shoot a cop unless they had to. The only reason they would is if he was going to take the Butcher’s Boy away to someplace where they couldn’t reach him. And where’s that, except the police station?”
“But, then, how …” said Lana, and stopped.
“How what?”
“Well,” Elizabeth said quietly, “they usually handcuff a person with his hands behind his back. But what you’re saying is that the Butcher’s Boy got out of the handcuffs, took the policeman’s gun and shot somebody who couldn’t hit him first with a machine gun.”
“You’re right,” said Richardson. “I got carried away.”
Elizabeth nodded. “He can do that to you.”
“And we’re not even sure he was the one,” said Lana.
“But if he was,” Richardson said, “then you’ve got to take my hypothesis seriously. There’s no vendetta against Balacontano that could include Fratelli in Buffalo and Cambria in Gary.”
“I already take it seriously,” said Elizabeth.
“You do?”
“Sure. I was making a mistake. What I was doing was putting myself in his body, saying, ‘What would I do if—?’ and that’s the wrong approach. In the first place, we don’t have enough information that we can be sure is true, and so we can’t build a theory that’s based on it. In the second place, he
Elizabeth saw that Lana had slipped away, and turned to see where she had gone. She was outside in the hallway talking to a deliveryman.
“Is she any good?” asked Richardson.
“Didn’t you hire her?”
“Not really. The system hired her. She was in the pool of applicants and had the best school record. When she came in for an interview she was wearing clean clothes and showed no symptom of mental illness, so I would have had to make a written argument to hire anybody else.”
“Nicely put,” said Elizabeth. “I think she’s smart. Eventually she’s probably going to figure out that she’s wasting her time here and do a lateral transfer.”
Lana signed the man’s clipboard and came back with a wrapped package. “It’s for you, Elizabeth.”
“Thanks.” She put the package under her arm.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” asked Richardson.
“Weren’t we in the middle of something?”
“Open it.”
The other two watched while Elizabeth looked for a return address, then tore the brown paper off and opened the plain white box. Inside was a leather folder with gold leaf that said “?. V. Waring.” When she opened it, she saw the stationery with the heading “?. V. Waring” on it. “I didn’t order this,” she said.
“Maybe it’s a present,” said Lana.
“Is there a card?” asked Richardson.
“There’s an envelope for one, but nothing inside. See?”
“What a shame,” said Lana. “It’s beautiful.”
Richardson said his version of the same thing. “It cost a lot of money. English glove leather, engraved vellum. It adds up quick.”
“What am I going to do?” asked Elizabeth.
“What do you mean?”
“Somebody sends you an expensive present for no reason at all, and you don’t have any idea who did it …”
She noticed that Lana was at her desk talking into the telephone. Of course. The messenger. He would know who had paid for the delivery, or at least the name of the store. There must be paperwork because Lana had signed for it. At least her brain was working, even if Elizabeth’s wasn’t.
The phone on her desk rang and she snatched it up. “Waring.”
“Hi, Elizabeth.”
“Jack, I’ve been trying to call you about—”
“About the fire in the motel. I just heard all about it on the police radio.”
“Police radio? Where are you?”
“Gary. I’ve been talking to the cops at the copying store. I figured you might be looking for me and thought I’d better call you.”
Elizabeth’s mind strained in two directions at once. First things first. Find out what Jack knows. “Good. We’ve been trying to work it out. There’s something missing, so it still doesn’t make sense. This Sergeant Lempert—”
“He’s what I’m calling about,” said Hamp. “What I’m about to tell you doesn’t get written down on paper. It’s an impression, a kind of instinct. I don’t want to have to fly to Washington and try to prove it, okay?”
“If you say so.”
“Lempert was dirty. Watching the cops going over the scene a little while ago. I got the feeling they didn’t think much of him. It’s just a feeling, and I don’t have time to go into it real deep, but he was dirty.”
Elizabeth groaned.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just that it so obviously fits, and it’s the one thing that never crossed my mind. I mean it did, but I kept pushing it out because it didn’t lead anywhere. It didn’t take me to the next step. Except that what I was doing was assuming I was the one who got to say what the next step was. That’s stupid.” There was a pause, and now her voice betrayed annoyance. “If the police knew, why didn’t they tell anybody?”
“It’s hard to say what they knew or when they found out. But they’re ashamed, which means that they’re sure. No matter how you look at it, they don’t get anything out of telling somebody like me.”
Elizabeth was already exploring this new terrain. “If the sergeant was taking money from somebody, it wouldn’t have been our friend. There’s nothing we know about him that would lead us to the conclusion that he’d have a corrupt policeman on the payroll. So who would? The local Mafia. And that explains why we have three bodies lying in a copying store: They were all on the same side. The only one that’s missing is the winner. Though I’d love to know what he won.”
“Another wake-up, and that’s about all. The next morning he’s in a motel outside Chicago and they tried to kill him there too.”
“So what did he want in Gary in the first place?”
“I know what I’d want if I were in his place. I’d want a way out. Maybe he thought Lempert could do it for him. People who can be bought once can be bought again, and cops meet a lot of people who can do a lot of things.”
“And Lempert arranged an ambush?”
“That sounds about right.”
“Where are you going next, back to Chicago?”
“Yeah, he’s long gone but I thought I’d go rake through the ashes like everybody else. If we’re lucky, I might be able to talk to somebody who knows something.”
“Jack?”
“What?”
“This is kind of … embarrassing, but did you send anything to me at the office?”
“No. What’s embarrassing about that?”
“Well, it’s a present. It just came, and the card got lost, and … you see what I mean.”
“You didn’t open it, did you?”
“Sure, why?”
“Forget it. I was going to tell you to call the bomb squad, but if it hasn’t exploded yet, I guess it must be from a secret admirer.”
“I guess so.”
