Thomas Perry: The Butcher's Boy

“Come on, John,” said Connors. “She can’t possibly know enough yet. There’s a difference between being clever and pretty and running an analysis section. She hasn’t even been in any field investigation yet.”

“But I think she’s got the touch,” said Brayer. “She’s the only one in my section that’s smarter than I am.”

3

Two this week, he thought. Too many. After the next one, a vacation. At least a month. The old lady in front of him stepped aside to count her change, so he moved forward. “One way to Los Angeles, the three o’clock.”

“Five fifty,” said the weary ticket agent, running his hand over the bald spot on his head as though checking to be sure nothing had grown in there while he wasn’t paying attention.

He paid the money and waited while the man filled in the ticket. It would be no problem. After something like Friday, a man buying a ticket on Saturday morning for someplace far away might have stuck. A man buying a ticket for Los Angeles on Monday afternoon was nothing. He wasn’t leaving the vicinity of a crime. He was just leaving. This man behind the counter wouldn’t remember him. Too many people in line buying the same ticket, as fast as he could write. Not even time to look at them all. Not the men, anyway.

He stepped aside and pocketed his ticket. The clock on the wall said 2:45. Almost time to board. Not much time to hang around the bus station and get stared at. No reason for anybody to remember having seen him, because they hadn’t seen anybody in the first place. No chance they’d check on the motel either. He’d registered Friday afternoon three hours before the truck blew up, and the truck had been thirty miles away in Ventura. Another county. All clean and simple. From Los Angeles, you could take any kind of transport to anywhere. You practically had to set yourself on fire to attract a second glance in L. A.

On Monday, February twelfth, at 2:43 P.M., a man not fat, not thin, not young, not old, not tall, not short, not dark, not light, bought a bus ticket for Los Angeles at the Santa Barbara bus station. He was one of twenty or thirty that afternoon that you couldn’t have told from one another, but that didn’t matter because nobody looked at any of them. If the police were looking for someone in the area, it wasn’t on a bus coming toward Ventura on its way to Los Angeles.

ELIZABETH STUDIED THE SECOND SET of printouts on the day’s possibles. The man who had been killed by the shotgun had left a note that satisfied his family and the coroner. The death by torture was linked to a religious cult that had been under investigation for a year and a half. The brake failure was officially attributed to incorrect assembly at the factory in Japan. That left the man poisoned in the hotel dining room and the victim of the dynamite murder.

The autopsy report on the unlucky diner convinced Elizabeth that there wasn’t much point in following up with an investigation. Chances were that he hadn’t even ingested the poison on the premises. It was a combination of drugs, all used for treatment of hypertension, and taken this time with a large amount of alcohol. Elizabeth moved on to the last one.

Veasy, Albert Edward. Machinist for a small company in Ventura, California, called Precision Tooling. Not very promising, really. Professional killers were an expensive service, and that meant powerful enemies. Machinists in Ventura didn’t usually have that kind of enemy. Sexual jealousy? That might introduce him to somebody he wouldn’t otherwise meet—somebody whose name turned up on Activity Reports now and then. Thirty-five years old, married for ten years, three kids. Still possible. Have to check his social habits, if it came to that.

Elizabeth scanned the narrative for the disqualifier, the one element that would make it clear that this one too was normal, just another instance of someone being murdered by someone who had a reason to do it, someone who at least knew him.

She noticed the location of the crime. Outside the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Machinists, Local 602, where he had been for a meeting. Her breath caught—a union meeting. Maybe a particularly nasty strike, or the first sign that one of the West Coast families was moving in on the union. She made a note to check it, and also the ownership of Precision Tooling. Maybe that was dirty money. Well what the hell, she thought. Might as well get all of it. Find out what they made, whom they sold it to, and tax summaries. She’d been expecting a busy day anyway, and the other possibles had already dissolved.

She moved down to the summary of the lab report. Explosives detonated by the ignition of the car. She made a note to ask for a list of the dynamite thefts during the last few months in California. She read further. “Explosive not dynamite, as earlier reported. Explosive 200 pounds of fertilizer carried in the bed of the victim’s pickup truck.” Elizabeth laughed involuntarily. Then she threw her pencil down, leaned back in her chair, and tore up her notes.

“What’s up, Elizabeth?” asked Richardson, the analyst at the next desk. “You find a funny murder?”

Elizabeth said, “I can’t help it. I think we’ve established today’s pattern. My one possible blew himself up with a load of fertilizer. You should appreciate that. You’re a connoisseur.”

Richardson chuckled. “Let me see.” He came up and looked over her shoulder at the printout. “Well, I guess it hit the fan this weekend,” he said. “But that’s a new one on me.”

“Me too,” said Elizabeth.

“How do you suppose it happened?”

“I don’t know,” said Elizabeth. “I’ve heard of sewers and septic tanks blowing up. I guess there’s a lot of methane gas in animal waste.”

“Oh yeah,” said Richardson, suddenly pensive. “I remember reading about some guy who was going to parlay his chicken ranch into an energy empire. But you know what this means, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Brayer’s a walking bomb. His pep talks at staff meetings could kill us.”

Elizabeth giggled. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you about this. I suppose I’ll have to listen to a lot of infantile jokes now.”

“No, I think I got them all out of my system for the present,” said Richardson.

Elizabeth groaned. “Go back to your desk, you creep.”

Richardson said, “I’m going. But you know what?”

“What?”

“I’d have this one checked out.” Elizabeth made a face, but he held up his hand in the gesture he used to signal the return of the businesslike Richardson. “Seriously,” he said.

“Checked out with whom?” asked Elizabeth, moving warily toward whatever absurdity he was anxious for her to elicit from him. “And why?”

“I’m not sure who. I guess the bomb squad. Maybe even somebody over in the Agriculture Department. Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time. Who knows? I’m a city boy myself. But if it does we ought to know about it. We might be sending agents out into the field once a week to find out some farmer blew himself up with his manure spreader.”

Elizabeth studied his face, but he seemed serious. “I don’t know if you’re joking or not, but what you’re saying makes sense. It’ll take a few minutes to clear this up, and I’ve got some time on my hands this afternoon.”

“Then do it,” he said. “If only to cater to my curiosity.”

IN THE LOS ANGELES AIRPORT there are some people who stand on the moving walkway, letting the long belt carry them to the end of the corridor. Others walk forward on it, combining muscle and machinery into something over a dead run; and others, probably the biggest group, don’t use the machinery at all. This group consists of people who have spent too much time sitting down and know they’ll soon be sitting again for a few hours, or people who arrived at the airport an hour earlier than they needed to. Among them was a man not tall or short, not young or old, not light or dark, with a oneway ticket to Denver in his breast pocket. When the stewardess checks his boarding pass for the seat number a few minutes from now, she won’t be able to decide whether he is on his way to one of the military bases in that area, or one of the ski resorts. And she certainly won’t ask. After that she won’t have time to notice. As soon as the lights go on she will be too busy to study faces. Once they are strapped in she will look mostly at their laps, where the trays and the drinks and the magazines will be.