Free The Informant by Thomas Perry Page A

became of it." She went into her office and closed the door. It had occurred to her that having someone remove the files for her current cases was exactly what would probably happen if she were fired. Maybe Hunsecker had used her two-day suspension to get the AG's office to approve the firing. Maybe that was what the suspension had been for.
    One of the buttons on her telephone lit up, then began to blink as Geoffrey put the caller on hold. She picked up the phone and hit the button. "Waring."
    "This is Dale Hunsecker. I'm waiting."
    She steeled herself for what she had to say. "If what you're waiting for is an apology, I know I owe you one. What happened last week was a misunderstanding that I allowed to happen. I wasn't ignoring your orders when I requested that surveillance on Frank Tosca. Conditions had changed, and I had new information that made it an emergency. I should have called you to explain before I did anything. I'm sorry."
    "Well," he said. "I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised. I expected you to say 'I told you so.'"
    "About what? Don't tell me Tosca has been killed."
    "No. As soon as the surveillance was lifted, Tosca took his family and slipped away. Right now we don't know where he is. He left three men in his house, apparently to guard it. They were murdered on Thursday night. Their bodies were found in various parts of the house."
    "How were they killed?"
    "Let's see." He seemed to be perusing something. "Two shot, one bludgeoned to death."
    "Do you know where the one who was bludgeoned was found?"
    "Aah, I don't see that information in this report. It does say he was unarmed."
    "Of course. The killer must have gone there without a gun. He killed one and used that man's gun to kill the others."
    "He would do that? He'd go to the house of a Mafia capo without bringing a gun?"
    "I'm guessing that he did. He was here in Washington and probably flew to New York, so he couldn't have taken a weapon with him or he'd have been stopped at airport security. He must have arrived in Tosca's neighborhood after the FBI surveillance ended, and moved in. He's been doing this for a long time. I've been told by informants that he hasn't done anything but kill people since he was about fifteen."
    "So he would arrive unarmed and see three armed men, and say, 'Great, they're at my mercy'? I don't see it."
    "He didn't want to kill three men. He wanted Tosca. I think he arrived, determined that someone was in the house, and assumed it was Tosca. You have to realize that they wanted him to think that. They wouldn't have been there to protect the parakeet. They were there to ambush him."
    "So he went through with it and killed them all. I still find it difficult to understand why he'd do that."
    "People who kill for a living aren't exactly normal. They don't think the way we do, and they don't all think alike. This one is unusual. He was brought up to do it, and he knows instantly how to kill each opponent without having to stop and think. If he hadn't killed each person he's come up against, he'd be dead. This happened Friday?"
    "Thursday night."
    "Then we've got to find Tosca right away."
    "Why Tosca?"
    "Because that's who the killer was looking for on Thursday night. Unless Tosca's dead, he's still searching. If we want him, we'll have to be where Tosca is."

8
    EDDIE MASTREWSKI HAD always had his own philosophy. "Killing is just one of a lot of things people ought to do for themselves, but end up paying somebody else to do for them. They pay some pimp to provide a woman who will go to bed with them, and they buy a fancy car and hire somebody to drive it for them. That's no way to live, but their mistake is a fortune for people like us. Do your own killing, drive your own car, find your own girls."
    He started the boy in the trade by taking him along on jobs. On the first job, the target was a man who was difficult to approach. He spent his days in a corner office on the tenth floor of a well-guarded office building.