The Maze

by Catherine Coulter

  He’d made a very small movement toward her, but she wasn’t going to let him get her this time. He was into martial arts, was he? She knew she was smashing the petunias, but she didn’t see any way around it. Mrs. Shaw would come after her because the flower beds were her pride and joy, but she was only doing her job. She couldn’t let him get the better of her again.

  She kept inching away from him, that Colt steady on his chest. She came up slowly, keeping her distance. “Turn around and put your hands behind you.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said again. She didn’t even see his leg, but she did hear the rip of his pants. The Colt went flying onto the sidewalk.

  She was caught off guard. Surely an escaping crook would turn tail and run, not stand there looking at her. He wasn’t behaving the way he should. “How’d you do that?”

  Where were her partners?

  Where was Mrs. Shaw, the postmistress? She’d once caught the designated bank robber by threatening him with a frying pan.

  Then he was on her. This time, she moved as quickly as he did. She knew he wouldn’t hurt her, just disable her, jerk her onto her face and humiliate her in front of everyone, which would be infinitely worse than being actually hurt. She rolled to the side, came up, saw Porter Forge from the corner of her eye, caught the SIG from him, turned and fired. She got him in midleap.

  The red paint spread all over the front of his white shirt, his conservative tie, and his dark blue suit.

  He flailed about, managing to keep his balance. He straightened, stared down at her, stared down at his shirt, grunted, and fell onto his back into the flower bed, his arms flung out.

  “Sherlock, you idiot, you just shot the new coach of Hogan’s Alley High School’s football team!” It was the mayor of Hogan’s Alley and he wasn’t happy. He stood over her, yelling. “Didn’t you read the paper? Didn’t you see his picture? You live here and you don’t know what’s going on? Coach Savich was hired just last week. You just killed an innocent man.”

  “She also made me rip my pants,” Savich said, coming up in a graceful motion. He shook himself, wiping dirt off his hands onto his filthy pants.

  “He tried to kill me,” she said, rising slowly, still pointing the SIG at him. “Also, he shouldn’t be talking. He should be acting dead.”

  “She’s right.” Savich sprawled onto his back again, his arms flung out, his eyes closed.

  “He was only defending himself,” said the woman who’d yelled her head off. “He’s the new coach and you killed him.”

  She knew she wasn’t wrong.

  “I don’t know about that,” Porter Forge said, that drawl of his so slow she could have said the same thing at least three times before he’d gotten it out. “Suh,” he continued to the mayor who was standing at his elbow, “I believe I saw a wanted poster on this big fella. He’s gone and robbed banks all over the South. Yep, that’s where I saw his picture, on one of the Atlanta PD posters, suh. Sherlock here did well. She brought down a really bad guy.”

  It was an excellent lie, one to give her time to do something, anything, to save her hide.

  Then she realized what had bothered her about him. His clothes didn’t fit him right. She leaned over, reached her hands into Savich’s pockets, and pulled out wads of fake one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “I believe ya’ll find the bank’s serial numbers on the bills, suh. Don’t you think so, Sherlock?”

  “Oh yes, I surely do, Agent Forge.”

  “Take me away, Ms. Sherlock,” Dillon Savich said, came to his feet, and stuck out his hands.

  She handed Porter back his SIG. She faced Savich with her hands on her hips, a grin on her face. “Why would I handcuff you now, sir? You’re dead. I’ll get a body bag.”

  Savich was laughing when she walked away to the waiting paramedic ambulance.

  He said to the mayor of Hogan’s Alley, “That was well done. She has a nose for crooks. She sniffed me out and came after me. She didn’t try to second-guess herself. I wondered if she’d have guts. She does. Sorry I turned the exercise into a comedy at the end, but the look on her face, I just couldn’t help it.”

  “I don’t blame you, but I doubt we can use you again. I have a feeling this story will pass through training classes for a good long while. No future trainees will believe you’re both a new coach and a crook.”

  “It worked once and we saw an excellent result. I’ll come up with another totally different exercise.” Savich walked away, unaware that his royal blue boxer shorts were on display to a crowd of a good fifty people.

