Landsberg wouldn’t get a glimpse of him from outside and put a hole in him. He looked around the room, and then saw it. “You said there wasn’t but one door.” He walked to the sliding door that led to the next room and studied it. There was a deep indentation beside the lock, and the wood around it had been compressed and cracked. He silently pointed to it, stepped to the side, and abruptly slid it open to allow Sota a clear shot, but Sota just stood and stared.

Cabell cautiously craned his neck to peer into the next room. It was identical to this one, and he could already see that some damage had been done to the lock on the sliding door that connected it to the third. He turned to Sota. “You go out in the hall. When I flush him, that’s the way he’ll go.”

At the end of the attic, Wolf lifted the plywood square just enough to fit the muzzle of Little Norman’s pistol. The roar of the automatic weapon a minute ago was a sure sign that somebody down there was getting jumpy. It also seemed like a reliable indication that the people down there were not from the FBI. As he looked down through the crack, he saw something he had not expected. There were a man and a woman, both about fifty, lying on the floor in the motel office. They were both on their backs, so he could recognize them as the owners, but they’d both had their throats cut. He could see that the counter drawers and cash register had been rifled.

Wolf lifted the hatch a few more inches. It was stupid. All they’d had to do was flash a badge they could have bought in any toy store and tell everybody there was a gas leak. For a moment he considered staying in the attic and waiting for his pursuers to leave, but something about the scene below made it seem foolish. They weren’t going to leave. He ran a mental inventory of the contents of his small suitcase and decided there was nothing in it that would tell anyone anything about him, so he left it in the attic, then lowered himself to the top of a filing cabinet, went to the counter and began to look in the drawers.

There was no sign that the couple lived here, so there had to be a car. Finally he found the woman’s purse, a large bag made out of something that looked like carpet, with wooden handles. Her key chain had a little flashlight and a whistle on it. It was sad that she would have imagined that those things would keep somebody from hurting her.

He moved toward the back door of the office. The car had to be in the back, because the lot was empty. There were only a couple of things in his favor now. One was that the only men he knew about for sure were still somewhere behind him firing automatic weapons into empty rooms, so nobody would expect him to emerge from the office. Another was that there couldn’t be many people still around who knew him by sight after all these years. He glanced back at the two bodies, already half drained of blood. Of course, those people outside didn’t seem much worried about killing the odd bystander. If any one of them had a functioning brain, at least some soldiers would be positioned around the motel waiting for him to break cover. He had to get them to show themselves.

He searched the other counter cabinets. What he was looking for wasn’t hard to find. It was a big cardboard carton full of boxes of matchbooks printed with an idealized drawing of the motel with imaginary trees around it and the words “Hanniver House Motel.” He had seen the matches in all the ashtrays in his room, and the supply had to come from somewhere. He opened a box and took a couple of books out of it, then tossed half the boxes up the access hatch to the attic and poured the rest against the wall of the office that joined it to the rest of the motel. He lit the pile of boxes in the attic first, then climbed down and waited a minute until he heard a crackling noise that told him the old, dry two-by-fours were beginning to burn. Now he tossed a burning match on the pile of boxes against the wall. After a few seconds the first matchbooks ignited with a bright, sputtering, sulfurous flare. Then the whole pile seemed to go up at once in a big flame, like the afterburner on a jet, licking up the wall, peeling the paint off it and covering the upper parts with a poisonous black smoke. He backed away, keeping himself within arm’s reach of the door because he wasn’t sure just how fast this place was going to burn.

