The Informant

28

IT WAS MONDAY MORNING, and Elizabeth Waring was finally at home. Chicago had been a defeat, a horrible misstep. It had also been a searing humiliation for her. She had gone into a crucial and dangerous situation without being clear in her own mind about what was going on or what she intended to do. She had gone fact-finding with a gun in her pocket. That was about all it was. All of her years of experience and her native ability to extrapolate information from bits of available data to figure out what was going on had deserted her. No, she had deserted them. All she had done was stumble on the name of a man the Butcher's Boy was likely to visit and then rush to be there too.

She had not decided in advance what she wanted to accomplish. Did she want to prevent him from making a deal with Pugliese, or from killing him? Did she want to protect him from being killed in an ambush, or did she want to arrest him? The answer to all of those questions had been yes. She had wanted him to see spontaneously that the whole world of organized crime was always going to be arrayed against him and that his only sensible choice was to turn himself over to Elizabeth Waring of the Justice Department. She had not brought enough federal officers to make his capture even possible because she had some notion that he would go quietly and willingly. It was ridiculous. He was not capable of reacting that way. His only strategy in life was the opposite, the strategy of wild animals. If he was surrounded and vastly outnumbered, he would be more vicious than ever and kill more of the attackers. In his world, agreements were more than risky. They were usually suicidal. They were an enemy's way of disarming him so he could be killed.

She had come to him with an offer he must have seen as naive and foolish. She had hoped he would be desperate enough to consider it, but he wasn't. He could never be. Then she had toyed with the idea of pulling a gun on him and holding him in custody. That was stupid because he would always take the chance that someone wouldn't shoot in time, or would miss, or wouldn't kill him. He would always take the chance, instantly, without hesitation, moving as fast as he could to evade and counterstrike.

Now she was going to have to do the thinking she had not done before. She needed to find an unambiguous position in relation to him and then construct a plan that would induce precisely what she wanted to happen. And she wouldn't try to do it alone this time. That had been a childish reaction to the refusal of Hunsecker to see the value of an informant like this one. She would have to design an ambush for the Butcher's Boy. It would have to involve enough federal officers to overwhelm him, to swarm him and physically overpower him. It was the only way to keep him alive and hold him long enough to make a deal.

She had always liked Monday mornings. Some of the people at work had told her she liked it because she didn't drink, but that wasn't why. Monday seemed to be the fresh start that would give her a lead on all the problems she was supposed to solve. She always drove to work early and got a sense of what was happening before the others came in, then selected the most pressing problems and the most promising leads and got people working on them as soon as they arrived. During breaks and lunchtime, she would turn her attention to issues that had to do with the kids or the household that required her to talk to someone during business hours.

There had been a couple of hundred Monday evenings when she had gone home physically and mentally exhausted, but glad that she had proceeded that way because the rest of the week would be better. This morning she began by looking at the routine activity reports that her analysts had set aside because they'd seen something in them that didn't seem routine. There was often a suicide in which the deceased had more than one bullet wound, a missing boater who'd never gone sailing before, a man killed in a hunting accident wearing a business suit. Sometimes it would be a violent incident with lots of victims and witnesses who had names from a single ethnic group. Occasionally that was a sign of organized crime. It usually took only a short time each morning to clear up some misunderstanding or refer the cases to regional offices for further investigation.

This morning, as she was going through the reports, her phone rang. "Justice Department, Waring," she said.

"Elizabeth? This is John Holman, over at the FBI. I was hoping you'd be in early."

"Hi, John. Are you still in Chicago?"

"No, I got back last night. When I came in this morning, I saw some information I thought you'd be interested in—some stuff we got on a couple of wiretaps over the weekend."

"Should I go over to your office?"

"I'm sending you copies of the transcripts by e-mail, but I wanted you to be aware that they're coming. The first batch is from a tap we've had on the phone of a Castiglione soldier named Ronald Bonardo. He runs a crew that's been doing real-estate scams in Florida. They'd buy and sell the same house four or five times among themselves to jack up the price, take out a giant mortgage, and then walk away. That worked in boom times when houses were going up. Now they're taking money to prevent foreclosures. The victim signs his house over to them."

"What does he say on tape?"

"Bonardo called Vincent Pugliese in Chicago to ask what was going on. Pugliese says on Friday night that the two older Castiglione brothers were dead and he was taking over the family. He said the one who had done the killing was the Butcher's Boy. That's the nickname of the guy you've been watching for, isn't it?"

"Yes. Is there anything on the tapes that will tell us where the Butcher's Boy is going next?"

"Not on the pages I've seen. The other transcript is a phone tap on a Lazaretti soldier in California named Joe Buffone. He's talking to an associate, a Lazaretti soldier in New York named Nano Scuzzi, this morning. Scuzzi asks whether they've got things set up. He says, 'I did what I was told by Tony. I delivered the first two hundred thousand to their company. That gets them on the job. When they deliver proof that he's dead, we give them the other three hundred.' Scuzzi says, 'Tony's smart. We don't want to see our best earners following that bastard into some dark alley, like the Castigliones did. It's stupid to even try. Let the guys like him handle him. If the pros bag him, we won't have to.' What do you think?"

Elizabeth felt her morning changing rapidly. "They've hired a hit man to kill the hit man. Or a team of them. I suppose it should have been obvious that this was going to happen, but I didn't see it coming. It makes perfect sense. The Lazaretti soldiers are skilled as drug smugglers and distributors. It doesn't make them effective against a professional killer. That's why they hired people like the Butcher's Boy a generation ago."

"How do you think we should handle this?" Holman asked.

"The first thing is probably to find out what we can about this murder-for-hire team. The ones who work that way usually have some kind of cover—an office, a company that takes in money and issues paychecks. Maybe there's something earlier on the tapes that will tell you where Buffone went to make his payoff, or if he spoke with the go-between on the tapped phone, or some detail we can use."

"I'll let you know if we find anything," he said.

"Thank you, John. I really appreciate your keeping me up on this. The taps were on two unrelated cases, and they would have been missed if you hadn't noticed. I'll talk to you soon." She hung up, and she felt a headache begin around her eyes and expand and intensify. She had been in Chicago all weekend, away from her children and putting herself in danger, which she had no right to do. She had just told herself that she wasn't going to try to go off alone and ad lib a plan after she was in the street between an angry professional killer and a bunch of armed gangsters. But the Butcher's Boy might be the most promising informant in forty years. And he wasn't worth anything dead.