Borderline Insanity

by Jeff Miller

  “I do.” She sighed inside.

  “Dagny, one last thing,” the president said.

  “Yes.”

  “I appreciate your work on this case.”

  “It’s my pleasure and honor, sir. To serve this nation, and under you.” And then she added, “Yada yada, stuff like that.”

  The president’s laughter was the last thing she heard before the click. When she looked down, their food was on the table. Her lemon-Parmesan shrimp looked like a huge mistake. “We should trade,” she said.

  “Don’t even,” he said.

  “Well, those green beans aren’t going to fill you up.”

  “You’re going to pretend that it’s normal that you just talked to the president? Like that was a normal call?”

  It was a big deal, but she really wanted the green beans. “We could do a half-and-half thing.”

  “You can have all of them if you admit that a weird thing just happened.”

  “It was weird.” Dagny slid her plate to Diego and took his. “Presidents are like everyone else, except with fewer scruples.”

  “You talking to him is like me talking to the Pope.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  It was easier to be dismissive of the experience after it happened; while it was happening, she had been completely starstruck. That embarrassed her. As a matter of principle, she held politicians in low regard.

  Her phone buzzed. It was the Professor. She answered.

  “We’re getting the NSA data,” he said. “He has to be on record opposing it, but he gave us the okay.”

  “So, he’s pretending we can’t access it?”

  “Correct. But we can.”

  “How is that being conveyed to NSA?”

  “There is a series of winks involved.”

  “I’m proud to be an American,” Dagny said. “How fast do you think we’ll have it?”

  “For all of the winks to fall in place? Maybe tomorrow morning.”

  Probably while she was spouting nonsense to reporters, she figured. “Why do I have to do this stupid press conference tomorrow?”

  “Because there are bigger things at issue than this case, Dagny.”

  “Bigger than a silo full of bodies?”

  “We are laying the groundwork for something huge.”

  He hung up before she could ask him to explain. Perhaps Brent was right, and the Professor really was maneuvering to become Director. She grabbed a green bean and took a bite. It wasn’t great.

  “Did you really ‘yada yada’ the president?” Diego asked.

  “Yep,” she said. And it felt pretty good.

  CHAPTER 40

  The only things in the exercise room at the Hampton Inn were one elliptical machine, one exercise bike, and two dumbbells. After the dumbbells left, Allison Jenkins wiped down the elliptical with a towel, and then rode the machine at its highest incline and against its highest resistance as fast as she could for thirty minutes. When she was finished, her gym clothes were drenched in sweat, and she felt great.

  She drew a few stares in the hallway on the way back to her room, perhaps because of her celebrity, or maybe because not many women looked like her in Bilford. Fitness didn’t seem to be a priority in the town. Neither did hair or skincare, as far as Allison could tell.

  When she slid the key card into her door, the light flashed red. She tried it again, to no avail. This happened to her every time, at every hotel. She marched to the front desk and waited behind a white-haired woman who argued with the clerk over a lost reservation, ignoring Allison’s throat-clearing suggestions that she wrap it up. When the woman finally stormed off, Allison stepped forward.

  “My key doesn’t work anymore.”

  The boy smiled. “A cell phone will do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Demagnetize it. You probably had your cell phone in your pocket. You’re Allison Jenkins, right?” His voice cracked when he said it. The skin on his face was pimply and red. He was slight, with poor posture. It was possible that it would all work out for him in a few years, but right now, he was an adolescent mess. She guessed he was about nineteen and that he was saving up for college.

  “Yes.”

  “Two on your side?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The slogan for Channel Two.”

  “Working for You.”

  “What is?”

  “Our slogan is ‘Working for You.’”

  “Yeah, I guess it works for me. I mean, I like the idea that you’re on my side.”

  She smiled. “My key?”

  “Of course.” He grabbed it from her hand. “What room are you in?”

  “114.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s a good room.”

  “Aren’t they all the same?”

