by April Smith
We entered a single space where twenty investigators were jammed together. A lot of them wore telephone headpieces to block out the noise. Since they redesigned our offices I missed the camaraderie of our old bull pen, but in this arrangement you had to smell your neighbor’s aftershave all day and look at the ass end of his computer monitor slopped over your desk. In fact it was hard to see where one desk ended and another began, as they seemed to work on one square surface billowing with papers and personal clutter. The walls were brick and the window blinds maroon. It felt like we had walked into a bad TV crime show from the seventies.
Our team was arriving for the briefing, talking in small edgy groups. Everyone in the field was fired up about something, hoping their little piece would complete the mosaic and be remembered as the one link that led to the safe recovery of the victim. You don’t make big salary jumps based on big scores at the Bureau; merit accrues from the steady accumulation of good choices and the intelligent analysis of details, most of which goes into a file that nobody but a supervisor will ever see. Briefings in high-visibility cases give the rare opportunity to show your moves in varsity play.
Computer techs were crawling under the table as two agents frantically tried to re-create the timeline by tacking brown butcher paper on the wall, unrolling it over notices of bake sales and group discounts to Universal Studios, while two others followed with marking pens and printouts from Rapid Start, copying in large letters the sequence of developments in the case.
Big-time federal agency.
Rick Harding strode in a few minutes short of 5 p.m., wearing a navy blue suit and wraparound sunglasses that made him look like a corporate president on steroids, sliding his briefcase down the conference table past a row of computer screens showing odd cascades of numbers.
“People?” he called.
We began to settle, in the close wood-paneled room with the soda machine droning on, next to a kitchen where someone was using a microwave. There was the black-and-white of Juliana holding on to the tree and a blown-up school portrait of her looking out in the tired ocher light, with the glassy expression of martyrs too young to have known the passion for which they died. At the last minute, Andrew appeared in the doorway. Two rookies stepped aside for the senior detective.
“Let’s start,” said Rick, ritually hanging his jacket on the back of the metal chair.
I took my place beside my supervisor. Forty-seven, a former navy pilot, Rick wore his mustache neat and blond hair clipped. He always looked tight, but today he was pretty well steamed. You could tell because he unclipped the handcuffs from his belt and started tapping them on his thigh.
We are all fussy about our handcuffs. You are issued one pair that can last your whole career if you’re smart enough not to lend them. Like any other tool, they become worn with handling and acquire an idiosyncratic feel, so you can tell which is yours just by touch. Nothing is more straightforward than a pair of handcuffs. In times of stress they are a comfort; you will often see several people in a high-intensity meeting worrying and working their little rings of power.
The only problem with handcuffs is sometimes they fall in the toilet bowl. If you are a woman, especially, this will happen when you’re in a hurry and you forget to lift them out of the back of your waistband before lowering your pants. Then you will hear behind you the unmistakable, heart-stopping sound of metal falling on porcelain.
All of us have heard it, more than once.
“What’s all this?” Rick asked of the brown paper snaking around the walls.
“Computers went down,” chorused several people.
He nodded grimly as if expecting one insult after another. “Now we’ve got a media leak, is that right, Ana?”
General groans and shifting in chairs.
“Right. The dad called channel five.”
Eunice chimed in. “He locked himself in the bathroom and used a cell phone. He believed that if he could get the daughter on TV, it would lead to her recovery.”
“Was it not explained to the gentleman there is a media blackout on this case because it might escalate the suspect?”
“Yes,” I cut in, “but he was crazed because his wife had just admitted that she had a boyfriend. She thought this guy might have taken Juliana for revenge. I asked Special Agent Jason Ripley to check him out. Jason?” I said it so harshly the poor kid jumped. He had been an agent only eight months — skinny and ginger-haired, still so eager he wore a three-piece suit every day.
“The suspect’s name is Ed Hobart.”
“He’s not a suspect yet,” I reminded Jason gently. Since when did I become a mother hen?
“The subject. Sorry.” His acne flushed pink. “Upstanding, churchgoing father of six. Mr. Hobart is a senior buyer in ladies’ fashions, who oversees a budget of five million dollars …”
My Nextel was vibrating, then the pager. It was Special Agent in Charge Robert Galloway, messaging me to return to the field office immediately.
“As for Mr. Hobart’s current whereabouts, the Seattle field office should be getting back to us within the hour …”
“Rick,” I said softly while Jason went on, “gotta go.”
“What’s up?”
“Galloway paged me twice.”
“What does he want?” Rick whispered back. “If it’s about the media leak, tell him we can handle channel five—”
We were talking with heads averted, so everybody knew something was going on. By now a lot of people packing guns had crowded into the room, including Andrew’s lieutenant, Barry Loomis, who wore a walrus mustache and a Superman tie, and Officer Sylvia Oberbeck, impassively chewing gum. She looked put together, just going on shift: heavy mascara and a freshly braided bun. At one point I tried to make eye contact, but she did not seem to remember who I was. There was the rustle of seashells, and Margaret Forrester suddenly pushed through, swinging the water bottle, stepping over legs.
