'Especially that one.'
Hands balled into hammerheads and jammed onto her hips, she fired back. 'And our lunch?'
I cocked my head, gave her my most apologetic grin. 'No, let's do lunch.'
I escorted her to the door.
'Where are you going?' she asked.
'For a walk. By myself.'
Her cell phone rang and she turned away, taking the call. I left her in my office, waving to Leonard who jumped out of his chair.
'Hey, Mr. Davis! You can't go anywhere without this.'
He handed me a Harper Institute of the Mind ID card threaded through a lanyard so I could wear it around my neck. My picture was pasted in the center. It was a headshot that included the shirt and tie I was wearing but no one had asked me to say cheese since I walked through the front door.
'It's a key card and an ID card,' Leonard explained. Swipe it on the sensors to get access to the other floors. Mr. Harper said to make it a master. It opens every door in the whole place. Anne from HR forgot to give it to you. When she brought it back, you were busy so she left it with me.'
'If she's Anne from HR, what's that make you, Leonard from the Eighth Floor?'
'It makes her hot and me horny.'
'Steady, son. She's wearing an engagement ring.'
'Yeah, but she's not wearing a wedding ring. Got to keep hope alive.'
Anne had acted like she'd been sentenced to a hard forty when I mentioned her pending marriage, making me wonder whether Leonard's hope was built on inside information.
'Hope is good. So, who took my picture?'
'There's a video camera in the wall behind Nancy's desk in the lobby. HR freezes the frame and pulls it off to make the ID card. Saves having to stand you up against the wall for a photo shoot.'
I had noticed the camera but not given it much thought. 'Not bad. Who was in charge of security before I got here?'
'I was,' Sherry said as she left my office. 'See you at lunch.'
Chapter Fifteen
I hadn't done any due diligence about my new employer either in my meeting with Harper or since then and it was showing. I hadn't considered whether I had taken someone's place and what impact that might have. All I had done was skim through the binder Harper gave me and piss off Detective McNair. None of that told me where the land mines were buried and I had just stepped on one.
Wendy was my best excuse for not focusing on my new job. I didn't think she had risen from the dead to confess to having stolen the drug ring's money because I hadn't stopped believing that she was innocent. I held onto the hope that if she was guilty of anything, it was of not being strong enough to contain her addiction, that her last couple of years of sobriety had given way to a final, fatal binge, making her vulnerable to the people behind the drug ring.
If I were wrong, what I had learned in twenty-eight years as an FBI agent would prove true once again. While there are more unintended consequences than conspiracies, more careless acts than crimes, and more people with good intentions than evil motives, crooks, even the ones you love, will never cease to amaze and, too often, break your heart.
Lucy was right that Ammara Iverson would cut me out of her investigation. I couldn't allow Ammara or anyone else to pass final judgment on my daughter and would fight to save whatever was left of her memory. Milo Harper was afraid that dreams could kill. I was focused on the other side of the equation, keeping my dreams of Wendy alive.
Sherry Fritzshall's resentment toward me was palpable. She had instructed Nancy to hold me in the lobby until she arrived and then made certain that Leonard and Anne from HR tied me to my desk until she could hamstring me with a day of interviews, tossing in lunch with her and a meeting with the boss in case I didn't know what to with my free time. Tomorrow, she'd probably ask me to take inventory of the office supplies, promising me a key to the men's room if I found the missing paperclips.
I would meet with the project directors but not on an assembly line that guaranteed canned responses regardless of whether their answers matched my questions. Interviews were much more productive when the subject hadn't spent the day rehearsing.
I needed to get a feel for the institute on my own without being fed forms, schedules, and histories. The best way to do that was to walk the halls and listen to the chatter that bubbles up everywhere there are people who are convinced they are underpaid and underappreciated, which describes everyplace with a clock that gets punched twice a day.
I stepped onto the elevator, activating the buttons by swiping my key card across a sensor. No card, no access. It was a basic security measure to prevent the kind of walk-in traffic that liked to wander hallways looking for unguarded purses and laptops or assault women in the bathroom. I punched the button for the fifth floor, a random start.
Office buildings are office buildings. There are only so many windows, corners, and cubicles. Toss in rooms for files, breaks, supplies, conferences, and toilets and they all look alike after a while. This one also had labs, libraries, auditoriums, and lots of locked doors. I decided not to use my master key card during business hours since barging in unannounced wouldn't win me any friends.
I stuck to the open areas occupied by support staff and the break rooms, practicing my skills as a conversation stopper. People acknowledged me with a nod; a few stealing glances at my ID card to catch my name and waiting until I had passed before resuming their conversations. They were not a welcoming bunch though they appeared intent on doing their jobs and mindful that what they were doing was important enough to be protected from strangers like me.
Less than an hour after I started, I was back at Leonard's desk. He was sorting through mail.
'Tear yourself away?' I asked him.
'Sure thing.'
He had one of those perpetual eager, ear-to-ear smiles, the kind guaranteed to exceed expectations on his annual review. He followed me into my office. I booted up my computer and entered my user ID and password.
'What's online here?'
'Everything.'
'Meaning what?'
'Depending on your level of authorization, you can access every personnel file, every research project, every everything. You just have to know what you're looking for. What are you interested in?'
'I want to read up on the institute's research projects.'
'Here, let me show you.' He walked me through a quick tutorial, showing me how to access information. 'As you go deeper into certain files, you'll be asked to reenter your user ID and password to make certain you are authorized to see those materials. It's all pretty intuitive.'
'Thanks. I'll let you know if I run into trouble. Close the door on your way out.'
Leonard was right about the system being intuitive. I found my way into the files of the lucid dreaming project, reentering my user ID and password as the security level increased from file to file. I bypassed the basics explaining the project, giving a cursory glance to Anthony Corliss's biography though I took the time to read Maggie Brennan's.
Her photograph showed a woman with gray hair cut short and straight, no makeup, full cheeks sagging past a down-turned mouth, eyes fixed in the distance-a woman not given to joy. She graduated from Berkeley with a degree in biology and went on to UCLA where she obtained a PhD in neuroscience. A string of academic appointments followed with matching publications in journals and texts, all focused on posttraumatic stress disorder and memory. She joined the Harper Institute a year ago. Her bio began with her college education as if she was
