There was a long silence on the other end, and she could hear the sounds of traffic. Finally he said, “I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Maximum trouble, maximum confusion. Bautista’s the logical one to hit.”
“That’s right. It’s practically a straight line. L.A., Santa Fe, drop off the car in Cleveland, then Buffalo. There’s not much left in that direction but Boston.”
“I see your point: too obvious for him. What’s your theory?”
“I think he’s someplace in the Midwest. I think he’s laying low and looking for a way out.”
“What are you going to do?”
“The best place to wait for him to poke his head up is Chicago. I can get just about anyplace from there in an hour or two.”
“Jack, there’s something I just found out that I ought to tell you about. My boss has called a meeting. The deputy assistant is going to be there, so it’s got to be about money or resources or whatever you want to call it, so—”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m independently wealthy. I have a pension from the LAPD. I’ll call you with my new number when I get to Chicago.”
The conference room looked different, even though it was another dark, rainy dawn. It was because the last time she had been here she was alone, laying out printouts on the big table and sitting in one chair, then another, and looking at each corner of the room without knowing she was seeing it, because the front of her mind was thinking about the way he would be traveling. People in the room changed it, and even though it was their place, it wasn’t an improvement.
Hillman, the deputy assistant, was already seated at the head of the table. It was typical of Richardson to relinquish his space to a visiting potentate. In a subtle way, this made it the deputy assistant’s meeting, and he obviously knew it. He sat back and watched her enter and look around at the others, then take a seat at the opposite end of the table. If it was going to be that kind of meeting, then she would take a place where she could face him. Elizabeth studied him without letting her eyes rest on him. He had thick brown hair that had begun to recede, and he had allowed some hairdresser to convince him to comb it forward in the front, so that at first it appeared to be a hairpiece. When she had come in, she had assumed he was tall because he had wide shoulders. But now he lifted his arms and rested them on the table, and they were so short that she thought that she must be taller than he was, and that he had probably arrived early enough to be seated before anyone saw him. He was going to interfere, just as his predecessors had ten years ago. Simply by being here and asking questions for an hour or two, he would cost them half a day. In half a day the Butcher’s Boy could put them another ten years behind him.
The deputy assistant looked down at his watch, then at her. “Miss Waring?”
“Hello, Mr. Hillman,” she said. There were three other women in the room, and all of them were in their twenties and wore designer glasses that had been chosen as accessories to outfits of the sort that nobody in this office used to wear except in court. From the looks of their hair, all of them had gotten the call hours before she had.
“It’s nice to see you again.” She could tell that Hillman wasn’t sure if he had seen her before, but if she had been in the Justice Department for more than ten years, she had a right to expect that the upper echelon at least knew her by sight. “I understand you’ve been transferred from Fraud. What’s your first impression?”
“I’m not exactly new,” she said. “This is where I started, And I’m not transferring back; I’m just on loan for this case.”
Hillman nodded sagely. “That’s right.” It was as though he had been testing her hold on her sanity. “The reason we’re having this little get-together is that this case came as a surprise upstairs. I’d sort of like to get up to speed. I understand that this Butcher fellow assassinated one of our informants in New York so that the wire was discovered; then the theory is that he flew to Santa Fe and killed a boss named Peter Mantino, and then went to Buffalo and killed the boss there.”
Elizabeth nodded. “That’s one possibility.”
Richardson looked alarmed. “Just a day ago you were sure of it.” He glanced at the deputy assistant as though he were checking to see if he was on fire. “Has something changed?”
Elizabeth answered him but looked at the deputy assistant. “The Buffalo police pointed out to me that it’s a lot of work for one person, no matter who he is. It meant he had to kill several other people in Buffalo—at least three—in different ways in a few hours. Not that he couldn’t do it, but it leaves the question of why.”
“Why?” This time it was the deputy assistant. “I understood that this is what he does.”
“It’s easy to think of reasons why a boss is murdered. Somebody hires the killer, or he has a personal grudge to settle. It’s not as easy to imagine why one man would come in and shoot two or three soldiers in one part of town, then go shoot the boss and three more soldiers afterward. Nobody would hire one man to do that, and the only reason anyone would want that sort of massacre is an unfriendly takeover. The Butcher’s Boy isn’t eligible for management.”
Richardson smirked. “I don’t think we really need the advice of the Buffalo police on this sort of thing, do we?”
“I didn’t ask for it, but it makes a certain amount of sense.”
Richardson prompted her. “But you aren’t buying it, are you?”
“Some of it.”
The others waited, but she didn’t go on. Finally Richardson prodded her. “Which parts?”
“The last time we heard of the Butcher’s Boy, ten years ago, he did something very similar, only we didn’t know what was happening until later. I think that something went wrong that made his clients turn on him, so he was on the run and did it to churn up the water so he could get away. I can’t be sure why he’s doing it this time, but I don’t think it’s for money.”
“All right, Elizabeth,” said the deputy assistant. She noted the change to her first name. “You’ve just come from Fraud, so you know something about revenue-center budgeting. That’s what I’m here about. We have limited resources to work with. This is one case, one man. What do we get if we catch him, and what does it cost?”
Elizabeth thought for a moment, then decided. She was going to have to defeat Hillman by tunneling under whatever position he took so that she got there before he did. “In Fraud that wasn’t hard to answer. We were recovering money stolen from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. We just figured out who took the most who was likely to still have it, and we went after him. This is different. I don’t have the slightest idea what it would cost to catch him, and I don’t know what we get.”
The deputy assistant nodded again, and this time he was smiling in contemplation of the triumph he was about to savor. “You have to look at this from the Malthusian point of view. I have to go upstairs and tell
“All right,” said Elizabeth. What a loathsome little man. She would have to argue his position for him, and let him see what was wrong with it. “As I said, I believe that the Butcher’s Boy fell out with his employers ten years ago, and as a result killed a number of organized-crime figures—some important, some not—in order to create the maximum chaos so that he’d have time to get away. I think that he’s an evil man, and in a perfect society would be forced to suffer some punishment. But if you’re asking if you should take, say, two million dollars from enforcing civil rights laws to spend on getting him, I don’t know. I doubt it.” The current administration had spent virtually nothing on enforcing civil rights laws, and everyone at the table knew it.
Richardson looked faint, but the deputy assistant seemed to relish the conversation. “Give me your reasoning, Elizabeth.”
“The reason we wanted him ten years ago was that we believed he knew a great deal about the men who ran organized crime and their activities. He’d have to. He was a sort of contract exterminator for people at a very high level. But I think he’s been in hiding for ten years. If that’s true, what he knows is mostly old news, which might make it hard to get convictions. There’s also the problem that his knowledge is pretty much limited to capital crimes. If we find him, we may not take him alive. If we do, he probably won’t tell us anything. I can’t assume many
