The Butcher's Boy (28 page)

She struggled to hold the smile, but she knew it must be fading. "Sure.

What about?"

Daly, a chubby man with thick glasses and a crew cut, spoke first. "It's about the incident concerning Fieldston Growth Enterprises. Please sit down." He sounded kind, soothing, almost the way some men did who had always been chubby and worn thick glasses.

Grove cleared his throat, and she suddenly realized that this was going to be something she wouldn't like. The men were distinctly uncomfortable. "To the best of your knowledge, who knew you had been ordered to serve a warrant on Fieldston Growth Enterprises?"

"John Brayer, of course," she said. "The FBI. There were two Bureau auditors, but I didn't get to meet them. I suppose the local FBI division head, the man who was just here. And there were two or three agents on surveillance at FGE." Grove scribbled on a yellow legal-size notepad.

He said, "Who else?" He seemed to know the answer.

She remembered. "The presiding judge and I suppose his staff."

He repeated, "Anyone else?"

This time she was sure. "Nobody I know of."

Daly spoke up. His eyes looked apologetic behind the round magnifying lenses—big, sad, puppy eyes. "Please try harder to remember, Miss Waring." It seemed to be very important to him. "Did you mention it to anyone? Family? A boyfriend, maybe?"

"No, of course not," she said. "I spoke to no one."

He smiled. "All of us who work in this field deal with a hundred details every day, a lot of them sensitive. We'd never intentionally reveal anything, but sometimes we make—" he paused, then chose "errors. Maybe we have plans that have to be cancelled due to our responsibilities at Justice." What in the hell was he getting at?

He smiled again. "You know. You get a call from the boss—your Mr.

Brayer, and then you have to break a date. My wife has gotten used to it, but believe me," he chuckled, "it took many years."

She saw it coming, but had to wait. He said, "You call your boyfriend and say,'sorry, can't go. I've got to serve a warrant.' "

Elizabeth said, coldly, "I just told you I spoke to no one. I have an excellent memory. Now tell me what's going on."

This time Grove answered. He was a large man about fifty years old, with small, sharp eyes and a broad, expressionless face. "We're here to find out why the people you're investigating seem to know in advance what the next move is.

Your superiors consider you bright and perceptive, Miss Waring. Surely that must have crossed your mind."

"Yes," she admitted. In fact it had kept her awake until after two last night, but she wasn't going to tell him.

His expression didn't change. He said, "Well, it occurred to Mr. Connors too. He's asked us to find the problem."

She wondered whether she would be able to keep herself under control.

Her head was beginning to throb. "And so you're asking me."

He nodded. "And so we're asking you."

She said quietly, "But I don't know. I was just told to do it, and when I got a call from the two agents—but they weren't agents, were they?—I served the subpoena. I spoke to no one."

Daly said, "Do you have any suggestions for us, Miss Waring?" So there it was: the chance to serve as the anonymous accuser. "We're not making much progress." The methods of interrogators were always the same.

"No," she said. "I only know I'm not the one. I don't have any idea how they know what to do or when to do it. It might be they just figured it out. I was the agent in the open. I'd been to FGE the day before and gotten nowhere. The next logical move was to audit their records. Maybe they just put the pieces together."

The two were already standing up and putting their notepads away.

Elizabeth felt a sudden desperation. She knew it was part of their craft, that they were trained to make her tell them things because she wanted to know what they knew, but she couldn't help herself. "Wait," she said. "Whom else are you talking to?"

Daly's chubby face turned to her in a look of bright hope. "All of the agents, I suppose. The judge and his staff. Are we missing someone?"

She said, "No, I don't think so." Watching them leave, she regretted having said anything.

Elizabeth shut the door and dialed Brayer's room at the Sands. When he answered she said, "John, I've just been grilled by two men from—"

He interrupted, "I know, I know. Internal Security. Don't let it bother you.

They're looking for a leak."

"I know they're looking for a leak," she said in frustration. "But I'm not it."

"No," said Brayer, "and neither am I. But I had to put up with it too, and so does everyone else."