“Damn! Computers still out?” Fanning herself at the collective menthol-scented body heat. “What did I miss?”
“Case closed, go home,” someone replied disagreeably.
“There’s been another development, Rick,” interrupted Special Agent Todd Hanley. He was a reliable sort. Narrow-faced, with horn-rimmed glasses, achingly serious, he wore tweedy sport coats and spoke only when it was relevant.
Maybe he was a spy.
“It also concerns the dad.”
Rick: “We are so past the damn dad.”
Nervous giggles. Bored, cynical looks.
“Just so you know, legal says Mr. Murphy has threatened to sue. Claims he sprained his back during the altercation with Special Agent Grey.”
Thirty sets of eyes went my way, including Andrew’s.
“What altercation?” I said defensively. “He tripped on a rug.”
Rick now was ratcheting the handcuffs with a rhythmic, grating sound.
“Oh, please,” I went on, “I admonished him about the cell phone, he took a swing at me and slipped on a Chinese rug. He was fine.”
“When he was barricaded in the rest room,” Rick seemed to have to ask, “why didn’t you call for backup? There was a surveillance team outside.”
“What were the ladies supposed to do?” cracked Andrew. “Bring in the artillery because the guy was taking a good, long shit?”
Amazement. Big laughs. Margaret squealing: “An-drew! I’m going to kill you!”
I wanted to crawl under the table. Don’t make this a fight!
Andrew must have stuck his head under the shower in the locker room because he looked refreshed. His thick dark hair was slicked back; he wore his shield on his hip, a hand-tooled leather gun belt and a fresh lilac blue shirt with a monogrammed cuff through which you could see the sculpted moves of his shoulders.
Still, I wanted to throttle him, especially when, as I pushed away from the table to leave, he said, “Where are you off to?” as if we were the only two people in the room.
“Back to the office.”
<
br /> “What about ‘Arizona?’” It sounded like a code. People were watching us.
My gut clenched. “It’s premature to talk about ‘Arizona.’”
Margaret shook her hair and took a long throaty draw on the water. “Sounds like Ana doesn’t want to share.”
“It’s a promising lead but needs to be developed,” I said dismissively.
Andrew replied, “Bullshit.”
“It is bullshit,” I repeated, now confused. We had not discussed this. I was not ready to present some half-baked theory based on the statements of a crazy homeless person.
Rick: “Could you two clue us in?”
“Sure,” said Andrew. “The source is a transient named Willie John Black.”
It was a bad moment, as I feared it would be. Andrew’s own people guffawed and began offering comments on their encounters with Black, who apparently was famous in the world of social services for his movable collection of wire hangers, coils of nylon tied with the precision of a yachtsman, cereal boxes, gloves, strips of fabric, milk cartons and the occasional flag mounted onto a trio of bicycles tied together, upon which he had somehow secured a full-sized camping tent. They didn’t let him take it on the Promenade so he kept the thing parked in an alley across the street.
“Black puts the victim with a young white male,” said Andrew, who seemed the only one at ease in the room. He held a small investigator’s notebook, to which he did not need to refer, and spoke with an authority that held the respect of a bunch of disbelieving, overtired cops.
“We know Juliana went there to buy marijuana. I make the suspect as a dealer. He has a camera, which he uses as a cover. Black says the guy is from Arizona, so I want to use narcotics investigators on the local level to identify this individual. We should reach out immediately to law enforcement in Arizona.” Nobody spoke. Margaret Forrester — peacekeeper and liaison — was mouthing the water bottle, big eyes gone bland, as if she had nothing to do with any of this. My heart was jackhammering; I was hoping Rick would not force me to make the call.
“Sounds like a poor use of resources,” he said. “Mr. Black is obviously a questionable source.”
“That’s your judgment.”
“Of course it’s his judgment,” I said nicely. “This is an FBI investigation.”
Andrew shut me down with a cold-blooded look—“Now you’re telling me who’s in charge?”—and my overbeating heart clutched at the shock of his anger.
His lieutenant intervened: “We’ll employ our own resources to follow up on Detective Berringer’s recommendation.”
“Thank you, Barry,” said Rick.
The pager went off again.
“This is whack,” I cursed under my breath, quickly shouldering handbag and canvas briefcase.
Rick had given up on the handcuffs, which lay splayed upon the table. The mood was suddenly wilted and depressed. There was no more oxygen left in the room, and what did we have? No new ransom demands. A half-assed boyfriend and a schizophrenic.
“Keep me informed,” said my boss. “And watch your back.”
I went out through the kitchen exit to avoid passing close to Andrew.
Seven
The fog was a surprise, but along the coast it often comes up quickly. When I left the police station, sometime after six, everything smelled of water. The air wasn’t air but cold humidity that had congealed. From inside the car, the windshield was impenetrable. I let the defroster blow. According to the dashboard readout, the temperature had fallen to thirty-seven degrees.
Someone was rubbing a clear circle in the driver’s side glass. Fingernails scratched and a round face peered close, spooking me. When I lowered the window I saw that it was Margaret Forrester. With hair frizzed out by the mist and some kind of seashells on a thong around her neck, she looked like a creature hauled out of the sea, a siren, regarding me with dark eyes that seemed to shine with strange compassion. Steam curled and vanished from her small-sculpted nostrils as she considered what to say.
