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  “Ahh,” said Sampson.

  “Ahh,” I said.

  “But you’re not completely sure, are you? You’re still not convinced.”

  “Not a hundred percent.” Then I laughed. “Maybe if we do catch him tonight. Maybe if I blow his brains out. Then we’ll definitely be even.”

  “That’s why we’re out here, sugar? To blow his brains out?”

  There was a knock against the car’s side window, and I went for my gun.

  Chapter 102

  “WHAT THE HELL IS he doing here?” Sampson asked.

  None other than Tony Mullino was standing next to the car—on my side. What the hell was he doing out here in Montauk?

  I slowly lowered the window, hoping to find out, to get an answer, maybe a whole bunch of answers.

  “I could have been Sully,” he said, with his head cocked to one side. “You’d both be dead if I was.”

  “No, you’d be dead,” Sampson said. He gave Mullino a slow smile and showed off his Glock. “I saw you coming up from behind about two minutes ago. So did Alex.”

  I hadn’t, but it was good to know that Sampson still had my back, that somebody did, because maybe I was starting to lose my focus a little—and that could get you shot. Or worse.

  Mullino was rubbing his hands together. “Cold as shit out here tonight.” He waited, then repeated himself. “I said it’s fricking frigid, freezing cold out here.”

  “Hop in,” I told him. “C’mon inside.”

  “You promise not to shoot us in the back?” Sampson said.

  Mullino raised both hands and looked either puzzled or alarmed. Sometimes it was hard to tell with him. “I don’t even carry a weapon, fellas. Never did in my life.”

  “Maybe you ought to, the friends you keep,” Sampson said. “Something to think about, brother.”

  “Okay, brother,” said Mullino, with a mean little laugh that made me rethink who he was.

  He opened the car door and slid down into the backseat. The question was still on the table: Why had he shown up here and what did he want?

  “He’s not coming?” I said, once he’d shut the rear door on the cold. “Is that right?”

  “Nah, he’s not coming,” said Mullino. “Never was.”

  “You warn him?” I asked. I was watching Mullino in the rearview mirror. His eyes narrowed and showed extreme nervousness, something uncomfortable, something not right.

  “I didn’t have to warn him. Sully’s self-reliant, takes care of himself just fine.” His voice was low, almost a whisper.

  “I’ll bet,” I said.

  “So what happened, Anthony?” asked Sampson. “Where’s your boy now? Why are you here?”

  Mullino’s voice sounded like it was coming from underwater. I didn’t quite catch what he said this time.

  Neither did Sampson. “You have to speak up,” he turned around and said. “You hear me? See how it works? You have to get your voice up to a certain volume.”

  “He killed John Maggione tonight,” said Mullino. “Kidnapped him, then carved him up. That has been a long time coming.”

  There was complete silence in the car. I doubt there was anything he could have said that would have surprised me more. I’d felt earlier that maybe we’d been set up, and we had been.

  “How did you hear about it?” I finally asked.

  “I live in the neighborhood. Brooklyn’s like being in a small town sometimes. Always been that way. Besides, Sully called me when it was done. He wanted to share.”

  Sampson shifted all the way around to face him. “So Sullivan’s not coming here to collect his family. Isn’t he afraid for them?”

  I was still watching Tony Mullino in the rearview. I thought maybe I knew what he was going to say next.

  “This isn’t his family,” he said. “He doesn’t even know who they are.”

  “Who’s in the house then?”

  “I don’t know who they are. Central casting. A family that might look like Sully’s.”

  “You work for him?” I asked Mullino.

  “No. But he’s been a good friend. I was the one afraid of getting my face messed up in school, not him. Sully always protected me. So I helped him. I’d do it again. Hell, I helped him kill his crazy old man.”

  “Why’d you come out here?” I asked him next.

  “That one’s easy. He told me to.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You’ll have to ask him. Maybe because he likes to take a bow after a job well done. He does that, y’know. Takes a bow. You don’t want to see it.”

