Max Allan Collins
Bones: Buried Deep
For Dr. Greg Haines and Missy Jones — who reassembled the skeleton
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to acknowledge forensics researcher/co-plotter Matthew V. Clemens.
Further acknowledgments appear at the conclusion of this novel.
Epigraph
“As those who study them have come
to learn, bones make good
witnesses — although they speak
softly, they never lie and they never
forget.”
“The more outré and grotesque an
incident is the more carefully it
deserves to be examined, and the
very point which appears to
complicate a case is, when duly
considered and scientifically
handled, the one which is mostly
likely to elucidate it.”
Prologue
On a moonless June night, Al Capone’s sleek teak motorboat skimmed like a child’s tossed stone across the surface of Lake Michigan.
The craft had been a gift from someone who owed the crime boss a favor; Capone had climbed aboard once, promptly gotten seasick, and vowed never to return.
But from time to time — even now, years after Snorky’s postprison retirement to Florida — the mob boss’s former business associates found use for the craft. Not big enough to make runs to Canada for whiskey back in Prohibition days, the craft would be used by Capone’s men to speed out onto the lake in the middle of the night, to meet the bigger boats and bring back small shipments.
Post-Prohibition, other kinds of contraband had been smuggled by the speedboat, but tonight neither booze nor narcotics were aboard — though passenger Anthony Gianelli wished he had a flask or even a reefer about now, to ward off the chill.
No, tonight was a much different sort of run.
Behind the wheel, Johnny Battaglia squinted into the darkness. Wanting to avoid prying eyes, the pilot — a rather generous appellation, Gianelli thought — ran the boat without lights and had to struggle to see where they were going.
Neither the smartest nor most keen-eyed of the mob’s loyal soldiers, Battaglia did have his strengths — tough as a nickel steak, brave as a bull, and loyal as an English bulldog, which he happened to closely resemble.
Like Gianelli, Battaglia was a made man, though they both knew that Gianelli was the brains of the operation — unlike his burly counterpart, Gianelli had management potential and was headed toward bigger and better things.
Taller, thinner, and more nattily attired than Battaglia, Gianelli was not an underboss yet, but he kept his eyes open and his mouth shut, and knew that tonight’s assignment was the next rung on his personal ladder.
All they had to do was get through this run unscathed.
Gianelli did not want to be out here on the water, and he found vaguely unsettling the lights of Chicago fading into the darkness, barely a glimmer on the horizon; but this was his job, and he would do it.
Any trepidation he felt wasn’t fear of being caught, not exactly — but his wife had just arrived home with their new son, Raymond, and he wanted to be with his family in case he was needed.
Granted, little remained for a father to do at this point — tending to the baby was, after all, woman’s work. But he still felt like he should be home.
His job did allow a certain flexibility of hours, and thank God he wasn’t overseas, in Europe steamrolling the Nazis, or worse, the Pacific fighting the Nips; like Sinatra, he had a punctured eardrum, thank you God.
Instead, here he was, bouncing along the water, part of a little navy in a different kind of war, wishing that he had brought his light overcoat. His suit jacket, an expensive gray pinstripe, was of little help against the wind cutting over the speedboat’s windscreen.
Hell, it was June! But it was so damn cold out here on the water, in the middle of the night, might as well be March.
Battaglia had his shoulders hunched against the wind as well. In the back, on the deck, police captain Ed Hill showed no signs of the cold getting to him — of course, Hill had already been dead for four hours, and was pretty cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather, a corpse wrapped inside a bedspread the size of one of those Caribbean banana republics.
This thought brought Gianelli a slight smile — gallows humor to a mob guy, as to any soldier, was the norm.
Hill was no ordinary copper. If he had been, anywhere here on the lake would have been good enough to drop him in.
But Hill had been a small but significant piece in the feds’ case against Paul Ricca, the man who sat in the chair at the head of the Outfit table, from which Al Capone and then Frank Nitti had ruled Chicago. Ricca, “the Waiter,” had been convicted last December and gone to Atlanta earlier this year for a ten-year stretch, leaving the capable if unimaginative Tony Accardo to run things in his absence.
Everybody knew Mr. Ricca was still in charge, but for now “Joe Batters” — a nickname given Accardo by Capone himself for the young thug’s skill with a baseball bat (and not on a diamond) — was running the business.
Hill’s role in getting Ricca sent away had earned him an official commendation… and Tony Accardo’s wrath. Normally cops were off-limits; but this one had made the mistake of taking the Outfit’s cash, and then ratting them out, anyway.
Tonight Gianelli and Battaglia had delivered a stern and terminal rebuke to Hill in his home. Mrs. Hill was out of town, visiting a sister in Milwaukee; had Gianelli not seen the woman board the train with his own eyes, he never would have whacked the cop in his own house.
Business was business, but they weren’t savages.
No women, no children, that was the rule. Usually no cops or reporters, unless they asked for it. If you didn’t have rules, you were just as bad as the animals.
Gianelli peered down at the large lump in the bottom of the boat. He felt nothing — nothing — about this body on the deck: not anger, not hatred, not joy, not even indifference. Hill had crossed them and paid for it — this was the end result of a business transaction, nothing more.
No one associated with the Outfit wanted Hill to turn up, no bobbing to the surface or washing up on the beach for this bastard with a badge. Even without a body, there’d be heat….
So they had other plans for Hill.
“That must be U.S. Steel,” Battaglia yelled, working to be heard over wind and engine noise. He pointed at dim lights off to their right.
Starboard, Gianelli thought… or was it port? He was almost sure it was starboard.
“Yeah,” Gianelli agreed, feeling like a schmuck for yelling back, when there were only the two of them… not counting the cop. Who sure as hell wasn’t listening.
The lights seemed distant, pinpoints only slightly larger than the few stars that dotted the sky. “We’re gettin’ there,” Gianelli said.
Battaglia nodded.
Another ten minutes and they would be well past the giant steel mill and approaching the barren sand dunes of the Indiana shore.
Accardo had sent word and a car would meet them. They would get rid of Hill for good, then back home by morning. That was the plan, anyway.
The U.S. Steel plant pumped out sheet metal three shifts a day — steel that would soon be tanks, flame throwers, ships, and God only knew what else in the war effort. Farther past the mill now, waves breaking on the beach were audible even over the engine thrum.