Sleeping Dogs (28 page)

Wolf didn’t stop running. He just let his feet outrun his torso, and went into a kind of baseball slide. When his side hit the ground, he rolled over onto his belly and aimed the pistol at the path out of the grove he had just left.

The first man out of the grove didn’t see Wolf at once. He took three steps onto the grass, then stopped, lifted his weapon and stared at Wolf’s prone form as though he were trying to decide whether it was a man or not. Wolf fired twice, and he could tell within a second that both shots had caught the man in the chest. The man went to his knees, then toppled over and gave a loud grunt and then Wolf was up again and running. Over the sound of his own breathing, he heard the second man say, idiotically; “Are you all right?”

Wolf kept running. He probably had one round left in the cylinder of the revolver, but he knew that his best chance lay in what the one remaining man was thinking; by now he would have noticed that for all practical purposes he was alone. He would also be aware that he had an acceptable excuse for not continuing to chase an armed man into a series of dark places; he had a colleague who was seriously wounded, and was lying there bleeding to death. There was only one thing left that the man needed to do before he officially gave up the pursuit.

Wolf made it to the first tree on the other side of the open space and ducked down while the survivor fulfilled that need, firing his weapon six or seven times into the darkness in Wolf’s general direction. Now he could show the underboss who was in charge of punishing the weak that he had been in the battle with the rest of the soldiers.

Gripping the telephone receiver, Richardson tried to calculate how much of his life was spent pressing one of these damned things against his ear. “What the hell is Jack Hamp doing?” he asked.

“Jack is still in Santa Fe,” said Elizabeth. “He’s trying to find out how our friend is getting around. Santa Fe is a small place, so he has a hope of getting a credit-card number, a rental-car license or the Butcher’s Boy’s latest alias. He’s also at least eight hours from Buffalo, because he’ll have to change planes at least once.”

“What are you going to do with the kids?”

“Please don’t make this harder. I’m paying Maria a sum I can’t afford to stay all night, and probably let them watch old horror movies in Spanish and teach them to love potato chips. But I can’t pull Jack away from the only place this man has been where he might not have been hidden in the crowd because there is no crowd. I’ve got to go myself, and my plane is getting ready to leave.”

Richardson shrugged and stared at the telephone. She hadn’t changed much in ten years; this was how it had started the last time.

Lieutenant Delamo of the Buffalo Police Department stood beside his plain-wrap Dodge and watched the long line of uniforms make their sweep of the park. He could see their flashlights moving back and forth on the grass in little circles. This was the sort of case that had lots of cracks and potholes to fall into. There were three bodies in a row in the middle of the park, and they hadn’t even died in the same way. One of them looked like he had been hanged, and the other two were shot with something, most likely double-ought buckshot at close range, judging from the mess it had made of them. One of them had about two thirds of a head left, and that was the one that occupied Delamo’s thoughts now. It had been a disgusting sight, and he could close his eyes and still see it. That was the test for him; it meant that at some point, maybe not tonight, but soon, it would come back to him in his dreams. It wouldn’t be accompanied by the sympathy and sadness that he usually felt when he had to look at human bodies that had run into something made of metal. This time he felt something different, and he would probably pay the price for it in guilt. The partial head that remained was perfectly recognizable as the property of Angelo Fratelli.

There had been several times in his career when Delamo had caught himself wishing that somebody would blow Angelo Fratelli’s head off, but he had always pushed the thought aside into a compartment of his mind that he never visited. Now somebody had done it, and Delamo had learned enough to realize that it wasn’t time to celebrate. It had already occurred to him that this midnight outing in Delaware Park might be only the first of many trips to look at bodies in the more deserted parts of Erie County. There had been no warning of any kind from any of the agencies that kept an eye on these people, which didn’t surprise him; it simply showed that things hadn’t changed as much as a lot of people had thought.