  “I already have,” I told him.

  Mullino opened the back door of the car, nodded his head to us, and then he was gone into the night.

  And so, I knew, was the Butcher.

  Chapter 103

  WHAT’S THAT OLD LINE, new line, whatever it is—life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans?

  I went back to Washington that night because I wanted to see the kids, and because of Nana Mama, and because I had patients who depended on me and were scheduled for the next day. Nana has always preached that it’s important for me to be helping people; She calls it my curse. She’s probably right.

  I could clearly see Michael Sullivan’s face, his little bow, and it killed me that he was still out there somewhere. According to the FBI, the mob had already put a million-dollar price tag on his head, and another million on his family. I still had a suspicion that he might be an FBI or police informant, and that one or the other was helping to protect him, but I didn’t know that for sure, and maybe I never would.

  On one of the nights after Sullivan escaped, a school night for the kids, I sat out on the sunporch and played rock and roll on the piano for Jannie and Damon. I played until it was almost ten. Then I talked to the kids about their mother. It was time.

  Chapter 104

  I’M NOT SURE why I needed to tell them about Maria now, but I wanted the kids to have some more of the truth about her.

  Maybe I wanted them to have the closure that I couldn’t get myself. I had never lied about Maria to the kids, but I had held back, and . . . no, I had lied about one thing. I’d told Damon and Jannie that I wasn’t with Maria when she was shot, but that I got to St. Anthony’s before she died, and we’d had a few last words. The reason was that I didn’t want to have to tell them details that I could never get out of my own head: the sound of the gunshots that felled Maria; the sharp intake of her breath the instant she was hit; the way she slid from my arms to the sidewalk. Then the unforgettable sight of blood pouring from Maria’s chest, and my realization that the wounds were fatal. I still could remember it with nightmare clarity more than ten years later.

  “I’ve been thinking about your mom lately,” I said that night on the porch. “I’ve been thinking about her a lot. You guys probably know that already.”

  The kids were gathered around close, suspecting this wasn’t one of our usual talks. “She was a special person in so many ways. So many ways, Damon and Jannie. Her eyes were alive and always honest. She was a listener. And that’s usually a sign of a good person. I think it is anyway. She loved to smile and to make other people smile if she possibly could. She used to say, ‘Here’s a cup of sadness, and here’s a cup of joy, which do you choose?’ She almost always chose the cup of joy.”

  “Almost always?” asked Jannie.

  “Almost always. Think about it, Janelle. You’re smart. She chose me, didn’t she? All the cute boys she could have had, she chose this puss, this dour personality.”

  Janelle and Damon smiled; then Damon said, “This is because the one who killed her is back? Why we’re talking about our mother now?”

  “That’s part of it, Day. But lately I realized I had unfinished business with her. And with the two of you. That’s why we’re talking, okay?”

  Damon and Janelle listened in silence, and I talked for a long while. Eventually, I choked up. I think it was the first time I’d let them see me cry about Maria. “I loved
her so much, loved your mother like she was a physical part of me. I still do, I guess. Still do, I know.”

  “Because of us?” Damon asked. “It’s partly our fault, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean, sweetheart? I’m not sure that I follow you,” I said to Damon.

  “We remind you of her, don’t we? We remind you of Mom every day; every morning when you see us, you remember that she’s not here. Isn’t that right?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe there’s some little bit of truth in that. But you remind me in a good way, the best way. Trust me on that. It’s all good.”

  They waited for me to talk some more, and they didn’t take their eyes off me, as if I might suddenly run away on them.

  “Lots of changes are happening in our lives,” I said. “We have Ali here now. Nana’s getting older. I’m seeing patients again.”

  “You like it?” Damon asked. “Being a psychologist?”

  “I do. So far.”

  “So far. That’s so you, Daddy,” said Jannie.