  The mayor began to laugh, then the people around him joined in. Soon there was rolling laughter, people pointing. Even a crook who was holding a hostage around the throat, a gun to his ear, at the other end of town looked over at the sudden noise to see what was going on. It was his downfall. Agent Wallace thunked him over the head and laid him flat.

  It was a good day for taking a bite out of crime in Hogan’s Alley.

  3

  SHE MET with Colin Pety, a supervisor in the Personnel Division, known in the Bureau as the Bald Eagle. He was thin, sported a thick black mustache, and had a very shiny head. He told her up front that she’d impressed some important people, but that was at Quantico. No one working here in Headquarters was impressed yet. She was going to have to work her butt off. She nodded, knowing where she’d been assigned. It was tough, but she managed to pull out a bit of enthusiasm.

  “I’m pleased to be going to the Los Angeles field office,” she said, and thought, I don’t want anything to do with any bank robberies. She knew they dealt with more bank robberies than any field office in the Bureau. She guessed it was better than Montana, but at least there she could go skiing. How long was a usual tour of duty? She had to get back here, somehow.

  “L.A. is considered a plum assignment for a new agent right out of the Academy,” Mr. Petty said as he flipped through her personnel file. “You originally requested Headquarters, I see here, the Criminal Investigative Division, but they decided to send you to Los Angeles.” He looked up at her over his bifocals. “You have a B.S. in Forensic Science and a Master’s degree in Criminal Psychology from Berkeley,” he continued. “Seems you’ve got a real interest here. Why didn’t you request the Investigative Services Unit? With your background, you would probably have been escorted through the door. I take it you changed your mind?”

  She knew there were notes about that in her file. Why was he acting as if he didn’t know anything? Of course. He wanted her to talk, get her slant on things, get her innermost thoughts. Good luck to him on that, she thought. It was true that it was her own fault that she was being assigned to Los Angeles and there was no secret as to why.

  She forced a smile and shrugged. “The fact is that I just don’t have the guts to do what those people do every day of their lives and probably in their dreams as well. You’re right that I prepared myself for this career, that I believed it was what I wanted to do with my life, but—” She shrugged again. And swallowed. She’d spent all these years preparing herself, and she’d failed. “It all boils down to no guts.”

  “You always wanted to be a Profiler?”

  “Yes. I read John Douglas’s book Mindhunter and thought that’s what I wanted to do. Actually I’ve been interested in law enforcement for a very long time, thus my major in college and graduate school.” It was a lie, but that didn’t matter. She told it easily, with no hesitation. She had practically come to believe it herself over the past several years. “I wanted to help get those monsters out of society. But after the lectures by people from ISU, after seeing what they see on a day-to-day basis for just a week, I knew I wouldn’t be able to deal with the horror of it. The Profilers see unspeakable butchery. They live with the results of it. Every one of those monsters leaves a deep mark on them. And the victims, the victims . . .” She drew a deep breath. “I knew I couldn’t do it.” So now she’d go after bank robbers and he would remain free and she wanted to cry. All this time and commitment
and incredibly hard work, and she was going to go after bank robbers. She should have just quit, but the truth of the matter was that she just didn’t have the energy to redefine herself again, and that’s what it would mean.

  Mr. Petty said only, “I couldn’t either. Most folks couldn’t. The burnout rate is incredible in the unit. Marriages don’t do well either. Now, you did excellently at the Academy. You handle firearms well, particularly in mid-distances, you excel at self-defense, you ran the two miles in under sixteen minutes, and your situation judgment was well above average. There’s a little footnote here that says you managed to take down Dillon Savich in a Hogan’s Alley exercise, something never before done by a trainee.” He looked up, his eyebrows raised. “Is that true?”

  She remembered her rage when he’d disarmed her twice. Then, just as suddenly, she remembered her laughter when he’d walked away, his boxer shorts showing through the big rip in his pants. “Yes,” she said, “but it was my partner, Porter Forge, who threw me his SIG so I could shoot him. Otherwise I would have died in the line of duty.”

