“Booth,” Stanton said by way of greeting.
“Hey. Where’s Dillon?”
“Out back with the locals. Trying to figure out if they could have gone out that way.”
Through the back door, Booth went down the few stairs into the yard, Woolfolk on his heels.
Dillon was out there, all right — a square-shouldered, square-jawed man of fifty, his dark hair swept straight back, his dark eyes cold as they scanned the area. His sharp nose gave him the appearance of an eagle.
Two uniformed officers and two local detectives fanned out around Dillon, wearing that horrible frustrating expression that meant they not only were unable to find what they were searching for, they didn’t know what they were searching for.
Booth approached the group and Dillon raised his chin in greeting.
“What went down here?” Booth asked.
Dillon shrugged. “They came in through the main gate, grabbed the guard, then your guess is as good as mine…. The bad guys probably used the agent playing guard as a hostage, to bargain for Musetti. But we don’t even know that for sure.”
“Jesus,” Booth muttered.
“All we know for sure is Musetti and our boys are simply not here… and no sign of a struggle. No neighbors saw or heard anything. Even the car is gone. The detectives are going to canvass the neighbors down toward the lake, to see if they could have gotten out that way. May be our intruders had a boat waiting.”
“In broad daylight, on a hot summer day with people on the beach?” Booth asked. “Doubtful.”
“Agreed,” Dillon said. “But no stone gets left unturned on this one. I want you in charge, Seeley.”
“We’re in agreement already. But what about the Gianelli case?”
Dillon’s features hardened. “Without Musetti, there is no Gianelli case.”
“No argument there, either.”
“Good. Make it happen, Booth — find Musetti. Find our four agents.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dillon gestured. “Woolfolk will work with you. Find Musetti and save our collective ass.”
Booth knew a dismissal when he heard it. He turned, but before he could take a step, Dillon’s voice halted him.
“We’ll get what little we have on your desk by the end of the day. In the meantime, start beating the bushes…. See if anybody on the street knows anything.”
“Yes, sir.”
At midnight, Booth was still at his desk, everyone else having cleared out, when a call from the night guard brought him to the lobby, where he found four FBI agents waiting…
…the four FBI agents who had been babysitting Musetti.
One still wore the security uniform from the guard shack.
He said when he went up to a car, men with automatic weapons came out of the woods and took him prisoner. Then, as Dillon had suspected, the attackers had gone to the house and used him to get inside and snatch Musetti.
“They had us blindfolded,” the agent told Booth. “Wrists and ankles duct-taped — took us in a truck of some kind, and drove us around in circles till we were so goddamn disoriented, I don’t think any of us has any idea where we were….”
Booth took them upstairs and questioned them at length, but little else was learned.
None of the agents could tell Booth where they had been, and Musetti had been transported in a separate vehicle… and they all assumed their witness was already dead.
No argument there, either.
However hopeless it might look, for the next forty-two days, Seeley Booth sought Stewart Musetti like the hitman was the holy grail.
The FBI agent worked sixty- to eighty-hour weeks, stopping only to eat and sleep.
He interviewed Musetti’s girlfriend, his ex-wife, the Gianellis, every man, woman, or child with even the most tenuous connection to the Gianelli family… and learned nothing.
What meager evidence had been collected from the safe house was tested and chased down, and each piece led to its own dead end.
Six weeks and all he had to show for his search was a pile of files leading nowhere, bags under his eyes, and the feeling that Stewart Musetti was gone for good… and he strongly suspected the same was true of the government’s case against Raymond and Vincent Gianelli.
Hot summer gave way to a warm autumn.
The garbage strike finally got settled. The drought continued, but the humidity was down, which at least gave Chicago a more tolerable climate.
One thing had not changed since that first awful day: Booth working until midnight.
On night forty-three, he was about to pack it in when the phone rang and he picked it up. “Booth.”
“Special Agent Booth, this is Barney.”
“…Barney?”
“You know — guard in the lobby?”
“Oh yeah. Sorry, Barney, didn’t recognize your voice.”
“You’re about the only one left in the building, sir. So I thought I better start with you. I’ve got something down here somebody needs to see. Probably you.”
Booth was in no mood for practical jokes, whether Barney’s or some vandal’s. “What is it?”
The guard took a long moment before answering. “It’s… well, it’s bones, sir. I guess you’d say — it’s a, you know… skeleton?”
Hanging up the phone, Booth threw on his jacket and hustled to the elevator.
Two minutes later he was in the lobby, where he found gray-haired, pot-bellied Barney staring out through the glass panes that made up the lobby.
Just outside, on the sidewalk of Plymouth Square, Booth saw something too. He exited the building, Barney on his tail, and looked down at a fully articulated human skeleton.
He scanned the area, thinking this might indeed be some elaborate pre-Halloween practical joke… but he saw no one.
Booth had a sinking feeling that this was all that was left of his star witness.
Under the mercury vapor lights illuminating Plymouth Square, the bones appeared very white, almost bleached. Squatting next to the skeleton, Booth saw something that struck him as odd, even in this already strange situation.
Tiny wires holding the bones together.
Someone had taken time to assemble the skeleton like one of those seen hanging in the science room back in Booth’s junior high days.
Between the bones of the foot, not quite a toe tag, Booth saw a folded piece of paper.
A note?
His curiosity told him to pick it up; his training told him not to.
He glanced one more time toward the toe-held note, then pulled his cell phone from his jacket.
“What do you want me to do?” Barney asked from behind him.
“Call 911 and tell ’em what we’ve got. I’ll watch the body until you get back.”
“Yeah, I, uh… guess he ain’t goin’ anywhere.”
“I guess not, Barney. But you are.”
The guard nodded and hustled off.
Booth punched in Woolfolk’s number, and when the sleepy agent picked up the phone, Booth outlined the situation.
“Is it Musetti?” Woolfolk asked.
“It’s just a frickin’ skeleton,” Booth growled. “How the hell would I know?”
“Okay, okay…. What do you want me to do?”
“Get your ass down here. I want to see the security video from this building, the surrounding buildings, and any traffic light cameras in a six-block radius. Somebody left us a hell of a present, and I want to know where to send the thank-you card.”
They clicked off and Booth went back to staring at the pile of bones in front of him.
Musetti?
Maybe. But like he had told Woolfolk, how the hell would he know?
The good news was, he knew someone who would know, someone who could tell him exactly whose skeleton had been dumped in Plymouth Square tonight.