The Butcher's Boy (14 page)

"I'll give you a hundred for this one," he said, tapping his finger on the graceful walnut stock of a thirty-ought-six with a scope.

"A hundred?" said the gas man. "That won't do it. The scope's worth eighty. Man who owned it got a bighorn sheep with that rifle just a week or so before I got it."

"He tell you that, did he?" he smirked.

"Well, it's a good rifle. I'll take two hundred for it."

He studied the rest of the guns hanging on the pegboard for a second, then said, "If you'll throw in this pistol I'll give you two-twenty."

The gas man looked more closely at the rifle, then plucked the pistol off the wall and tested the action. It was a thin .32-caliber Beretta. He thought for a second and then said, "Cash?"

He nodded and the gas man handed him the pistol. He put it in his coat pocket and counted eleven twenties from his wallet. The gas man counted the twenties a second time before he folded them and put them into the pocket of his overalls. Then he started to turn away, but stopped and added, "Sell you some ammunition for those? I got no use for it.”

“People leave you cartridges too?"

The gas man chuckled. "No, just one. Fellow had a whole case full of it.

All kinds. Guess he was a collector or something. I'll give it to you for half the marked price."

"I'm not really interested," he said. "I wasn't out here on a hunting trip, 66

you know, but I'll take a box of each if it's not too old."

"About a year, no more." He was already bent over a crate in the corner, reading the small cardboard boxes he pulled out, one by one, until he'd found what he wanted. "Let's see. That'll be eleven dollars."

When he paid the gas man and took the two cartridge boxes he noticed the date on them was almost three years ago, but he'd only looked out of curiosity. It made no difference. At the car he set the rifle and the cartridge boxes in the trunk, taking only the Beretta and a dozen rounds into the front with him. He glanced at his watch as he pulled out onto the highway. Only twenty-five minutes—less time than it would have taken to fill out the papers in Los Angeles .

There was only one problem left, and that was where to put the car. It had to be available, close to Caesar's, and in a place where it would attract no notice. If you put it that way, there was no choice. He glided up the drive in front of Caesar's Palace, pulled to a stop in the middle of the only part of the parking lot that was still crowded at this hour, and got out. He opened the trunk as far as he could without letting the light go on, loaded the rifle by the light of the moon, jammed it into the wheel well beside the spare tire so it pointed to the rear, and closed the trunk.

He was in the hotel's back hallway a moment later, skirting the casino and shops, and taking the back stairway to his room. There was no sign that anything had been moved. His clothes were still in a heap on the floor by the door, and the television was still glittering noiselessly into the darkness, throwing colored shadows across the crumpled white sheets of the bed. There was little chance anyone knew he had been out, and whatever searching they were going to do had been done early in the evening. He had managed to build himself an edge—not much of an edge, just a car and some guns that they wouldn't know about. But then he probably wouldn't need an edge. He was on vacation.

He loaded the pistol, went to his bag, and took out six large Band-Aids.

He used them to tape the pistol tightly to the wall inside the closet above the doorway, the one spot where nobody ever looked. Then he took his pocket knife and cut a thin slit in the lining of his left coat sleeve just above the cuff and pushed the two car keys into it. It wasn't much of an edge, he thought, but at least it was enough to let him go to sleep. It was almost five in the morning, and it had been a long day for a man who wasn't working.

Senator Claremont's papers had been stuffed into a battered brown leather briefcase and flown to Denver in the baggage compartment of the airliner. They sat apart from the rest of his belongings on a little table in the corner of the 67

laboratory, the latch of the case burnished to a dull gold sheen by daily handling.

Elizabeth sat sipping her morning coffee and staring at the soft, wrinkled leather. "Has anybody gone into the papers yet?" she asked, her voice catching a little in her throat so that it came out almost a whisper. It reminded her it was the first full sentence she'd said this morning. Hart had left a note under her door telling her to take a taxi to the FBI building. She had yet to see him, and wondered vaguely where he was. Elizabeth cleared her throat and prepared to try again, but Mistretta had heard.

