by Thomas Perry
There was one notable exception that Schaeffer knew of—himself. He had killed people, including a union leader and a US senator from Colorado, in exchange for money from Carl Bala. He remembered every detail of the few jobs Bala had hired him to do.
But the reporter was sure that the federal prosecutors were long out of new things to charge Balacontano with. He had been locked up too long. If his hearing determined, as it might, that he had done nothing to forfeit his eligibility for parole, he could theoretically be let out at the discretion of a hearing officer and one parole commissioner.
Bala himself, Schaeffer was sure, must still be interested in killing the man who had framed him for the one crime he had not committed, the murder of Arthur Fieldston. But could he be the one trying to kill Schaeffer now? Bala had gone to prison on a phone tip. Every one of his appeals had been exhausted decades ago, but he had one more chance to go free—to take advantage of a federal parole system that had been abolished so many years ago that most lawyers currently practicing in New York probably had never seen a federal parole hearing. Bala certainly knew he had a chance that was almost miraculous. Would he risk it by trying to get somebody killed now?
16
Schaeffer thought about sleep, but it was impossible at the moment. He had activated the part of his memory that had been there since the first time of trouble when he was in high school.
After the “Big Cleanup,” which was what Eddie called the massacre at his butcher shop, there was another period when they seemed to be forgotten in the chaos of a war they’d started. Schaeffer remembered sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast while Eddie would read from the newspaper. “Here’s another one. ‘Angelo De Pinto, a reputed crime boss, was assassinated on the steps of a church in Palermo, Italy, last month.’ What the hell kind of reporting is that? A month ago? ‘Palermo police say this is the fifth such murder in the past two months.’”
Another time Eddie read aloud, “‘A boy who was walking his dog in a field on the south side of Niagara Falls, New York, found the body of a Buffalo man yesterday afternoon. Police identified the victim as Michael Floria, thirty-eight. The body showed signs of torture, but the probable cause of death was three bullet wounds to the chest and head. He had not been reported missing, although the police believe the body had been there for about three days.’ Jesus. I knew that guy.”
The boy remembered Eddie reading items just like that several times over the next year. He remembered that Eddie had remained watchful and didn’t take on any contracts that year while the warfare went on. The boy went to school, and Eddie devoted most of his efforts to making the butcher shop more competitive and entrenched in the neighborhood than it had been. His only break from the shop during those months was when he would leave for an hour or two for one of his special home deliveries.
On those days, the boy would run the shop by himself after school until Eddie returned. But by then he was making his own home deliveries to Mrs. Whittaker, and then also to her best friend, Mrs. Casey.
The boy met Mrs. Casey, his second delivery customer, one day while he was ending one of his usual deliveries to Diane Whittaker. They were still upstairs in the spare bedroom where she liked to take him, and she began kissing and caressing him while he was putting on his clothes. He noticed that she glanced out the window a couple of times. At one point she reached down and touched him and said, “Oh. That’s interesting.”
He laughed. “You just did that because you knew that would happen.”
A moment later the doorbell rang.
She wasn’t alarmed. She looked out the window, smiled, and said, “Don’t worry. It’s only a friend of mine. Do you remember Linda McCutcheon from school? She was on the cheerleading squad with me. Long, dark-brown hair?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“She’s Mrs. Casey now. She’s here, so just sit tight for a few minutes.”
He looked at his watch. He had just finished buttoning his shirt.
“You have to be back right now?”
“No,” he said. “Not really.”
She closed the door on him and went to the staircase. He heard the sound of her shoes going down quickly. He heard the front door open and shut, and then the bolt sliding into place. He sat on the bed to tie his shoes and waited for Diane to get rid of her friend.
After a few minutes he heard flat shoes coming up the staircase. The door opened, and there stood Linda Casey.
“Hi,” she said. “Diane told me about your home deliveries. I hope you won’t be mad at her. She said she promised you not to say anything to anybody.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. He meant that she had been the one to make him promise to keep the secret.
She slowly shook her head from side to side, and pulled her sweater over her head. “I think you’ll figure it out though, won’t you?” She unhooked her bra. “She said she thought you wouldn’t mind once I was here.” She had very light skin that contrasted with her long, dark hair. He had not forgotten her large breasts from high school. As she freed them, he saw the small, pink nipples. She waited for a few seconds, letting him look. “No?”
“Yes,” he said. “If you want to.”
“It’s really why I came.” She unzipped the back of her skirt, stepped out of it, and moved toward the bed, where he was still sitting. He put his hands on her white, silky underpants and pulled them down to the floor.
She pretended to be surprised by his audacity. “Oh!”
He quickly shed his clothes and put his arms around her, feeling the shape of her body and the softness of her skin. “Oh,” she said again as she lay back on the bed and the encounter went on. She said it over and over.
