Authors: Thomas Perry
She straightened and stared at him. "We've been handed an opportunity to put away the heir apparent of one of the five New York families—a man who is young, very violent, and growing more powerful every day. I've been trying to help dismantle the Mafia for over twenty years, and I can tell you that I haven't seen any nice snitches. Good, honest people seldom know anything useful about the Mafia. The people who have the information we need are usually criminals."
"I understand. And I caught the reminder that I'm a recent political appointee, and you're a careerist. Our differences are not imaginary. But contrary to your assumption, they're not all in your favor. What you're proposing is the old way of doing business. The government has been protecting one criminal so he'll tell on another for—what? Fifty or sixty years? And what has this gotten us?"
"Half as many criminals."
"That's hardly been demonstrated by the current pervasiveness of organized crime. And it's a deal with the devil that could make this man a bigger problem later. If he's this spectacular hired killer, he could kill anyone—a visiting dignitary, a Supreme Court justice, a president."
"He hasn't been seen in about ten years. He hasn't been working."
"You mean he's been in prison."
"I don't think he has been, or someone would have recognized him and tried to collect the price on his head, or told the guards who he was in exchange for privileges. He's been away—maybe out of the country, or maybe just living a quiet life in some backwater. Something riled him up. Whatever got him upset had to do with Michael Delamina and, therefore, with Frank Tosca. It's what brought him to me."
"You actually sound starstruck."
"I'm not. I told you, he's a bad human being—maybe psychotic. While he was working, he was almost continuously hired by organized crime bosses to do the most important hits, the ones that had to be done by an outsider so that they could never be connected to the bosses. Some of his hits probably didn't even seem to be murders. There are undoubtedly some that seemed to be heart attacks or overdoses. He's potentially the most important informant the Justice Department has ever had. He's not somebody who can tell us about a thousand-dollar drug deal or a football pool that closed down ten years ago. His only business was murder."
"And why would he tell us anything about that?"
"He was always an outsider, not a made guy. He's not even Italian. At this point he has no loyalty to anybody, and now somebody has made him very angry. I didn't find him and ask him questions. He came to me and offered me information. This is an opportunity I don't expect to see again."
Hunsecker stroked his chin and cheeks, shook his head impatiently, stood up, and paced his office. "This opportunity you're bringing me is the news that you've found an unlocked door to the madhouse. Once we're taking orders from this serial killer, arresting whomever he wants us to, we're in an entirely different universe, and it's not one we want to inhabit. If, just to get information, we're going to ignore the crimes of a man who has probably killed scores of people, then what won't we ignore?"
"He—"
"Don't," he said. "It was a rhetorical question. My answer isn't going to change. The U.S. government isn't going to be in business with a man with a name like 'the Butcher's Boy.' We won't act on his information. If you've got something more on him than third-hand stories, then arrest and charge him. If not, we'd both better get back to our responsibilities."
"Yes, sir."
ELIZABETH WARING LOOKED
up from behind the desk in her office and saw that the wall clock said it was after seven. She was still frustrated by this morning's conversation with the deputy assistant, but she had managed to distract herself with work until after the official hour for closing her section. It had been her intention to kill the extra hour or so by accomplishing a few things that would make tomorrow morning more productive. That way she wouldn't have to go to the underground parking garage and run into Hunsecker there, and she wouldn't have to look at whoever came down about the same time he did and know that Hunsecker had complained about her.
She knew that whenever he did tell someone, he would present his account as an example of the lack of ethics of some of the Justice Department's career employees. Or maybe he would just say that people like Elizabeth Waring, who had dealt too long with organized crime, began to be more and more like the enemy. Twenty years ago, when she had started out in the Justice Department, there probably would also have been an oblique hint that there was a moral uncertainty to women. A few of the old guard felt women didn't really belong in the Justice Department, but had been allowed in for purely political reasons. At least that was over.
Now she had to report to a man who really had been allowed in for purely political reasons. He had, through complicated family relationships, been made a partner in an old, respected law firm. The combination of family and law firm had made him a good fund-raiser for political candidates, and so he was a perfect choice for a post two levels down from a cabinet member. Fortunately, he could be counted on to leave eventually. He was a bit too arrogant to survive many meetings with his superiors, too unintelligent to inspire his staff to do great things he could take credit for, and too ambitious to stand still for long. Most of the value he could get from serving as a deputy assistant attorney general he'd had on the day he'd been sworn in. He would be able to play a bigger role in his law firm or sell out to a rival firm, and spend the next few years making up for a dull career by getting very rich.
She steered her mind around the inevitable comparison. She had begun as a data analyst in this same building more than twenty years ago. She had repeatedly, reliably done something that none of the political appointees had ever done: she had solved crimes and put the people who had committed them in prison. She had caused three crime families to fall into decline because of lack of leadership, then stood by to convict the followers as they made foolish mistakes and then turned informant to save themselves.
She couldn't claim she had not been rewarded. She was the highest ranking civil servant in the Organized Crime and Racketeering section. She had also had a personal life. She had met FBI agent James Hart during her first year, fallen in love with him, married, and had two beautiful children. He had died a slow, agonizing death from lung cancer just before their eighth anniversary, and if it hadn't been for the children, she might have chosen to die with him. It sometimes occurred to her that she was still in mourning. She still thought about him each morning, each night before she slept, and several times during the day. But over the past couple of years she had stopped picturing him only at the end, when he'd looked like a tormented skeleton. When he would come into her mind now, he was a tall, handsome FBI agent in his dark suit. She would think of him early in the morning while it was still dark and nobody else was awake, and she would think,
At least I had that. I had love.
