The man turned and went back into the house, then returned with a cheap-looking cell phone. Brian tested it, got a dial tone, and dialed the number Matt Bysantski had left. Matt came onto the line almost instantly.

“Paul?” After two years it was a jolt to hear anyone call him Paul.

“Hi. What’s up?”

“Reggie Varga called me, trying to get the word out. Her cousin Viktor Panko and her two brothers and another cousin got killed a few days ago.”

“Who did it?”

“She doesn’t know. She said there was a retired female cop in Buffalo who had been asking about Panko, and after some poking around, her brothers figured out the old cop was working with some other investigator, a woman who wasn’t local and had been asking around too. They were afraid she was FBI or state police or something. Right after they killed the retired cop, they set up an ambush at the old woman’s house to get the younger woman she was working with. The ones who got killed were Attila Varga and his cousin. Then her other brother and Panko decided they’d better burn down their workshop to get rid of evidence. When they went over to do it, there were people waiting, and they got killed.”

“It just sounds like they killed some old woman for nothing, and her relatives didn’t appreciate it. A local thing.”

“No. Once Reggie started calling, she learned that it wasn’t just Panko and her family. Weiss has been missing in Florida for a while, maybe a month.”

“Another thing that could be nothing.”

“Could be but isn’t. Two days after her brothers and Panko got it, she says Alan Becker got killed in his apartment building in New York City. Somebody called the police, and when the police came, they found him in the stairwell. It was in the papers there.”

“Jesus.”

“That’s all you can say?”

“I just found out. Give me a second and I’ll do better. Is there anybody else, or is that all?”

“Reggie was in the middle of calling people, and I decided I’d better help get the word out. I think somebody has been out there hunting us down, and I’m trying to be sure that everybody who’s left knows about it.”

“Gee, I don’t know about this,” said Paul. “I picked these guys for a lot of reasons—knowledge, skills, and so on, but some of them were a little bit temperamental. In two years any of them could have made a lot of new enemies, or gotten pissed off at somebody and then found out the other guy thought faster.”