see what had been added to the continuing accumulation of details of the Butcher's Boy's visit to Los Angeles.
The federal agencies were the best in the world at the patient, almost superhumanly thorough collection and analysis of details, and her section of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Division was one of the great engines of analysis. Anything that was discovered by local or state law enforcement, or by the FBI, DEA, or any other organization, was noted, entered in the records, and cataloged. Every connection was explored, every lead followed.
There was news. The man killed on Marengo Avenue in Pasadena early in the morning was named Randall Alan Simms. He was shot in the middle of the road. At the time he was carrying a German-made Heckler amp; Koch rifle with the barrel machine-threaded to hold a silencer. Simms was a former soldier who had served in the first Gulf War and had been given an honorable discharge after half of a second enlistment because of unspecified medical reasons. She sensed a covered-up mental illness. That would come out too, because she would not be the only one to wonder. Simms's address was in Van Nuys, California, and he was listed as unemployed, which probably meant he was paid in cash.
The two men in Griffith Park were Stephen Fields and Brent Patterson. Fields had two DUIs, a breaking-and- entering charge that was dropped, and three domestic violence convictions. He had served six months of a one-year sentence for the third. Patterson had an assault conviction and an aggravated assault bargained down. There was a weapons charge that had put him away for two years. Fields was listed as a former employee of the Macedonian Security Group, but he'd been carrying an ID issued by the Able Security Company.
The Los Angeles FBI field office would, by now, be all over the Able Security Company, its bookkeeping, and its present and past employees. She was willing to bet that the blue Crown Victoria the Butcher's Boy had mentioned on the phone was registered to the company. There would be some connection to somebody in the Lazaretti family, even if it was only that they'd once hired the company to guard a construction site the family owned.
She wrote notes to herself to be sure that somebody in her section kept up with the investigation of the victims. It was important to know who this hit team actually consisted of. Had there been three, or thirty? Was the security company the umbrella for a lot of illegal activities, or was killing people a sideline of a few employees?
She made notes on every aspect of the events in Los Angeles. At eight o'clock she was still checking her e- mail for updates. At eleven she put away her notes and the laptop. She knew that she had to start doing some planning to set her trap for the Butcher's Boy, and it made her uncomfortable. She could only attract him to some specific place at a specific time by getting him to believe some attractive lie. He would trust her because he had treated her honorably-trusting a person he'd invested in was human nature. And she would betray him.
There must be many ways to capture him. It was possible to meet in a restaurant and have all of the workers and customers be FBI agents. She could meet him on a bus and have all the bus seats occupied by FBI agents. All they'd have to do was drive him to jail. She could meet him in an airport, where they would both have to be unarmed. She felt frustrated. People had been trying to betray and kill him for twenty years. Was there anything that he hadn't seen before and wouldn't recognize instantly? She needed something new and outlandish that would never occur to him.
She thought about the times when she had seen him. He had come into her bedroom to talk to her in the night. He had appeared suddenly when she was getting into her car at the dry cleaners. He had come to her hotel in Los Angeles. What all of those occasions had in common was that she hadn't known in advance that he was coming. He had a way in, and a better way out that nobody would be blocking. If she asked for a meeting, he might come, but not to some prearranged place at a particular time. Could she possibly guess in advance where and when he would choose to surprise her? And if the trap worked and FBI agents had him surrounded, that wouldn't mean that he would surrender.
She thought about places. There was the Washington Metro. It would be possible to fill a train car with agents looking like commuters and to flood the platform of a station with other agents, but was there any way to keep civilians out without his seeing the trap? There were restaurants, bars, stores. She just had to pick a place, find a way to isolate it from the public, block every means of escape, and persuade him to meet her there.
The trap was already beginning to feel like a chance for a stupid mistake. When a large number of people were together in one room, they had great potential for deciding on the right answer to a question. They called it the wisdom of crowds. But crowds had an even greater potential for mixed or misunderstood signals, for false alarms, for simply bumping into each other when the time came to act.
The Butcher's Boy was great in crowds. He had operated in crowds all his life, made his way to his targets in front of large numbers of people, none of whom seemed ever to have seen him kill or been able to describe him afterward. She had seen him operate in crowds, and it had been an education. He adjusted his posture, his gait, his expression to match the people around him. Even when people had suddenly begun shooting at him in Chicago, his expression was a voluntary act of muscle control.
No crowds. She would have to arrange the worst possible kind of trap and meet him alone. She would have to talk to him and get him to come to her out of trust in her word and her personal integrity. And then she would have to give some signal that brought in the hidden men with bulletproof vests and automatic weapons.
It was late. She put her notes in her briefcase with the files, locked it, and stood. It was time to get to bed. Cross-country travel was exhausting, and she'd come off her flight and put in a few hours of work afterward. Maybe tomorrow, after a night's sleep, something brilliant would occur to her. She checked the locks on the doors, set the alarm, and climbed the stairs, turning lights off as she went. When she reached the upstairs hallway, she saw the lights in the kids' rooms were off.
She went to bed so tired that the problems and worries of the day seemed to merge into a single category- things she could not solve without sleep. For a few seconds she thought about the Butcher's Boy. It occurred to her that he was probably traveling again, somewhere alone in a car on the night roads, and she wondered which city he was heading for. And then she was asleep.
At two A.M. she was startled awake. Her mind struggled to the surface, aware that there was some kind of emergency. She had been hearing noises, and there weren't supposed to be noises. Elizabeth sat up, switched on the light by her bed, kicked a little to get the blankets off, and swung her feet to the floor.
A male voice startled her. 'Stay right there. Don't move.' The voice was sharp, angry, coming from inside her room just on the other side of her bed.
She sat still, not daring to turn around, her eyes squinting in the light. She fought to catch up. The kids had been in the house. Had this man overlooked them? Maybe they'd heard him breaking in and gotten out. Maybe they were on the stairs trying to get out right now. She had to keep him occupied. 'Who are you? What do you want in my house?'
'I'm Number One, and wherever I am, I own it. Don't try to do anything. I have a man with your son and one with your daughter. If anything happens, they'll die first.'
Her chest felt like it was being crushed. She tried to breathe, but her breaths were quick and shallow, her chest refusing to expand to take in air. Her heart seemed to be pounding harder and harder. 'You don't need to harm my children.' She had a desperate hope. 'Having them can't help you.'
'They're not going anywhere,' the man said. 'This will be a family thing from beginning to end.'
'What do you want?'
'The Butcher's Boy. You were with him in L.A. Tell us where he is and get him to come here.'
'I don't know where he is,' she said. 'If I did, he'd already be in jail. I work for the Justice Department.'
'We know where you work,' he said. 'You're not being helpful, so now it's time to get ready for what comes next. Get up slowly and put your hands up.'
She slowly stood and turned.
He surged forward instantly, so she hadn't come completely around before he was there, delivering a bare- handed slap to the side of her head. She completed her turn and saw Jim and Amanda at the entrance to the room, each with a man holding a pistol close to their heads.
'Oh, God,' she said. 'You can't.'
'What do you think, guys? Think we can't?'
One of the two men, a man in his late twenties or early thirties with spiked blond hair, answered, 'We can do what we want.'
Number One said, 'You know who's paying us. They want their money's worth. They want him dead,
