In fact, all the cadaver dogs turned up (conveniently in a garbage dump owned by the Family) was half of a head, charred to the skeleton, with a hole from a.38 in the back, attached to just the trunk of a body, also burned to the bone. Helpfully, Sal Cupertine’s wallet was also found nearby. His driver’s license, which Cupertine inexplicably kept current, contained the only verified description of the man in the last decade: six foot, 215 pounds, brown hair, hazel eyes. He had an olive complexion, which made him look a bit more exotic than he was, since both of his parents, and their parents, too, were born and raised in Chicago. His file said he had a tattoo on his arm of an eight ball, which would have been a good identifying mark if the corpse happened to have had an arm.
It was all too convenient, though not without precedent, that the Family would kill one of their own and make his body so easy to discover. The Family hadn’t done business in Chicago for the better part of a century without knowing how to make amends, even to the authorities. How many dead crooked cops had turned up over the years? Twenty-five? Fifty? Enough to be both a shame to the city as well as a tidy solution. Yes, there were bad cops. . and this is what happened to them. So here was the body of Sal Cupertine, offered up as a peace offering to the FBI. The FBI hadn’t bothered to investigate much further to see if it really was Cupertine — Jeff knew it wasn’t, it just wasn’t possible — because the point was clear enough: We’ve given one back to you.
“Can I get you anything else?” the clerk asked.
Jeff looked up from the paperwork and saw that the clerk had arranged all the information into a kind of order — boxes containing information on Cupertine’s presumed victims were put into a nice pyramid, boxes about his close family members in another, boxes of general information in another — which Jeff rather appreciated. “What’s your name?” Jeff asked.
“Matthew Drew.”
“You a student?”
“I graduated UIC last December,” he said. “Quantico sent me back here to see if maybe it would be a good fit. So I’m just waiting to see where I’m assigned.”
“So you’re an agent?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I am.”
“What’s your specialty?”
“If it were up to me, I’d be on Hostage Rescue,” he said. “I qualified for an assault team.”
“Why are you running boxes for me?”
Matthew shrugged. He was young — maybe twenty-five, Jeff guessed — but big through the shoulders, maybe played small college football. “I guess I’m the guy who runs your boxes until I’m otherwise directed.”
“This case,” Jeff said, “what do you know about it?”
“Just what I saw on the news.”
“C’mon,” Jeff said. “You spend the whole morning hauling up boxes on big, bad Sal Cupertine, and you don’t stop to read one or two files?”
This got the kid to smile. “I might have looked over some stuff,” he said.
“What do you think? You think that body was Cupertine’s?” Jeff handed the file he was reading to Matthew, but he didn’t open it right away, which told Jeff he’d probably spent some time with it already.
“You want my opinion or an educated guess?” Matthew asked.
“Both,” Jeff said.
Matthew opened the file and started thumbing through the documents. “Body was found three days after the killing, but with garbage that had been picked up five days earlier,” he said. “So he was stashed, I’d say, not put in a garbage can somewhere. They actually carried him and pushed him under a bunch of trash. No teeth. No hands. No feet. I mean, no nothing, really. It’s a pretty brutal way to kill a guy who’d done a lot of good work for you, isn’t it?”
“You tell me,” Jeff said.
“Seems excessive. I mean, he was their top muscle. So he messes up and kills a couple good guys. . bad news, right? But not as bad as if he was skimming or planning a coup. If they killed him for messing up, my guess is that they’d do him decently. The wallet? That’s too sloppy for them. No way they’d let his wallet get into the mix.”
“So?”
“So that’s not him.”
“Why fake his death? Why kill another guy?”
Matthew closed his eyes for a moment. “Maybe his cousin Ronnie’s influence. Maybe as an appreciation for his services. Maybe they were scared to go after him. Maybe all that. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think that’s the problem. Easier to just make it him and get on with things. Easier for the families of those guys and for us, too.”
Matthew was right about that, but the thing that niggled at Jeff had nothing to do with the four men Sal Cupertine had killed at all. Certainly their deaths mattered. Certainly. What got to Jeff was that he knew Sal Cupertine believed the agent named Jeff Hopper was dead. That he saw Jeff’s name on the bill and decided he’d go upstairs and take Jeff Hopper out, put a bullet in his face, or choke him to death like he did Cal, and how, in his mind, that was an okay thing. How wherever he was now — and Jeff was certain he was out there somewhere — he thought he’d killed Jeff Hopper.
And maybe he had killed Jeff Hopper for a while. Six months, give or take. Now Jeff Hopper wanted Sal Cupertine to know: He was alive, and he was coming for him.
“You have a sport coat or something in your cubicle?” Jeff asked.
“No,” Matthew said. He had on a pair of tan slacks — probably Dockers — and a nicely pressed white polo shirt that now was dotted with smudges of dirt and dust from unloading the boxes.
Jeff checked his watch. It was a little past two o’clock. “You live nearby?”
“Yeah,” he said, “just down by the college.”
“You got a suit there?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Okay,” Jeff said. “Go change your clothes and come back. We’re going into the field.”
“Sounds good,” Matthew said calmly, though Jeff could tell he was excited. He apparently didn’t know yet that Jeff Hopper was a pariah. “Where are we headed?”
“Sal’s house,” Jeff said.
Jeff Hopper was always surprised by the houses bad people lived in, since they tended to look just like the houses good people lived in. In the case of Sal Cupertine’s house in Lincolnwood, there was even a white picket fence out front, which went along nicely with the brick driveway shaded by a towering blue ash. The blue ash even had a tire swing, something Jeff had always imagined he’d have one day, too, if he ever managed to have children, though at this point in his life that likely meant step-children. Turning forty-five without a wife, and with no clear prospects in sight, had confirmed that.
Hopper had Matthew make another drive around the block so they could rendezvous with the surveillance car at the end of the street, which was a peculiar place to watchdog a house, since they had to spend their whole day looking through their rear and side mirrors. Jeff couldn’t help but wonder how long that detail would last. Maybe another month? Two months? The house was likely bugged, and Jennifer Cupertine’s car had a tracker on it, so there was no real cause for concern that she’d skip out of town to find or meet up with her husband without the FBI being aware, though there was still the small chance that Jennifer and her son were in danger from the Family, an idea Jeff found unlikely. That was some Russian mob shit that even the Italians looked down on.
Matthew pulled up next to a black Chrysler, and Jeff rolled down his window so he could talk to the agents inside. There were two of them, both about Matthew’s age and build, which meant they were probably spending their free time cursing the recruiter who’d told them they’d be on the front line in the war on crime.