Thomas Perry - The Informant

Elizabeth said, "Well, I guess you'd better get your flight arranged. I hope we actually get to work on something in the future." She held out her hand and each of them shook it.

Manoletti cocked his head. "Aren't you coming back with us?"

"No. When this mess came to light and we were on the plane, the FBI called, so now that I'm here I'm going to see what I can do to understand what's happening. I'll be back in my office bright and early Monday."

"Good luck," Irwin said. "I hope you land your informant."

"Thanks," she said. "But he's probably far away by now. We'll see what we can learn from what he left behind."

The two men went to their room to repack, and Elizabeth locked the door behind them. She called the local FBI and introduced herself. She could tell immediately that Holman must have called them. A woman named Special Agent Cable got on the line and said, "A car is on its way to you now, Ms. Waring. The two agents will take you to the scene. Their ETA is about ten minutes."

"Perfect. I'll be waiting."

"Yes, ma'am."

Elizabeth was beginning to like these people. They had a stripped, unembellished way of speaking and a direct decisiveness when they were working, just as Jim had when she'd met him. They all seemed to have an almost military sense of discipline. As she was having that thought, she realized that what she had been doing today would not have been tolerated at the FBI. By now they would have fired her about three times. Holman was undoubtedly aware of that. She was useful and helpful in this set of circumstances, but he wouldn't want her to be part of his organization. She was in terrible trouble in her own job and could easily be out of work in a week.

She went down to the lobby, sat in one of the easy chairs, and looked out the tall glass windows at the cars going by on the street, and more surreptitiously, at the cars that pulled to a stop in the circular drive.

She was in the waning part of a day when she wasn't quite sure what her job was. Her boss seemed to think it was staying at her desk in the office in Washington and collecting intelligence about the Mafia, mostly from amassing police reports and court cases and wiretap transcripts, many of them years old. Her section did perform those tasks. But every one of her people was looking for bits of information that brought them forward in time, information that could lead to arrests and convictions in the near future. They weren't simply constructing some historical archive. They were trying to keep people from being cheated and robbed and murdered.

Murder was often the avenue that was most fruitful to investigate. All kinds of suspicious things happened in the world, but not all of them involved organized crime. When witnesses disappeared and their bodies were found in fields, there was a strong likelihood that it wasn't done by a solitary perpetrator, but by one of the groups her section followed.

A car pulled up in front of the entrance and a man got out of the passenger seat and stepped into the lobby. He looked at her. "Ms. Waring?"

She stood and walked out the door with him. She shook his hand as they walked. "I'm Agent Saddler," he said. It took only thirty minutes to arrive at Joe Castiglione's big, medieval-looking stone house. The openings in the stone wall had been strung across with crime-scene tape. It looked to her as though the only ones coming in or out of the house were police technicians.

Her two companions got out of the car with her and walked toward a man in a gray suit who was standing in the driveway. Whoever went past him seemed to stop and give him some bit of information. He would nod and they would proceed. Agent Saddler said to Elizabeth, "Please wait here," ducked the tape, and approached the man in the driveway.

The man in gray came back with him. "Hello, Ms. Waring. I'm Special Agent Doug Fowles. I'll show you around."

"You're the special agent in charge?"

"Yes," he said.

"Have you had much time to look around yet?"

"We got here at seven A.M. The police called us in as soon as they had the address because they knew who lived here. But you can imagine what we've been trying to do-take fingerprints everywhere, photograph everything we can while we have access, try not to trample the scene in the process."

They went in the front door and Elizabeth stood still.

He said, "It's all right to go up the stairs. The shooter came and went on a back staircase."

"You say 'shooter.' Do you know for sure there wasn't more than one?"

"Not for sure. Never for sure at this stage. Everyone was shot with a shotgun loaded with double-ought shot. All I can say is that there was at least one."

"I think I know who he is."

He looked closely at her. "You do?"

"Not his name. He's been retired for about twenty years, but he used to be a high-end hit man. People knew of him as the Butcher's Boy. He was involved in the confusion in the Carlo Balacontano murder case. In the years since then, the old man has always wanted him dead."

"How can you tell it's him?"

"That Arizona retreat that Frank Tosca called last week was to get the families to help him find this man. He thought Carl Bala would reward him from prison by making him boss of the family. The killer found Tosca first."

"If he got Tosca, why would he come here and do this to the Castigliones?"

"I think that the other bosses didn't like it that he killed Tosca, so they're hunting him. He seems to be making his death as costly for them as possible. It's hard to know exactly what a man like him feels-what portions of his mental life haven't been permanently turned off, or what he wasn't born with. He seems to feel that once they'd agreed to come after him, they were all fair game."

Fowles took the rest of the staircase in silence. At the top of the stairs was a big room with a few metal bunk beds. Fowles said, "He came up those back stairs. He probably looked in those rooms-which are a bathroom and a closet-to be sure they were empty. Then he stepped into this area."

"Who was here?"

"One man, Jerry Grisanti, age thirty-four. He was shot once with a twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with double-ought shot. A neighbor reported hearing the shots, and it wasn't shots tumbling over one another. It was more like this: Boom. Boom. Boom. Each about a second or two apart. Which sounds like one man shooting, pumping the shotgun, and going straight to the next victim, then shooting again."

"Interesting choice, a shotgun," she said.

"He picked up the shells afterward, so there's nothing to fingerprint and no brand name to trace. The shot was the sort you'd find in a store today, nothing antique or exotic."

"I'm not surprised."

"After this man was dead, the shooter probably took a couple of quick steps to this room." He stepped to the end of the short hallway and opened the door. It was a modern, attractive master bedroom with a California king bed, a pair of matching dressers and nightstands in dark-colored wood. The mattress was covered with the darkened red stain that was left when someone bled heavily. The wall beyond it had blood spatter. "Castiglione was reaching for a gun in the nightstand, but didn't have time to fire it."

"And then he shot the girl?"

"We think Castiglione was first, or he might have had time to shoot back."

Elizabeth nodded. "I appreciate your giving me the chance to see it."

"Still think it's him?" Fowles asked.

"If this and the other two scenes were the work of just one person, he'd be my leading candidate." She turned and walked toward the stairs. "Thanks again."

She descended the stairs past technicians kneeling to dust surfaces for prints and photographers taking pictures, seemingly in every room. Then she was out the front door.

The two FBI agents were waiting back at their car. Saddler said, "Would you like us to take you to the other house?"