"Not yet. We're checking with the White House first. Protocol. The theory is you never know what might be in there. There's always a chance it might be something they don't want turning up as physical evidence at somebody's murder trial."

"Are they sending somebody?"

Mistretta shrugged and went on with his work, which consisted of studying a long typewritten list and making a shorter list on a pad beside it.

Elizabeth decided against asking him what the list was. It looked too much like the sort of drudgery he might want to share.

She left him and went down the hall to the main office. As she came in the receptionist said, "Miss Waring, this is just in for you over the line from Washington ." It was a computer printout. Elizabeth, accepted it without bothering to look. She had seen Padgett's airline summaries too many times. "Is there a place I can spread these out?" she asked.

The receptionist glanced at the sheaf, appearing to calculate its length and apply it to all available spaces. "The best place is the conference room," she said, indicating the room where Elizabeth had been the night before.

Elizabeth stepped into the room and considered closing the door, but didn't. It wasn't that the airline reports didn't require concentration, but that the concentration probably wouldn't produce any useful results anyway. She unfurled the long, continuous scroll on the conference table and then walked back to the head of the table where it began.

FLT 205 UNITED. DENVERCHICAGO: DEP: 0503. ARR: 0647.

Underneath were the names and addresses of the passengers. She wasn't sure what to do with them. Padgett used the reports to spot the particular two or three hundred names he referred to as his "friends." All that took was programming the computer to remember the names, addresses, credit card numbers, and usual aliases. It was done in a second a day. But this was different, and would have to be done by elimination.

The murderer worked alone—one set of marks on the window, a single person sneaking around in the darkness trying not to wake up a sleeping victim—it had to be one person. But would the person travel alone? It would be less suspicious to travel with someone else: a family, children and all. No, that couldn't be. If he traveled with someone else his companion would know. The 68

camouflage wasn't worth the risk. So it had to be a single reservation. And it was probably a man, most likely between twenty and forty. The marks on the window were too high for any but the tallest women, and the climbing around on the balconies in the cold would require the kind of flexibility and stamina that began to disappear early even in athletes.

She went through the passenger list of Flight 205, crossing out all the obviously female names and the men who traveled with them, all the half-fare children's seats, all the men who were traveling in pairs on one reservation. That part worried her, so she thought it through again: who would the second man be? A partner? But if it were a partner, he would have to be responsible for doing something that was worth a share of the money, if there were money involved. But if the murder was political, there wouldn't be any distrust, and no money: he might be a contact, a controller, a spymaster. No, that was unlikely too. There was no reason for any organization to risk a second agent where he had no particular function. Then she remembered that there was still the Senator's briefcase. If something were missing from the briefcase the second man would be the one to take the handoff. If that were it, though, they wouldn't be on the same plane. They'd be on two different planes going in different directions, or no plane at all. The handoff would take place before anybody left town, and probably very soon after the murder. So he had to be alone. A young man alone. Elizabeth moved down the long conference table, crossing off the names on each flight. She lost track of the time it took, and when she reached the foot of the table and straightened up, her back was stiff. She noted it and forgot it as she walked back to the top of the list.

The next thing had to be the times. The Senator hadn't gone to bed until after 11:30 Monday night. That meant nobody could have come in until midnight at the earliest. If everything went supernaturally well he could have been out by 12:30 and caught a 1:00 a.m. flight out of Denver . She sat down on the nearest chair and worked out the rest of it: a 2:00 a.m. flight from Cheyenne, a 3:00

a.m. from Pueblo, a 3:30 from Laramie, a 2:30 from Boulder, and nothing earlier than 6:00 from Salt Lake City . There was something else about times, but she couldn't quite identify it yet. It was too vague, just a feeling that she was missing something important. She opened her mind but it wouldn't come, so she stood up and walked down the list again, this time crossing out the flights that were too early.

Elizabeth studied the list and thought for a minute—of course, the addresses. If somebody had killed a senator and gotten on an airplane afterward, it meant he didn't live in Denver . That let out about half the remaining names, which she spent the next half hour crossing off. The list was getting short now, and she was able to tear out whole sheets and set them aside.

