Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

She wondered if he was figuring out the rest of it, and hoped he wasn’t. He had at least the right to assume that he had his job because he had earned it, and not because all the competition had turned it down. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said. “I did all right. Jim came over and joined me there, and that’s how I got him to marry me.”

Richardson accepted the escape route gratefully. “Really? That sounds romantic.”

“Oh, Jim was a romantic guy.” She smiled.

But she could already see Richardson’s youngest analyst hurrying toward them with the morning’s list of disasters. He followed her eyes and saw her too. “Lana,” he said. “What have you got?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. She glanced at Elizabeth, and seemed to wonder if she should acknowledge that she knew the older woman was somehow above her in the department, so she said, “I wondered if one of you had time to look at this.” She laid the printout on Elizabeth’s desk, and hovered while Elizabeth and Richardson read it.

Elizabeth saw the inconsistency almost instantly. “Salcone, Albert, 42. Ficcio, Daniel, 19. Lempert, Robert, 53.” Sergeant Lempert, Robert. A police officer. Lempert and Ficcio both shot numerous times with an Ingram MAC-10. Salcone shot with Sergeant Lempert’s service revolver. But a witness says Salcone and Ficcio both had MAC-10’s, and they came in together and killed Lempert and another man.

“What is this?” asked Richardson. “Where is this?”

“Gary, Indiana,” said Lana.

“We’ve got one too many dead people,” said Elizabeth. “Or one too few.”

Jack Hamp stepped up to the yellow cordon of police tape and waited for one of the patrolmen to meet his steady gaze. Ducking under the tape to enter the area and then flashing an ID only after somebody stopped him wasn’t a good idea at this particular crime scene. Somebody would stop him, and it might be a more vivid experience than he was in the mood for right now. Policemen didn’t much like letting strangers in when a fellow officer was shot down. They protected each other from having a photographer come in and put the picture in the newspapers. When an officer was shot, they made sure all the papers got to run was a formal portrait of the man in his uniform, usually taken about the time he graduated from the academy.

The man Hamp had been staring at seemed to feel the heat on the back of his neck, turned and strolled toward Hamp, who held out his identification wallet so that the policeman could take it into his hand. “Jack Hamp, Justice Department,” he said. “I’d like to come in and look around.”

The policeman handed it back to him and said, “Suit yourself.” Hamp let this reverberate in his mind as he slipped under the tape and walked to the front of the store. It wasn’t right. It didn’t tell him what was going on, but it wasn’t right. If they were eager to accept federal help, the policeman would have taken him to the ranking officer on the scene and introduced him. If they were still shaken by having one of their own killed and were operating on the herd instinct, he would have brought the head man out to the tape to talk to Hamp. But this man had done neither.

Before Hamp reached the broken window he could see the destruction inside. Automatic weapons at close range made more hits than misses and spread a lot of blood around. The floor and walls of the store made a horrible first impression.

Hamp didn’t have any trouble spotting the captain; he was the only one around who didn’t look as though he’d had to pay attention to the fitness regulations. He approached the man warily. “Jack Hamp, Justice Department.” The captain saw his hand but didn’t shake it, so he added, “Sorry about Sergeant Lempert.”

The captain looked at him, then looked away. He didn’t say, “Yeah, he was a good man,” or, “We’ll get the bastard who did it.” All he did say was, “What can I do for you?”

This told Hamp that what he could see right now was about all he was going to see. But that was all right, because looking at dead men didn’t tell you as much as looking at the ones who were still alive.

Wolf was only a little surprised after he had looked through every telephone book the Washington public library had and still couldn’t find a listing for anybody named E. V. Waring. There were lots of Warings in the books, but no E.V. He supposed it wasn’t unusual for somebody who worked for the Justice Department on cases like this not to want his address printed out where everybody could read it. But it was the Department of Motor Vehicles that really surprised him. He paid his ten bucks, filled out the department’s form at the long, stand-up writing table, waited for three hours and finally was told that E. V. Waring didn’t have a vehicle registered to him. This was more peculiar, but Waring was listed on the NCIC printout as “Agent in Charge,” so maybe he had a government car. Still, this was starting to feel like somebody who actually went to some trouble to keep out of sight after the office closed at night.

Wolf was experiencing a sense of increasing uneasiness. Waring had to be the one who was making it hard for him to get out of the country; Waring had figured out his escape route and blocked it within hours. He was also careful enough to keep himself from being found easily, and this was the part that was worrisome. Wolf could find anyone. If he wanted to, he could start going through lists at the county clerk’s office to find the house Waring undoubtedly owned, or pay the credit bureau for a credit report, or use any of a hundred other lists that solid citizens couldn’t help getting their names on. But all of these took time.

On his second day in Washington, he took a bus to Georgetown University. He walked around the fringes of the campus until he found a stationery store that looked as though the owner had been around long enough to be trustworthy, and was prosperous enough to stay. He picked out a folding leather notebook cover of the sort that he had seen people who worked in law offices use for notes. He ordered the engraving on the leather, then picked out the paper for it and selected a serious, businesslike typeface for the printing.

By afternoon Elizabeth had decided that she liked Lana. It was such an odd name for a woman her age. It was a relic of the fifties, and she had to admit that Lana must have been born in the late sixties. But Lana had found another anomaly, so Elizabeth forced herself to think about it.

This time it had happened right inside Cook County. It was a small motel, and the couple who owned it had been murdered. But either before that or afterward, several heavily armed men claiming to be police officers had gone from room to room just before dawn, telling everyone to leave because they had cornered a fugitive in the building. Then they had gone through the place breaking in all the doors, and ended by burning it down. Or maybe they had opened the doors to make the fire move faster. The police had already declared the fire an arson to cover up the murder of the proprietors when they got a call from one of the motel guests who was in a phone booth in Springfield and was curious to know if they had caught the fugitive. A second call came from Carbondale, and that guest wanted to know if the police were going to refund part of his room rental, since he had been forced to leave a full eight hours before checkout time.

Elizabeth picked up the telephone and dialed the number of Jack Hamp’s motel room in Chicago for the third time, listened to six rings and then set it down again. It was infuriating to know that he was practically on the scene, and she couldn’t even tell him it had happened. Finally she took the report and started to walk toward Richardson’s office, then realized that she was walking alone. She stopped and turned. “Come on, Lana.”