Delamo didn’t pride himself on his knowledge or expertise. The only claim he made for himself was that he was not a fool. In keeping with this modesty, he had not ignored the old-timers who had been around the last time this had happened, in the fifties. If he listened carefully, the frustration and anger were still evident in their voices. In those days, police intelligence on organized crime had been so sparse and unreliable that they’d had no idea of who was at war with whom, or for what stakes. All they had known at first was that kids started to find mutilated bodies lying in empty lots.

It had gone on for years, and the cops had been able to do little beyond carting away the corpses and writing down their names. Eventually it had turned out to have no local cause at all, having been started by a bungled murder attempt at a restaurant in New York City, and it had ended at a small meeting a year or so after the famous interrupted conference about two hundred miles from here in Apalachin. But nobody had even known that much until the late sixties, ten years afterward.

“Lieutenant,” said a voice behind him. Delamo turned and saw a young patrolman named McElroy coming toward him with a woman. He had sent McElroy around the neighborhood to knock on doors and ask the neighbors the usual “Was it two shots or ten shots?” questions, but he had done so principally to give the kid a chance to pick up his second wind. McElroy had been held over for this mess after working a twelve-hour shift which had, according to his sergeant, included a twenty-minute wrestling match with a particularly nasty pair of drunks, followed by a gruesome car accident on the Father Baker Bridge in which a family of four had been roasted in their station wagon, and he was beginning to get that peculiar look where he was forgetting to blink his eyes regularly.

“Lieutenant? There’s someone here,” said McElroy. “This is Miss Elizabeth Waring of the Justice Department.”

“Thank you, McElroy,” Delamo said. He looked at the woman. She was very young, he decided, then changed his mind and revised his estimate to the middle thirties. “We haven’t met, have we?”

The question took Elizabeth by surprise. Then she realized he must be assuming she had come from the Buffalo office. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so. I just flew in from Washington.”

Now Delamo was surprised. “How did you get here? How did you know?”

“I was expecting something like this, so I was waiting for the right sort of report to come over the wire.” She couldn’t wait any longer. She tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice, but she had to know. “Have you confirmed that it’s Angelo Fratelli?”

“I don’t have to confirm it. I’ve seen him before.”

She could hear the annoyance in his voice, but she couldn’t allow herself to think about him yet. “Then it’s the third.”

“The third?” Delamo asked. His face was flattening into an exaggerated expression of incredulity, so there could be no question that she would interpret it correctly.

Of course, she thought. How could he know? “A week ago a man named Antonio Talarese was killed in New York. He was an underboss watching things there for Carlo Balacontano while he’s in jail in California. Two nights later, Peter Mantino was killed in Santa Fe. He was the family’s western regional boss. I haven’t had time to find out what he was doing in Santa Fe. And now Fratelli.”

“Miss uh—Waring. I’m a simple honest-to-God policeman. I’ve got to confess that I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I assume you do. I know who Carl Bala was—or is—but that’s about it. If you people knew that there was a war on, why the hell didn’t you say something?”

It was starting to feel to Elizabeth like one of those moments when cops made suspects admit things they hadn’t known they were accused of. “I still don’t know anything about a war. I think this is somebody we heard about from an informant ten years ago, and I think he’s alone. He’s a killer for hire that people call the Butcher’s Boy—no real name, no record, not even a description. One of the witnesses says that’s who killed Tony Talarese in New York. We know he was somewhere in the West when Mantino was killed.”

“So who hired him?”

“I don’t know if anybody hired him, and I don’t know what it’s about. The others were from the Balacontano family, and Fratelli wasn’t.”

“So what am I supposed to expect—a couple of hundred new faces from Chicago or New York moving in and carving up Fratelli’s estate?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think that’s what it’s about.”

Delamo took a deep breath, let it out slowly and then said it anyway. “You people don’t have a whole lot of useful information, do you?”

Elizabeth wondered if he would have said that to Jack Hamp. It wasn’t that another man would have punched him, but there was something about her being a woman that made it easier for them to behave like this. If she answered the same way, she would be a bitch. She explained patiently, “There are too many things happening at once. Some of them are contradictory, others are meaningless and some are probably fake. In any case these people don’t always make long-term plans and stick to them. When they feel threatened, they lash out at somebody, and when they see an opportunity, they take it.”

