April Smith - Good Morning, Killer

“Hope you like spiders,” I called humorously.

Ramon answered with a Spanish phrase he knew I would not understand. Margaret’s hands were still somehow all over me as we chugged upstairs. But then she was all over everyone, shouting, “Congratulations! I heard Brian made the soccer team!” to a busy secretary, or giving the thumbs-up to a baffled cadet behind the desk. The waiting area was basically a wooden pew underneath a pot of fake begonias furry with mold, the yellowing walls smudged with finger marks, as if people had been crawling up them for decades.

Lean bicycle cops and sour overweight detectives were going in and out and Margaret had a word or a touch or a hug for each. Following in her wake was like looking through a camera in which smiling fish-eye faces loomed and fell away. The smiles were tolerant, and I wondered why. She had no experience and was no help to me. Working with the locals was tricky enough — they already resented the Feds. You hoped your contact person would be a professional, but here was an individual better suited to hostessing a martini bar.

When I said something like, “What’s with that Margaret Forrester?” Andrew responded with a sharp rebuke that Margaret Forrester was a police widow. Her husband (they called him “the Hat” because he shaved his head) had been one of Andrew’s closest buddies, an undercover narcotics detective murdered by a gang; but he had been assaulted and killed while off-duty, and therefore his pension benefits were denied. Out of compassion, and because the Forresters had two young children, the department gave Margaret this job.

“I hate spiders!” she confided. “They eat my cashmere sweaters.”

I have never owned a cashmere sweater or a new gold Lexus sedan, but Margaret Forrester had these things. They lived in a tiny cottage in the wrong part of Venice, but she would throw birthday parties for the police chief at the swank Loew’s Hotel, only the select people invited. She had been, according to the careless scuttlebutt you pick up at two in the morning, stunningly ambitious for her husband, to the point of leaking stories about his cases to the press so reporters would call and include his name. But now, according to the blue code of sacrifice, we were all supposed to cut Margaret Forrester a lot of slack.

We entered a single space where twenty investigators were jammed together. A lot of them wore telephone headpieces to block out the noise. Since they redesigned our offices I missed the camaraderie of our old bull pen, but in this arrangement you had to smell your neighbor’s aftershave all day and look at the ass end of his computer monitor slopped over your desk. In fact it was hard to see where one desk ended and another began, as they seemed to work on one square surface billowing with papers and personal clutter. The walls were brick and the window blinds maroon. It felt like we had walked into a bad TV crime show from the seventies.

Our team was arriving for the briefing, talking in small edgy groups. Everyone in the field was fired up about something, hoping their little piece would complete the mosaic and be remembered as the one link that led to the safe recovery of the victim. You don’t make big salary jumps based on big scores at the Bureau; merit accrues from the steady accumulation of good choices and the intelligent analysis of details, most of which goes into a file that nobody but a supervisor will ever see. Briefings in high-visibility cases give the rare opportunity to show your moves in varsity play.

Computer techs were crawling under the table as two agents frantically tried to re-create the timeline by tacking brown butcher paper on the wall, unrolling it over notices of bake sales and group discounts to Universal Studios, while two others followed with marking pens and printouts from Rapid Start, copying in large letters the sequence of developments in the case.

Big-time federal agency.

Rick Harding strode in a few minutes short of 5 p.m., wearing a navy blue suit and wraparound sunglasses that made him look like a corporate president on steroids, sliding his briefcase down the conference table past a row of computer screens showing odd cascades of numbers.

“People?” he called.

We began to settle, in the close wood-paneled room with the soda machine droning on, next to a kitchen where someone was using a microwave. There was the black-and-white of Juliana holding on to the tree and a blown-up school portrait of her looking out in the tired ocher light, with the glassy expression of martyrs too young to have known the passion for which they died. At the last minute, Andrew appeared in the doorway. Two rookies stepped aside for the senior detective.

“Let’s start,” said Rick, ritually hanging his jacket on the back of the metal chair.

I took my place beside my supervisor. Forty-seven, a former navy pilot, Rick wore his mustache neat and blond hair clipped. He always looked tight, but today he was pretty well steamed. You could tell because he unclipped the handcuffs from his belt and started tapping them on his thigh.

We are all fussy about our handcuffs. You are issued one pair that can last your whole career if you’re smart enough not to lend them. Like any other tool, they become worn with handling and acquire an idiosyncratic feel, so you can tell which is yours just by touch. Nothing is more straightforward than a pair of handcuffs. In times of stress they are a comfort; you will often see several people in a high-intensity meeting worrying and working their little rings of power.

The only problem with handcuffs is sometimes they fall in the toilet bowl. If you are a woman, especially, this will happen when you’re in a hurry and you forget to lift them out of the back of your waistband before lowering your pants. Then you will hear behind you the unmistakable, heart-stopping sound of metal falling on porcelain.

All of us have heard it, more than once.

“What’s all this?” Rick asked of the brown paper snaking around the walls.

“Computers went down,” chorused several people.

He nodded grimly as if expecting one insult after another. “Now we’ve got a media leak, is that right, Ana?”

General groans and shifting in chairs.

“Right. The dad called channel five.”

Eunice chimed in. “He locked himself in the bathroom and used a cell phone. He believed that if he could get the daughter on TV, it would lead to her recovery.”

“Was it not explained to the gentleman there is a media blackout on this case because it might escalate the suspect?”

“Yes,” I cut in, “but he was crazed because his wife had just admitted that she had a boyfriend. She thought this guy might have taken Juliana for revenge. I asked Special Agent Jason Ripley to check him out. Jason? ” I said it so harshly the poor kid jumped. He had been an agent only eight months — skinny and ginger-haired, still so eager he wore a three-piece suit every day.

“The suspect’s name is Ed Hobart.”

“He’s not a suspect yet,” I reminded Jason gently. Since when did I become a mother hen?

“The subject. Sorry.” His acne flushed pink. “Upstanding, churchgoing father of six. Mr. Hobart is a senior buyer in ladies’ fashions, who oversees a budget of five million dollars …”

My Nextel was vibrating, then the pager. It was Special Agent in Charge Robert Galloway, messaging me to return to the field office immediately.

“As for Mr. Hobart’s current whereabouts, the Seattle field office should be getting back to us within the hour …”

“Rick,” I said softly while Jason went on, “gotta go.”

“What’s up?”

“Galloway paged me twice.”

“What does he want?” Rick whispered back. “If it’s about the media leak, tell him we can handle channel five—”