Cabell was preparing to kick in the door of the fifth room when a familiar sound reached his ears from a distance. It sounded like an electric smoke detector. At first he felt the special sort of anger that he reserved for people like Sota. It would be right out of Sota’s repertoire to toss a burning cigarette somewhere just because there was nobody to make him pay for the damage to the carpet, and therefore no reason not to. Right now he hoped Sota was listening to the reason not to, but then a second thought occurred to him. What if the ten or twelve impatient geniuses stationed around the place had heard the gunfire a while ago, and then expected Sota and Cabell to come out? They hadn’t, so those guys might have assumed that it meant they couldn’t, that what they had heard was the sound of the Butcher’s Boy shooting him and Sota. He thought about the ones he had known before this excursion. Some of them were thieves like him, a couple had something to do with the gambling business and three were apparently pimps. The only ones he was sure had any experience at all with this sort of thing were Puccio’s own men, and where the hell they were right now was anybody’s guess. The others would react to the sound of an automatic weapon the way he would—with a resolution not to enter the building hastily. But whose idea was it to burn the guy out? Well, if that was the plan, it was time he got with the program. He went to the door of the room, opened it and peered into the hallway. Sota whirled and aimed the little submachine gun in his direction, but he didn’t fire.

“Jesus,” said Sota. “You scared me.”

“It’s about time,” said Cabell. “Let’s get out of here.”

As he glanced down the hallway to look for the most likely exit, he saw two things he didn’t like. One was that black smoke started to pour out of the crack under the door of one of the rooms down the hall. It wasn’t seeping out; it looked as though it were being blown out with a fan. The second thing he saw didn’t look as ominous at first. On the ceiling of the hallway thirty feet from Cabell’s head, a little red disk popped and fell to the carpet. Then the little brass pinwheel it had held in place started to spin. It gave a hissing, gurgling noise, and then began to spew a thick spray of muddy, rust-colored water onto the carpet. A second later the next spigot did the same. Cabell started to run, but it was too late. All along the pipeline, the spigots of the sprinkler system popped and vomited red-brown, icy water down on the hallway. The first eruption was so cold that Cabell’s heart stopped and he gasped, but in an instant he and Sota were drenched. As he sloshed toward the exit, he could taste the metallic, gritty stuff, and he kept waiting for the pipe to clear itself and maybe blow the sediment off his head and out of his eyes. But he made the exit without knowing if it ever got any clearer.

As they dashed out of the main entrance and slopped onto the pavement, Cabell could see two or three other men moving away. He looked to see if any of them were running, but they all moved with the same chagrined strides that he was taking. The son of a bitch they were supposed to kill must be long gone. If he had still been here, they would have heard him laughing.

Wolf finished ripping the woman’s dress off her bloody, lifeless body. He slipped the wet rag over his clothes and cinched it together with her dead companion’s belt, rolled his pant legs up over his knees, then pulled a little tablecloth that had “Chicago” embroidered on it off the counter, folded it, threw it over his head and tied it under his chin like a scarf. The torn, bloodstained dress covered his clothes, and if nobody got too close, he might make it the five yards to the car.

The only one out there who would be positive the woman couldn’t be dragging herself out of the burning building to drive herself to the emergency room was the one who had brought the knife across her throat. If any of the others were still around the motel, with all the noise and smoke attracting police and firemen and gawkers, they weren’t likely to open up on anything wearing a bloody dress. He just had to hope the one with the knife was gone.

As he slipped the bolt on the back door of the office, he had a brief attack of irrational reluctance. There was something horrible about the possibility of dying in this bizarre costume. But he reminded himself that he didn’t know any way of dying that wasn’t horrible, and if they got him, it wouldn’t much matter what he looked like. He swung the door open and bent over to cross the open space as quickly as possible.

Wolf slipped into the old Ford station wagon, started it and pulled away from the back of the motel slowly. There was a car parked across the drive, but nobody seemed to be in it, so he pulled around it and bumped across the lawn and onto the highway. When he saw the fire engines coming toward him, he pulled over to let them pass, but after that, he felt it was probably safe to get into the left lane and give the car its last hard ride. It was probably only good for about a half-hour drive, and after he abandoned it, the heirs would undoubtedly junk it.

“I love you,” said Elizabeth.

“I know,” said Jimmy. He was cheerful about it, and he seemed to mean it, but she wanted him to say, “I love you too,” and he didn’t seem to think this response was appropriate from somebody who was already four and on his way out the door to catch his ride.

