Kreiss, arms still folded across his chest, bent forward to bring his face closer to hers.
“Do you have some questions for me that pertain to this case, Agent Carter?”
“Not at the moment, sir,” she replied, her chin up defiantly.
“But if we do, we’ll certainly ask them.”
She was trying for bluster, Kreiss decided, but even she knew it wasn’t working. He inflated his chest and stared down into her eyes while widening his own and then allowing them to go slightly out of focus. He felt her recoil in the chair. Talbot cleared his throat from across the room to break the tension. Kreiss straightened up, exhaled quietly, and went back to sit down in the rocking chair.
“My specialty at the Bureau was not in missing persons,” he said.
“I was a senior supervisor in the Counterintelligence Division, Far Eastern section.”
Carter had recovered herself by now and cleared her throat audibly.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“So what you said earlier pertains absolutely: Do not go solo on this, please. You find something, think of something, hear something, please call us. We can bring a whole lot more assets to bear on a fragment than you can.”
“Even though you’re giving up on this case?”
“Sir, we’re not giving up,” Talbot protested.
“The case remains in the Roanoke office’s jurisdiction even when it goes up to national Missing Persons at headquarters. We can pull it back and reopen anytime we want.
But Janet’s right: It really complicates things if someone’s been messing around in the meantime.”
Kreiss continued to look across the room at Carter.
“Absolutely,” he said, rearranging his face into as benign an expression as he could muster.
For a moment there, he had wanted to swat her pretty little head right through the front window. He was pretty sure she had sensed that impulse; the color in her cheeks was still high.
“Well,” Talbot said, fingering his collar as he got up.
“Let me assure you again, sir, the Bureau is definitely not giving up, especially with the child of an exagent. The matter is simply moving into, um, another process, if you will. If something comes up, anything at all, pass it on to either one of us and we’ll get it into the right channels. I believe you have our cards?”
“I do,” Kreiss said, also getting up.
“I think you’re entirely wrong about this,” he told Talbot, ignoring Carter now.
Talbot gave him a sympathetic look before replying.
“Yes, sir. But until we get some indication that something bad has happened to your daughter and her friends, I’m afraid our hands are somewhat tied. It’s basically a resource problem. You were in the Bureau, Mr. Kreiss, you know how it is.”
“I know how it was, Mr. Talbot,” Kreiss said, clearly implying that his Bureau would not be giving up. He followed them to the front door. The agents said their good-byes and went down to their car.
Kreiss stood in the doorway, watching them go. He had fixed himself in emotional neutral ever since the kids went missing. He had cooperated with the university cops, then the local cops, and then the federal investigation, giving them whatever they wanted, patiently answering
questions, letting them search her room here in the cabin, agreeing to go over anything and everything they came up with. He had attended painfully emotional meetings with the other parents, and then more meetings with Lynn’s student friends and acquaintances. He had endured two brainstorming sessions with a Bureau psychologist that aimed at seeing if anyone could remember anything at all that might indicate where the kids had been going. All of which had produced nothing.
Some of Lynn’s schoolmates had been a bit snotty to the cops, but that was not unusual for college kids. Engineering students at Virginia Tech considered themselves to be several cuts above the average American college kid. Perhaps they are, he thought: Lynn certainly had been. He noticed again that his thinking about Lynn was shifting into the past tense when he wasn’t noticing. But there was no excuse for the students to be rude to the law-enforcement people, given the circumstances. And there had been one redheaded kid in particular who seemed to go out of his way to be rude. Kreiss had decided that either he had been grandstanding or he knew something.
Give all the cops their due, he thought wearily as the Feds drove off.
They hadn’t just sloughed it off. They had tried. But the colder the trail became, the more he’d become convinced that they would eventually shop it to Missing Persons and go chase real bad guys doing real crimes.
The Bureau had budgets, priorities, and more problems on its plate than time in a year to work them. Missing persons cases often dragged on for years, while an agent’s annual performance evaluations, especially in the statistics-driven Bureau, were based on that fiscal year’s results: case closings, arrests, convictions. Fair enough. And they had been considerate enough to drive all the way up here to tell him face-to-face, even if the young woman had been snippy. So, thank you very much, Special Agents Talbot and Carter. He let out a long breath to displace the iron ball in his stomach as he closed the door. In a way, he was almost relieved at their decision. Now he could do it his way.
Talbot navigated the car down the winding drive toward the wooden bridge at the bottom of Kreiss’s property. Janet checked her cell phone, but there was still no signal down here in the hollows.
“I hate doing that,” Talbot said as he turned the car back out onto the narrow county road.
“Telling them we’re giving up. Parents always feel Missing Persons is a brushoff.”
“We do what we have to,” Janet said.
“Personally, I still think the kids just ran off. Happens all the time, college kids these days. They have it too easy, that’s all.”
“I thought for a minute he was going to blow up back there. Did you see his face when you started talking about his background? Scary.”
Janet did not answer. She fiddled with her seat belt as Talbot took the car through a series of tight switchbacks. The road was climbing, but the woods came down close to the road, casting a greenish light on everything.
She’d seen it all right. It had taken everything she had to come back at him, and even then, her voice had broken. She’d never seen anyone’s face get that threatening, especially when the person was a big guy like Kreiss, with those lineman’s shoulders and that craggy face. Talbot had said Kreiss was probably in his mid-fifties, although his gray-white hair and lined face made him look older. He appeared to be keeping the lid on a lot of energy, she thought, and he was certainly able to project that power. She had actually been afraid of him for a moment, when he’d trained those flinty eyes at her with that slightly detached, off-center look a dog exhibits just before it bites you.
“You know,” Talbot was saying, “like if I had some bad guys covered in a room, he’d be the guy I’d watch.”
“I suppose,” she said as nonchalantly as she could, trying to dismiss the fact that Kreiss had unsettled her. Get off it, Larry, she thought.
“I mean, I wouldn’t want him on my trail, either. Especially if what Farnsworth said was true.”
Their boss, Farnsworth, knew this guy?
“What?” she said.
“Kreiss was apparently something special. One of those guys they could barely keep a handle on. Lone wolf type. I’ve heard that the Foreign Counterintelligence people get that way, sometimes. You know, all that cloak- and-dagger stuff, especially if they get involved with those weirdos across the river in Langley.”
“Special how?” Ted Farnsworth was the Resident Agent in Roanoke.
Janet couldn’t see a homeboy like Farnsworth consorting with the FCI crowd.
“He didn’t elaborate, but he was shaking his head a lot. Supposedly, Kreiss spent a lot of time apart from the normal Bureau organization.
Then something happened and he got forced out. I think they reorganized FCI after he left to make sure there was no more of that lone wolf shit.”
