Ackerman didn’t see people on his route. He saw the backs of heads, collars raised and bodies bundled against the predawn chill, eyes half-closed because there could be nothing to look at until the train stopped moving. When he entered the terminal he took the precaution of finding a door with a little picture of a man on it so that he could wash any invisible traces of burned powder off his hands and forearms to fool a paraffin test. Then he went to his locker, retrieved his suitcase and returned to change his clothes in a stall.
He knew he was acting like a shopkeeper who had just killed his wife for the life insurance, but something unexpected had happened at Talarese’s. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but he knew it couldn’t be good.
Elizabeth Waring Hart poured boiling water through the coffee filter, then set the kettle back on the burner without making any noise. She stopped and listened to the baby monitor for a second, poured the coffee into her cup and then sat in the cold predawn darkness. As soon as she raised the cup and touched it tentatively to her lips, she heard Amanda’s first stirrings. There was a faint little gasp that the monitor amplified into a rattling snore, and then came the roll. The crinkle of the biodegradable diaper sounded like the crumpling of a newspaper over the thin layer of static. Then Amanda began to coo to herself in her crib, and Elizabeth listened intently. In a few minutes, she would be crying for rescue, but as long as she was experimenting happily with sounds and running the morning inventory of toys in her crib, it was better to leave her in peace.
Elizabeth took another sip of her coffee. When Jimmy was this age, Jim had been the one to do this. He had been a morning person. Sometimes, soon after he had died, Elizabeth had felt strange when she sat here, taking his place. Sometimes she had even tried to talk to him, because it seemed as though he were nearby. She would say, “You bastard. You stupid bastard. You should be doing this.” The counselor from the hospital had said that anger was a normal reaction, but counselors were in the business of telling people things were normal that weren’t.
When the telephone rang she snatched it off its cradle before it had finished its first jangle. “Hello?” she said, just above a whisper.
“Elizabeth.” It was a statement, uninflected, and not enough to tell her who would call at this hour.
“Yes.” She matched the emptiness of the tone.
“I think we’ve finally found something that will make you come back to Organized Crime.” So it was Richardson. When she had transferred out of the section ten years ago, Richardson had been at her level, just a data analyst with a law degree. Now he was in charge.
“What’s that?” she asked without curiosity. She had been in two other sections of the Justice Department since then and taken two maternity leaves, and nobody had ever asked her to come back.
“A couple of hours ago in New York a man walked in the back door of a restaurant and put a hole in Tony Talarese’s head.”
“Tony T?” What surprised her was that she remembered who that was. She could be away for a hundred years, and she couldn’t get the names out of her memory.
“There’s only one suspect. He did it in front of Talarese’s brother, his wife and three mistresses.”
“Interesting. Who was it?”
“The Butcher’s Boy.” But she wasn’t really listening, because there was no other reason why this man would call her at this hour. She was already thinking way ahead: about the kids’ babysitter, about the problem of arranging a temporary transfer out of her section when everybody was working double shifts tracing money from Housing and Urban Development into private bank accounts and about the dress at the dry cleaner’s that she wished she could wear if she had to go into that office again. Part of her was also listening to the baby monitor, because Amanda was beginning to change her tone subtly, occasionally pausing in her quiet babble to issue little bulletins of discomfort.
Richardson gave her the old desk. It was amazing that it even existed; no, not that it existed—because anything that had ever been on a government inventory stayed on it—but that it was still here in the same place, not even shifted off the little wooden wedge Elizabeth had jammed under one leg to keep it from wobbling on the uneven floor.
She played the tape recording a second time. The gun was unbelievably loud. She glanced at the report again: .32 caliber. But, of course, he was firing it two feet from the microphone, into Tony T’s head. She listened to the loud scrabbling, tearing sound, and then the woman shrieking, “The son of a bitch is wearing a wire!” She punched the button.
She stood up and walked into what they had called the chief’s office. In the old days she wouldn’t have considered walking into that room without knocking, but Richardson was her contemporary, and, whether he knew it or not, he wasn’t her boss.
He looked up from his desk. “Well?”
“And the grieving widow said it was the Butcher’s Boy?”
“She said that’s what her brother-in-law told her. He, of course, won’t tell anybody anything.”
“She happen to mention what he’s been doing with himself all these years?”
“I don’t get the impression she’d ever heard of him before. When we catch him you can fill each other in.”
Elizabeth felt it. She couldn’t help that. But she reminded herself that Richardson wasn’t complicated enough to try to jab the sensitive spots. Those ten years had been her portion of a decent life, her allotment. She was a widow too. Richardson knew at least that much. She said carefully, “We’re not going to catch him unless we figure things like that out. You called me down here in the middle of the night, so help me.”
Richardson pushed aside his papers and looked at her evenly. “Right.”
“What were they doing in a closed restaurant—a party?”
“Hardly,” said Richardson. “There was an empty hearse in the back lot. They were going to the airport to pick up Tony’s nephew. It’s been a bad week for Clan Talarese.”
“He was killed too? Where?”
“England.”
She jumped up. “My God, we’re wasting time. Get me the flight lists from London to New York. Every flight since the nephew died. And every flight out of New York since he killed Tony T.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions. We don’t even know what happened to the nephew. It might have been AIDS.”
“Then find out. But later. First the airline flight lists.”
Elizabeth worked alone. In the old days it used to take hours of negotiations to get anything from the airlines. Now any question from the Justice Department—at least the Washington office-induced a special kind of panic. Too many planes had been dropping out of the sky. The fax machine kept buzzing, and Richardson’s secretary had to keep walking back into the little cubicle to change the paper.
Elizabeth crossed off all the names of women, then all the names of travelers with Frequent Flyer credits, then all the reservations made more than a week ago, then all the passengers with names he couldn’t be expected to use—Yamaguchi, Babatundi, Gupta, Hernandez and Nguyen—then looked through the sheets again. What else? What was it that made him special? Nothing. That had to be it. There would be nothing special at alclass="underline" no special seat, special meals, special luggage arrangements. He didn’t give a damn if he rode naked in the baggage compartment; all he wanted was to get out fast and disappear again. She checked the notations on the printouts once more, crossing off any passenger who had a special request.