“Be good.”

“Okay,” he said, then stepped out the door and ran down the steps toward the van. She watched him climb up the big step and pivot to sit down hard on the bench seat in the back. They grew up so fast. No, it wasn’t growing up; it was growing away–becoming a separate person.

Elizabeth spotted Amanda crawling across the floor toward the pole lamp. As she approached it, she was like a soldier in a movie scrambling up the last few yards of a beach under fire. Her little legs pumped so fast that her knees slipped out from under her and she made a premature grab for the pole. Elizabeth closed the front door and got there in time to hold the lamp upright as Amanda lifted her body, hand over hand, up to a standing position. She looked pleased and proud as she stared up at the bulb, her little face containing a hint of the explorer planting a flag on a peak, as well as a hint of the escaped felon. She had made it in time to keep her mother from stopping her. “Up, up, up so tall,” said Elizabeth helplessly.

It was a simple matter to hold the pole firmly while Amanda bent her knees and bobbed up and down in an attempt to dislodge it and topple it over. “Careful, baby girl. That’s not a good game.” Elizabeth acknowledged that she should have stored it in the garage with the glass coffee table months ago. Maybe tonight, when she had gotten into her jeans and sweatshirt, she could face that corner of the garage. Jim used to do that sort of thing. A lot of the stuff in there was just where he had put it a year ago, and it would probably stay there forever. She wasn’t very good at getting rid of things.

Elizabeth heard Maria open the door behind her and then hang her purse on the doorknob. “Hello, Maria,” she said. “Say hello to Maria, Amanda. Say, ‘Hi, Maria! How’s it going?’ ”

Maria moved into the living room. “I’m here, little Amanda,” she said. “I missed you so much. I wanted to come back just as soon as the sun came up. I said, ‘Where’s my little Amanda? I better get dressed quick and run to the car.’ ” This was to tell Elizabeth that she knew she was late, and that nothing was wrong. “Now we better say bye-bye to Mama.” This was to tell Elizabeth that she was dismissed.

Maria snatched up Amanda and carried her to the door for the ceremony. Elizabeth kissed the baby’s incredibly smooth little cheek, and Amanda’s fat little chin started to quiver, her eyes filled with tears and she began to cry the lament of the forsaken. Elizabeth said, “I’ll be back before you know it. I love you,” and the tiny, uncomprehending victim held her arms out in a final plea as her mother slipped out the door. For some stupid reason, this morning she could feel tears forming in her own eyes as she hurried down the steps toward the garage. She knew that the stupid reason was that her period was going to start, and that a lot of unnecessary hormones were coursing through her and making her feel weepy. But at the same time she also didn’t know it, because even though it always happened, and had since she was thirteen, each time it was as though such a reaction had never occurred before. Because what she was feeling was as real as any other feeling at any other time, and maybe it was, after all, the true reaction. Maybe the difference was that at other times she had the strength to keep herself from seeing things clearly.

As she started the car, she thought again that it was probably going to begin giving her trouble unless she found time to get it into the shop for maintenance this week. Maybe Thursday, so it would be okay again by Friday and they wouldn’t have any excuse to keep it over the weekend. This morning everything seemed to be overdue and about to fall apart.

As Elizabeth drove into the city, she made a point of looking at the trees. She had read in a doctor’s column in a magazine that looking at trees was a cure for stress. It had something to do with focusing one’s eyes on faraway objects, and something to do with the color of the leaves. But the same column had said that a cure for depression was looking at the light in the sky just before the sun came up. She hadn’t missed a day at that in one year and two weeks.

Elizabeth found herself in the Organized Crime office earlier than expected. Maybe looking at trees was a cure for slow driving. She sat down at her desk and saw with sadness that someone had taken the time to provide her with an “In” box. She didn’t want an “In” box, so now she would have to spend some time trying to find out who had done such a thoughtful thing and then try to keep from hurting her feelings.

