“Is that what’s happened?”
“I don’t think so, but if the information we’ve been treating as factual is accurate, then it’s possible.”
“You mean we still haven’t started at zero? We have to go back further?”
“I’m just saying that we shouldn’t get too attached to our facts. We both listened to the tape recording of Tony T getting killed. He says, ‘You?’ Big bang, lots of screaming and scuffling. Then Mrs. T says, ‘He’s wearing a wire!’ Nobody says, ‘Hey, wasn’t that the Butcher’s Boy?’ or words to that effect. Not on the tape, when they were alone. Only Mrs. T says it later, and what she says is that her brother-in-law told her, but she’d never seen the man before in her life.”
“Why would either of them lie?”
“I don’t think they did. But do you remember what it was like ten years ago? When Dominic Palermo came to me in the middle of the night looking for protection, he told me all this stuff about a hired killer. He’d never seen him, just heard about him. The people who were talking about him just referred to him as the Butcher’s Boy. What if there is no such person? What if it’s just a name for a whole lot of men who have done murders for money? Nobody knows who it was, so it all gets attributed to somebody whose exploits are, by this time, mostly imaginary like Buffalo Bill’s, or maybe even attributed to a completely imaginary person, like Paul Bunyan.”
“You’re leaving out the best evidence we have—Carlo Balacontano. He told you about him.”
“He told me that the Butcher’s Boy was the man who really committed the crime he’s spending his life in prison for. I mentioned him first.”
“But you believed him.”
“I still do. I think Carlo Balacontano was framed for the murder of Arthur Fieldston, and I think this department was so eager to put him away that people forgot to ask a lot of questions they were being paid to ask.”
“Did you say anything at the time?”
“You mean you didn’t hear? I said it until everybody got tired of listening, and then I said it again until they decided I wasn’t a team player. That’s what got me my vacation in Europe.”
“No …” Richardson looked genuinely shocked. Elizabeth couldn’t tell whether he was lying, but how could he not be? He had been here in those days. “I thought … They said you’d just sort of burned out, because of the killings …”
She wondered if he was figuring out the rest of it, and hoped he wasn’t. He had at least the right to assume that he had his job because he had earned it, and not because all the competition had turned it down. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said. “I did all right. Jim came over and joined me there, and that’s how I got him to marry me.”
Richardson accepted the escape route gratefully. “Really? That sounds romantic.”
“Oh, Jim was a romantic guy.” She smiled.
But she could already see Richardson’s youngest analyst hurrying toward them with the morning’s list of disasters. He followed her eyes and saw her too. “Lana,” he said. “What have you got?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. She glanced at Elizabeth, and seemed to wonder if she should acknowledge that she knew the older woman was somehow above her in the department, so she said, “I wondered if one of you had time to look at this.” She laid the printout on Elizabeth’s desk, and hovered while Elizabeth and Richardson read it.
Elizabeth saw the inconsistency almost instantly. “Salcone, Albert, 42. Ficcio, Daniel, 19. Lempert, Robert, 53.” Sergeant Lempert, Robert. A police officer. Lempert and Ficcio both shot numerous times with an Ingram MAC-10. Salcone shot with Sergeant Lempert’s service revolver. But a witness says Salcone and Ficcio both had MAC-10’s, and they came in together and killed Lempert and another man.
“What is this?” asked Richardson. “Where is this?”
“Gary, Indiana,” said Lana.
“We’ve got one too many dead people,” said Elizabeth. “Or one too few.”
Jack Hamp stepped up to the yellow cordon of police tape and waited for one of the patrolmen to meet his steady gaze. Ducking under the tape to enter the area and then flashing an ID only after somebody stopped him wasn’t a good idea at this particular crime scene. Somebody would stop him, and it might be a more vivid experience than he was in the mood for right now. Policemen didn’t much like letting strangers in when a fellow officer was shot down. They protected each other from having a photographer come in and put the picture in the newspapers. When an officer was shot, they made sure all the papers got to run was a formal portrait of the man in his uniform, usually taken about the time he graduated from the academy.
The man Hamp had been staring at seemed to feel the heat on the back of his neck, turned and strolled toward Hamp, who held out his identification wallet so that the policeman could take it into his hand. “Jack Hamp, Justice Department,” he said. “I’d like to come in and look around.”
The policeman handed it back to him and said, “Suit yourself.” Hamp let this reverberate in his mind as he slipped under the tape and walked to the front of the store. It wasn’t right. It didn’t tell him what was going on, but it wasn’t right. If they were eager to accept federal help, the policeman would have taken him to the ranking officer on the scene and introduced him. If they were still shaken by having one of their own killed and were operating on the herd instinct, he would have brought the head man out to the tape to talk to Hamp. But this man had done neither.
Before Hamp reached the broken window he could see the destruction inside. Automatic weapons at close range made more hits than misses and spread a lot of blood around. The floor and walls of the store made a horrible first impression.
Hamp didn’t have any trouble spotting the captain; he was the only one around who didn’t look as though he’d had to pay attention to the fitness regulations. He approached the man warily. “Jack Hamp, Justice Department.” The captain saw his hand but didn’t shake it, so he added, “Sorry about Sergeant Lempert.”
The captain looked at him, then looked away. He didn’t say, “Yeah, he was a good man,” or, “We’ll get the bastard who did it.” All he did say was, “What can I do for you?”
This told Hamp that what he could see right now was about all he was going to see. But that was all right, because looking at dead men didn’t tell you as much as looking at the ones who were still alive.
Wolf was only a little surprised after he had looked through every telephone book the Washington public library had and still couldn’t find a listing for anybody named E. V. Waring. There were lots of Warings in the books, but no E.V. He supposed it wasn’t unusual for somebody who worked for the Justice Department on cases like this not to want his address printed out where everybody could read it. But it was the Department of Motor Vehicles that really surprised him. He paid his ten bucks, filled out the department’s form at the long, stand-up writing table, waited for three hours and finally was told that E. V. Waring didn’t have a vehicle registered to him. This was more peculiar, but Waring was listed on the NCIC printout as “Agent in Charge,” so maybe he had a government car. Still, this was starting to feel like somebody who actually went to some trouble to keep out of sight after the office closed at night.