Thomas Perry - The Informant

"Do we have a time of death for Tosca yet?"

"He was dead no more than an hour before we got there."

"So it doesn't tell us much about who did it."

"No, but it makes an outsider who did it and slipped away before we moved into the area a lot less likely. We already had cars blocking the road by then."

"If he was there, he didn't come or go by road. Do we have a murder weapon for either victim?"

"No. We have a few knives, but nothing that has any trace of blood on it, and most of them are too small to be the one. Nothing on the strangling cord, which could have been any kind of rope, strip of leather, or even rolled fabric."

"So what's been found doesn't prove anything at all."

"Agreed."

"I'm beginning to think I can't prove my theory with what we have," she said. "But if this were my raid, I would have forensics people examining the clothing of each of the men who have been detained and searching the grounds for clothing that's been thrown away. It's highly unlikely that somebody could cut Tosca's throat and not get some droplets of blood on his own clothes or shoes. Since nobody heard a struggle or shouting or anything, the attacker probably took him by surprise, and that usually means from behind. It's hard to cut a man's throat without getting a hand or arm around his head to tilt it back. By the time the throat is fully cut, the carotid artery is shooting blood out a couple of feet, and it gets messier after that."

"You're right," Krause said. "They're treating the whole ranch as the crime scene, so they'll be searching it foot by foot."

Elizabeth Waring corrected the misinformation in the files and wrote in relevant details. There were a large number of obfuscations and lies in the answers the detainees had given to direct questions. Danny "the Monkey" Strachello listed his occupation as "casino operator" even though he had been barred from entering a casino in all the states that had them. Paul Mascone from New Jersey had planted some nonsense about being in the insurance business, which was only true if extortion was a form of insurance.

But there were also genuine bits of information. Anthony Barino, the head of the family in Tampa, had listed a holding company that owned four restaurants as his employer. Jerry Sorrenti from New York had a monopoly on refuse collection in part of the city, and he listed his occupation as "garbage man." If this meeting could be shown in court to be what it was-a meeting of the men who ran the Mafia-these businesses could be broken up or confiscated under the RICO statute.

She used a computer in the outer office to examine the list of men who were on parole and were not allowed to be within speaking distance of other convicted felons. There were a dozen who weren't even supposed to leave their home states without the permission of a judge. There were fifty-six who had been taken into custody with concealed firearms, and over a hundred firearms had been found that hadn't been tied to anyone in particular. Nineteen men had been carrying cocaine and thirteen had medications with false or suspicious prescriptions on the labels.

The count she liked best so far was the telephones. Thirty-seven men had been carrying cell phones that were stolen or were clones of phones registered to other people. That apparently was their current way of keeping their calls from being monitored. But it also reminded her of something she had learned in her first days at the Justice Department. Gangsters were all thieves at heart. A capo who made millions of dollars a year on rake-offs and tributes still couldn't resist a stolen television set that ran on a cable diverted from a neighbor's yard. A case of scotch was a hundred times better if it was boosted from the back of a truck.

By now all of them must have had a chance to make a telephone call so the flights coming into Phoenix for the next twenty-four hours would be delivering the largest influx of legal talent that Arizona had ever seen. But there was still time to find more vulnerabilities in these detainees and more opportunities to ask questions.

There were men in the meeting who had so many policemen, prosecutors, and judges on their payrolls that they would have had to commit massacres in public to get arrested in their home cities, and something more than that to get anything but a suspended sentence. Immunity had made some of them careless, so many of them were going to be in serious trouble for things they habitually did at home-carrying guns and drugs, and spending time with people just like them.

She spent several more hours working with the U.S. attorney's people in the office preparing charges to be filed against the heads of the twenty-six families and then oversaw the work of the staff in filling out the papers for some of the lower-ranking men.

Holman came in looking for her late in the afternoon, and when he saw her, he grinned and called, "Waring!" He rushed up to her and extended his arms to give her a hug, but then restrained himself and lowered his hand to shake hers. "Thank you so much for coming to help us out."

"It's my pleasure," she said. "We hardly ever have too much of a good thing-so many suspects that we can hardly push the paper fast enough."

"That's the truth. I heard you've been at this all day without stopping."

"We all have. But as a result, we're getting down to the simple stuff now-the ones who didn't have the sense to throw away their guns and drugs. Nothing subtle or arguable."

"Thank you very much for doing this. I've been tied up for most of the day processing the crime scene in the Tosca murder and the one up the hill. If we could just tie the bodies to one or two of these guys-"

"I'm afraid that's not going to happen," she said. "The killer is long gone. He got out before the FBI arrived."

"How did he do that?"

"How? Probably he came on foot, avoiding the roads, and killed one of the guards along the crest so he'd be able to leave the same way."

"And where would that put him now?"

"Believe me, if I find out, you'll be the first one I call."

Schaeffer awoke in the filtered sunshine that had invaded his room. For a second he thought he was in Bath, and that he and Meg had been sleeping in the bedroom of his house in the center of town with the wall of glass bricks high above his bed, rather than the darker bedroom in her family manor. But the sun was only streaming through a narrow space in a set of hotel curtains. Then he remembered where he was and felt so disappointed that he could hardly bear it.

It was two o'clock. He had been deeply asleep since around five-thirty A.M. He stared at the ceiling and felt grateful to the people on the hotel staff who had spared him the irritating knocks on the door and the reminders that checkout time was noon. He moved his legs tentatively, and felt pain and stiffness in his knees and hips. His feet were sore in some complex way. The many small bones seemed to have been subjected to strain that was separate from the surface damage to the ball and heel from running so many miles over rough ground. As he moved his torso a little to sit up, he learned that the news from his back and arms was not good either.

He considered flopping back down on the bed, but he had slept so long that he was sure the inactivity had contributed to the stiffness. He also sensed that he didn't want to waste the effort it had taken to sit up the first time.

He walked to the shower and ran the water to heat it up, and then stood under the strong stream for a few minutes. He moved his arms, then swung them, and finally raised them over his head and stretched. With a bit of trepidation he bent over to touch his toes, stretching his tight muscles under the hot water. After fifteen minutes of attention to the various strained regions of his body, he began to feel better.