  He blushed. She was used to it. Men stammered and stumbled into silly statements when they were around her. “The rooms are all the same, but first floor is close to breakfast, so that’s something.”

  “Starts at six?”

  “Six thirty,” he said, sliding her card into a machine and pressing some buttons. “Six thirty,” he repeated, handing her key back. “How is the reporting going?”

  It was cute that he was trying to draw her into further conversation, but their dealings were done. She turned to leave and bumped into her producer, Jack McDaniel.

  “Sorry,” he said, waving his key card in his hand. “Demagnetized.” He handed his card to the boy behind the desk, gave the boy his room number, and then turned to her. “ABC got an order forcing the FBI to let crews film along the edge of the Hoover property.”

  “That’s fantastic,” she said. Finally, they would have a decent backdrop for the reports.

  “I’m going to get up at four tomorrow to stake out a spot with Phil.”

  “Want me to come?” It was the polite thing to say, and she knew he’d refuse it.

  “You’re the one on air, Ally. You need your sleep. Just cab it.”

  “Thanks, Jack.”

  The boy handed Jack his key card. He started to walk away. “Night, Ally,” he said, walking toward the elevator bank.

  “Hey, Jack!” she called.

  He turned around. “Yes?” he asked, smiling.

  “The networks are going to stake their spots and hold them overnight. So maybe you and Phil want to head there now? Because at four a.m., it’s nothing but leftovers.” She watched the smile dissolve from his face. “We want the silo in the shot. Otherwise, we could be standing anywhere. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, take the pillows from your bed and sleep in the back of the van.”

  “Maybe I’ll send Phil.”

  “You need to pick the spot, Jack. Because if Phil gets it wrong, it will be on you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t sound glum. We could go places from this.” She could, anyway.

  “You’re right. We’ll head out now.”

  “Thanks, Jack. That’s why you’re the best.” Of course, if he were really the best, she wouldn’t have to keep telling him how to do his job.

  When he stepped into the elevator, she turned back to the boy behind the counter. “Can you arrange for a cab to pick me up tomorrow at five thirty a.m.?”

  It was a tall order for a Hampton Inn concierge. “I don’t know,” he stammered.

  She smiled. “You can. Use the phone book. I’ll be forever grateful.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  She gave him a friendly wave good-bye and returned to her room. The light turned green when she inserted the key card. She pushed the door open, turned on the lights, and plugged her phone into the charger. Picking up the remote, she flipped on the television and cycled through the channels. The network affiliates were back to showing prime-time shows, but MSNBC had one of her reports playing. She climbed onto the bed, leaned back against the pillows, and let herself enjoy the segment. The Bilford Massacre was giving her a national audition. This was her chance—if it didn’t
happen now, it wasn’t going to happen.

  CHAPTER 41

  The thin man lowered the brim of his cap, folded up his newspaper, and walked up to the counter. He studied the boy for a second. The boy didn’t notice him—his mind, it seemed, was still on Allison Jenkins. Who could blame him? The boy pulled the yellow pages from a shelf, set it on the counter, and stared at it a bit. He seemed daunted by the challenge it presented.

  “Look,” said the thin man, “I couldn’t help but overhear the young lady. She needs a cab. I work for Red Top Cab and can have one of ours come, if you’d like.”

  “You could?” The boy seemed relieved.

  “Sure. Five thirty a.m., right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It will be here on the dot.”

  The boy smiled. “Thanks, man.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” the thin man said. And it was. Sometimes problems solve themselves. This time, it was almost too easy.

  CHAPTER 42

  Dagny should have stayed at the Hampton Inn. That’s what she was thinking, anyway, as she shook her pillow over the second-floor railing at the Bilford Motor Inn, dropping roaches onto a FOX 19 news van in the parking lot below. All of the other news crews had landed better rooms in New Bilford, but FOX 19 had arrived late, and it was paying the price. Dagny had been there from the start, so she had no excuse.

