Thomas Perry: The Butcher's Boy

“Satterfield, R. J. Male. Afro-American. 26. Apparent murder/robbery. Revolver, .32. Washington, D.C. Code number 79-8478.” No.

“Davidson, B. L. Female. Caucasian. 23. Apparent murder/rape. Knife. Carmel, California. Code number 79-8479.” No again.

Down the printout she went, letting the sheets fall in front of her desk to re-form themselves into an accordion shape on the floor. Now and then she would make a check mark with her pencil beside an entry that didn’t fall into the ten or twelve most common murder patterns. It was Monday, so she had to work fast to catch up. One thing Elizabeth had learned on this job was that a lot of people killed each other on weekends.

It was just after ten when she reached the final entry. “Stapleton, R. D. Male. Caucasian. 41. Apparent murder. Revolver, .45. Suspects: Stapleton, A. E., 38; no prior arrests. Buffalo, New York. Code number 79-102033.” Padgett, the senior analyst in charge of analyzing reports, would be on his morning break, she thought. The timing was always wrong, somehow. Whenever you got to the stage where you needed somebody it was either lunchtime or a break. She picked up the printout and carried it across the office to the glass-walled room where the computer operators worked.

She was surprised to see Padgett at his desk behind the glass, frowning over a report. She rapped on the glass and he got up to open the door for her without putting down the papers he was reading.

“I thought you would be on your break, Roger,” she said.

“Not today,” said Padgett. “Must have been a big weekend. Four of our friends bought airline tickets in the last three days.” He always called them “our friends,” as though the years of scanning lists for familiar names had prompted a kind of affection.

“All to the same place?”

“No,” he said. “Two to Las Vegas, one to Phoenix, and one to Los Angeles.”

“It’s probably the weather,” said Elizabeth. “They don’t like it any more than we do. You still have to scrape the snow off your car if it’s a Rolls Royce.”

He looked impatient. “Okay, love. What did you find?”

“Eight possibles. The numbers are marked. The rest are the usual weekend stuff—rapes, muggings, and arguments that went a little too far.”

“I’ll have Mary get the details to you as soon as they’re printed out. Give her fifteen minutes. Take a break or something.”

“Okay,” she said, and walked out again into the large outer office. She saw that Brayer, her section head, was just putting a few papers into a file, then throwing on his sport coat.

“On a break, Elizabeth?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Can’t do anything until the computer spits out the day’s possibles.”

“Come on,” said Brayer. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. I’m waiting on something myself.” They walked down the hall and into the employees’ lounge. Brayer poured two cups of coffee while Elizabeth staked her claim on a table in the far corner of the room.

Brayer sat down, sighing. “I sometimes get tired of this job. You never seem to get anything worthwhile, and you spend an awful lot of time analyzing data that doesn’t form a pattern and wouldn’t prove anything if it did. This morning I’ve been going over the field reports of last week’s possibles. Nothing.”

Elizabeth said, “Just what I needed—to hear my section chief talking like that on a Monday morning.”

“I guess it’s the logical flaw that bothers me,” said Brayer. “You and I are looking for a pattern that will lead us to a professional killer, a hit man. So we pick out everything that doesn’t seem routine and normal. The point about professional killers is that they don’t do things to draw attention to themselves. What did you get this morning, for instance?”

“A shotgun suicide. One where they tortured a man and then cut his throat. One where a man was poisoned in a hotel dining room, one where the brakes failed on a new car. And a dynamite murder, and—”

“There!” said Brayer. “That’s just what I was talking about. A dynamite murder. That’s no hit man. It’s a mental defective who saw a hit man do that on television. What we ought to be looking at is the ones that don’t look unusual. The ones where the coroner says it was a natural death.”

“You know why we don’t,” said Elizabeth.

“Sure. Too many of them. Thousands every day. But that’s where our man will be. And you wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was a hit man or pneumonia. Dynamite, shotguns, knives, hell. You don’t have to hire a professional for that. You can find some junkie in half an hour who could do that for a couple of hundred.”

“We help catch one now and then, you have to remember that.”

“Yes, we do. You’re right. We’re not just wasting time. But there has to be a better way to do it. As it is, we find what we find, not what we’re looking for. We catch lunatics, axe murderers, people like that. Once every few years an old Mafia soldier who wants to come in from the cold and can tell us who did what to whom in 1953. It’s okay, but it’s not what we’re after.”

“John, how many actual hit men do you suppose there are operating right now? The professionals we look for?”

“Oh, a hundred. Maybe two hundred if you count the semiretired and the novices who have the knack. That’s in the world. Not too many, is it?”

“No, not many when you’re trying to find them by analyzing statistics. From another point of view it’s plenty. I’d better go call my bank while I’ve got a minute. They bounced my check unjustly.”

Brayer laughed. “Typical woman,” he said. “Mathematical genius who can’t add up her checkbook.”

Elizabeth smiled her sweetest smile at him, the one that didn’t show that her teeth were clenched. “Thanks for the coffee. I’ll have the activity report in an hour or two.” She got up and disappeared out the door of the lounge.

Brayer sat there alone, sipping the last half of his cup of coffee and feeling vaguely bereft. He liked to sit at a table with a pretty woman. That was about as far as he allowed it to go these days, he thought. It made him feel young.

“May I join you, or am I too ugly?” came a voice. Brayer looked up and saw Connors, the Organized Crime Division head, standing above him.

“You’re perfect, Martin,” said Brayer. “You being the boss, this being Monday, and you being ugly enough to fit right in. It’s a pattern.”

“Thanks,” Connors said. “How are things going?”

“Rotten, I’m afraid. Elizabeth went back to pick out the second-stage possibles, of which there are several. None very promising, but they all take time. The field reports from last week are all blanks except the one from Tulsa, which is three days late and is probably just as blank.”

“I almost hope so this morning,” said Connors. “We’ve got just about every investigator in the field, and Padgett’s airline reports say at least four of the people we keep an eye on bought tickets west this weekend.”

“Anything in it?”

“Probably the usual. Old men like warm weather. At least I do. And Roncone and Neroni have investments out there. Legitimate businesses, or at least they would be if those two weren’t in on them. But there’s always a chance of a meeting.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” said Brayer without enthusiasm. “Well, I think I’ll go see if Tulsa phoned in. I’d like to close the books on last week before Elizabeth comes up with today’s massacres.”

“How’s she working out, anyway? It’s been over a year.”

Brayer sat back down and spoke in a low voice. “To tell you the truth, Martin, she’s a real surprise. I think if I had to retire tomorrow, she’d be the one I’d pick to replace me.”