Good Morning, Killer

“Will you cool out?” I said. “What’s going on? You yell at me over the phone that I shouldn’t tell you how to do your job, now I embarrass you in front of your boss. I mean, what am I doing that’s so wrong?” “You’re in my way.”

I lost my balance then, as if I’d suddenly looked down those seventeen stories and realized I was standing on a ledge.

“If I’m in your way … I’m sorry … I’ll get out of your way.”

“No. Look. I’m sorry.” He took my hands, drew me into a tense embrace. My eyes were open, staring at the cinder block. When he spoke again, his voice was spent. “Got to go,” he whispered hoarsely.

I stepped back. “If I’m making you so miserable—”

“It isn’t you.”

“Then—”

“Later? Okay? Barry’s waiting.”

“Okay. Listen.” Still. The contact. “That was a good idea about the suspect’s military background. And thanks for standing up for me with Kelsey.”

It took a moment for him to remember. “That? It was just such a waste of everybody’s time.”

He hadn’t been defending me; it was just politics as usual, move the boring shit along. I found myself fighting a dull panic.

“Like your cowboy shirt,” running a finger along the decorative white edging that swirled above the pockets. “Want to go for a ride? How about tonight?”

He pulled on the handle of the metal door. A helix of wind sucked it back.

“Sure, when I get off. Around seven.”

The hair on our heads flew up in the draft.

We happened to be standing together on line in the cafeteria. It was three that afternoon and I was just getting lunch.

Galloway said, “Are you and Kelsey Owen having a personality conflict?”

“Kelsey? No, of course not.”

“I think we should pay attention to what she’s saying. She gives things an interesting twist. She’s green, but I think she’s got some good ideas.”

“Me, too.”

“So why don’t you listen to her ideas?”

“I listen.”

“Didn’t look that way.”

I couldn’t focus on how things had looked as far back as that morning. I had tried to be open, or at least appear that way, but now it was past and we had moved on to the next phase, and I was numb and dumb after ten grinding days with no sleep.

“She said you never answer her e-mail.”

“You want me to hold her hand, I’ll be happy to hold her hand. Whatever you want me to do, Robert, I’ll be happy to make you happy.”

“It’s not about me being happy.”

We were at the cashier. He could have paid for me and I could have paid for him, but that’s not the way it is.

“I’m going to work in a summer camp,” he mused. “I don’t want to be the camp director, nothing like that — I’m going to be the guy with the rake, keeping the area clean, where the kids throw stuff out of the tents.”

“You don’t think the Bureau is summer camp?”

He smiled. We walked outside, and I felt sorry for him, the way the sun burned through to the roots of his curly thinning hair. Wasn’t he hot in those turtlenecks? We were each holding our cardboard tray. I had a packaged tuna sandwich and a large black coffee, which would have zero effect. We had been heading toward the main entrance, but now he stopped.

“I’m going to take a break,” indicating the outdoor tables.

My cue. “See you later.”

But he stayed put. “You think I’m pitiful.”

“I don’t think you’re pitiful, I think you’re a great leader.”

He smiled painfully. “We’re all a team. Part of the Bureau family, and that ain’t no jive.”

We were squinting at each other against the sun.

“I’ll take care of it.”

“All right.”

About this time I had started to experience blackouts, nanoseconds of sleep that, like it or not, shut down the brain. I was fading in and out, with no defenses. After the grueling and unresolved encounter with Andrew, I could not grasp what else might possibly be expected of me. The rebuke came then, through a flickering daze.

“You were a kid once, too,” I heard Galloway say.

I went up to my pod and ate the tuna sandwich. I made some arrangements, and when they were complete, left a message on Kelsey Owen’s voice mail, reporting what I had done:

“Hi, Kelsey, it’s Ana Grey. I wanted you to know that I had a talk with the SAC about your theories, and based on my conversation with him, I have gone ahead and placed three agents on undercover assignment at different S&M bars in the Valley. Actually, one is a regular black leather bar and two are dungeons run by a dominatrix, where sadomasochists go to be punished with whips and racks, but I’m sure you’re familiar with the pathology. I think if we’re looking for a sadist, we should look where sadists hang out, don’t you?

“By the way, little lady, if you think this is your ticket to profile school, think again. There’s a code around here called not ratting each other out that even the brass catches on to. You want to tell me something, have the guts to tell me in person.

“And one more thing. I take pride in my work. It’s hard, what we do — to treat people fairly, whether they’re the good guys or not. Sitting down and interviewing the victim is one thing. But to sit down and interview a rapist, or someone who has done something that, in your past, you were a victim of yourself, that’s something else. That’s a result of time on the street.

“Not everyone can do what we do. I’m the kind of person who, when I hear the national anthem, I get all teary-eyed. It’s a feeling. Patriotism. I don’t know. But whatever that feeling is, you have it or you don’t. Like I said, I will keep you informed.”

My legs were responding only stubbornly as I passed beneath the portico of the Federal Building, not letting up in their complaints of stiffness and neglect; shoulders and neck were being just as petulant, as I had not been to the pool since the case began, but we all dragged on, discombobulated body parts trying to keep up the march. The evening was muggy and overcast, and glancing at the disinterested sky, I remembered one fragment of a dream in which an owl had put its spiky wing around me.

In the Bureau garage, four male prisoners were chained to a bench. I made them for Chinese mafia. There had been rumors of a deep cover operation about to end in a bust down in Garden Grove that involved the chief of police and a string of sex parlors owned by local Asians. This must be it.

Two of them were businessmen wearing coats and ties, two looked like delivery boys in bad seventies shirts. They were sitting down, handcuffed with arms behind their backs. The handcuffs were locked to a thick chain that ran around the bench. Two agents I recognized from the white-collar-crime squad were walking a fifth prisoner, also wearing a suit, toward the cubicle where he would be fingerprinted and photographed. It was slow going because of the ankle irons.

In the doorway of the cubicle — similar to the office where the manager of a parking lot might tally the ticket stubs — was Hugh Akron, looking like a shoe salesman eager to sell you shoes, but actually he was an English