She sat there and thought it out again from the beginning. There were still around five hundred names, too many to do anything with. But there was something else—it was all too neat, too logical, and she was getting farther and 69

farther along, each step depending on the others, and if one step was wrong he could slip through the mesh. It all depended on his being logical too, setting everything up just as Elizabeth would herself. All he had to do to escape her logic was to do something foolish—have a companion he trusted enough to travel with—something of that sort. But there was still something else and she was near it now. She could feel it. He wasn't foolish. He'd done too much too carefully already, taken too many steps to get to the Senator and get out without faltering or wasting time. He made all the right choices, and some of them were crazy. They were crazy, but they were logical.

Elizabeth looked at the list and it was suddenly clear. She was looking at the wrong list. What she needed was the reservations list. She knew now that she understood him. He was a man who made choices. He hadn't climbed into the hotel room of a U.S. senator knowing he was going to poison his dentures.

That was what had bothered her from the beginning. It was too absurd. It was just that he carried with him a range of options in case he needed them. He wouldn't take a chance on not getting out, missing a flight or having it cancelled, and he couldn't be sure he'd succeed on the first try. If it was the first try. He'd be double-booked. He might have reservations on a flight every hour for several days. And there would probably be a car, and a bus ticket too. It didn't matter which one he finally used, whether he'd gotten on a plane or driven out or disappeared into thin air or stayed put. The point was, he'd have given himself all the options. Whatever he'd finally done didn't matter at all, and there was no sure way to resurrect it now anyway. The only thing she was sure of was that he'd be on more than one list. Elizabeth snatched up her printouts and walked out of the conference room.

"Where's your computer terminal?" she asked the receptionist.

"Room twenty-one seventeen," said the receptionist.

Lang, the FBI man she'd met last night, was in the terminal talking to one of the programmers when Elizabeth arrived. He listened carefully as she tried to explain what she wanted. The programmer saw her theory immediately. He said,

"What's the flag?"

"What do you mean?" asked Elizabeth .

"What do we ask the computer to look for to establish a match?"

"Names, addresses, credit card numbers if there are any. Anything that comes up more than once. The idea is, he'd want to use several airlines, probably several nearby points of departure, and certainly several times, beginning with Monday night and ending when the Senator was scheduled to leave Denver . When was that, Mike?"

"This Friday night," Lang said.

"Okay," said the programmer. "I'll begin with the airlines. You want car rentals, buses, Amtrak. Anything else?"

"No," said Elizabeth . "If that doesn't produce at least a double, then I'm wrong in the first place."

"Right," agreed the programmer, and began to type in codes with rapid, 70

jittery fingers as though Elizabeth and Lang had ceased to exist or had somehow been switched to another circuit that had nothing to do with him.

An electric voice that Elizabeth recognized as the ghost of the receptionist said, "White phone, Agent Lang," through the intercom. He went to the wall and picked up the telephone. Then he listened for a moment, said "Understood," and hung up.

He headed for the door before turning to Elizabeth . "We can get started on the papers now, if you'd like to be in on that."

"I suppose I would," said Elizabeth . "The reservations lists will probably take most of the day."

In the laboratory Elizabeth expected to see the others already peering into the briefcases, but when she and Lang arrived the room was empty. "Where is everybody?" she asked.

Lang said, "Hart's on the poison with the forensics people. They're taking the samples to the Air Force's toxicology lab today and then hanging in for a theory on where it came from. Mistretta's investigating the people who stayed in the Constellation Hotel. The theory now is that whoever it was must have checked in, but not necessarily while the Senator was there. Anybody who would want to kill the Senator would have known enough about him to know that's where he'd stay when he came to town. Hobson's sweating through the police reports for all the precincts in Denver beginning last Friday. Davis is doing the same for state police. MacDonald—I don't think you've met him—is coordinating all the inquiries to other agencies, trying to get them to squeeze their informants