Elizabeth had learned years ago that analysis had to do with taking the flow of information that moved through the bureaucracy and preventing it from moving in its normal way through the old channels. Sometimes she collected tidbits and left them lying around for weeks until they made sense, and sometimes she merely scanned the printouts and knew that there was nothing in them but distractions. If you had an “In” box and an “Out” box, you were treating information the way it was meant to be treated, which was the wrong way. The system put you here to process paper, but you had to resist the system in order to make it work.

She put her purse in the “In” box so that nobody would deliver anything there, and walked to the communication room to look at the night’s reports. As she entered, she saw a copy of the NCIC entry lying on the desk. Something had been added to the bottom of it: “Information concerning the suspect: Attention E. V. Waring, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., as Agent in Charge.”

Wolf sat by himself in the back of the diner in the Chicago railroad station and looked at the pile of folded papers. If they had not been about him, he wouldn’t have had any idea what they said. As he had thought, Charles Ackerman had been burned for all time: the paper referred to him as “AKA Charles Ackerman, AKA the Butcher’s Boy, real name UNK.” They had tagged him with Tony Talarese for sure, but said they also wanted him for questioning about Peter Mantino and Angelo Fratelli. So Little Norman had been right about the wire on Talarese. That had brought the FBI in right away, and then somebody there had told them who he was.

Still, the physical-description part didn’t seem to fit this theory. Hair color, eye color, height, weight: all UNK. If somebody had recognized him, what the hell had they used—smell? What it sounded like was that they had heard about his identity from somebody who didn’t know he was telling them. They must have picked it up from the wiretap. If they had put a wire on Talarese, they would have tapped his phones too.

In one way it was reassuring; they didn’t seem to know anything about him at all—where he was, what he looked like, what he was doing. In about four other ways, it was starting to scare the hell out of him. The reason he was stuck in the United States in the first place was that somehow they had managed to figure out he was using the Charles Ackerman passport, then had shut down an airport three thousand miles away in time to keep him from using it again. Maybe they had shut down every airport in the country with one phone call. He had no way of knowing how they did things, or whether there was any practical limit to what they could do.

In the old days he hadn’t spent much time worrying about the police. He had thought about them only when he was actually doing a job. If he managed to get through it without making too much noise, leaving fingerprints or getting himself hurt, he stopped thinking about them at all. It didn’t take much thought to stay out of their way; once you got out of the water, you could probably stop worrying about getting bitten by a fish.

He wanted to stop worrying about the FBI. He thought about going to Mexico. He could certainly get across the border, but what then? He didn’t know anybody in Mexico, and the Mafia must have lots of people there to keep an eye on its drug interests. It was a fairly obvious place for him to go into hiding, so they would be looking for him, with fewer chances of missing him. Even if he could buy a passport there that would get him into England, it wouldn’t do him much good. The British customs man would ask him a question in Spanish, and he wouldn’t understand it.

He could get into Canada with even less strain. A Canadian passport would be perfect, but the setup there had always been worse than in Mexico. The Mafia had established footholds all along the border during Prohibition in order to bring in liquor. Even before that, a lot of the old Mustache Petes had gotten into the United States by signing up for a wheat harvest in Manitoba or someplace and walking across the invisible line. It was hard to know what the Mob controlled there, but one thing they were sure to have a corner on was forged passports. He kept remembering the computer scanner that Immigration had used on his passport at Kennedy. He needed a real passport or he was going to be stopped. And unless he got out of the country soon, there was no question that he was going to die. The way he had survived in the past was by quick retaliation. The hand would move in his direction, and he’d sting it, and it would hesitate long enough to let him disappear. It still worked, too, except for the part about disappearing.

It wasn’t the Mafia that was keeping him in the fire; it was the damned FBI. But he was overlooking something. Organizations didn’t do anything; it was some person in charge, some human intelligence that was working on him. He looked at the sheets of paper again. On the last one was “Attention E. V. Waring, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., as Agent in Charge.”

