kept three men alive and possibly caught the Butcher's Boy, and he knows it.'
'He's not your friend. There was an upper-level staff meeting Friday. 'Why does this professional killer know Waring? Why does he come to her after twenty years and ask for information? Why would she give it to him? How does he know where she lives?' And he's looked into the conviction of Carlo Balacontano twenty years ago. He says he's got a nose for things that don't smell right. Why would the head of one of the five New York families bury the head and hands of a Las Vegas businessman on his own horse farm in Saratoga? If he did that, then who knew about it and called in a tip to tell the FBI where to look? Why did the Justice Department buy into that?'
'It's ironic,' she said. 'That's exactly what I said twenty years ago. I said it over and over, but everybody said, 'That just shows how arrogant Carl Bala is.' And I kept insisting, until finally John Connor, the deputy assistant AG at the time, pressured me into taking a long vacation out of the country. If I hadn't agreed, it was pretty clear I was going to be out.'
'I don't suppose anybody at the time wrote anything down about your objections.'
'Of course not. At least not that I've ever seen. What Connor did was put a notation in my personnel file that said the long vacation in Europe was 'health-related.' For the next ten or twelve years I had to explain that to my new bosses during every annual evaluation and every promotion committee. I would say it was a great opportunity, and they took it to mean I was attached to some foreign police force.'
'He knows about that too,' said Fulton. 'He thinks you had a mental breakdown and they saved your career by covering it up.'
She shrugged. 'What else could it be? And I must be having another one now.'
Fulton shook his head. 'I told him I thought it might have been a pregnancy that you weren't ready for. You were twenty-two. You could have given up the baby. That's the kind of thing that doesn't get spelled out in attendance records and doesn't matter much all these years later.'
'Very creative,' she said. 'Thanks for trying.' She stood up. 'And thanks for the warning too. I'll be very careful not to let him see that I know.' She looked at her watch. 'While I'm here, I think I'll do a little catching up on work I missed during my suspension.'
Fulton stood up too. 'What I was really trying to head off was your saying something to him like what you said to me tonight.'
'What do you mean?'
'This killer, the Butcher's Boy. He's the real problem right now. Hunsecker's gut tells him that cops who have exclusive relationships with criminal informants almost always end up being corrupt. Pretty soon they're protecting the source from things that would normally get him and only passing on information he feeds them. Ultimately they end up working for the informant.'
Elizabeth said, 'We've both been around long enough to see that happen a few times. He didn't make that up.'
'If you can see his point even a little, just think what it would sound like to the assistant AG or the AG. Make sure you're not vulnerable. If I were you, I wouldn't tell anybody that I'd seen that creep again and talked to him.'
She said, 'Oh, I didn't talk to him. I just happened to spot him on the street as I was leaving my cleaner's where I was picking up some clothes. I watched him from a distance to see where he went.' She realized that she had crossed a line. She was lying to Fulton now.
'Well, if he does try to talk to you again, I'd think carefully before I told Hunsecker.'
'Not much chance of either,' she said. 'Well, thanks. I owe you another one.' She turned and left his office.
As Elizabeth walked along the hallway, she pressed the wheel on her phone to automatically dial home. After a moment she heard Amanda's voice. 'Hello?'
'Hi, honey. I'm still at work. I'm afraid something new has come in and I've got to deal with it tonight. Can you and Jim cook something up for dinner between you? There's plenty in the refrigerator.'
'Sure. It was getting to be that time, so I already took a look in there and have my eye on a few things. We'll see what his majesty wants.'
'Tell him I said he has to help. Or if you cook, he cleans up.'
'We'll work it out,' Amanda said. 'I'll see you later.'
'Yes,' said Elizabeth. 'But don't wait up for me. Tomorrow's a school day, and this could be a late one.'
When they'd hung up, Elizabeth spent a minute or two walking along the nearly deserted hallway of the big building, feeling a kind of emptiness. Even the phrases were formulaic-something came up. Don't wait up for me. She sounded like a cheating husband, not a devoted mother. When things calmed down, she would do better.
She rode the elevator down to the computer rooms in the basement. She was going to see what the old men were up to. If the Butcher's Boy was right, tonight was the only chance to learn where they were going to meet. The day after tomorrow, they would all be back in their houses behind the high walls and at the ends of quarter- mile driveways. But tonight, if her source was correct, they would be on the move, like hermit crabs out for a walk without their shells. The trick was to pick them up before they could scuttle back in.
10
As Schaeffer drove through the night back on the Canadian highway again, he thought about the life he had lived in England, and about the Honourable Meg. The Honourable Margaret Holroyd was the only child of Lord David Holroyd, Marquis of Axeborough, and Lady Anne Holroyd of Harrelsford, and she had been brought up in a house that looked like a castle and had secret rooms and a passageway that emerged outside the walls across a pond. Nonetheless, she claimed to have been a poor, sad, runny-nosed creature through most of her childhood. It was apparently true that she and her social set, all of whom seemed to share the coloring and facial characteristics of near relatives, had been ignored by their parents most of the time and sent early to cruel stone boarding schools where the rules involved being hit with sticks and bathing in cold water.
She had told Schaeffer about a friend's hideous Aunt Gwendolyn who caught Meg telling a ghost story at a party and stood her up as an example to the other children while she told them that liars went to hell. Meg told him, 'But I wasn't sure I was on the Devil's side until I heard he'd invented sex. It seemed he had invented it just for me, to conform to my temperament and taste.'
Even though the Holroyds and their complicated network of relations had large amounts of money that seemed to appear in their bank accounts magically from rents and royalties and interest, he was fairly certain that in being raised by Eddie Mastrewski, he had been the privileged child.
Eddie was a very tough man, and he never hid from the boy that the world they lived in was an unforgiving place. He raised the boy with foul language but no harsh words, and they spent most of their time together. He wasn't against schools, and knew that not going would lead to trouble, but he wasn't about to enforce anything the school said the boy had to do.
Eddie was born in a small Pennsylvania coal mining town, and he had started out working in the mines. He was not a genius, but at eighteen he knew that life in the mines was harder than anything he was likely to find elsewhere. He was drafted into the army, and when they let him out a couple of years later, he had learned a skill. He could kill people. He moved to a big city where there were men who would pay him well for killing people, and with practice, he got better at it. He also needed to have some profession that was legal, so he got a job working in a butcher's shop and learned to be an expert butcher. Later he passed both skills on to the boy.
Schaeffer didn't meet the Honourable Margaret Holroyd until he'd already had a fairly long career in killing. After a bad experience involving the Balacontano family, he had flown to England and retired to the picturesque and ancient city of Bath. He bought a comfortable old house and remodeled it in ways that would have horrified the architectural preservationists. He replaced perfectly functional old windows with arrays of glass bricks high on the walls that let in light but would frustrate snipers. He had unobtrusive, locked cabinets installed at various points in the house and stocked them with loaded firearms of several types. He had closed-circuit television cameras mounted on all sides of the exterior, and had impermeable steel doors on the entrances and on the room where he slept. When he had satisfied his sense of security, he settled in and began to live a quiet, solitary existence.
At the time Meg Holroyd was a bored, aristocratic young woman who spent all of her time going to parties
