Thomas Perry - The Butcher's Boy

The next thing had to be the times. The Senator hadn’t gone to bed until after 11:30 Monday night. That meant nobody could have come in until midnight at the earliest. If everything went supernaturally well he could have been out by 12:30 and caught a 1:00 A.M. flight out of Denver. She sat down on the nearest chair and worked out the rest of it: a 2:00 A.M. flight from Cheyenne, a 3:00 A.M. from Pueblo, a 3:30 from Laramie, a 2:30 from Boulder, and nothing earlier than 6:00 from Salt Lake City. There was something else about times, but she couldn’t quite identify it yet. It was too vague, just a feeling that she was missing something important. She opened her mind but it wouldn’t come, so she stood up and walked down the list again, this time crossing out the flights that were too early.

Elizabeth studied the list and thought for a minute—of course, the addresses. If somebody had killed a senator and gotten on an airplane afterward, it meant he didn’t live in Denver. That let out about half the remaining names, which she spent the next half hour crossing off. The list was getting short now, and she was able to tear out whole sheets and set them aside.

She sat there and thought it out again from the beginning. There were still around five hundred names, too many to do anything with. But there was something else—it was all too neat, too logical, and she was getting farther and farther along, each step depending on the others, and if one step was wrong he could slip through the mesh. It all depended on his being logical too, setting everything up just as Elizabeth would herself. All he had to do to escape her logic was to do something foolish—have a companion he trusted enough to travel with—something of that sort. But there was still something else and she was near it now. She could feel it. He wasn’t foolish. He’d done too much too carefully already, taken too many steps to get to the Senator and get out without faltering or wasting time. He made all the right choices, and some of them were crazy. They were crazy, but they were logical.

Elizabeth looked at the list and it was suddenly clear. She was looking at the wrong list. What she needed was the reservations list. She knew now that she understood him. He was a man who made choices. He hadn’t climbed into the hotel room of a U.S. senator knowing he was going to poison his dentures. That was what had bothered her from the beginning. It was too absurd. It was just that he carried with him a range of options in case he needed them. He wouldn’t take a chance on not getting out, missing a flight or having it cancelled, and he couldn’t be sure he’d succeed on the first try. If it was the first try. He’d be double-booked. He might have reservations on a flight every hour for several days. And there would probably be a car, and a bus ticket too. It didn’t matter which one he finally used, whether he’d gotten on a plane or driven out or disappeared into thin air or stayed put. The point was, he’d have given himself all the options. Whatever he’d finally done didn’t matter at all, and there was no sure way to resurrect it now anyway. The only thing she was sure of was that he’d be on more than one list. Elizabeth snatched up her printouts and walked out of the conference room.

“Where’s your computer terminal?” she asked the receptionist.

“Room twenty-one seventeen,” said the receptionist.

Lang, the FBI man she’d met last night, was in the terminal talking to one of the programmers when Elizabeth arrived. He listened carefully as she tried to explain what she wanted. The programmer saw her theory immediately. He said, “What’s the flag?”

“What do you mean?” asked Elizabeth.

“What do we ask the computer to look for to establish a match?”

“Names, addresses, credit card numbers if there are any. Anything that comes up more than once. The idea is, he’d want to use several airlines, probably several nearby points of departure, and certainly several times, beginning with Monday night and ending when the Senator was scheduled to leave Denver. When was that, Mike?”

“This Friday night,” Lang said.

“Okay,” said the programmer. “I’ll begin with the airlines. You want car rentals, buses, Amtrak. Anything else?”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “If that doesn’t produce at least a double, then I’m wrong in the first place.”

“Right,” agreed the programmer, and began to type in codes with rapid, jittery fingers as though Elizabeth and Lang had ceased to exist or had somehow been switched to another circuit that had nothing to do with him.

An electric voice that Elizabeth recognized as the ghost of the receptionist said, “White phone, Agent Lang,” through the intercom. He went to the wall and picked up the telephone. Then he listened for a moment, said “Understood,” and hung up.

He headed for the door before turning to Elizabeth. “We can get started on the papers now, if you’d like to be in on that.”

“I suppose I would,” said Elizabeth. “The reservations lists will probably take most of the day.”

In the laboratory Elizabeth expected to see the others already peering into the briefcases, but when she and Lang arrived the room was empty. “Where is everybody?” she asked.

Lang said, “Hart’s on the poison with the forensics people. They’re taking the samples to the Air Force’s toxicology lab today and then hanging in for a theory on where it came from. Mistretta’s investigating the people who stayed in the Constellation Hotel. The theory now is that whoever it was must have checked in, but not necessarily while the Senator was there. Anybody who would want to kill the Senator would have known enough about him to know that’s where he’d stay when he came to town. Hobson’s sweating through the police reports for all the precincts in Denver beginning last Friday. Davis is doing the same for state police. MacDonald—I don’t think you’ve met him—is coordinating all the inquiries to other agencies, trying to get them to squeeze their informants—Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco; Narcotics, CIA, and so on. I’ve got other people collecting hotel and motel registrations all over the city, watching airports and train stations for old faces, and others transmitting everything to Washington for interpretation. So we’re stretched damn near the limit around here. Within a couple of days we’re going to have about all the raw data we’re going to get. If we don’t get a break or an inspiration pretty soon, somebody’s going to have an uncomfortable time in the Senate.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s bound to be a special committee of inquiry set up to find out what happened. Somebody from the Bureau—probably the director himself—is going to have to go in there with whatever we can give him. If he doesn’t have a culprit, he’s going to have to prove there’s such a thing as a perfect crime.”

“You don’t really have much hope for it, do you?” she asked.

Lang turned to study her for a moment. A look of tired amusement seemed to flicker across his face, but he stifled it, took off his glasses, and peered closely at the lenses before taking out his handkerchief to clean them. “No, I don’t. I didn’t at the start. Somebody who pulls off something like this and manages to get himself out of sight afterward without leaving a print or a witness is practically home free. He doesn’t look any different from anybody else.” He put on his glasses again, as though illustrating his point, and added, “What it amounts to is a burglar who didn’t take anything.”

Elizabeth thought about it and sighed. It really was a lot like that. She was beginning to feel tired again, and it wasn’t even noon yet. “So we’re just covering now, trying to look thorough, is that it?”