  I snorted out a laugh, but I didn’t go fishing for a compliment about what Jannie had said. Not that I was completely averse to compliments, but there was a time for everything, and this wasn’t it. I remember that when I’d read Bill Clinton’s autobiography, I couldn’t help thinking that when he was confessing to the hurt he’d caused his wife and daughter, he couldn’t seem to resist looking for forgiveness too, and even hugs from the reader. He just couldn’t resist—maybe because his need for love is so great. And maybe that’s where his empathy and compassion come from.

  Then I finally did the hardest thing—I told Jannie and Damon what had happened to Maria. I told my children the truth as I knew it. I shared most of the details of Maria’s death, her murder, and I told them that I had seen it happen, been with her when she died, felt her last breath on this earth, heard her last words.

  When I was done, when I couldn’t talk anymore, Jannie whispered, “Watch the river, how it flows, Daddy. The river is truth.”

  That had been my mantra for the kids when they were little and Maria wasn’t around. I’d walk them by the Anacostia River or the Potomac and make them look at it, the water, and say, “Watch the river . . . the river is truth.”

  Or at least as close as we’ll ever get to it.

  Chapter 105

  I WAS FEELING STRANGELY emotional and vulnerable, and I guess, maybe, alive these days.

  It was both a good and a bad thing.

  I had breakfast with Nana Mama at around five thirty or so almost every morning. Then I jogged to my office, changed clothes, and started my sessions as early as six thirty.

  Kim Stafford was my first patient on Mondays and Thursdays. It was always a hard thing to keep personal feelings out of the sessions, at least for me, or maybe I was just out of practice. On the other hand, some of my colleagues had always struck me as too clinical, too reserved and distant. What was any patient, any human being, supposed to make of that? Oh, it’s okay if I have the affect of a turnip; I’m a therapist.

  I needed to do this my way, with warmth at times, with lots of feeling and compassion rather than empathy; I needed to break the rules, to be unorthodox. Like confronting Jason Stemple at his station house and trying to punch that scum’s lights out. That’s what I call professional.

  I had a break in my schedule until noon, so I decided to check in with Monnie Donnelley at Quantico. She was doing some research on a theory of mine about the Butcher. I hadn’t said much more than hello, when Monnie interrupted. “I have something for you, Alex. I think you’re going to like this. It’s your idea anyway, your theory.”

  Monnie then told me that she’d used my notes and tracked down news about Sullivan’s wife through a mob soldier who was in the Witness Protection Program and now living in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

  “I followed the trail you set up, and you were right on. It led me to a guy who was at Sullivan’s wedding, which was small, as you might expect. The pal from Brooklyn you told me about, Anthony Mullino, he was there. Apparently, Sullivan didn’t want many people to know about his private life. His own mother wasn’t invited, and his father was dead, as you know.”

  “Yeah, killed by his son and a couple of pals. What did you find out about Sullivan’s wife?”

  “Well, it’s interesting stuff, not what you’d expect, either. She’s originally from Colts Neck, New Jersey, and she was a first-grade teacher before she met Sullivan. How about that? Salvatore Pistelli, the Witness Protection guy, said she was a sweet girl. Said Sullivan was looking for a good mother for his kids. Touching, huh, Alex? Our psycho hit man has a soft spot. The wife’s name was Caitlin Haney. Her family’s still living in Colts Neck.”

  That same day, we had a tap set up on the phones of Caitlin Sullivan’s parents’ place. Also on a sister who lived in Toms River, New Jersey, and a brother who was a dentist in Ridgewood.

  I had some hope again. Maybe we could close this case after all and bring down the Butcher.

  Maybe I would see him again and take a little bow myself.

  Chapter 106

  MICHAEL SULLIVAN HAD BEEN USING the name Michael Morrissey since he’d been living in Massachusetts, Morrissey being a punk he’d more or less drawn and quartered in his early days as a hit man. Caitlin and the boys kept their first names but went under the surname Morrissey now too. The story they had learned by heart was that they had been living in Dublin for the past few years, where their father was a consultant to several Irish companies with business connections to America.

