Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

She slipped out, quickly closed the door and skated on her stocking feet to the telephone in the office. “Yes?” she said into it. She knew her voice sounded angry, and how could they know?

Richardson’s voice had a stupid cheerfulness. “Hi, Elizabeth. Hope I didn’t get you up.”

“No,” she said. “You know, I never asked you. Do you have any kids?”

“Sure.” She could hear him beaming, probably looking at a picture that he kept somewhere out of sight. “Dan’s twenty-two and Brenda’s nineteen. She just transferred to Northwestern.” Of course the question had been a mistake. She had wanted to know whether he had any idea what time one-year-olds get up, or whether he had simply forgotten, but the instant she had asked she realized that Richardson wouldn’t have been the one to get up with a baby.

“Actually, I was going to call you before work anyway. I’d like to have the Boston office watch Giovanni Bautista as closely as possible, starting now-I know it’s expensive—and also get the people who watch airports and borders to step up security on the major routes from Boston into Canada.”

“Why Canada?”

“That’s in case the ones who are watching Bautista make a mistake. The Butcher’s Boy is ready to leave. I can feel it. He’ll do something to get them off his back so he can disappear. Killing Bautista is one possibility. There are others, of course, but that one just struck me. Can you do it?”

“I’m not sure what we can do. We’re going to have a meeting. The deputy assistant wants to talk about the case.”

“Which one?”

“Hillman’s in charge of us. How soon can you get here?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve got to get Jimmy up and give him his breakfast; then I’ll call the baby-sitter and ask her to come early. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

As soon as she let the receiver’s weight press down on the button it rang again, as though it were alive. She snatched it up. “Yes?”

It was Hamp. “Hi, Elizabeth. I’m sorry to call you before work, when the baby’s probably getting ready to nod off.”

“How did you know? Do you have kids?”

“I just have a knack for waking people up. Can you talk?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“Cleveland. They found the car he was using. I can see it from where I’m standing. He abandoned it in the parking lot of a big project. He left it clean.”

“I hope you’re not waiting for me to sound surprised. Did you get anything out of it?”

“Dead end,” Hamp said. “He rented it on the Ackerman credit card. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t let anybody run the card through a machine since then.”

Elizabeth sighed. “Great. Jack, I think the place he’s going might be Boston. He could be after Giovanni Bautista.”

There was a long silence on the other end, and she could hear the sounds of traffic. Finally he said, “I don’t think so.”

“Why not? Maximum trouble, maximum confusion. Bautista’s the logical one to hit.”

“That’s right. It’s practically a straight line. L.A., Santa Fe, drop off the car in Cleveland, then Buffalo. There’s not much left in that direction but Boston.”

“I see your point: too obvious for him. What’s your theory?”

“I think he’s someplace in the Midwest. I think he’s laying low and looking for a way out.”

“What are you going to do?”

“The best place to wait for him to poke his head up is Chicago. I can get just about anyplace from there in an hour or two.”

“Jack, there’s something I just found out that I ought to tell you about. My boss has called a meeting. The deputy assistant is going to be there, so it’s got to be about money or resources or whatever you want to call it, so—”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m independently wealthy. I have a pension from the LAPD. I’ll call you with my new number when I get to Chicago.”

The conference room looked different, even though it was another dark, rainy dawn. It was because the last time she had been here she was alone, laying out printouts on the big table and sitting in one chair, then another, and looking at each corner of the room without knowing she was seeing it, because the front of her mind was thinking about the way he would be traveling. People in the room changed it, and even though it was their place, it wasn’t an improvement.

Hillman, the deputy assistant, was already seated at the head of the table. It was typical of Richardson to relinquish his space to a visiting potentate. In a subtle way, this made it the deputy assistant’s meeting, and he obviously knew it. He sat back and watched her enter and look around at the others, then take a seat at the opposite end of the table. If it was going to be that kind of meeting, then she would take a place where she could face him. Elizabeth studied him without letting her eyes rest on him. He had thick brown hair that had begun to recede, and he had allowed some hairdresser to convince him to comb it forward in the front, so that at first it appeared to be a hairpiece. When she had come in, she had assumed he was tall because he had wide shoulders. But now he lifted his arms and rested them on the table, and they were so short that she thought that she must be taller than he was, and that he had probably arrived early enough to be seated before anyone saw him. He was going to interfere, just as his predecessors had ten years ago. Simply by being here and asking questions for an hour or two, he would cost them half a day. In half a day the Butcher’s Boy could put them another ten years behind him.

The deputy assistant looked down at his watch, then at her. “Miss Waring?”

“Hello, Mr. Hillman,” she said. There were three other women in the room, and all of them were in their twenties and wore designer glasses that had been chosen as accessories to outfits of the sort that nobody in this office used to wear except in court. From the looks of their hair, all of them had gotten the call hours before she had.

“It’s nice to see you again.” She could tell that Hillman wasn’t sure if he had seen her before, but if she had been in the Justice Department for more than ten years, she had a right to expect that the upper echelon at least knew her by sight. “I understand you’ve been transferred from Fraud. What’s your first impression?”

“I’m not exactly new,” she said. “This is where I started, And I’m not transferring back; I’m just on loan for this case.”

Hillman nodded sagely. “That’s right.” It was as though he had been testing her hold on her sanity. “The reason we’re having this little get-together is that this case came as a surprise upstairs. I’d sort of like to get up to speed. I understand that this Butcher fellow assassinated one of our informants in New York so that the wire was discovered; then the theory is that he flew to Santa Fe and killed a boss named Peter Mantino, and then went to Buffalo and killed the boss there.”

Elizabeth nodded. “That’s one possibility.”

Richardson looked alarmed. “Just a day ago you were sure of it.” He glanced at the deputy assistant as though he were checking to see if he was on fire. “Has something changed?”

Elizabeth answered him but looked at the deputy assistant. “The Buffalo police pointed out to me that it’s a lot of work for one person, no matter who he is. It meant he had to kill several other people in Buffalo—at least three—in different ways in a few hours. Not that he couldn’t do it, but it leaves the question of why.”

“Why?” This time it was the deputy assistant. “I understood that this is what he does.”

“It’s easy to think of reasons why a boss is murdered. Somebody hires the killer, or he has a personal grudge to settle. It’s not as easy to imagine why one man would come in and shoot two or three soldiers in one part of town, then go shoot the boss and three more soldiers afterward. Nobody would hire one man to do that, and the only reason anyone would want that sort of massacre is an unfriendly takeover. The Butcher’s Boy isn’t eligible for management.”