  Most of the roaches fell easily, but one clung for his life. She beat the pillow against the rail until he finally popped off, then went back to her room, locked the door, and drew its chain. Had she gone one night or two without sleep? Two, she realized. Not good.

  She went to the bathroom, started the shower, undressed, and waited an eternity for the water to warm before stepping in. The spray washed away the soot from the silo, but it did little to dispel concerns she had about the investigation. The Professor didn’t have his head in the game—or rather, he had his head in a different game altogether. If he was making a play for the Director’s job, it was a mistake. Right now, their team had complete independence with little accountability. Oversight of the entire Bureau, by contrast, would invite constant scrutiny. The Professor would spend most of his time answering to congressional committees or fielding press inquiries while performing little of the crime fighting he loved. Ambition for its own sake always delivers disappointment. She was surprised that he couldn’t see this.

  The only good that could come out of the Professor’s sojourn in DC was access to NSA data. The calls, texts, e-mails, photographs, and locations of an entire nation sat on massive servers, and there was scarcely a crime that couldn’t be cracked with them. Dagny recognized the importance of privacy and opposed the mass collection of this information. But she wasn’t above making an unprincipled exception for this case. After all, she opposed mass murder, too.

  Of course, the NSA data only mattered if the unsub carried a cell phone.

  If the water had stayed warm, Dagny would have showered for an hour or more, but it turned cold fast, so she shut it off. She hated the down moments of an investigation. During the chase, the constant stimulation of new information kept her mind racing ahead. Stopping for showers or sleep gave her mind the opportunity to reflect and feel, two things that got her every time.

  Standing naked in a dank bathroom at a cheap motel in Bilford, Ohio, was a good way to experience loneliness.

  She grabbed a towel, dried off, dressed in sweats, and climbed into bed. Scrolling through her iPhone, she caught up on missed calls and e-mails. Her best friend, Julia Bremmer, had sent an Evite to her daughter’s birthday party. This roused Dagny to tears. Once, they had been on the same track, first at Harvard Law School and then working at big firms for good money. Dagny joined the Bureau around the same time Julia got married, and now they had nothing in common except a bunch of old stories. She tried to picture what it would be like to plan a little girl’s birthday party but didn’t know where to start. Thirty-five was a terrible age for a woman. You stand in front of the great edifice of motherhood and watch the cracks spread until the whole thing crumbles.

  She had two voice mails: one from her mother and the other from Dr. Childs. She played the one from Dr. Childs first. “I’ve seen the news, so I know you’re busy, but I want to remind you that I’m available by phone if you need to talk to someone. Call me anytime. I mean it.” Then she listened to her mother’s message: “Dagny, I’m watching the news, and I hope you don’t have anything to do with this awful thing in Ohio. Please call me and tell me that you’re working on something safe instead. Or since you won’t call me, send me a text letting me know that you’re all right.”

  Dagny started to type a text—Safe at my desk in DC—but deleted it when she remembered that she was committed to a press conference the next morning that would have exposed the lie. I’m all right, she typed, and then hit “Send.”

  Thinking about the press conference sent her into a foul mood. Every minute of an investigation has an opportunity cost. Some minutes have to be sacrificed to food and sleep, both of which refresh the investigator and provide net gains for the investigation. But a press conference was the opposite of those things—all it would do was sap her energy while stealing her time.

  It was easy for two old men to assign her to press conference duties, since they had no understanding of the logistics it would involve. Hair, makeup, attire—men never thought about any of these things, unless they were judging a woman for them. Dagny wasn’t normally vain, but she also wasn’t normally on national television.

  If she was going to talk to the press, she figured she should know what she was in for. Since the hotel television was inoperable, she turned on her iPad, opened her Slingbox app, and watched her Comcast feed from back home.