There was something especially erotic about his afternoon with Linda Casey. She was very pretty—as pretty as Diane Whittaker. And she was clearly taken with the idea of this secret tryst with a man a few years younger than she was. She loved that he took charge, touching her with undisguised lust, as though he had a right to, and letting her do the same to him.
At the end of it, she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. “That was nice,” she said. “Thank you. Can I be your other home-delivery customer?”
“I, uh,” he began. “Yeah. Just call in an order to the shop and tell Eddie you want me to deliver it.”
After that, he usually made two deliveries a week at each of the two houses. A few times he would go to one house and find them both waiting. He didn’t mind; it limited the number of times Eddie’s car would be parked at either house, and made them all a bit safer—them from gossip, and him from the next set of shooters who learned that killing him and Eddie would be worth a trip from New York.
The men who would come for him and Eddie were sure to be men he didn’t recognize. They would not recognize him either, but they would know about the butcher shop and might have seen Eddie’s car.
When, at about age twelve, he had first seen Diane and Linda, they had seemed like celebrities, superior and unattainable. But now, whenever they were bored or feeling neglected or resentful of their husbands, they would call in an order for him to deliver. He knew that part of the attraction was that with him they felt the same superiority they’d always felt. They loved being with him because they could control him. He didn’t bully them or look down on them or fail to appreciate them, the way their husbands did.
They adored him because he would do what they wanted and stop when they wanted him to stop. And because he was pliable and agreeable but inexperienced, they taught him. They said to him, “Women aren’t really interested in that, but we all love it when you do this. Touch me here.” They would guide his hands, his lips, his tongue, and then let him know with little cries when he had done something right.
He knew he was risking his life those four afternoons a week, but it never occurred to him to stop. It was better than anything else that existed in the world.
> The home deliveries continued through his high school years and beyond. One day when he brought Diane Whittaker’s order of sliced turkey breast and sausages, she took the package, walked down the hall to the kitchen, and placed it in the refrigerator as usual. Then she beckoned to him, handed him a Coke, and sat down at the kitchen table across from him. She reached across and held his hand, looking at him seriously. “I’ve got to stop ordering special delivery.”
“Why?”
“I’m pregnant. Don’t worry. It’s not yours. It’s Dan’s. His and mine.” She took his hand in both of hers. “It’s funny, I never minded cheating on Dan, even though I love him. But I can’t take that chance for my baby. Do you understand?”
“Are you happy?”
“About the baby? I’m so happy I can hardly stand it.”
“Then congratulations. You’ll be a great mother.”
She looked at him with a kind of hopeless exasperation, as though they both knew that couldn’t be true. “I mean it,” he said. “That’s going to be a lucky baby. Its mother already loves it. ” He drank down most of his Coke and turned away to hide the inevitable burp. Then he said, “I guess I should probably go, huh?”
She nodded. “That would make it easier.”
They stood up, and she came around the table to give him a long kiss. Then they separated, and he said, “Goodbye.” On the way out, she stopped and kissed him one more time. He knew that she was doing it because she wanted to remember what he felt like.
About four months later, he found himself in the same conversation with Linda Casey. He had been expecting it because Diane and Linda were such close friends, and he imagined they wanted their children to be in school together.
By the time the two friends had opted out of his home-delivery service, the girls his own age had grown into adult women and more curious about boys, and particularly this boy.
Schaeffer looked at the clock beside the bed. It was after 1:00 a.m., late enough to walk the perimeter outside his hotel and make sure that none of the people he’d been reading about on his iPad had found out he’d checked in. If someone had, there would be people coming at night, maybe to hide a transponder under his car, maybe to set up an ambush for tomorrow, and maybe to get into his room to kill him tonight. He had learned that it was best to start out in the deep darkness, outside the glow of the parking-lot lights, and then move inward toward the building.
17
Elizabeth Waring stood in front of the big bathroom mirror and tried to move every hair into place and then apply a layer of delicate concealer that would hide the dark circles under her eyes. The lips came next, a subtle shade chosen for these occasions when she had to radiate substance. This meeting had been called at her request, and she had been thinking hard about the facts that she would present, the questions that would be asked, and how she would reply, so she was feeling as though it had already begun.
She reminded herself that she was a ranking official, no longer an adviser or a specialist. When she’d begun working at the Justice Department at age twenty-two, they still treated Organized Crime as a task force, as though any day they might make a few dozen arrests and then disband the group and reassign them where they were really needed. She had worked in a basement with a dozen or so other data analysts searching those long-lined printouts with accordion folds to determine which deaths might be the work of gangs, syndicates, or other criminal organizations.
She had seen all the changes and developments since then. Now she was one of the veterans. She occupied a corner office on the fourth floor, which was high enough to show she had status, but low enough to show she was still actively engaged in the work of the department. Some female agents coming up now would not have let an office like hers stay the way her male predecessors had left it—with a heavy dark-wood desk, chairs, and table that matched the chair rails and wainscoting. She had been smart enough to present herself as solid and familiar. “How’s the new boss? Same as the old boss.” That was what she’d wanted.