  Now he was doing “consultant” work in Boston.

  The latter part happened to be true, since the Butcher had just gotten a job through an old contact in South Boston. A job—a hit, a murder for hire.

  He left the house overlooking the river that morning at a very civilized nine o’clock. Then he headed down to the Massachusetts Turnpike in his new Lexus. He had his work tools in the trunk—guns, a butcher saw, a nail gun.

  He didn’t play any music on the first part of the trip, preferring to travel down memory lane instead. Lately, he’d been thinking a lot about his early kills: about his father, of course; a couple of jobs for Maggione Sr.; and a Catholic priest named Francis X. Conley. Father Frank X had been messing around with boys in the parish for years. The rumors were all around the neighborhood, the stories laced with plenty of kinky, slimy detail. Sullivan couldn’t believe that some of the parents knew what was going on and hadn’t stepped up to do something to stop it.

  When he was nineteen and already working for Maggione, he happened to spot the priest down at the docks, where Conley kept a little outboard for his fishing trips. Sometimes he would take one of the altar boys for an afternoon. A reward. A little sweet treat.

  On this particular day in the spring, the good father had come down to the dock to prepare his boat for the season. He was working over the engine when Sullivan and Jimmy Hats stepped on board.

  “Hey, Father Frankie,” Jimmy said, and beamed a crooked smile. “How ’bout we take a little boat trip today? Do some fishin’?”

  The priest squinted up at the two young hoods, frowning when he recognized who it was. “I don’t think so, boys. Boat’s not ready for action yet.”

  That brought a laugh from Hats, who repeated, “Ready for action—yeah, I get you.”

  Then Sullivan stepped forward. “Yeah, it is ready, Fodder. We’re goin’ on a sea cruise. You know that song? Frankie Ford’s ‘Sea Cruise’? That’s where we’re goin’. Just the three of us.”

  So they cruised on out of the boatyard, and Father Frank X was never seen or heard from again. “God rest his immoral soul in hell,” Jimmy Hats joked on the way back.

  And that morning, as he drove out on his latest job, Sullivan remembered the old Frankie Ford song—and he remembered how the pathetic priest had begged for his life, and then for his death, before he got cut up into shark food. But most of all, he remembered wondering whether he had just done a good deed with Father Frank,
and whether or not it was possible that he could.

  Could he do anything good in his life?

  Or was he just all bad?

  Chapter 107

  HE FINALLY ARRIVED IN STOCKBRIDGE, near the Massachusetts-New York border, and used his GPS to find the right house. He was ready to do his worst, to be the Butcher again, to earn his day’s wage.

  To hell with good deeds and good thoughts, whatever they were supposed to prove. He located the house, which was very “country” and, he thought, very tasteful. It sat on a tranquil pond in the middle of acres of maples and elms and pines. A black Porsche Targa was parked like a modern sculpture in the driveway.

  The Butcher had been told that a forty-one-year-old woman named Melinda Steiner was at the house—but that she drove a spiffy red Mercedes convertible. So who did the black Porsche belong to?

  Sullivan parked off the main road behind a copse of pines, and he watched the house for about twenty minutes. One of the things he noticed was that the garage door was closed. And maybe there was a fine red Mercedes convertible in the garage.

  So—once again—who owned the black Porsche?

  Careful to stay under the cover of thick branches, he put a pair of German binoculars to his eyes. Then he slowly scanned the east and south windows of the house, each and every one of them.

  No one seemed to be in the kitchen—which was all darkened windows, no one moving about.

  Or in the living room, either, which was also dark and looked deserted.

  But somebody was in the house, right?

  He finally found them in a corner bedroom on the second floor. Probably the master suite.

  Melinda, or Mel, Steiner was up there.

  And some blond dude. Probably in his early forties, presumably the owner of the Porsche.