Kochel Farms had been owned by a man named Mel Kochel Jr. since 1979. The farm and the thirty thousand head of cattle that were routinely slaughtered to fill up grocery stores and fast-food restaurants around the country had been around much longer than that, started by Mel Sr. back in 1959, but the day-to-day operations of the farm had been transferred recently to Mel Jr.’s son Trey.
There wasn’t a hint of criminal activity related to the Kochel family, unless one considered Trey’s speeding ticket in 1992 an act of domestic terrorism. In the weeks since Fat Monte’s suicide, every conceivable avenue into the Family’s involvement with the farm had been investigated, and all the FBI had been able to prove — and even this could be met with some reasonable doubt — was that one of the Family’s bars in Bridgeport, the Sidewinder, occasionally bought ground beef from a distributer who occasionally got meat from Kochel Farms. In essence, the only relationship was one of mere happenstance.
That didn’t mean there wasn’t something, Jeff understood, only that it was buried so deep it didn’t exist on paper. Fat Monte didn’t just throw out the name Kochel Farms because he saw it on the side of a truck and thought it would be a funny joke to play on the FBI, not after he’d already buried a bullet in his wife’s head, and not while he was working up the guts to put one through his. Jeff knew that much. What Kochel Farms really meant was another matter.
Could be Sal Cupertine was now a Big Mac, but that just didn’t make a lot of sense. He couldn’t see Ronnie Cupertine engaging the services of civilians to help get rid of one of his dead bodies. There was just too much risk involved in having some ten-dollar-an-hour farm employee shove a human being into the slaughterer, even if Ronnie had Fat Monte hand over a stack of bills in compensation. Could be it was Chema Espinoza or Neal Moretti who did the honors — not that they’d found Neal’s body in that landfill, nor did Jeff think they ever would — but, still, why would Ronnie bother making them do it all the way out here, when they could have used whoever was doing the job Paul Bruno used to do? Not that they’d found his body, either.
If Kochel Farms was somehow involved in the disappearance of Sal Cupertine, Jeff thought it was a more passive experience. . a point he’d been trying to elucidate to the FBI for the last several weeks to little avail. Which also made perfect sense, since the leadership of the FBI in Chicago weren’t exactly charter members of the Jeff Hopper Fan Club, not after the Fat Monte suicide hit the Sun-Times and Tribune.
It took a few days for everything to come out due mostly to the fact that Chicago was more interested in dealing with the fallout of the blizzard that had drilled the city than the suicide of a gangster and the attempted murder of his wife. But once the city began to thaw and journalists could actually get to their offices, what had been a page 3 blip turned into a front-page embarrassment with “confidential sources” confirming that “Family enforcer” Fat Monte Moretti’s last conversation had been with an FBI agent, who, it turned out, was currently on paid administrative leave for misconduct. Those same “confidential sources” were happy to suggest that the agent in question was Jeff Hopper and that it was believed he would soon be relieved of his duties completely, particularly in light of the murder of four people under his supervision the year previous and his now questionable relationship with a known crime figure.
Jeff was pretty sure that the “confidential sources” named in all the stories was in fact Kirk Biglione, who at the moment was trying to explain to Special Agent Poremba how much he was going to enjoy Chicago once spring came around, now that Poremba had been hired ostensibly to replace Jeff. “Lots of great restaurants,” Biglione said. “And if you like to hunt or fish, it’s just a couple hours to some great spots in Wisconsin. I’ve got this place I’ve been dreaming about building in Fond du Lac.”
“I don’t hunt or fish,” Poremba said.
“What do you like?” Biglione asked.
In the time Jeff had worked with Lee Poremba, that was the one question everyone had about him: He didn’t seem to like anything other than his job, which made him, at the time, seem like one of those guys ready to stab you in the back. Except it just happened that he was a fairly boring guy who had a pretty firm vision of what his life would be like, one where he caught bad guys and then went home and tended to his three springer spaniels. This was information Jeff had learned only after being asked to do some background on him when he was up for a promotion in Kansas City, as the FBI was typically concerned with agents who didn’t seem to exist outside their jobs. It wasn’t normal not to leave some kind of footprint, somewhere.
It had been several years since he’d done the background report on Poremba, but Jeff still remembered the most salient details of his life: a brother in Tampa, an ex-wife in Santa Fe, and, as far as Jeff could find, no one else. Incorruptible, Jeff had said about him in his report, because his tastes are so base. A good book, his dogs, a place to sit, a matinee movie every Saturday afternoon when he wasn’t working. And if he was working, he’d see a matinee on Sunday instead. Preferred romantic comedies and anything with talking animals.
“I like to read,” Poremba said.
“You still have springers?” Jeff asked.
Poremba turned in his seat and stared at Jeff for a few seconds. “Yes,” he said finally. “They’re still in Kansas City at a kennel. Can’t have them living with me at the Comfort Suites.”
“Last I knew,” Jeff said, “you had three of them. You’ll need a place with a yard in Chicago. Probably need to look out in the suburbs. Batavia is nice, I hear.”
“I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” Poremba said.
“Oh yeah?” Jeff said. “I thought you were permanent.”
“I have a feeling I’ll be moving around some in the next few weeks,” he said.
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Biglione said. “We may find what we’re looking for today, and then you’re knee-deep in moving boxes by the end of the week.”
“Maybe,” Poremba said. Biglione was technically Poremba’s equal in rank, but it was clear to Jeff that Poremba had been brought in to fix a potential nightmare for the FBI. Once word got out that the body in the dump wasn’t Sal Cupertine, or that there was another body somewhere in the dump that they couldn’t find, big questions about the FBI’s investigation into the Family would begin to be asked. The only reason the press hadn’t discovered this information already had a lot to do with the present situation Jeff Hopper found himself in.
As soon as Jeff heard Fat Monte’s body hit the floor, he knew that the rules had changed. In all his time working organized crime, he’d never run into a made guy killing himself outside of prison, and even then it was rare. That he tried to kill his wife, too? That didn’t happen, ever. He also knew the fact that Fat Monte was on the phone with him would be the sort of thing that the press would eventually discover, which meant it was the sort of thing the FBI would offer up to them in form of sacrifice — a juicy tidbit that might keep them from digging much further into the real story, namely why Sal Cupertine was allowed to disappear. As it happened, it wasn’t that much different than the Family offering up the body of Chema Espinoza. Tit for tat, everyone stays in business, and the world keeps spinning.
It was how business was conducted in Chicago. And it made Jeff Hopper sick to know he was going to need to cut a similar deal if he wanted to protect the one person with something real to lose: Matthew. The only way to do that was to push the FBI into a corner. Jeff knew he had the one thing that the FBI needed: information.