She had never personalized her office. She thought of it as a piece of staging to remind people that they were in a government agency that conducted serious criminal investigations. She had never put framed photographs of her son or daughter in her office. Her job was to be the enemy of some of the worst people in the world. Why would she have photos of her biggest vulnerability—her children—where suspects’ attorneys, compromised politicians, or organized-crime witnesses might see them? Having a photo of her late husband, Jim Hart, in the office would have been too depressing at first, but now it would also be confusing. He had died almost twenty-five years ago, so all his photos were of a man too young to be her husband. People who actually cared about her knew that she was the widow of an FBI agent. Nobody else needed to know anything.
She took another look at her image in the mirror. Her face was the face of a woman her age, the black business suit was tasteful and fit her nicely, her shoes and purse matched. Time to go.
When she looked out the front window, the sky was the color of disappointment, and she could see rain streaming down her car’s windows. She opened her umbrella to walk to the car, drove to the Justice Department, then took the elevator to her corridor. She spent a few minutes sitting at her desk, checking her messages for anything urgent, and then walked up the hall.
The people above Elizabeth in the hierarchy were all political appointees. That, even in the best of times, made her an outsider, and these were far from the best of times. There were many more women in responsible positions than there had been when she’d started, but most were not notable improvements over the men they’d replaced.
She stepped into the doorway of the deputy assistant attorney general’s office at the end of the hall and presented herself at the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist was young and pretty, as they always were and always had been. The men who hired them were susceptible to the stupid pleasure of looking at them, even the men for whom a connection with them was the farthest thing from their minds, and who knew that a wrong word or an accidental touch actually imperiled careers.
This receptionist was new. She looked at Elizabeth and said, “Good morning, Ms. Waring.” She was alert. She’d had to tell quite a few others over the years that there was no Mrs. Waring. She was Mrs. Hart only at home, and Ms. Waring only at work.
The deputy assistant attorney general, Criminal Division, was the most powerful person at this meeting. He was in charge of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, the Human Rights and Special Prosecution Section, and the Organized Crime and Gang Section. There were four other deputy assistants who oversaw other things.
When she saw Deputy Assistant Holstra appear in the doorway of his private office, she could tell he was impatient for the meeting to begin. She went into the conference room and sat in the chair at the table that he seemed to indicate to her with his eyes.
When the others didn’t come in immediately, he cleared his throat. That brought two more. Then he said, “John. Bill. Let’s get started.”
When all were seated along the sides of the big table, they were bunched at the high-status end, near Deputy Assistant Holstra.
She surveyed the faces. Mark Holstra was a political appointee, but he had experience working for the US attorney in Houston about twenty years ago and had then gone into a private firm as a litigator. He seemed to Elizabeth to have returned on some kind of mission that he had not yet revealed. Maybe he felt he’d wasted his talent and intelligence getting rich, or he had been feeling guilty about not having done much to help the country. Maybe he had simply felt he owed a service to Edward Benton, the attorney general, who was an old friend.
The others were all of a type that she had seen come and go at Justice for decades. They were smart graduates of great law schools who expected to rise in government service, rid the nation of crime, become famous, win elective office, and get very rich within a f
ew years. They were creatures dedicated to struggling toward the light and fresh air above them.
Holstra said, “Elizabeth has an important matter to discuss today. I’ve heard the bare bones of it. I should remind you that we’re in a soundproof room. No recordings are being made, and no transcripts. The only people who will be discussing this meeting are the six people present. To make the situation clear, if this leaks, I will expect the four people other than Ms. Waring and me to resign instantly and without being reminded. Elizabeth?”
Elizabeth said, “The night before last I had a visit from a man in the middle of the night. I recognized him because I’ve seen and spoken with him before. In the course of my first case with the department, I only ran across his work, but never caught up with him and never saw him. He was a highly regarded professional hit man in those days, and people referred to him as ‘the Butcher’s Boy.’”
“Heartwarming name,” said Bill.
“He had committed various murders for several different LCN families beginning when he was about fifteen. At the time of my first case, he was about thirty. My first assignment was to go to Denver to take part in the investigation of the murder of Senator McKinley Claremont, who had gone back to his home district while Congress was in recess. The senator was planning, once Congress returned, to hold hearings on a lot of corporations that had made large profits but paid little or no tax during the preceding few years. Although the senator didn’t know it, one of these corporations was partially or wholly owned by Carlo Balacontano, the head of one of the five New York crime families. This professional killer murdered the senator in his hotel room. He also murdered a troublesome member of a machinists’ union in Ventura, California, who had been raising questions about why his company’s pension fund hadn’t grown in tandem with the stock and bond markets. Apparently that was Balacontano’s work too.