  “But it was Dillon who bought the big one,” Petty said. “I wish I could have seen it.” He gave her the most gleeful grin she’d ever seen. Even that bushy mustache of his couldn’t hide it. It was irresistible. It made him suddenly very human.

  “It also says that you pulled a Lady Colt .38 on him after he’d knocked the SIG out of your hand. Do you still have this gun?”

  “Yes, sir. I learned to use it when I was nineteen. I’m very comfortable with it.”

  “I suppose we can all live with that. Ah, I know everyone must comment on your name, Agent Sherlock.”

  “Oh yes, sir. No stone left unturned, so to speak, over the years. I’m used to it now.”

  “Then I won’t say anything about offering you a pipe.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Let me tell you about your new assignment, Agent Sherlock,” Petty said, and she thought, because I don’t have any guts, I’m going to be catching jerks who rob banks. He continued, “The criminal you brought down in Hogan’s Alley, namely, Dillon Savich, has asked that you be reassigned to his unit.”

  Her heart started pounding. “Here in Washington?”

  “Yes.”

  In one of those huge rooms filled with computers? Oh God, no. She’d rather have bank robbers. She didn’t want to play with computers. She was competent with computer programming, but she was far from an intuitive genius like Savich. The stories about what he could do with a computer were told and retold at the Academy. He was a legend. She couldn’t imagine working for a legend. On the other hand, wouldn’t he have access to everything? Just maybe—“What is his unit?”

  “It’s the Criminal Apprehension Unit, or CAU for short. They work with the Investigative Services Unit for background and profiles, get their take on things, that sort of thing. Then they deal directly with local authorities when a criminal takes his show on the road—in other words, when a criminal goes from one state to another. Agent Savich has developed a different approach for apprehending criminals. I’ll let him tell you about it. You will be using your academic qualifications, Agent Sherlock. We do try to match up agents’ interests and areas of expertise with their assignments. Although you might have seriously doubted that if you’d gotten sent to Los Angeles.”

  She wanted to leap over the desk and hug Mr. Petty. She couldn’t speak for a moment. She’d thought she’d doomed herself after she’d realized she simply couldn’t survive in the ISU as a Profiler. The week she’d spent there had left her so ill she’d endured the old nightmares in blazing, hideous color for well over a week, replete with all the terror, as fresh as it had been seven years before. She just knew, deep down, that she could have never gotten used to it, and the ISU people did admit that many folks just couldn’t ever deal with it, no matter how hard they tried. No, she wouldn’t have been able to survive it, not with the horror of the job combined with the horror of the nightmares.

  But now, she felt an incredible surge of excitement. She hadn’t known about Savich’s unit, which was strange because there was always gossip about everything and everyone at the Academy. And this sort of unit would provide her with an ideal vantage point. At the very least, she would be able to access all the files, all the collected data impossible for her to see otherwise. And no one would wonder at her curiosity, not if she was careful. Oh yes, and she would have free time. She closed her eyes with relief.

  She’d never felt as though anyone was looking after her before. It was frightening because she hadn’t believed in much of anything since that long ago night seven years ago. She’d had a goal, nothing more, just that goal. And now she had a real chance at realizing it.

  “Now, it’s two-twenty,” Mr. Petty said. “Agent Savich wants to see you in ten minutes. I hope you can deal with this work. It’s not profiling, but I don’t doubt that it will be difficult at times, depending on the case and how intimately involved you have to become in it. At least you won’t be six floors down at Quantico working in a bomb shelter with no windows.”

  “The people in the ISU deserve a big raise.”

  “And lots more help as well, which is one of the reasons Agent Savich’s unit was formed. Now, I’ll let him tell you all about it. Then you can make a decision.”

  “May I ask, sir, why Agent Savich requested me?”

  There was that unholy grin again. “I think he really can’t believe that you beat him, Agent Sherlock. Actually, you will have to ask him that.”

