'Did you find out where it is?' Of course it would be him. Who else would it be at this hour? The kids had gone to bed.
'Where what is?'
'The meeting.'
She hesitated. 'I think there will be one, but that's all I can say.'
'How do you know?'
'Because you're calling me. It means you weren't lying the first time. I also saw reports of big people on the move.' She was staring at the screens right now, even though it was nearly midnight.
'On the move to where?'
'Airports. Beyond that I don't know yet.'
'If people are flying, then the Justice Department can find out where the planes are going.'
'All right,' she said. 'I'll be candid. I can see they all seem to be headed for one part of the country. As of now they've gotten within a thousand miles of each other, but they should be closer soon. I don't know the place yet. The span between them is still too big.'
'What part of the country?'
'I know that you still want to kill Frank Tosca. I can't give you any information that will help you do that.'
'That was our deal.'
'I wasn't aware that we had a deal.'
'From before. I tell you something, you tell me something. I told you what's going to happen, and now you tell me where.'
'I can't.'
Elizabeth heard the click. It wasn't a man slamming down a pay phone in a rage. It was just there, not there. He was gone.
There was no way to tell what the Justice Department was doing, and he had probably been foolish to think she would tell him. He should have held something back to trade her and made her give him the location first. Dealing with law enforcement was like dealing with the Mafia. They had no innate sense of fair dealing or honor. They felt themselves subject only to judgment by the members of their own little organizations, according to their own rules. To them, betraying an outsider was an accomplishment.
Schaeffer walked away from the pay phone, got into his rental car, and drove it across the Peace Bridge from Buffalo to Fort Erie, Ontario. He hated to waste time backtracking, but he had to find out where the meeting was. The simplest way to do that was to find someone who planned to be there. Cavalli, the man he had killed in Tosca's beach house along the St. Lawrence River, had certainly expected to be there. He was an important ally of Frank Tosca's. Cavalli seemed to see himself as the ambassador of the Castiglione family to the future boss of the Balacontano family. His travel arrangements would already have been made.
After he had killed Cavalli, he should have taken the time to search the house. There might be tickets, reservations, phone numbers, or something. It was even possible that the meeting would happen somewhere in the area-maybe one of the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence. Most of them were privately owned and many of them had houses on them.
As he drove east along the north shore of Lake Ontario toward the St. Lawrence, he considered the possibilities. It was not out of the question that Tosca might have returned to his beach house by now. It was probably more likely that he would send a couple of men to clean the house and move the body so it would be found in a place that didn't connect his death with Tosca. The Castigliones wouldn't like it if Cavalli's body wasn't found very quickly, but Tosca's men could arrange that too. As soon as the Canadian authorities had established that the body had nine-millimeter holes in it, so there was nothing mysterious about the cause or manner of death, they would release it for burial.
Schaeffer drove the same route he had covered before, along the Queen Elizabeth Way. He was aware that time was passing while he went over old ground to do something he should have done the first time he was here. He had bet too heavily on Elizabeth Waring. He'd been sure she would find the approximate location of the meeting-a particular city-and that she would ask him to narrow down the possible meeting spots in that city that might host a large group of Mafiosi.
He was sure she didn't want Tosca to kill him and become the most powerful man in the country. A relatively young, violent leader like him in charge of one of the biggest families might re-form and revitalize the whole Mafia. The old years of gang-run companies and unions, and gang-controlled city governments, would be back to stay.
He had been overconfident about her. The Justice Department must know where the meeting was by now, and they should be trying to get their people and their microphones and cameras in place before it started. She should have been excited, busy, careless about everything but the success of their raid. She should have been trying to find out anything he knew that might keep her agents safe. Instead she had been on her guard, thinking about what he would or wouldn't do if he knew where the meeting was.
He made it back to Tosca's house along the St. Lawrence River early in the morning. He drove past to see whether there were any cars parked there, or any other signs of people, but there were none. He parked a half mile up the road at the apartment building again and then walked back on the narrow, stony beach. It was still dark, just as it had been when he had come before. He watched the road for cars and studied the fronts of the houses for signs that they were occupied. There were a few with windows open to the cool night air, but only a few. The closer he got to the string of bigger brick houses where Tosca's was, the fewer signs of life. These were summer places owned by rich families, and rich families could go anywhere in the world so they probably spent less time here.
He approached Tosca's house, then stood at the edge of the water on the pebbly shore and studied it. The windows were open, just as they had been before, but there were no lights on. Could Tosca have failed to understand that he'd been here and killed Cavalli in his house? No. Maybe he had devised some way of keeping himself in the clear by having a caretaker find the body while he was somewhere far away.
Schaeffer moved forward. He found the screen he'd cut the night before last, still pulled out from the window. He went to the back door, found it still unlocked, and stepped inside. He could smell the body. The house looked just as it had when he'd left. He listened to the silence for a few seconds, then turned on the light. The body was still lying in front of the chair. The big pool of blood had dried completely around the edges, and even in the middle it was dark and congealed.
As he moved closer, the smell of the body was stronger. He was careful to stay away from the blood. That was the kind of evidence that cops all over the world dreamed about-the killer's handprint or footprint in the victim's blood. He stepped close on the side that was bloodless, reached into Cavalli's pocket, and extracted his wallet and keys. The tag said the keys were for a rental car from a lot in Toronto. He supposed it must be in the garage. There was a lot of cash in the wallet, but nothing that would help him find some particular place-no travel agent's card, no written notation of a confirmation number, a flight number, or even a phone number with an area code.
He looked around him. It had been late night when he'd come in before, and Cavalli was alone watching TV, not visiting with anyone. He turned off the light, moved to the staircase, and climbed to the second floor. He found the room he wanted right away. There was a two-suiter suitcase open on a chest and an unmade bed. He closed the shutters and turned on a bedside lamp. He ran his hands in the outer pockets of the suitcase and felt paper.
He pulled out a thin sheaf of letter-size inkjet-printer paper. His eye caught the word ITINERARY at the top of the first sheet, so he read it. Cavalli had booked a flight from Syracuse, New York, tomorrow morning to Phoenix, Arizona. He looked at the second sheet. It was a car rental reservation for the lot at the Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix. The third sheet was a hotel reservation for three days in a hotel in Scottsdale, but it began the day after Cavalli arrived in Phoenix. That meant the meeting must be in the next forty-eight hours.
He folded the papers and put them in his pocket, switched off the light, and made his way to the stairs. He went down the stairs to the first floor and moved toward the garage to see if Cavalli's car was inside, then stopped. There was an engine sound, a car approaching on the road. Then a rectangle of light appeared on the back wall. It was a headlight shining through the front window. He quickly climbed the stairs to the second floor, went to the window in Cavalli's room, and looked down.
There was a van idling in the driveway. As he watched, it pulled out and backed into the space in front of the