Finally it was just, “Drive carefully.”
“I will. You, too.”
She smiled sympathetically and reached in and patted my hand on the wheel. I grinned like a cat until she had withdrawn and the window rose again and sealed off the vaporous outside.
What was her concern? Was it for Juliana, disappeared into the dark psychic stink of America? The fog was blanking out the street lamps, making the night unnaturally dim, a guttural gray through which they shone just faintly. But sometimes the fog would be a lens, diffusing a pair of headlamps passing behind a tree so its outline would spring out, monumentally visible, each twig and leaf in flashing silhouette as if etched by a laser.
I wished for that same shocking clarity in our search for Juliana, even as I fought a growing instinct it would not occur. There was uncertainty beneath the frenzy of the briefing, a stain of helplessness that seemed to be numbing Rick. We were all giving in to the fear that we had failed. Look at us, Andrew and me, fighting in public like dogs over territory.
I dialed his pager: Code 3-AG.
Emergency.
It was ten long minutes of creeping through fog until he called back.
“Still in the briefing?”
“That’s been over.”
“I’m sorry for what happened back there.”
When he didn’t gush, Oh my darling, I’m sorry too, my instinct for compromise evaporated.
“We never talked about going with Willie John Black.” My voice was hard.
“This is not working,” Andrew decided abruptly. “Let’s forget it.”
“It’s a little late, don’t you think?” I listened to his impatient snort into the mouthpiece. “This is what I told you would happen on the beach.”
“I work independently. I don’t report to the lieutenant every time I take a crap.”
“Now you’re accusing me of pulling rank.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“But you’ve said it, about this very thing, Willie John Black. ‘What is this, pulling rank?’”
“When? When did I say that?”
“This morning, at breakfast.”
Now there was silence. I knew what he was thinking: just like a woman to start whining about personal shit.
“Andrew? We’re still together on this, am I right?”
“Sure, baby,” he said with penetrating indifference. “Doesn’t matter to me.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Kiss up to your boss, that’s cool. Just stay out of my business.” He hung up.
Sometimes the temperature drops and you are blinded. All that I could see in front of me was swirling white and not the labyrinth beyond — the sudden drop-offs, veering alley walls and bottomless puddles into which whole cars could up-end and disappear — creeping inch by inch all the way to Westwood, and the police scanner was jammed with accidents, hit dogs, frightened seniors lost at indistinguishable intersections, reports of a fire.
A bus had rammed a car in front of the Federal Building. Traffic was stalled and lights were blinking idiotic green. When I finally pulled into the parking lot, I was surprised to find it still half full. People must be waiting it out. You could see the red throat of the stuck freeway from the upper stories of the tower.
The stark brightness of the institutional lobby gave little relief from the mayhem outside, only serving as a reminder that steely measures were required to keep things in order; there was no room for soft upholstery of any kind. We were the Department of Justice, not the Department of Comfort. The elevators were sterile, and the turnstile where you swiped your card a floor-to-ceiling cage of bars that rotated loyalty and discipline in, individuality out.
We all used to work together in an open bull pen. The supervisors had window offices around the rim, the grunts labored at traditional oak desks pushed together in the center of the room, like the detectives at the Santa Monica Police Department. There were no walls or encumbrances, you could see at a glance where eve
rybody was and who they were gossiping with, and you could feel fine about important work being done by decent people, even though most of them were middle-aged men in white shirts who kept their shoulder holsters on.
You damn well knew where you were.
Then the elders started to retire in waves, and the rest of us watched with apprehension as a generation of experience and chops walked out the door, while the technology to replace them walked in. Some android in the administrative division got rid of the oak and installed workstations covered in charcoal acoustical felt arranged in “pods” like alien seedlings, and we were all supposed to sit in front of our computer screens and germinate, nothing to look at except the constellation of pushpins on our mini bulletin boards, also covered in charcoal acoustical felt, where the messages we posted were only to ourselves.
This reduced the sound level to a few shuffles and the occasional belly laugh, and chopped up the social space into a confusing stew. Once sight lines were cut off nothing was clear. You couldn’t just look up from your desk and with one sweep register the current pecking order, or instantly see who was making it with whom. The new kids, like Jason Ripley, didn’t seem to have the time or imagination to fool around anyway. My pod was occupied by raw rookies with fast agendas who considered me an old fart even though I had only ten years in. Naturally, I distrusted them, too. In the new configuration, our time-honored FBI paranoia grew like a fungus in the dark.
I had not been back to the office since I met Andrew in the parking lot and gone straight to the M&Ms. I found myself moving through the darkened space with customary informality, like unlocking the front door and walking into your living room after a long trip. The collection of plastic trolls on my work surface was reassuringly in place, chair stowed. The in box had acquired three days’ worth of debris, the cartons of court papers and files I pulled for the ninety-day file review as untended as before. The stress I had been feeling about the review seemed remote as I zigzagged through the charcoal matrix toward the executive suite, where the lights were still on.