Wolf finished his coffee and walked out into the cavernous train station. The place was not just wide but vertically immense, in a way that buildings constructed now could never be unless they were designed to shield some sport from the weather. The ceiling must have been seventy or eighty feet above him, and they could have held a cattle drive through the waiting area without taking up more than a third of the marble floor. These places had seemed archaic to him when he was a child, remnants of some richer time when there was more stone and wood and leather in the world, and more time to think about what things looked like. In the old days these places were always noisy with the echoes of feet, luggage carts, yelling and amplified announcements, but for some reason he couldn’t remember ever hearing a train. Now the station still echoed, but the sound of his shoes on the marble was all he heard as he walked to the one ticket window that wasn’t boarded up and bought a ticket to Washington, D.C.

Elizabeth looked at the list she had made before falling asleep last night. The way to keep the cost down was to get in touch with the people who already were paid to watch things and give them something specific to look for. If she was right about what was happening, he was running; that meant small motels, cars fraudulently rented or stolen, bogus identification and credit cards and paying cash for merchandise anybody else would buy with a check. These were details that gave him a chance to make a mistake. If he did, he might come to the attention of a police department somewhere. All she could do was to send out circulars to introduce the possibility that the next time it could be him.

It was essential to keep the Butcher’s Boy from getting out of the country as long as she could. If he had survived for ten years with Carlo Balacontano screaming for his head, then he must have lived someplace where Carlo Balacontano’s voice wasn’t very loud. She had made a formal request to the State Department to examine new passport applications for male Caucasians aged thirty to forty-five with extreme care, checking independently at least two of the statements or supporting documents supplied. It might not turn him up, but it would delay the processing, which might keep him here a little longer. This had brought a strange inquiry from the CIA, but the questions they had asked had been about McCarron, the man who had been found dead with Fratelli in Buffalo. Maybe he was a former agent or something. Whatever their interest was, it couldn’t hurt.

The main thing was to keep trying. If every policeman in every department asked his informants about the Butcher’s Boy, and every person who watched airports and steamships and provided passports and rented cars kept alert, somebody just might notice him. The most depressing thing about it was that the only way she was going to recognize him was if he did something, and what he would have to do to identify himself was to kill someone else.

Elizabeth started to move her eyes down the list again, but now Richardson was standing over her desk. “You know what I think is going on?” he asked. “I think this is a cleansing ritual.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Who was Tony Talarese? He was about forty-five years old, a capo at the time of his life when he should have been out there scrambling. But what was he doing? He wore fancy clothes, spent lots of money, had a house that Al Capone would have thought was too ostentatious. But the main thing was, he was corrupt. He’d been schtupping the waitresses in his brother’s restaurant, the wives of at least two of his soldiers and his brother’s wife’s niece, which in those old-time families is incest. But most of all, he’d been robbing his boss while he was in prison, and he was wearing a wire for the FBI. Think about it.”

Elizabeth rested her head on her fist. “Okay, I’m thinking about it. What conclusion am I supposed to be reaching?”

Richardson frowned and churned his hand in the air to conjure the next example. “Peter Mantino. He was about the same age. He’d been in charge of the western operations for a while. Was he in Las Vegas robbing the suckers? No. Was he in L.A. cutting into the drug trade? No. Was he in Portland or Seattle trying to organize the ports? No. He lived in Santa Fe like a retired homosexual art dealer. He did nothing to increase his family’s stake in the richest, fastest-growing region in the country. He was lazy and corrupt.”

Elizabeth squinted her eyes and tilted her head to look up at Richardson. “It’s been a long time since you actually prosecuted a case, hasn’t it? I mean in front of a jury.”

“Angelo Fratelli.” Richardson stopped for a moment. “You’re not buying this, are you?”

“Go on, Angelo Fratelli,” she prompted. “Corrupt.”

“What I’m getting at is this. We suddenly get three killings, at least two of them done by a very special professional exterminator. Forget everything else we think we know about him. In fact, forget him completely. One correspondence that we seem to have overlooked is that these three people were lousy specimens, and that raises the possibility that their deaths were purchased by reformers.”

