Thomas Perry: The Informant

"Michael Delamina?" she repeated. "I don't know who that is."

"Then good night. I'll leave your gun outside in the back yard where you can find it. I remember you have kids."

In a few heartbeats, Waring sensed that he had reached her bedroom doorway, but she hadn't seen or heard him move. "Wait."

He was still. "I'm waiting."

"I do know who he is. I just needed to know what rules you were setting-what would happen if I didn't know."

"You mean would I kill you? No. Now you want to know what will happen if you tell me."

"Yes."

"Tell me, and I'll tell you something."

"Frank Tosca. He's an underboss trying to move up to be the head of the Balacontano family. He's an upstart, but he's young and energetic, and the family was stagnant, aging, and fading. Now, one by one, all of the old soldiers and their relatives and hangers-on are being gathered into the fold." She paused. "So what are you going to tell me?"

"I know Frank Tosca."

"So what?"

"I'll tell you something about him. About fifteen years ago he killed a man named Leo Kleiner on Warren Street in New York. He shot him in the left side of the head with a K-frame. 38 revolver, like the cops used when we were kids. That one was originally owned by a cop. I'd be surprised if Tosca didn't still have it hidden in his house on the St. Lawrence River in Canada."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I didn't take some oath of omerta like they did. I worked for people who had the money to hire me. What I tell you next is important. There were three men on the street that night who saw it happen-Davey Walker the driver, Boots Cavalli, and Andy Varanese. Cavalli wouldn't tell you anything if you set him on fire. Davey Walker is dead. But if you put enough pressure on Varanese, and promise him protection for the rest of his life, he'll help you out. He hated Tosca."

"Will anybody believe this after fifteen years?"

"The house in Canada used to have a hidden room. If you head down into the basement, right in the middle of the stairway before you get down there is a door built into the wall. That's where he kept his collection of things he couldn't let cops find. He figured the Canadians wouldn't be interested in raiding the house because he never did anything there, and the Americans can't do a surprise search in a foreign country. So I think what I've given you is an eyewitness and the chance to find the murder weapon in the suspect's possession."

She waited for him to say more, then sensed that he wasn't standing where he had been anymore. She stayed still, wondering what he was doing. She heard the door downstairs by the kitchen being locked. She threw off the covers, sprang from the bed, ran to the window, and looked out.

She watched him from above, a dark shadow moving across the back lawn. He stopped at the brick barbecue, opened the stainless steel lid, placed her sidearm on the grill, and closed the lid over it. He turned, looked up at her, then moved to the back of the yard, pulled himself up onto the low stone wall, and rolled over it into the next yard.

Waring snatched up the telephone and speed-dialed her office at the Justice Department. "This is Elizabeth Waring. I just had a home visit from a suspect of the very highest priority. I need a team to set up a perimeter five blocks from my house. He looks about forty-five years old, Caucasian, probably brown hair, wearing a black topcoat, dark clothing." She listened for a few seconds.

"If he looks like every man for a mile, pick up every man for a mile, and I'll try to sort them out. This is not a brainstorming session, it's an order."

On Tuesday morning Elizabeth Waring wore a navy blue pants suit and a pair of flat, highly shined shoes. It felt like a uniform, which was what she had designed it to be. It helped her to feel invulnerable. She was forty-six years old now, well past the age when she could be intimidated by one more meeting with a deputy assistant attorney general. But she was still watchful. When she had finished telling him the story, Dale Hunsecker made a serious face, but it was just that-arranging his features into an expression he had practiced, probably for future appearances before congressional committees.

He said, "This man just walked into your house?"

"My bedroom. The doors and windows were all locked, and the alarm system armed. But figuring out how to get around those things is part of what he does. He was also able to avoid or get through the ring of agents we set up afterward. Nobody saw him."

"And he did it just to give you an eyewitness account of a fifteen-year-old killing in New York City?" Hunsecker was about fifty and acted as though he had spent much of his time with underlings who were much younger than he was, so he had gotten used to conducting conversations as though they were seminar dialogues in which he led his pupils to a series of incontestable conclusions.

"No. He knows that my section tries to keep track of all the Mafiosi we know about. He asked me who Michael Delamina's boss was. I told him it was Frank Tosca, who has been beginning to solidify support in the Balacontano family. In return, he told me information about Frank Tosca that he knew I would want."

"Why?"

"You know who Tosca is, right?"

"I've seen his name in briefing papers. It's hard to tell these people apart sometimes, but I understand he's a boss."

She tried to keep her voice from betraying anything but information. "He's the latest incarnation of a bad old school of thought in La Cosa Nostra. He's a throwback. He's young-late thirties when he started making his move upward-physically strong and intimidating at forty-one, and just a little bit crazy. When he turns violent, it's always out of proportion to what made him mad. We think that two years ago he was the one who had Paul Millati shot. Afterward somebody flew to California and killed Millati's son, his daughter-in-law, and their two kids. Somebody in New York killed his wife, daughter, and the family dog. And six months later, when the gravestones were set up in the family plot at the cemetery, a mysterious crew in a white truck came and removed them."

"I can see he would be somebody we'd want in jail."

"We never managed to get this kind of evidence against him before. All we ever had is rumors. What the new information does is give us a chance to go back in time to the period before he and his friends all got used to living with wiretaps and tax audits, and stopped doing things in person. This is something he did himself, and if the tip is reliable, it isn't very well covered up."

"I'm not sure what you're asking permission to do. You still don't have anything to charge him with."

"I'd like to ask the New York FBI people to lay the groundwork to pick up Anthony 'Andy' Varanese. He's the one witness who supposedly saw it happen and might be induced to talk."

"Pick him up for what?"

"He's got a long record. His last conviction was for running a ring in California that stole cargo containers from the port of Long Beach. He's back in New York now, and I think we can be sure he's doing something. I'll ask them to keep him under investigation until they catch him at whatever he's up to. The operation shouldn't take more than two or three weeks."

"I think I need to speak clearly about what you're proposing, Mrs. Waring," Hunsecker said. "There are several problems with this. We're on a war footing. The FBI is just about fully occupied with protecting this country from terror attacks. After that, there's the escalating drug war on our southern border, which has already begun to move north into major cities. We don't get unlimited use of whole squads of FBI agents every day. The Organized Crime and Racketeering Division is just one small part of Justice. And you're talking about wiretaps. In this political climate, if you request a domestic wiretap, it had better be on somebody who is going to be convicted of a crime in fairly short order."