Her time at Justice had brought her other things too—a modest, steady income to raise and educate her two children, a sense of purpose.
She didn't hate Hunsecker. She was just disappointed in him. She knew that if by some fluke he lasted long enough to understand his job, he would wish he had another chance at this day. Yes, arresting a young, frighteningly effective crime boss at the instigation of a killer was sure to gratify the killer. That was regrettable. But what the killer was trying to get them to do happened to be their job. It was why they came into this office each day.
She stared out the office window. She had slowly, over twenty years, moved from a shared desk in a windowless basement computer room that was freezing all the time, all the way to a pleasant office on the fifth floor, where at least her window gave a view of Pennsylvania Avenue and a corner of the neighboring J. Edgar Hoover Building. Her rise had been a long, unceasing effort. It had required enduring the periods when the administration in charge was ineffectual, fanatical, and paranoid, or unable to focus on anything but the next election. Her special part of the Justice Department remained pretty much the way it had been when Attorney General Robert Kennedy had founded it in the early 1960s. Politics could sometimes have a terrible effect on the efforts of the Justice Department, but there had been no political faction in those years that didn't at least profess to be opposed to organized crime and racketeering, so the nonsense from above was barely audible in her section.
What had bothered her was the regular infusion every four years of political appointees at the top of the system. During her time, there had been at least three attorneys general who had, at best, rudimentary knowledge of the law, and two who had never practiced law at all. Only one had ever had any experience in the sort of crime fighting that included conducting investigations of actual criminals and convicting them of crimes, but it wasn't recent and he wasn't very good at it. The AG's hired underlings were no better qualified. The lawyers who were really good at criminal law were too rich and too busy to consider taking a government job.
Elizabeth finished reading and initialing the memos and reports that her people had submitted during the afternoon, wrote a query in the margin of the last one, put them all in the outgoing office mail, and closed her office door. The more challenging pieces of paperwork she put into her briefcase with her laptop. She went to the elevator, rode it to the cavernous parking garage beneath the building, got into her car, and drove to the exit. The armed guard waved her past and she was out on the street. She was pleased to see that in waiting she had missed the worst of the evening traffic, the segment of the commuter population who were willing to take risks to get home fast.
Elizabeth had moved to McLean, Virginia, a couple of months after Jim died. Even though she had always loved being in D.C. when Jim was alive, it had seemed much better to her to raise the kids in a nice suburb if she had to do it alone. And getting out of the house where her husband had died had been good for her and for the kids, Jimmy and Amanda.
She had always thought that Special Agent James Hart had been created to use all that courage and strength in some epic struggle to vanquish evil. Thanks to the cancer, he had only used it to endure and falsify his own death, smiling at his wife and children through the pain and suffering of that horrible last year. When it was over, she had cried every night. She had waited until the children were asleep and she could lock her bedroom door and put her face in her pillow. And then, after a year or so, there was a particularly busy time in the organized crime section, and when it had passed, one day she realized she hadn't cried for a month. What she worried about most now was Jim and Amanda. The effects of the early death of a parent on children were huge and life changing, but essentially unknowable. What she had learned was that children became very adept at appearing normal and unscathed, but she could not know what sense of loss or emptiness might be hurting them inside.
As she drove home, she looked in her mirrors frequently, watching for a car that lingered too long behind her, or one that came up on her too fast. It was not out of the question that some faction that her office had targeted might be watching for her. Prosecutors in Italy had been machine-gunned in their cars a few times in recent years, and some of the American families were still in the habit of taking in apprentices and reinforcements from the old country.
Organized crime wasn't just the Italian Mafia, either. It was Canadian bikers and Mexican
narcotrafficantes,
and Russian smugglers and pimps, and groups from every other country of the world. They all brought with them their own money launderers and crooked accountants and assassins. She had been successful enough to have enemies in every group, so she took precautions every day. She watched for things that weren't right, used five alternate routes to get home, and kept her purse open on the seat beside her, so she could quickly grasp the gun inside it.
When Elizabeth reached the clapboard house with the brick fa- çade on the quiet street in McLean, it was almost eight o'clock. She could see cars in other driveways, other houses with the lights on in kitchen and dining room windows. She pulled up her driveway into the garage attached to the house and pressed the button on the remote control to close the door behind her. She carried her briefcase into the house. She smelled food. "Hi! I'm sorry I'm late."
Nobody answered. She stepped into the kitchen. She could see the kids had eaten and left one place setting for her. There was a note from her son, Jim.
WENT TO SCHOOL FOR A COLLEGE WORKSHOP.
He had made his own dinner and driven back to school. She felt deflated and guilty. She was sure it wasn't one of the meetings that parents were supposed to attend, but she went to the bulletin board and checked anyway. The notice was still hanging there. Students only, thank God.
She kept going and followed a faint clicking to Amanda's room. She was typing at an incredible rate and staring at her computer screen, her iPod's earbuds in her ears. Elizabeth moved closer, into the periphery of Amanda's vision, and waved.
Amanda gave a little jump, smiled, and said "Hi, Mom" a little too loudly. She pulled the earbud out of one ear.
"Hi. How was your day?"
"Not bad," Amanda said. "I got a ninety-eight on that history test we took Friday."
"Wow. Keep learning those dates, Killer. What are you up to now?"
"A French paper. In French."
"What's it about?"
"I guess I'd translate it as 'The Wondrous Cheeses of France.'"
"I don't think I'd try that one on an empty stomach. Have you eaten dinner yet?"
"Hours ago, around five-thirty. Jim had to go back to school."
"I saw his note." Elizabeth paused, then realized her daughter was waiting patiently for her to leave so she could get back to work. "Well, I'm home if you need me. My French is a little last century."