him into an informant, she could have done it without permission from anybody. But this man, the professional hit man who had just killed the most potent and dangerous mob boss since Carl Bala himself, evidently wasn't acceptable to the department.
And even if, as probably would happen, the deputy assistant was forced by the avalanche of publicity on his superiors to take an interest, it would be a distant, tepid interest in what the FBI was up to. And the one person who must not be directly involved was Elizabeth Waring. Not only did she have a distinctly supervisory post that precluded her going out into the field, but she was tainted. She had spoken with the killer alone before the three murders at Tosca's house. If Hunsecker knew that she had spoken with the killer a second time, she would be fired.
Elizabeth was in an impossible position, and she had no method for handling it. She had been through twenty years of bureaucratic civil wars, and she had never needed more than one strategy-look at every detail and tell the truth about it. In her first big case she had relinquished forever the chance to endear herself to the upper echelon of the hierarchy by dissenting from their view of the chaos that got Carlo Balacontano convicted of murder. And by being the lone dissenter, she had denied herself the chance to be popular with her equals. When she had been asked for an opinion, she had told the truth. Each time someone who had embraced an opposing view questioned her assessment, she would supply the evidence-as much of it as was necessary to overwhelm him and make him move on to score his points on some other issue.
The strategy of telling the truth would not work this time. She had broken rules, argued with her boss, deceived him, and done things he had forbidden. The truth would destroy her. She had crossed a line and didn't see a way back. She had already begun to console herself the way lunatics and fanatics did-by telling herself that some day everyone would see she was right. She thought about her husband, Jim. He would have told her to concentrate her efforts on persuading the rest of her section. 'Bring the team along,' he would have said. 'If you get too far out there ahead of everybody, the main thing you are is alone.'
She woke up her computer and surfed the websites of the various packagers, searching for the best flight from Reagan International in Washington to Sky Harbor in Phoenix. She was about to select a flight when she remembered the rest of the ritual-her itinerary would be sent to her computer and printed. The computer would tell anyone who wanted to look exactly what she'd done and when.
She looked at her watch. It was five-thirty already. The sun was rising on the other side of the building, and the facades across the street were bathed in a red-orange glow. She picked up the telephone on her desk and started to dial, then hung up. She had no proof that her phone calls weren't being recorded. Maybe they weren't, but the numbers anyone dialed would appear on the bill. She used her cell phone and called Delta Airlines. She got a ticket for the flight at ten A.M. Then she wrote a memo to her second-tier people, saying she was taking a personal day or two. She thought about the kids. Amanda and Jim were exceptionally mature and self-reliant, and they had each other. But she would have to do some thinking before she went through with this.
When she got home, she spent a few minutes examining the physical evidence of how her two children had operated without her last night. The dishes in the dishwasher were clean and indicated they'd cooked something that required a pot. The storage container indicated they'd finished the homemade pasta sauce, and the package in the garbage identified the pasta as penne. She was shocked to see the trimmed bottoms of asparagus and a few wilted leaves of Romaine lettuce. They were growing up.
Before she woke them for breakfast, she wrote a note explaining where she was going and approximately why, with a reminder that they were never to answer any questions about her, regardless of who asked. She said she was going to try to contact a suspect, separate him from other prisoners in a jail, and persuade him to cooperate. Then she went upstairs, woke them, and told them she had to leave for a couple of days. Neither seemed especially interested, and certainly not impressed.
She took some cash out of her hiding place in her closet, which was a tall pair of hiking boots she never wore, and left them half of it. She also left them both cars, but didn't tell them that the reason was that if anyone drove past in the daytime, one would be there, and late at night she wanted them to notice that neither was missing.
When she had kissed them good-bye and watched them get into the Volvo to head off for school, she showered, dressed, packed, and called a cab. When she got to the airport, she met a couple of colleagues from the Justice Department. They were both flying to some case in Florida, and they all checked in and declared their weapons, then were taken on a detour around the metal detectors before they parted company.
In two hours Elizabeth was on a plane watching the baggage carts go forward past her window as the tractor pushed the plane away from the gate. The plane taxied out to its spot, bumped along the runway into the wind, and lifted. It was still tilted sharply upward and leaving identifiable buildings and streets below when her night of staring at a computer screen exacted its price. She fell asleep.
She woke six hours later as the plane went into its final descent over Phoenix. The strange, hot Arizona winds always gave planes landing there sudden rises and drops, and then, as the plane touched down, batted it from the side to force the pilot to set it down fast and hard. She was shocked and embarrassed. She would no more have slept on a plane than in any other public place.
She endured a few minutes of feeling awful and half asleep, took out her hairbrush and makeup, and did her best to repair her appearance. She was almost at the rear of the airplane so she had a long wait to get into the aisle and leave. She used the time to recover from taking her night's sleep in an airplane seat. After she got out and visited the ladies' room, where she finished her makeup and hair in front of big, well-lighted mirrors, she walked toward the baggage claim while she called Special Agent Holman's cell phone number.
'Holman.'
'Hi. This is Elizabeth Waring. I'm in Phoenix. I realized I didn't have anything more important than this to do. I'm on my way to the baggage claim. If you'll tell me where you are, I'll join you and see what I can do to help.'
'I'm sending a man for you. His name is Agent Krause. What airline?'
'Delta.'
'Give him about a half hour.'
'Thank you. I'll watch for him.'
Agent Krause was there in twenty minutes, and he wasn't difficult to spot. He was probably thirty, about six foot one, and looked a lot like a former running back for a small college. He wore a good gray suit and carried a sheet of paper that said WARING.
She stepped up to him and held out her hand. 'Waring.'
'Krause,' he said. 'The car's at the curb.' He took her bag and led her there. It was the usual Ford Crown Victoria Interceptor. Krause drove the way they all did, with a slightly aggressive certainty that came from the driver training they got. She had always been a little bit nervous and distrustful of her husband Jim's way of pushing the speed, but nothing had ever happened, so she was resolved to ignore it now.
'You know why I'm here, right?'
'Yes, ma'am,' he said.
'Is there any way I can go straight to where the prisoners are and look at them all at once?'
'Not at once. They're in about a dozen different places-precinct jails, mostly. We've got seven regional offices in Arizona, and we've been bringing in agents from all of them to help out with this.'
'Have the prisoners been booked and photographed?'
'Yes. We're collecting the booking files for you right now in a conference room at the FBI building on Indianola Avenue in town.'
'That should be fine.'
When they arrived at the FBI field office, she recognized it from other trips to Phoenix. It was a low redbrick building that dominated the street corner, with high windows on two sides that seemed designed to save on artificial lighting. He set her up in the conference room. The room was what they all were, a long room with windows on one side and a long table surrounded by chairs that looked comfortable but weren't. She realized she had been in this room once before, about ten years ago. It had been for a briefing on information the Phoenix office had obtained in wiretaps of the phone of old Vito Sangiovese while he was exiled to Arizona.
She sat down beside the pile of files and attacked them, going through them as quickly as she could, just opening each one, glancing at the snapshot, closing the file, and setting it on top of the pile to her right so she could go to the next one.
