Thomas Perry - The Informant

"That should be fine."

When they arrived at the FBI field office, she recognized it from other trips to Phoenix. It was a low redbrick building that dominated the street corner, with high windows on two sides that seemed designed to save on artificial lighting. He set her up in the conference room. The room was what they all were, a long room with windows on one side and a long table surrounded by chairs that looked comfortable but weren't. She realized she had been in this room once before, about ten years ago. It had been for a briefing on information the Phoenix office had obtained in wiretaps of the phone of old Vito Sangiovese while he was exiled to Arizona.

She sat down beside the pile of files and attacked them, going through them as quickly as she could, just opening each one, glancing at the snapshot, closing the file, and setting it on top of the pile to her right so she could go to the next one.

Krause said, "What are you looking for?"

"A particular face, a man who might be using any name or no name. I think he was there. If he got picked up, I want to talk to him."

She had seen thousands of arrest files in the twenty years since she had gone to work for the Justice Department. The men in today's collection of files were unusually well dressed and neatly shaven, but otherwise they looked like booking photographs always did-one profile, one facing the camera, with height lines behind the irritated subject and a black square in front with his name. In this group there were men as old as eighty, and men who at nineteen or twenty could barely be called men. They were a year or so older than her own son, Jim. She had seen many of these faces before-most in surveillance photographs, a few in person.

She read the name in front of her, below the face of a middle-aged man. "This says he's Dominic Ippolito. He's actually Salvatore Gappa, and he lives in Detroit. He even lied about his age. This says he's fifty-one, but he's at least sixty."

"Another one?" said Krause. "We've already found about twenty who had false ID. Credit cards and everything."

She gave him the Gappa file and went to the next. She kept moving through the files quickly, scanning the pictures. She had a sense of the men who had attended the meeting. The heads of the twenty-six families that ran cities had come, as well as a few heads of crews that ran particularly important businesses. Each had brought two or three young soldiers as bodyguards and one or two consiglieres or underbosses. That group of thirty or so old men and their hundred and fifty retainers made up the central group, the people essential for a national consensus on anything. The other fifty or so were probably petitioners who had grievances, or disputants with issues they wanted the old men to decide, or heads of crews who wanted permission to do various things. In a system where the penalty for overstepping was always death, a meeting must be a great opportunity to avoid problems.

As Elizabeth went through the files, she kept searching for the face of the one man who had not been invited to the conference, but whom she believed had come anyway. She stared once at each photo of a face, unable to avoid seeing each name too, but pushing herself to get through them and find him.

If he had been there, his picture should be with the others. He was a man, not a ghost. Fifty years ago at Apalachin, at least a few important capos had evaded the police by running through the fields of nearby farms. But that had been a different kind of operation. A New York State trooper had simply noticed that there seemed to be a lot of big fancy cars parked at a local farmhouse. This time there had been a few hours' advance notice, so the might and sophistication of a modern military-style federal operation had been applied. There had been helicopters with infrared imaging, advanced night-vision scopes. How could he have gotten away? Something occurred to her and she turned to Krause.

"Holman said they'd found Frank Tosca's body in one of the cabins."

"That's right. He was killed with a knife. His throat was cut."

"What's been found since then? Were there any other bodies?"

"Yes. There's a file on it over here."

She felt the breath go out of her. Why hadn't she thought of it before? Being able to get in and kill Tosca didn't mean he could get out afterward. He wasn't in these files because they'd killed him.

Krause got up and walked to the corner of the long table, brought back a file, and handed it to her.

She opened it, almost certain whose face she would see. She looked down. It was a young man of Italian descent, twenty years younger than the man she had expected, and his name was Agnetti. "Any others?"

"Not yet. It's a big crime scene. There's the ranch, all the cabins and facilities, miles of trails, and so on. And all around is just empty mountains and desert."

"Okay." She returned to the photographs, looking for his. If he had been swept up with the others, there might still be time. All of them would have been handcuffed during the first few hours. There may not have been a moment when a group of them could strangle him or stomp him to death in a cell.

As she looked at file after file, she quietly became more and more frantic. The time she had spent looking at the ones who were not him seemed wasted. She flipped through files at an increasing rate, even when part of her mind was telling her that the odds against his being in one of the last few files were enormous.

She reached the last file, and his picture was not there. She looked up and said, "That's it, right? There aren't any men detained but not photographed, or stopped and released as innocent bystanders or something?"

"No, ma'am. I believe the thinking was that La Cosa Nostra wouldn't have let anyone like that get near their little retreat. Everybody there was considered to be invited. And there isn't much chance that anybody got away unnoticed."

"That's my next question. Why do you say that?"

"Because before the order came to move in, the roads had all been blocked with patrol cars waiting for the word for nearly an hour. We didn't want anybody driving in and saying they'd seen a whole bunch of cops. The raid was a complete surprise. When the helicopters landed, the meeting in the main building was still in session. Nobody was running away."

"Who killed Frank Tosca?"

"I don't know, but I'm guessing it was somebody working for whoever ends up as boss of the Balacontano family. Probably with the approval of the council of old men, or at least some of them."

"Who killed this other man, the young one?" She opened the file. "The diagram of the scene puts him up on the mountain, at the crest above the ranch. He was strangled with a rope or a cord."

"Maybe he was a Balacontano soldier who came to the ranch with Frank Tosca."

"The most logical reason to be up on the mountain is to stand guard, to protect the meeting from intruders. And strangling a young, healthy man is a lot of work. If it was an execution, why not do it the way they've always done it, a bullet at the base of the skull?"

"I don't know."

"I think it wasn't an execution. I think it was the killer taking out a guard in the most silent way."

"Why?" asked Krause.

"So he could get into the complex where Frank Tosca was, kill him-also silently, with a knife-and then walk out the same way, past a dead guard."

He looked skeptical. "You think the FBI screwed this up, don't you?"

"Absolutely not."

"But you think we let the one who killed Frank Tosca slip away. We apprehended over two hundred men, including the heads of twenty-six families, and about a hundred of their best people, none of whom got away. Doesn't it make more sense to think one of the two hundred made members of the Mafia we caught within a hundred yards of the body did it, and not someone we can't prove was even there?"