Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Richardson’s voice came to her. “Elizabeth. Sorry to call now, but it’s important.”

“Something happen?”

“Yeah. The police just identified two bodies they picked up in the parking garage at the Gateway Tour Center. One was your basic LCN infantry. His name was Jerry Bartolomeo. The other was a surprise, a guy named Paul Martillo. He was a lobbyist for a bunch of nonprofit organizations, one of them being the Italian American Anti-Libel League.”

“What’s that? Is it legitimate?”

There was a blast of air across the receiver that must have been a kind of laugh. “I forgot you haven’t been on the mailing list for a while. It was founded by Peter Cuccione about thirty years ago to threaten the television networks because he didn’t like having his kids see The Untouchables. Since then it’s been run out of Detroit by the Toscanzio family.”

“Then it’s a definite possibility.”

“I don’t know if this has anything to do with the rest of it, but a guy like Martillo … I thought you’d better know.”

“You bet I want to know. You think it’s him?”

Richardson was cautious. “Well, I don’t know. Martillo wasn’t a big deal, but he worked for people who are a very big deal. And shooting the guy in the middle of a workday near the Federal Triangle is kind of bizarre.”

“It is. Richardson, we’ve got to get somebody down there. Jack’s in Chicago, and I can’t go just like that. I’ve got the kids sleeping.”

“Can’t they … oh, yeah, they’re little, aren’t they?”

“Four and eleven months.”

“How about a neighbor?”

Elizabeth eyes moved to Wolf reflexively, and then away. A minute ago she had been trying to figure out if he was a con man, an emotional vacuum cleaner or a sexual sadist. “No.”

Richardson sighed. “Okay. I guess I’ll drive in myself. I’ll try to get as much from the D.C. police and the FBI as they’ll give me, and I’ll ask them to send you copies of whatever gets committed to paper.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Sorry I can’t do it, but—”

“I know,” he interrupted. “I forgot about the kids.”

Wolf picked up the fourth packet of photographs and recognized a shot of Milk Street in Bath. But beneath it, at the bottom of the box, was a pile of papers, tags and things held together with a rubber band. There were long envelopes with the British Airways logo and a couple of receipts that somebody had just tossed in. As he looked at the photographs, he felt the packet with his other hand. It was stiff, and a corner of something blue was sticking out. He recognized its texture and size. She had said they had gone two years ago. It wouldn’t expire for five. He looked at her as she prepared to hang up the phone. In a second she would turn away to put it on the cradle. He gripped the corner hard with his thumb and forefinger. Come on, turn. Come on. Now!

But she didn’t turn. She picked up the whole telephone, brought it around her without looking at it, set the receiver down and returned to the couch. “Sorry. It was work.”

Sorry. He nodded. It was work, all right. Since the start of all this he had been reduced to doing everything the hard way. “Look, I couldn’t help overhearing. If you have to go somewhere …”

She shook her head. “No, thanks. I can’t leave the kids.”

“I’ll keep an eye on them for you. I don’t mind.” She smiled.

“That’s very kind, but they don’t know you. If they woke up, they’d be terrified.”

Jack Hamp sat in his motel room and listened to the big jet engines roaring along the runway at O’Hare, louder and louder as their pilots throttled them up, and then thundering off into the sky before they made the wide turn to bank into their prescribed compass headings.

The Washington report was virtually incoherent. This was one more time when he wished that computers would either take over the world completely so that people would know precisely and promptly what the hell was happening, or else just go away. The combination of human being and machine hadn’t worked out too well. The report had two people dying who at first glance didn’t seem to have much to do with each other, let alone with the Butcher’s Boy, until they both were found lying in a Washington parking ramp. Their occupations were listed as “Driver” and “Lobbyist.” To Hamp’s practiced eye, it looked like a report where one or both of the bodies were misidentified. All it told him was that something had happened in Washington today, and that some people had died. He could have learned as much from the flashing light of his silenced phone beeper.

He glanced at his watch, picked up his suitcase and then walked the room a last time to be sure he hadn’t left anything. That was another thing: The goddamned machines put out so much paper that you practically had to bundle it like a week of newspapers before you could throw it away. Not that you could throw it away, because it was always full of sensitive information that didn’t answer any of the questions any sensible cop would ask.

As Hamp walked into the airport, he considered calling Elizabeth Waring. It wasn’t because she was the person in the home office to whom he was supposed to be reporting. Twenty years of police work didn’t make you more respectful of hierarchies; it only made them one more thing you found out you could live with, like carbon monoxide and bird shit. Ninety-nine percent of the time you were out on your own, driving around town in a car and trying to solve people’s problems by asserting an authority that, if only they knew it, consisted of nothing more than your ability to persuade people that whatever they were contemplating wasn’t worth it. He wanted to call Elizabeth because after a couple of weeks of talking to her two or three times a day, he was fairly sure she would be able to sort the report out for him.

But it was after eleven o’clock in Washington, and young widows with kids had enough to do in the evening without having to explain to somebody who the hell Paul Martillo was, and what he was doing in a parking ramp without a car or a set of keys. There would be time enough for that in the morning, after she’d had her meeting. She probably didn’t know she was having one yet, but this kind of thing always caused morning meetings. All bureaucracies worked the same.

Wolf put the photographs back in the box. “Let me help you with the dishes.” It was going to have to be the hard way. He couldn’t even use Little Norman’s gun because the whole neighborhood would hear it, and when the men across the street heard it, they would know what it was. He was going to have to take the serrated bread knife off the counter and slit this woman’s throat while her two children slept. He would have to hold her over the sink while she bled to death, and then grab the passport out of the box. The worst part of it wasn’t that it was messy; it was that he had gone to a lot of trouble to find Elizabeth Waring, and now what he really felt like doing was just leaving her alone. It had probably been the telephone call. She was no threat to him; she wasn’t even capable of going out at night to do whatever her boss had wanted her to do. In fact she had probably been hoping to be in bed by now. She was simply a nice woman with no husband who had a job that she was good at, and today she had met a man who was polite and didn’t scare her. She wouldn’t go out looking for a man, but if she met one by accident, it would seem all right to her. Women like her probably didn’t get laid very often, and something like this wouldn’t have done any harm. She was smart and sensible enough to know that she was still attractive to men, and if things had been different, he would have liked to accommodate her. Cutting her throat with a kitchen knife wasn’t going to throw the FBI into confusion; it wasn’t going to accomplish anything.