Darkfall

Carramazza.”
    “Oh, shit!” Jack said. “Gennaro’s brother? ”
    “Yeah, the godfather’s little brother, his favorite brother, his right hand,” Tufton said quickly, before Yeager started to answer. Tufton was a fast-spoken man with a sharp face, an angular body, and quick movements, brisk and efficient gestures. Yeager’s slowness must be a constant irritant to him, Jack thought. “And they didn’t just kill him. They tore him up bad. There isn’t any mortician alive who can put Dominick back together well enough for an open-casket funeral, and you know how important funerals are to these Sicilians.”
    “There’ll be blood in the streets now,” Jack said wearily.
    “Gang war like we haven’t seen in years,” Tufton agreed.
    Rebecca said, “Dominick…? Wasn’t he the one who was in the news all summer?”
    “Yeah,” Yeager said. “The D.A. thought he had him nailed for-”
    When Yeager paused to swab his yellowed teeth with his big pink tongue, Tufton quickly said, “Trafficking in narcotics. He’s in charge of the entire Carramazza narcotics operation. They’ve been trying to put him in the stir for twenty years, maybe longer, but he’s a fox. He always walks out of the courtroom a free man.”
    “What was he doing here in the hotel?” Jack wondered.
    “I think he was hiding out,” Tufton said.
    “Registered under a phony name,” Yeager said.
    Tufton said, “Holed up here with those two apes to protect him. They must’ve known he was targeted, but he was hit anyway.”
    “Hit?” Yeager said scornfully. He paused to tend to his teeth and made an unpleasant sucking sound. Then: “Hell, this was more than just a hit. This was total devastation. This was crazy, totally off the wall; that’s what this was. Christ, if I didn’t know better, I’d say these three here had been chewed , just chewed to pieces.”
    The scene of the crime was a two-room suite. The door had been broken down by the first officers to arrive. An assistant medical examiner, a police photographer, and a couple of lab technicians were at work in both rooms.
    The parlor, decorated entirely in beige and royal blue, was elegantly appointed with a stylish mixture of French provincial and understated contemporary furniture. The room would have been warm and welcoming if it hadn’t been thoroughly splattered with blood.
    The first body was sprawled on the parlor floor, on its back, beside an overturned, oval-shaped coffee table. A man in his thirties. Tall, husky. His dark slacks were torn. His white shirt was torn, too, and much of it was stained crimson. He was in the same condition as Vastagliano and Ross: savagely bitten, mutilated.
    The carpet around the corpse was saturated with blood, but the battle hadn’t been confined to that small portion of the room. A trail of blood, weaving and erratic, led from one end of the parlor to the other, then back again; it was the route the panicked victim had taken in a futile attempt to escape from and slough off his attackers.
    Jack felt sick.
    “It’s a damned slaughterhouse,” Rebecca said.
    The dead man had been packing a gun. His shoulder holster was empty. A silencer-equipped.38 pistol was at his side.
    Jack interrupted one of the lab technicians who was moving slowly around the parlor, collecting blood samples from various stains. “You didn’t touch the gun?”
    “Of course not,” the technician said. “We’ll take it back to the lab in a plastic bag, see if we can work up any prints.”
    “I was wondering if it’d been fired,” Jack said.
    “Well, that’s almost a sure thing. We’ve found four expended shell casings.”
    “Same caliber as this weapon?”
    “Yep.”
    “Find any of the loads?” Rebecca asked.
    “All four,” the technician said. He pointed: “Two in that wall, one in the door frame over there, and one right through the upholstery button on the back of that armchair.”
    “So it looks as if he didn’t hit whatever he was shooting at,” Rebecca said.
    “Probably not. Four shell casings, four slugs. Everything’s been neatly accounted for.”
    Jack said, “How could he have missed four times in such close quarters?”
    “Damned if I know,” the technician said. He shrugged and went back to work.
    The bedroom was even bloodier than the parlor. Two dead men shared it.
    There were two living men, as well. A police photographer was snapping the bodies from every angle. An assistant medical examiner named Brendan Mulgrew, a