Линкольн Чайлд - Verses for the Dead

“You never asked why I wanted to stop at Jamesville,” Coldmoon said.

Pendergast looked over. “Conjugal visit?”

“No. It has to do with why I became an FBI agent.”

Pendergast closed the folder.

“I grew up on a reservation in South Dakota. When I was eleven, my father was murdered in a bar fight. My mother and I were almost certain who did it. But the killer was in tight with the tribal police. There was no investigation. We had nobody to appeal to — local and state police have no jurisdiction on the rez. The feds did, but they couldn’t be bothered. To them, it was just a fight between two drunken Indians. So the case was shelved. I was lost for a while, went to college, and then after a lackluster start it suddenly clicked. I worked my ass off to get that degree, graduate at the top of my class, and earn a spot at Quantico. Once I left the Academy, I made sure I got rotated into the satellite field office in Aberdeen. I investigated my father’s murder and found all the evidence needed to convict the killer. That was my first case.”

There was a brief silence. Coldmoon took a sip of his Dewar’s.

“So you became an FBI agent out of a desire for revenge.”

“No. I became an agent to help ensure that kind of injustice doesn’t happen again.”

“I see.” Pendergast paused. “And the perp is currently housed in Jamesville?”

“I like to visit him when I’m in the area.”

“Naturally. A reunion of sorts.” Pendergast nodded. “Which of the council fires is yours, by the way?”

“What?”

“The seven council fires of the Lakota.”

“Oh. Teton. Oglala.”

“And yet your eyes are pale green.”

“My mother was Italian.”

“Indeed? I’ve spent a great deal of time in Italy. What was her family name?”

“It doesn’t matter.” While Coldmoon loved his mother, he couldn’t help but feel she’d tainted his otherwise unadulterated Sioux bloodline. He’d taken her last name for his own middle one, but never told anybody what it was — he’d even kept it to a mere initial on his FBI application.

“Forgive me for prying. In any case, I hope your, ah, visit was a success.” And with that Pendergast went back to his reading.

Coldmoon regarded the agent with private amusement. It seemed the grim justice of the situation appealed to him.

At least they agreed about something.

Roger Smithback drained his bottle of porter and placed it on the scarred wooden table. Moments later, the barmaid — blond, fortyish, with spandex shorts worn over a swimsuit — came over. “Another, sugar?”

“Hell, yes.”

She plucked her order pad from a pocket of her shorts. “You boys ready?”

“I’ll have a grouper sandwich,” Smithback said. “Extra banana peppers, please.”

She turned to Smithback’s companion.

“The usual,” he said. The waitress smiled, scribbled on her pad, then turned away.

Smithback glanced across the table. The man who stared moodily back at him was ordinary in almost every way: average height, tanned, mouse-brown hair with a two-day stubble, wearing a Ron Jon T-shirt and baggy Bermudas. It was one of the getups Miami undercover cops favored — if you knew what to look for.

And Roger Smithback knew what to look for. He’d been working the town for six years now, starting as a lowly researcher at the Miami Herald and battling his way up to full-fledged assignment reporter. And Casey Morse had, more or less, risen along with him. They’d met during Smithback’s second week at the Herald . Back then, Morse was a newly minted patrol officer, assigned to Little Haiti. He put in his time pounding the pavement, spent two years on a narco rotation, and now he was a vice sergeant in the central district. And Smithback had been buying him cheeseburgers — rare, fried onions, no lettuce — once a week for the whole ride.

The waitress put a fresh bottle of Morning Wood on the table. Smithback grabbed it and took a long pull. The strong flavors of coffee, maple, and — yes, there it was — bacon that washed over his taste buds were stimulating and comforting. The beer was brewed just up the coast by Funky Buddha, and it was usually available only seasonally. But the Sunset Tavern always seemed to have a supply on hand, and that was the main reason Smithback frequented the place — that, and because it was a typical cop bar, where he knew Morse could chill out and relax.

They shot the usual shit for a while — the depressing prospects for the Marlins’ upcoming season; the new Zika outbreak in Liberty City; the tyrannical behavior of Morse’s new lieutenant. Morse was a pretty decent cop, but he never seemed to get along with his immediate superiors. Smithback wondered if that said more about the bosses or about Morse himself.

Smithback let the small talk continue, fiddling aimlessly with his porkpie now and then, until their dinners arrived. He’d done this for so long, he had it choreographed down almost to the individual dance steps. It wasn’t that he played Morse or his one or two other cop friends, exactly — it was more of a give-and-take in which both sides benefited. Police never liked to be thought of as leakers to the press, except of course when it benefited them directly — but they were as gossipy as anybody else. If they thought you already knew something, they wouldn’t change the subject... as long as they could rationalize they hadn’t been the first one to give up any dirt. But naturally, they were as curious as the next guy. So if you, as a reporter, had picked up an interesting tidbit of your own here or there... well, you could barter. That’s one reason Smithback often frequented neighborhoods like this one, where he might uncover tips that would interest a sergeant on the vice squad.

Smithback knew his style wasn’t flashy, but he didn’t care. He’d known plenty of reporters who lived just for the big leads. His older brother, Bill, had been one of them — always looking for an angle, antennae never at rest, pissing people off, a bull in a china shop who’d do almost anything to get another story above the fold. It wasn’t that he was a bad guy — Bill had been a great big brother, with a heart as big as a house, and Roger missed him and mourned his untimely death every day — it’s just that their work styles were as different as their personalities. Bill had liked jazz and poetry and Damon Runyon, while Roger preferred mathematics, Marvel comics, and classical music.

Their father had been a newspaperman, too, and in a funny way Bill and Roger had grown up mirroring two different sides of his personality. On the one hand, as a reporter their father had been the terror of their quiet Boston suburb, chasing down leads and local scandals with the determination of an ink-stained harpy. On the other, once he took over the reins of the Beverly Evening Transcript , he’d become more nuanced and strategic in his thinking: planning for the long term, seeing beyond the next big scoop, and carefully grooming both his paper and his sources. Roger understood that approach. The Transcript had been his dad’s first and last love — and he’d died at the tiller, so to speak, suffering a massive heart attack while sitting hunched over the phototypesetter.

Outside on Northwest Eighth, traffic hummed. The cars would slow down later, when the hookers came out. Morse was enjoying his burger, giving it his full attention. That was good, Smithback mused. Funny how cops always seemed to prefer comfort food when they went off shift — just like they seemed to prefer bars with the word Tavern in their names.

“How’d you make out with that commissioner?” he asked nonchalantly. He’d gotten a tip that a certain Miami commissioner had been hiring escorts using county money, and he’d passed it on to Morse.