Burl Meltzer, 1919 to 1999.
Josef Barer, 1923 to 1999.
Sherri Morgan, 1953 to 1999.
Sol Cohen, 1906 to 1999.
Jennie Fishmann, 1975 to 1999.
Megan Berkowitz, 1959 to 1999.
He walked by each grave, hoping to see some hint, some guidepost, but of course Sal Cupertine was smarter than that, so Poremba left a stone on each headstone, said the only prayer he remembered from childhood—the twenty-third psalm—and then sat down on one of the few benches, watched the thick white clouds that had formed this morning burn slowly away to reveal a deep-blue sky.
It was in these moments that Poremba wished he possessed some kind of clairvoyance other than recognizing the awful truth of it all: that in the end, he’d be in a place just like this, too, and without children or a wife or even siblings, he’d be just as lost, just as gone, as the body of Jeffery Hopper. Because of that, Poremba always imagined he’d ask to be cremated, but he was changing his mind about that. He sort of admired the notion that he could disappear into eternity, his usefulness, his desire for justice, feeding the earth.
He looked toward the Strip, though he couldn’t see it from this angle, his view blocked by trees and houses, and imagined what it must be like for the people in those casinos, going about their life on vacation, not once turning on the news today, never knowing or caring about that which had obsessed Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba for four years. Sal Cupertine would be caught. Sal Cupertine had been caught. And in the end, how many people died because of it? What a waste. What a terrible waste.
“There you are.”
Poremba turned and saw Kristy Levine walking through the headstones.
“Sorry,” Poremba said, “I should have let someone know where I was going.”
“It’s fine,” Kristy said. “I tracked your phone.”
“Really?”
“No, I just looked on the security cameras. They’re out here, too.”
Poremba took his phone from his pocket. Thirty-seven missed calls. Kristy sat beside him. Pointed off into the distance. “My plot is over there, if you’d like a tour.”
“I shouldn’t have come here,” Poremba said.
“Probably not,” Kristy said.
Poremba said, “Jeff Hopper was kind of a shit. You ever meet him?”
“No.”
“You might have hated him,” he said. “He was never wrong. Not once. He was so headstrong when he started, he actually thought he was going to bring down the very notion of organized crime. And when that didn’t happen, he was sure it was a conspiracy.”
“Isn’t it?”
“We need bad guys, Agent,” Poremba said. “If we didn’t have any, we’d start arresting good guys instead. Become an authoritarian force. In the absence of evil, we’d create it.”
“You honestly believe that?”
“I do,” Poremba said. “It’s why history never sleeps. No one is ever content with happiness.” He gestured to the graves. “Why doesn’t anyone ever come back to tell us how wonderful heaven is, make all of this worth it?”
Kristy laughed, somewhat ruefully. “Wrong cemetery, Lee.”
Poremba turned his ringer back on. Two seconds later, he had a call. He let it go to voice mail. “What’s the update?”
Kristy took out a notepad, ran through what they had and what was missing: Bennie Savone was on a plane to Minnesota; agents would greet him at the airport when he landed. Rabbi Cy Kales had booked a red-eye the previous night, departing from McCarran to Tel Aviv at 1:10 a.m. They didn’t yet have any crimes to charge him with, but they sure wanted to talk to him.
His phone rang again. His boss at Quantico. He turned the phone to show Kristy. “We’re national news now.” He silenced the phone again. “Where do you suppose Cupertine is?”
“We’ve got eyes on the 95, 15, 215, 515, and 11,” Kristy said, “going in and out of the city and the state. We’ve got air support to the state line. Checked the border crossings, nothing. Checked the agricultural checkpoints in Yermo, Blythe, Truckee, and Needles. Nothing.”
“When was the last time we had eyes on him?”
“Security at his gated community has his Range Rover exiting the main gate last night at 11:52 p.m. We’re working on getting a photo, see if anyone was with him.”
“He could be anywhere,” Poremba said.
“One other thing. Ruben Topaz is missing. His wife says he never returned from a pickup last night. She hasn’t heard from him since midnight. I suspect they’re together.”
“A pickup? What does that mean?”
“I asked the other worker. Miguel. He had no clue.”
“You believe him?”
“Kind of. Unlike Topaz, he’s not some reformed gangster.”
“What about Topaz’s wife?”
“Not real forthcoming. Said if we had any more questions, we could talk to her lawyer. Vincent Zangari.”
