these days. In another week, they'd have had enough evidence to convict him of some form of larceny, since that seemed to be his specialty. With some nudging, he would agree to testify against Tosca. Meanwhile, another team could concentrate on Tosca, pursue the cold case murder of Kleiner, and see if there was a way to get the Canadians to search his summer house for the weapon.
Hunsecker was a terrible obstacle. Some day he would move on, up, and out. Until that day she would have to devise a way to live with him. She couldn't simply stop working while she waited for him to get bored with organized crime, but she couldn't circumvent him either. There had to be some middle way. She was tired now. She put away the papers, went to the living room couch, and turned on the television set.
The eleven o'clock news was on, flashing its moving logos and slogans. The teaser was already over, so she didn't know what the top stories were. The two anchor people came on, an attractive, well-dressed man named Curt Wendler, and a pretty blond woman in her late thirties named Kate Lathrop.
Kate Lathrop was frowning. 'A man police believe to be a midlevel New York organized crime figure was found dead in his home on Long Island's north shore yesterday. Michael Delamina, age thirty-six, was found on the floor of his home with a single stab wound to the heart.'
Elizabeth found herself standing, staring at the screen image of the front of a long, low white house across a vast green lawn shaded by tall oaks and maples. There were police cars with blue stripes, and an ambulance. A couple of coroner's men pushed a wheeled stretcher down the driveway with a bagged body strapped to it.
'Police have declined to speculate on a motive for the killing. They said the victim had several felony convictions, and that he had probably made many enemies over the years. But they do confirm that he had ties to the Balacontano family.'
The screen was now filled with an accident on a narrow bridge over a river somewhere. A tractor-trailer was jackknifed across three lanes, and two small cars appeared to have tried to veer around it at the same time, but Elizabeth had stopped listening because she was already dialing the phone.
She heard the voice. 'Justice, this is Fulton.'
'Bob.'
'Hi, Elizabeth,' Fulton said. 'You heard about Delamina?'
'Yes. Why am I watching it on the eleven o'clock news?'
'Everything we know about it has been forwarded to you in an e-mail. It isn't much.'
'Do we know when it happened, approximately?'
'Only approximately. The body temperature indicates he died yesterday, probably late in the afternoon.'
Elizabeth thought. It had happened before the Butcher's Boy had come to Washington. He had killed Delamina, then decided that his next move would be to kill Delamina's boss. He had been out of the crime world for too long to know who that was, but he knew that the Justice Department would know. He had flown to Washington and asked her. She couldn't quite bring back now why she had told him.
'Bob, call the FBI office in New York and say I have a very special request. I would like them to put Frank Tosca under surveillance. He's going to need some protection-set up a perimeter around him that will alert them to anybody attempting to get to him.'
'Are you thinking that Tosca had a hit man do Delamina, and now the guy is coming for his pay?'
'No,' she said. 'It's a long story, but the man who killed Michael Delamina went to some trouble to find out who Delamina was working for. Now he knows, so he's going to kill Frank Tosca unless we can catch him when he comes to do it.'
'Oh, boy,' Fulton said. 'You want me to tell the FBI that?'
'We don't have any choice. Warn them that this guy is very good at what he does. If he wants Tosca, it wouldn't bother him if he also had to take out an FBI agent or two on the way in. If we can possibly capture him alive, he could be the best domestic catch we've made in about twenty years. He knows a million things we'd like to know.'
'When would he be likely to get there?'
'He's probably on his way.'
'All right, I'm on it.'
'If there's a problem, anything at all, call and wake me, or have them do it.'
'I will.' He hung up.
Elizabeth stood in the middle of her living room holding the dead telephone. She put it back on its cradle and looked at the television set again, but didn't really see it. It occurred to her that what she had just done was exactly what Hunsecker had ordered her not to do.
4
He had been calling himself Michael Schaeffer since he had moved to England twenty years ago, so he was comfortable with the name. It was the sort of name that wasn't made up, and wasn't simplified or changed from something people couldn't pronounce. Schaeffer was the sort of name that a lot of Americans had, not an attempt to pretend he wasn't American. The British could detect imposture, and they didn't like it.
Before he had gone to England with his Michael Schaeffer passport, he had randomly used a number of other names. Most were just signifiers for landlords who needed to see something filled in on that line. The only name that had meant anything was the one other people called him when he wasn't there. They used the name the Butcher's Boy to refer to him behind his back. In a way, it was the only name he'd had since he was ten that was real. Now that he was back in the country the nickname seemed on the verge of coming back to him like a relapse of a chronic disease.
After all of the years of quiet in the old city of Bath, he was back in New York. He'd had to make a visit some years ago because a couple of young guys had spotted him on a trip to England. This time it was worse. Michael Delamina and two friends of his had tried to sneak into a summer house he'd rented in Brighton and kill him and his wife in their sleep.
He had taken Meg to hide in the cellar, then gone out the cellar window into the narrow space between the window and the privet hedge that surrounded the house. In a minute he had found one of the men had gone through the back door into the pantry. Schaeffer had come up behind him, dragged him outside, and cut his throat there to keep the blood out of the house. He found the second man sixty feet down the road in a car with the lights off because in the three A.M. silence he could hear the motor running. He had used the first man's silenced pistol to put a hole in the side window and through the man's temple. He had then gone back to the house to look for the third man, but he heard the car drive off. He ran to the spot and found the man he had shot lying in the gravel where his comrade had pulled him out onto the ground so he could get behind the wheel. He searched the corpses, and then drove them fifty-four miles to London and pushed them over the side of a bridge onto a stretch of railroad tracks that led up behind an old, dark factory.
He had found a business card in one of the dead men's wallets with the address of a bed-and-breakfast in Brighton run by a Russian emigre named Voltunov. On the top page of the sign-in register on a little podium in the foyer were the names of the two dead men. Between them was the name Michael Delamina.
Schaeffer had packed a suitcase while Meg looked on. 'I assume you know where you're going,' she said. 'Somewhere in the States?'
'Yes. He brought those two here to help him look for me. He's going to run back there now. He'll bring two dozen next time. I can't let him do that.'
'I should think not.'
They were silent for a few minutes while he threw the rest of the clothes he'd brought from the house in Bath into his suitcase. Meg said, 'I wish we were going home.'
'So do I.'
'Do you know how long this will take?'
'If it goes well, three days to a week. Most likely, a bit longer.'
'If it doesn't go well?'
'Then I'll know you're safe in London at your parents' town house for as long as it takes,' he said. 'Don't go to the house in Bath until I get back. That could be where they first spotted me, and if it is, then it's not safe.'