"Then it's not because I was the one who—"

"No, dammit," he said. "It isn't. So forget it. I've got things going on here and I can't take the next hour to hold your hand. So get back to work."

"What's going on?" she asked.

"More killings." He hung up.

Elizabeth sat with the dead telephone in her hand. The field reports were still in a pile on the table, set aside to make room for the Internal Security men.

But killings. Brayer had said killings. That made the field reports obsolete, she thought. Half of them were more than twelve hours old. The petty chieftains had been running for cover for two days. By now some of them could be anywhere—

given twelve hours Damon could be in Hong Kong . Or dead. But Elizabeth had 137

been assigned to the field reports, and the only way back into Brayer's good graces was to do what you were told. And she had been told to analyze the field reports. But how did Brayer know there had been killings? She picked up the pile of reports and leafed through them quickly. They were almost uniform. There were no reports of murders among them, just the opposite: what she held in her hand were thirty or forty individual ways of saying that nothing was happening.

If there were killings, Brayer hadn't gotten the information from the field, because as soon as a call came in, the typescript was run off and distributed to everyone on the case. Her heart stopped. Oh, God, she thought. Was it the mistake or the suspicion that she was the security leak?

Elizabeth sat motionless for a moment, then remembered she was still holding the telephone, and set it back on the cradle. She thought it through again. No, it wasn't like Brayer to take someone off a case and say nothing. He wouldn't leave her in a quiet office with a pile of out-of-date reports to keep her out of the way while the others handled everything sensitive, would he? But then why hadn't he explained what was going on? Then it hit her. There was another possibility. That was if the killings were local. The field agents would be reporting directly to the local controller. And the controller right now happened also to be the unit head. John Brayer.

There was one way to find out, she thought. If the agents were in the field the controller would call in the report to the FBI office, even if the controller was John Brayer himself. And if Brayer had called in and the report had been withheld from her, she decided, she was damned well going to know why.

The car's headlights threw a bright wedge of light into the dark Illinois fields and the car rushed forward to occupy it, never quite fast enough to catch up. He drove in the silence of intense concentration. He knew he had to figure it out, but no matter how he arranged the facts, there was something he didn't know how to account for. It was the thing that was most dangerous.

Maureen spoke. "I didn't sell you."

"Huh?" he said.

"I said I didn't tell them where you were." Her voice, coming from the darkness, sounded frightened. Of course.

"Oh, don't worry," he said. "No, do worry, but not about that. I know you didn't. You might be stupid enough to sell me to them and then panic when you realized they would take you out too. They're not stupid enough to send a face I knew. Not unless they didn't know where I'd be. You did fine. Your fee just doubled."

He sensed in the darkness that her body relaxed from a rigidity that must 138

have gripped it for some time. Stupid, he thought, both of us—her for being afraid and me for letting her sit there like that and not noticing. And the gun she must have near her hand will disappear now. She won't let me see it, and she'd deny it if I said it, but I know it's there. Probably under her skirt, between her legs.

"What now?" she said.

"Now we've got trouble," he said. "Did the old man know the cover?"

"Yes," she said. "But he didn't blow it. He wouldn't and anyway he couldn't be sure they'd get us both."

"I suppose," he said. "But the cover is blown. We'll get rid of the car in a bit."

She was silent, so he went back to his concentration. Something was going on. He thought about the comical surprise on Crawley ’s face when the slugs had ripped into him in the motel room. But that was just a distraction.

Crawley was Bala's creature. What was he doing in Chicago? Chicago belonged to Toscanzio. It was Toscanzio's responsibility to get the man who'd killed Castiglione if he was in Illinois . It shouldn't have been Crawley ; they'd never hire an outsider for the one who'd gotten Castiglione. It should have been Toscanzio's soldiers, maybe half a dozen. And they wouldn't have sneaked in to do it quietly. They'd have smashed in and demolished him, torn the whole motel down if they had to. It didn't make sense unless killing Castiglione had worked.

He smiled to himself. There was no question about it. The bastards were at each other's throats.

"He looked just like that when we found him, Miss Waring. We haven't moved him yet because of the—the way it was done."