Delamo sighed. “Come on. You might as well see what we’ve got.”

He walked her over to the grove of trees and stopped where the yellow police tape was stretched from tree to tree. He pointed to the three body bags. “This one is Fratelli. Shotgun blast to the head, took off the top of the skull. Ditto this one. He was a bodyguard named Salvatore Gamuchio, age thirty-eight, twenty years of rap sheets for strong-arm robbery, extortion, assault, et cetera. He was carrying a submachine gun in his coat and a pistol in an ankle holster, neither one fired. This one over here is a puzzle. He seems to have a broken neck. The coroner will have to tell us how that happened. No identification. One of the guys said he looks familiar, but so far we can’t place him.”

“All this happened here? In the park?”

“Yeah. Lots of calls from people living around here—loud gunshots, yelling, the whole bit. Units in the area responded, but this is a big park, and by the time they could sweep it with lights nobody was standing up anymore, so the patrolmen didn’t find them until they walked the area on foot.”

“Have you figured out … how?”

“I think some people over there in the trees shot them with shotguns. With the exception of this one. How he died I can’t imagine.”

Another voice came out of the darkness behind them. “Lieutenant …”

He turned toward it in a leisurely way. “Yeah?”

“We found a shotgun over there in the bushes.”

“Anything interesting about it?”

“No, sir. Twelve-gauge Remington pump. Not sawed-off or anything.”

“I know I don’t need to say this, but be careful with it. I’d sure like to get a print off it.” As the patrolman walked away, Delamo turned to Elizabeth. “I guess that eliminates looking for a man with a shotgun.”

“Lieutenant?”

As Delamo turned in the other direction, Elizabeth had a sense of what a Homicide lieutenant’s life must be like. They would bring him items one after another, and he would evaluate them and sort of put them into his pockets. “Yeah?”

“They just called in with the IDs on the other ones.”

“And?”

“The two on Grant Street were Fratelli’s too. The house was owned by the old man they found in the river.”

“Thanks,” Delamo said, then turned to Elizabeth. “I think your theory’s starting to look a little weak.”

“Why?”

“Well, there’s an old black man we found in the river about suppertime with a thirty-eight bullet in his head. It seems that two other guys got killed in his house. With one or more shotguns. Then you got Fratelli and Salvatore Gamuchio, and this other guy who got his neck broken. All in the space of about three or four hours. It’s a lot of work.”

“Lieutenant,” came another voice. “We got some more blood way over there.”

“Get a bunch of it on slides,” Delamo said, “and then look for some more bodies. I think we’re going to have to drag the damned lake as soon as the sun comes up.”

“I think there may be some way to drain it,” said the voice.

“Find out. Call the Parks Department.”

“Right.”

Delamo turned back to Elizabeth. “I guess that once again the ‘lone gunman’ theory doesn’t hold up.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I don’t care who this no-name-no-description guy is. It’s pretty unlikely that he came in ail by himself and wasted six-plus men in at least three locations in three different ways in one night, And if he came here because he hated Angelo Fratelli, he would have killed Angelo Fratelli. He wouldn’t have killed three men who worked for Fratelli first. Do you disagree with that?”

“I’d have to know what he was thinking to answer that.” Oh, God, she thought. I’m only a few hours behind him, and this man is sending the police to look for a gang while he wastes time convincing me.

“How do you think one man could do all that?”

“I’m not sure how,” said Elizabeth, “but I know that ten years ago a man in Las Vegas who had never laid eyes on him came to me for protection because he was afraid to go to sleep. I couldn’t blame him, because that morning we’d found nine bodies around town. The man who killed them is the one I’m looking for now.”

It wasn’t long after Ms. Waring left that McElroy appeared at Delamo’s elbow again. “We just got a radio call from downtown, Lieutenant. They said another fed will be here in a few minutes. We’re supposed to extend him every courtesy.”

Delamo turned to look at him. “What the hell is that about? Why wouldn’t we?”