“What sort of reformers were you thinking of?”

“Two kinds come to mind. One is the old men at the top—the last generation, who came to power before World War Two. They see that the next generation has grown up into a bunch of slobs, and they don’t like it. They decide, in effect, to replace all of middle management.”

“Okay,” said Elizabeth. “That’s possible. But you said two kinds.”

“The other one is conservatives.”

“Somebody out there who’s older than the old men?”

“In a way. An ultra-neoconservative movement.”

“This is something you know about, or are you making it up?”

“A little of each. You’ve got the generation that’s coming up now, in their twenties and thirties. All over the world—in the Middle East, in Europe, in this country—you have a big stampede toward the past. Every last one of them is dirt-ignorant, and more conservative than their great-grandmothers. Why should the Mafia be immune?”

“No reason that I know of. So what would these people be after?”

“Power. They’re old enough now to have seen a little action and done some dirty work. When they see the degenerate jerks who are in charge they become instant reformers.”

“Okay, then what?”

“They get in touch with a hit man.”

Elizabeth thought about this for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. That’s not the way it works.”

“What do you mean?”

“Reformers have to pull the trigger themselves. If they think the generation that’s in power is fat and lazy, they have to prove that they themselves are not by killing them personally. I can see the old dons hiring some messenger to go out and clean house, but I can’t see a revolution by proxy.”

Richardson paused. “No,” he said. “I guess I can’t either. What are the other alternatives?”

“I don’t know,” said Elizabeth. “I can’t prove that the lieutenant in Buffalo was wrong. It makes perfect sense that with Carl Bala in jail, somebody might kill his caretakers and take over his holdings. And what you were saying about the three victims makes it seem more likely. If you have a business with terrific potential but inefficient management, you have unfriendly takeovers, right?”

“Okay, let’s start with what we know. Tony T was killed by the Butcher’s Boy. He waltzed in there alone and flew out on the next flight. Is that how you’d do an unfriendly takeover?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “It wouldn’t be a bad start. You hire somebody who’s supposed to be the most efficient and reliable at that kind of work but who has no known connection with you. He spends a couple of days decapitating the hierarchy and disappears again. That leaves the field clear, with Carlo Balacontano locked in jail, his lieutenants dead and his troops presumably in disarray.”

“Is that what’s happened?”

“I don’t think so, but if the information we’ve been treating as factual is accurate, then it’s possible.”

“You mean we still haven’t started at zero? We have to go back further?”

“I’m just saying that we shouldn’t get too attached to our facts. We both listened to the tape recording of Tony T getting killed. He says, ‘You?’ Big bang, lots of screaming and scuffling. Then Mrs. T says, ‘He’s wearing a wire!’ Nobody says, ‘Hey, wasn’t that the Butcher’s Boy?’ or words to that effect. Not on the tape, when they were alone. Only Mrs. T says it later, and what she says is that her brother-in-law told her, but she’d never seen the man before in her life.”

“Why would either of them lie?”

“I don’t think they did. But do you remember what it was like ten years ago? When Dominic Palermo came to me in the middle of the night looking for protection, he told me all this stuff about a hired killer. He’d never seen him, just heard about him. The people who were talking about him just referred to him as the Butcher’s Boy. What if there is no such person? What if it’s just a name for a whole lot of men who have done murders for money? Nobody knows who it was, so it all gets attributed to somebody whose exploits are, by this time, mostly imaginary like Buffalo Bill’s, or maybe even attributed to a completely imaginary person, like Paul Bunyan.”

“You’re leaving out the best evidence we have—Carlo Balacontano. He told you about him.”

“He told me that the Butcher’s Boy was the man who really committed the crime he’s spending his life in prison for. I mentioned him first.”

“But you believed him.”

“I still do. I think Carlo Balacontano was framed for the murder of Arthur Fieldston, and I think this department was so eager to put him away that people forgot to ask a lot of questions they were being paid to ask.”

