head of the Castananza family in Cleveland, Pete Castananza, returned from Arizona only three days ago. He and his family took a flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico, yesterday. They are believed to be on a private boat somewhere in the Caribbean.' 'Four days ago John Mangano of the New York Mangano family was followed to a house in Telluride, Colorado, owned by New York attorney Andrew Spiegel.' 'Over a period of a week, beginning with the funeral of Frank Tosca, members of the Balacontano family have been gathering in Saratoga Springs on Carlo Balacontano's stud farm. At least thirty men are now in the property, and as each group arrives, they bring more supplies and groceries.' It wasn't some single boss who knew he would be next. It was a general retreat to defensible places. As she looked down the long list of reports, the examples simply multiplied. Some of the old men were taking sudden vacations, and others were making preparations that seemed appropriate to some kind of siege. None seemed to be feeling less vulnerable than the others. At this point, all of them seemed to be expecting a visit from the Butcher's Boy. She checked other cities. Men in Buffalo, Rochester, Tampa, Youngstown, St. Louis, New Orleans, Denver, Biloxi, Boston, and Providence were agitated and active. If what he had been trying to do was to create a panic, he seemed to have succeeded.
She added this new information to her memory and let her subconscious mind work on it while she turned her attention to the e-mails and memos that had come in for her. She answered quickly, using few words, but being careful to say enough to reassure her people that she had paid attention and that she cared. That was what they required-the sense that they weren't working for nothing, issuing reports that simply disappeared into a filing cabinet in the main office. Some of her replies asked for interpretations. Some directed the field people to investigate facts they'd turned up.
At the end of the day, there had been no ominous rumbling from the direction of the deputy assistant's office. She stayed an extra hour to finish the backlog of communications, and then picked up her purse and briefcase, locked the office door, put a couple of notes for Geoffrey in his in-box, called a cab, and went outside to meet it.
Elizabeth got out of the cab in front of her house and gave her credit card to the driver. While he filled out the slip, her eyes strayed to the house. She could see the light in Amanda's bedroom. It was good to know she was working on her homework. Jim's window was a bit more ambiguous. The steady white light from his computer screen bathed the ceiling and back wall of his room, but Jim was more complicated for her to understand. He seemed to think growing up meant keeping most thoughts and all activities private. Most likely he was working intensely to finish a paper, but it was also possible his computer was simply on while he texted nonsense back and forth with a new girl she had never met. She knew she was just thinking of that as a way of punishing herself for not paying much attention to her kids for two weeks.
She took her credit card back, added a tip to the slip and signed it, watched the cab move off into the night, and then extended the handle on her small suitcase and walked to her front porch. She felt a sense of guilt and loss as she pulled her keys out of her purse to unlock the door. She had spent the past three weekends away, so the time when she could have been with the two kids had been wasted. Next year Jim would be away at college, and Amanda would be a senior.
The thought brought another sick feeling. Jim had been working on his applications during those weekends, and she hadn't been around to read his essays or remind him of things he'd done that he should mention. She knew he was a good student and a straightforward sort of person. His SAT scores were high, but not remarkable. He had been elected to the student council, but was not an officer. He was on the track team, but he was by no means a star. His teachers had hinted at what their letters of recommendation would say, and the gist of their opinions wasn't too different from what she would have said. He was a good kid, the sort who became a genuine man when the time came, and thereafter did things that made his mother proud. He wasn't very different from his father. The thought made the guilt intensify. She should have been a better mother during this time. It was probably the last time he'd need, or be able to accept, heavy-duty mothering.
She unlocked the door and stepped inside. She called, 'Amanda! Jim! I'm home.'
Amanda came to the upstairs landing, looked down, and waved.
Elizabeth said, 'I see you're rushing to help me carry my suitcase.'
'No, I just wanted to be sure you weren't bringing home a pony or a stepfather for us.'
Her brother appeared from the other side of the upstairs landing. 'Hey, Wandering Mom. Nice to see you.'
'I just stopped in to see if either of you has any broken bones or arrests.' She stared at them for a few seconds. 'No? Then have you both had dinner?'
'Yes,' they both said.
'We didn't know you'd be home this early,' Amanda said. 'We would have waited for you.'
'No, I'm glad you ate,' Elizabeth lied.
The two came down the stairs, and Elizabeth rolled her suitcase to the laundry room and left it there for unpacking later. 'Don't anybody touch that,' she said. 'I locked my weapon in it because I didn't want to haul it around in the office.'
Jim said, 'You mean your laser pointer?'
She laughed. 'Yep. So what's been happening around here?'
'Your mail is on the counter,' said Amanda. 'I think I clinched my A in history on the test Monday. Jim stayed out with Nora Phelps until the birds started singing.'
Elizabeth stuck her head in the refrigerator and said evenly, 'Congratulations and shame on you, respectively. Is this asparagus still from when I left?'
'No, that's new,' Amanda said. 'And so is the chicken. Jim cooked that, so it's called 'Chicken della Romeo.''
Elizabeth took the two plastic containers out and closed the refrigerator with her hip. 'How are you coming on the college applications?'
'Fine,' he said. 'They're not due for months.'
'But if you know what the essay topics are, you can write rough drafts and then have lots of time to polish them.'
'I've still got to get through the first semester. Want me to start working on my law school applications too?'
'Not a bad idea,' she said. 'A smart guy like you could have everything done ten years in advance.'
'I'll start thinking about it.' He paused. 'There. I'm done thinking. No.'
She sat down to eat, and one at a time Jim and Amanda drifted back upstairs to their work. Elizabeth was silently grateful that they had taken her spate of absences and late nights as a small, inconsequential passing variation in the routines they had always followed since their father died. For most of those years her job had been different, an eight to five job with an hour commute on either end, and the occasional Saturday or Sunday when Organized Crime was swamped with information.
She showered, changed into a pair of soft exercise pants and an old T-shirt, and curled up on the couch with a cup of tea, her laptop computer, and her briefcase. It was good to be home. Even if she couldn't see or hear the kids from down here, just feeling them upstairs safe, working at the things they needed to do, was comforting. She had been out on the streets of unfamiliar cities with a gun in her coat pocket, but it was over now, like a fever passing. She had made an energetic but ultimately foolish attempt to turn a killer into a witness. The fact that her effort had turned out to be hopeless didn't mean it had been worthless.
The killer had given her information that would probably lead to the convictions of two Mafiosi on old homicides. That was quite a lot of success by any standard. Before she had left the office today, she had written reports on those two cases, requesting that warrants be obtained to search for the surviving evidence in the places where the Butcher's Boy had said it would be. Hunsecker would not be delighted by the way the information was obtained, but it wouldn't stop him from claiming credit if two important criminals were convicted.
Her reckless behavior had yielded some results, but she'd had enough now. Just being at home with Jim and Amanda made her wonder what she could have been thinking. She wasn't a field agent, she was a bureaucrat. If she hadn't made it home, what would have become of them? It was as though the night the Butcher's Boy had materialized in the darkness in her room, she had lost all sense of caution and judgment. He had been like a ghost returning, suddenly willing to tell her the answers to all of the things she'd been wondering about. She hadn't been able to resist.
She opened her laptop and used her password to get into her Justice Department account. She wanted to