  All of it was grim. The cable stations had entered twenty-four-hour mode, which called for the recitation of the same few facts over and over again, augmented by wild speculations and crass political commentary. Although the Bureau had yet to make its first official comment, Sheriff Don seemed to have held four press conferences during the day, each with a different backdrop. The sheriff maintained that pro-immigrant forces had most likely committed the mass murder in order to engender sympathy for their cause. When pressed for evidence to support his hypothesis, the round demagogue rolled his eyes and accused the inquiring reporter of having an agenda.

  The sheriff wasn’t the only person injecting politics into the massacre. Hacks from both political parties busily spun events to the benefit of their associated interests. The whole mess proved that we needed gun control, although there was no evidence that the unsub had used a gun. No, the crimes demonstrated that taxes were too high because of the flow of capital overseas.

  While talking heads did their thing, the networks played video of the silo taken from a helicopter, followed by an exterior shot of Bilford High School, which, according to the text banner below it, was Operations Headquarters for the Bilford Massacre. That’s what everyone was calling it: the Bilford Massacre. At least they had given it a serious name—nothing silly like The Bubble Gum Thief.

  Once she felt confident that she had seen everything they had to show, she turned off the light, placed her head upon the roach-free pillow, and pulled the covers to her chin.

  As she lay in bed, every sound in Bilford crept into her ears. Two men shouting in the parking lot about betrayal. The beep of a car horn. The slamming of a door. Something scampering, possibly across her floor. Footsteps on the landing. Laughter. A baby crying. The successive plops of a suitcase tumbling down a staircase. A man and a woman fighting, and another door slam. After twenty minutes of this, Dagny grabbed her phone, opened a white-noise app, and increased its volume to the highest level.

  With the sound of Bilford blanched by static, her mind began to clear, and she fell into the great, big empty of a silent black. Her breathing slowed. Her muscles relaxed. She drifted into the embrace of sleep, and then she was spinning in a dream.

  Black faded to gray, then pockmarked white. Spinnin
g and swaying, she pushed her legs against the concrete walls to stop the motion. Looking up, she saw the spotlight beaming down from the neck of the crane. Looking down, she saw the bodies—a mosaic of bone and flesh and ash and cloth. The cable pulled her away from the bodies, higher and higher, until she dangled way above the mouth of the silo. And then the cable broke, and she fell, back into the chamber of the silo and into the cushion of body and bone. The decapitated face next to hers seemed familiar. When it came into focus, it was Diego’s severed head.

  Dagny bolted upright, heart racing, drenched in sweat. The clock on the nightstand said it was 3:40 a.m.

  CHAPTER 43

  At 3:40 a.m., the thin man parked his pickup in an empty Kroger lot. “Kashmir” was playing on the radio, and he let it play. It reminded him of being fifteen, back when anything was possible, and trouble was Judy Gelson and a six-pack of Hudepohl under the bleachers at a football game.

  His father had been a welder at the Dakota plant, which used to be the kind of job that let you provide for a family even if you had a prison record. One night, the old man came home with a brand-new olive-green Buick Skylark and a smile he’d never shown before. It was the only nice thing the old man ever bought for himself, and the old lady let him have it for it. Their voices carried up the stairs to his room, where the thin boy lay in bed thinking about Judy Gelson and a six-pack of Hudy.

  His parents were still fighting the next morning—the silent kind of fighting that makes you shovel down your eggs and toast and leave for school earlier than the half-hour walk required. Thirty minutes every day, he walked through the cesspool of Bilford, passing the dumb and dull in their run-down homes and their driveways full of rusted and dented cars. People in secondhand clothes. Women caked in too much makeup. Everyone doused in cheap perfume and colognes, trying to get the stink of Bilford off them. The figurative stink, but the literal one, too. It came from the sulfur factory, and the Hayes Cooperative rendering plant, and a landfill they built too close to the center of town. Even on sunny days, Bilford was overcast from the industrial smoke and soot that kept everyone even on the mortgages of their tiny homes.