"I see," said Elizabeth . She walked back toward the front of the gift shop where the other one had been, the girl. She stepped behind the counter and stood at the cash register, then scanned the room. You couldn't see the dressing cubicles from the counter. The tall racks of china objects in the center of the room were too thickly crammed for that—coffee cups that had Las Vegas and a pair of dice on them, ash trays that looked like roulette wheels. The killers had probably stood behind the rack of coats in the back. The front of the gift shop was where all the likely objects were placed: the jewelry, small carved figurines, and even the junk that wasn't worth stealing. In the back were the bigger things, the clothes and the imported coffee tables. They were too big for a shoplifter.

There was a round convex mirror on the wall, but the girl at the cash register couldn't have seen behind the rack of coats. God, what a place. A rack of coats—

sable and mink and silver fox, none of them to be had for less than seven thousand, and next to it a rack of T-shirts. Something for everybody.

The girl's body was gone, but the usual chalked outline was on the rug where she fell. Not that anybody needed it. It was amazing how much blood you had in you.

"Miss Waring, we're getting ready to move him now."

Okay. One last chance. It wouldn't accomplish anything, probably, except to give her one more image for a nightmare. But you had to look. You always had to look, because they might have made a mistake, gotten too confident, let their flair for the dramatic get them into trouble. She left the counter and made her way back around the racks of souvenirs to the dressing rooms.

The police lieutenant was waiting for her. He pulled open the curtain and stood back. A gentleman, she thought. Absurd. She stared in at the body. It was sitting on the bench, leaning in the corner of the little cubicle, the head lolling sideways as though he were trying to look over his own right shoulder. She could see the face in the mirror, the open eyes bulging, and a T-shirt stuffed in the mouth. It was hard to tell what he would have looked like when he was alive. He was big: fifty-three years old, they'd said, but he was broad shouldered and with a barrel chest. She looked down at his waist. Not much of a paunch—he had stayed in shape. A hard man to take into a busy gift shop and do this to. He'd been strangled and they'd broken his neck. She looked down to examine the shoes, but she couldn't get past the abdomen without stopping. For some reason that was the most horrible part of it. The joke.

The china figurine of a baby rabbit had been stuffed into the fly of his pants, so only the head and shoulders stuck out, the little face smiling shyly at nothing. She looked down at the shoes. They were beautifully polished, with no scuff marks. What was the leather? Lizard. At least two or three hundred dollars, she thought. A good match for the suit. She'd lost track of what men's clothes cost, but this one was expensive.

"Do you know what he did?" she asked.

"Did?" said the police lieutenant.

"Yes," she said. "What he did for a living. You know."

The lieutenant shrugged and let the curtain swing across the body. "Not really. Ferraro was from New York, and the response from NYPD didn't tell us much. The first round just said he was a probable. When they sent the rap sheet to us the last they had was 1958, assault, three counts. Nothing recent, but he's obviously come up in the world." He nodded, and the ambulance men shouldered their way into the cubicle to begin maneuvering the body to their cart.

"What do you think happened to the girl?" said Elizabeth .

"Hard to tell," he said. "At the moment I think she probably saw something or heard something, and started toward the dressing room. But it's possible they wanted her too. She was shot four times. There must have been a silencer because nobody heard anything, and this is a big, busy hotel."

It didn't matter, Elizabeth knew, because Brayer had been right all along.

They had probably killed the girl because she'd seen their faces. There must have been two of them. It was Ferraro they wanted. But why in a gift shop in a bottomlevel corridor of the MGM Grand Hotel? She looked out through the glass display window at the crowds moving past. It was easy to see how they'd done it, slipped in and done their work, maybe one of them at the door to pull the 140

curtain and put up the CLOSED sign. Then in a few minutes they'd just come out and dissolved into the flowing current of people. And it might have been an hour before anyone had checked the door or wondered aloud why a hotel gift shop was closed at ten thirty on a Wednesday. But why? The only possibility was that Brayer was right. It was a struggle for primacy, and the opening gambit would have to be like this, terror tactics, each side telling the other that it would be best to submit. They were saying we can get you whenever and wherever we want to.