throat again and took two steps toward the couch. Chavez bent her head while still lying down and looked over her shoulder.
She spied Bransford, quickly raised up on her hips, and put both feet on the floor.
“Oh, hi, Lieutenant,” she said. Maria still held the book open on her knees. Bransford looked at the spine of the book and read the words:
“Hello, Maria,” Bransford said calmly. “You want to tell me what’s going on here?”
Maria Chavez stared ahead for a second, as if still someplace far away. Then she looked back up, directly into Max Bransford’s eyes, and he saw an intensity and a clarity that he’d seen in another person’s eyes only a few times in his life. It was the look of epiphany.
“What was that FBI agent’s name?” she asked.
Bransford studied her for a few moments. “Powell,” he said finally. “Hank Powell.”
She looked away. “Yes, Powell …” Then she turned and looked back at Bransford. “We have to call him. Now.”
“But why?” Bransford asked.
“Sit down, Max,” Maria said, motioning with her head to the chair next to her. “You’re not gonna believe this.”
PART II
THE INVESTIGATION
CHAPTER 15
Hank Powell stepped out of the director’s office, strode quickly past the receptionist without speaking and through the doors into the outer office, then through that room and out into the hallway. His face was set in stone, which belied the churning in his gut. His temples throbbed. The back of his neck burned as if he’d been too long in the sun. His right hand clenched the black leather portfolio like someone was without warning going to mug him for it. His left fist was a knot of muscle and bone.
Once out in the main hallway, he took a deep breath as he walked to the elevators, trying to center himself, trying not to give anything away to the other starched and suited robots passing him in the opposite direction. All he wanted was out of there, back to the safety and relative quiet of his office at Quantico.
Behind him, a voice called out: “Hank! Wait.”
A flushed and winded Lawrence Dunlap burst past the doors of the director’s office and almost trotted to catch up with him.
“Wait,” he said, puffing as he stopped next to Hank. The air in the Hoover Building, Hank thought, suddenly felt even more stale and suffocating.
“Yes, sir?” Hank asked.
Deputy Assistant Director Dunlap stopped a moment, catching his breath, then reached out and touched Hank gently on his left elbow.
“C’mon,” he said, “let’s step over here, out of the way of all this traffic.”
The wall across from the bank of elevators had an alcove to one side, which led to a door where janitorial supplies and equipment were kept. Dunlap walked over, Hank following, then stopped in the shadows and turned to him.
“Look, for what it’s worth, I think the old man was a little out of line in there,” Dunlap said.
“I don’t appreciate being talked to like that,” Hank said after a moment. “But I’ve been around long enough not to let it get to me.”
“Yeah, well,” Dunlap said, slowly shaking his head as if trying to figure something out, “go ahead and let it get to you. He was wrong. But you know how he hates this kind of publicity.”
“And I don’t?” Hank demanded. “You think this makes my job any easier? I’ve got to worry about not only this son of a bitch going around slicing up girls practically my own daughter’s age, but now I’ve got the director of the FBI crawling up my ass screaming about a press leak.”
“Hank, don’t lose your detachment here. You’ve always been a pro. I need you to hold on to that for me.”
Hank took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I know,” he said after a moment. “He’s under a lot of pressure.”
“We all are on this one,” Dunlap said. “We’ve gotten a lot of bad publicity the last few years. The old man wants it stopped. We find this guy and nail his ass, people might forget some of the other cluster fucks that have gone around here.”
Hank was silent for a few seconds, then looked up directly into his superior’s eyes. “Is he going to pull me off this?”
Hank asked. “If he’s going to yank me, I want to know. I’ve got my twenty. The old man relieves me, I’m putting in for early retirement. I mean it. I won’t fall on my sword for him.
Not when I’ve done my job as well as anyone could.”
Dunlap stared at Hank Powell and realized he meant every word of what he’d just said. “No,” he answered. “There’s no talk of relieving you. You’re still the SAC of this investigation.”
Hank’s jaw relaxed just enough for him to feel it, but not enough for Dunlap to see it. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you, sir. Now if that’s all, I have a lot of work to do.”
Dunlap nodded.
The thirty-five miles that separated the FBI main headquarters at the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., from the three hundred and eighty-five acres that contained the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, might as well have been the distance between two planets at opposite ends of the solar system.
The back of Hank’s neck still burned on the long ride back. As he left I-395 South and merged onto I-95, he saw that the traffic was even thicker than usual. Normally the drive would take between forty-five minutes and an hour, but it had already taken him nearly that long just to hit the freeway. It didn’t matter; he barely noticed. In his long career at the Bureau, no one had ever talked to him like he’d just been spoken to. It was all he could do to keep himself under control.
Hank kept a stack of books on tape in his car for long drives and had popped in a tape as soon as he pulled out into traffic. He soon realized, though, that there was no way he could focus on the reading and flicked off the tape player.
Hank Powell also felt bad for the way he had talked to Dunlap back at FBI headquarters. Threatening to resign was no way to gain the support of your superiors, he knew, but in this case he had to do and say something strong enough to let Dunlap know they had pushed him about as far as he was willing to be pushed.
So Hank felt bad for being dressed down in the director’s office and for copping an attitude with Dunlap, but what he felt worst of all about was his inability to make any progress on this case at all. The material that had been found in Nashville had yielded a DNA profile, but whose? And nothing else of any use had been gleaned from the Alphabet Man’s garbage.
Hank couldn’t remember the last time he felt so low. Even when Anne got sick, it hadn’t been quite like this. He’d been saddened, grieving, had felt frustrated and helpless as she became sicker and sicker. But he’d never questioned his own actions, his own worth. He knew he’d done his best for her, had done everything possible.
And, he realized, it was different now because he was so alone. If this had happened years earlier, before