  He rose and walked her to the door of his small office. “I’m joking, of course. The Unit is three turns down this hallway and to the right. Turn left after another four doors and two conference rooms. It’s just there on the left. Are you getting used to the Puzzle Palace?”

  “No, sir. This place is a maze.”

  “It’s got more than two million square feet. It boggles a normal mind. I still get lost, and my wife tells me I’m not all that normal. Give yourself another ten years, Agent Sherlock.”

  Mr. Petty shook her hand. “Welcome to the Bureau. I hope you find your work rewarding. Ah, did anyone ever refer to a tweed hat?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sorry, Agent Sherlock.”

  It was hard not to run out the door of his office. She didn’t even stop at the women’s room.

  Savich looked up. “You found me in ten minutes,” he said, looking down at his Mickey Mouse wristwatch. “That’s good, Sherlock. I understand from Colin Petty that you’re wondering why I had you reassigned to my unit.”

  He was wearing a white shirt rolled up to his elbows, a navy blue tie, and navy slacks. A navy blazer was hanging on a coatrack in the corner of his office. He rose slowly from behind his desk as he spoke. He was big, at least six two, dark, and very muscular. In addition to the martial arts, he clearly worked out regularly. She’d heard some of the trainees call him a regular he-man, not a G-man. She knew just how strong and fast he was, since he’d worked her over in that Hogan’s Alley exercise. Her stomach had hurt for three days after that head butt. If she didn’t know he was an agent, she would have been terrified of him. He looked hard as nails, except for his eyes, which were a very soft summer-sky blue. Dreamy eyes, her mother would have called them. Her mother would have been wrong. There was nothing soft about this guy. He was patiently looking at her. What had he been talking about? Oh yes, why he’d wanted her reassigned to this unit.

  She smiled and said, “Yes, sir.”

  Dillon Savich came around his desk and shook her hand. “Sit down and we can discuss it.”

  There were two chairs facing his desk, clearly FBI issue. On top of the desk was an FBI-issue computer. Beside it was a laptop that was open and humming, definitely not FBI issue. It was slightly slanted toward her, and she could see the green print on the black background, a graph of some kind. Was this little computer the one she’d heard everyone say that Savich made dance?

  “Coffee?”

  She shook her head.


  “Do you know much about computers, Sherlock?” Just Sherlock, no agent in front of it. It sounded fine to her. He was looking at her expectantly. She hated to disappoint him, but there was no choice.

  “Not all that much, sir, just enough so I can write reports and hook into the databases I will need to do my job.”

  To her unspeakable relief, he smiled. “Good, I wouldn’t want any real competition in my own unit. I hear you had wanted to be a Profiler, but ultimately felt you couldn’t deal with the atrocities that flood the unit every moment of every day and well into the night.”

  “That’s right. How did you know that? I just left Mr. Petty less than fifteen minutes ago.”

  “No telepathy.” He pointed to the phone. “It comes in handy, though I much prefer e-mail. I agree with you, actually. I couldn’t do it either. The burnout rate for Profilers is pretty high, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Since they spend so much time focusing on the worst in humanity, they wind up having a difficult time relating to regular folks. They lose perspective on normal life. They don’t know their kids. Their marriages go under.”

  She sat forward a bit in her seat, smoothing her navy blue skirt as she said, “I spent a week with them. I know I saw only a small part of what they do. That’s when I knew I didn’t have what it took. I felt as if I’d failed.”

  “What any endeavor takes, Sherlock, is a whole lot of different talents. Just because you don’t end up profiling doesn’t mean you’ve failed. Actually, I think what we do leaves us more on the normal side of things than not.

  “Now, I asked to have you assigned to me because academically you appear to have what I need. Your academic credentials are impressive. I did wonder, though. Why did you take off a year between your sophomore and junior years of college?”

  “I was sick. Mononucleosis.”

  “Okay, yes, here’s an entry about that. I don’t know why I missed it.” She watched him flip through more pages. He hadn’t missed it. She couldn’t imagine that he’d ever miss a thing. She would have to be careful around him. He read quickly. He frowned once. He looked up at her. “I didn’t think mono took a person out for a whole year.”