Chapter 91
I T WAS LATE, and I decided to go for a drive in the R350. I was loving the car. The kids felt the same way. Even Nana did, praise the Lord. I found myself thinking about Maria again. The long investigation into her murder I had conducted and failed at. I was messing with my own mind, trying to picture her face, trying to hear the exact sound of her voice.
Later that night, back at home, I tried to get to sleep but couldn’t. It got so bad that I went downstairs and watched Diary of a Mad Black Woman again. Actually, I found myself cheering like a crazy person at the flickering TV screen. Tyler Perry’s movie matched up perfectly with my frame of mind.
I called up Tony Woods at the director’s office around nine the next morning. Then I swallowed my pride and asked Tony for some help on the rape and murder case. I needed to find out if the Bureau had anything on the contract killer called the Butcher, anything that might be helpful to Sampson and me ? maybe something classified.
“We knew you’d call one of these days, Alex. Director Burns is eager to work with you again. You up for some consulting? Just light stuff. It’s your call what and where, especially now that you’re taking on cases again.”
“Who said I’m taking on cases? This is a special situation,” I told Tony. “The Butcher probably murdered my wife years ago. It’s the one case I can’t leave unsolved.”
“I understand. I do understand. We’ll try to help if we can. I’ll get you what you need.”
Tony arranged for me to use the office of an agent who was out of town, and he said it was okay if I wanted to start a dialogue with an FBI researcher-analyst named Monnie Donnelley.
“I already talked to Monnie,” I told him.
“We know you did. Monnie told us. We cleared it for her now. Officially.”
The next couple of days, I pretty much lived in the FBI building. Turned out, the Bureau had quite a lot on Michael Sullivan, the Butcher. His file included dozens of photographs. One problem was that the photos were five to seven years old, and there didn’t seem to have been any contact with Sullivan recently. Where had he disappeared to? I did learn that Sullivan grew up in a part of Brooklyn known as the Flatlands. His father had been a real butcher there. I even got the names of some old contacts and friends of Sullivan’s from his days in New York.
What I read of Sullivan’s backstory was curious. He’d attended parochial schools through tenth grade, and he’d been a good student, even though he never seemed to work at it. Then Sullivan dropped out of school. He took up with the Mafia and was one of the few non-Italians to break in. He wasn’t a “made man,” but he was well paid. Sullivan earned in the six figures when he was in his early twenties and became Dominic Maggione’s go-to hit man. His son, the current don, had never approved of Sullivan.
Then something strange and disturbing to all concerned started to happen. There were reports of Michael Sullivan torturing and mutilating the bodies of victims; murdering a priest and a layman accused of misconduct with boys at his old grade school; a couple of other vigilante hits; a rumor that Sullivan might have murdered his own father, who disappeared from his shop one night and whose body had never been found to this day.
Then Sullivan seemed to completely disappear off the Bureau’s radar screen. Monnie Donnelley agreed with my assessment: that Sullivan might have become somebody’s informer in the Bureau. It was possible that the FBI, or the New York police, was protecting him. Even that Sullivan might be in Witness Protection. Was that what had happened to Maria’s killer?
Was he somebody’s snitch?
Was the FBI protecting the Butcher?