“Did you say anything at the time?”

“You mean you didn’t hear? I said it until everybody got tired of listening, and then I said it again until they decided I wasn’t a team player. That’s what got me my vacation in Europe.”

“No …” Richardson looked genuinely shocked. Elizabeth couldn’t tell whether he was lying, but how could he not be? He had been here in those days. “I thought … They said you’d just sort of burned out, because of the killings …”

She wondered if he was figuring out the rest of it, and hoped he wasn’t. He had at least the right to assume that he had his job because he had earned it, and not because all the competition had turned it down. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said. “I did all right. Jim came over and joined me there, and that’s how I got him to marry me.”

Richardson accepted the escape route gratefully. “Really? That sounds romantic.”

“Oh, Jim was a romantic guy.” She smiled.

But she could already see Richardson’s youngest analyst hurrying toward them with the morning’s list of disasters. He followed her eyes and saw her too. “Lana,” he said. “What have you got?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. She glanced at Elizabeth, and seemed to wonder if she should acknowledge that she knew the older woman was somehow above her in the department, so she said, “I wondered if one of you had time to look at this.” She laid the printout on Elizabeth’s desk, and hovered while Elizabeth and Richardson read it.

Elizabeth saw the inconsistency almost instantly. “Salcone, Albert, 42. Ficcio, Daniel, 19. Lempert, Robert, 53.” Sergeant Lempert, Robert. A police officer. Lempert and Ficcio both shot numerous times with an Ingram MAC-10. Salcone shot with Sergeant Lempert’s service revolver. But a witness says Salcone and Ficcio both had MAC-10’s, and they came in together and killed Lempert and another man.

“What is this?” asked Richardson. “Where is this?”

“Gary, Indiana,” said Lana.

“We’ve got one too many dead people,” said Elizabeth. “Or one too few.”

Jack Hamp stepped up to the yellow cordon of police tape and waited for one of the patrolmen to meet his steady gaze. Ducking under the tape to enter the area and then flashing an ID only after somebody stopped him wasn’t a good idea at this particular crime scene. Somebody would stop him, and it might be a more vivid experience than he was in the mood for right now. Policemen didn’t much like letting strangers in when a fellow officer was shot down. They protected each other from having a photographer come in and put the picture in the newspapers. When an officer was shot, they made sure all the papers got to run was a formal portrait of the man in his uniform, usually taken about the time he graduated from the academy.

The man Hamp had been staring at seemed to feel the heat on the back of his neck, turned and strolled toward Hamp, who held out his identification wallet so that the policeman could take it into his hand. “Jack Hamp, Justice Department,” he said. “I’d like to come in and look around.”

The policeman handed it back to him and said, “Suit yourself.” Hamp let this reverberate in his mind as he slipped under the tape and walked to the front of the store. It wasn’t right. It didn’t tell him what was going on, but it wasn’t right. If they were eager to accept federal help, the policeman would have taken him to the ranking officer on the scene and introduced him. If they were still shaken by having one of their own killed and were operating on the herd instinct, he would have brought the head man out to the tape to talk to Hamp. But this man had done neither.

Before Hamp reached the broken window he could see the destruction inside. Automatic weapons at close range made more hits than misses and spread a lot of blood around. The floor and walls of the store made a horrible first impression.

Hamp didn’t have any trouble spotting the captain; he was the only one around who didn’t look as though he’d had to pay attention to the fitness regulations. He approached the man warily. “Jack Hamp, Justice Department.” The captain saw his hand but didn’t shake it, so he added, “Sorry about Sergeant Lempert.”

The captain looked at him, then looked away. He didn’t say, “Yeah, he was a good man,” or, “We’ll get the bastard who did it.” All he did say was, “What can I do for you?”

This told Hamp that what he could see right now was about all he was going to see. But that was all right, because looking at dead men didn’t tell you as much as looking at the ones who were still alive.