Our eyes meet for just one small, meaningful moment, before each of us breaks eye contact. He’s right, of course. And that’s always been my plan. I have absolutely no intention of giving up this investigation.
The only question is what I’ll have to sacrifice to keep going.
42
“EMMY, DO come in,” says Dickinson. His assistant, Lydia, has left for the day. This floor, where the executives work, is half-empty and very quiet. The room, Dickinson’s office, feels smaller to me now.
For the first time, Dickinson is not pretending to be doing something else, to make me wait while he reviews a report or scans a lunch menu or chats on the phone to highlight my insignificance. This time, Dickinson has been eager to see me, eyeing me with that feral expression, a predator smelling blood in the water. He owns me now. I’m his. We both know it. I’ve lost. He’s won.
I walk up to the chair by his desk but remain standing.
“You can sit if you like,” he says.
“I’ll stand.”
He clucks his tongue. “Emmy, Emmy, Emmy. Always choosing the more difficult path when an easier path is available.”
We both know what he means by the easier path. I knew it more than a year ago, the first time he put his hand on the small of my back in a familiar way, how he used to hover over my shoulder under the guise of reviewing something on my computer screen. Then the roundabout references to a drink or dinner after work, and then, finally, that day he asked me to go away with him for a weekend in Manhattan. I remember that it didn’t click with me at first—I was so far from considering a romantic relationship with this guy that it didn’t occur to me he was talking about a lover’s getaway; I assumed it was business-related. Why are we going to Manhattan? I asked. He double-blinked his eyes, stared at me as if the answer were obvious. To have some privacy, he said.
That’s when I laughed. It was a small hiccup, a chuckle, nothing more, but enough to tell him that the mere thought of us rolling around in the sack together was downright comical.
At the time it happened, I felt kind of bad about it. I had every intention of discussing it with the Dick the next morning. But it never got that far. Because the next morning, I was told that I had been written up by Assistant Director Julius Dickinson for sexual harassment and erratic behavior.
“What’s the easier path?” I ask.
Dickinson actually winks at me, causing my stomach to do a flip. Then he gets out of his chair and comes around to my side of the desk. He shows me a small handheld device that looks like an old walkie-talkie, with lights and a small antenna.
“This is what you’d call a bug detector,” he says. He pushes a button, and it hums to life, one light turning orange, a small screen with a line bouncing up and down in jagged fashion, measuring radio frequency waves like a heart monitor. “It will detect any sort of eavesdropping device, phone tap, GPS transmitter, spy-cam.” He waves it over me and walks behind me. The humming noise continues unabated but steady.
“No recording devices,” he concludes, his breath tickling my ear, raising the hair on my neck. “Now I must frisk you. Raise your arms.”
“Why?”
“Because my little gadget won’t pick up a standard, old-fashioned tape recorder. Or maybe just because I want to.”
I raise my arms. He pats me down. He takes his time doing so, probing my various body parts so thoroughly that he knows what kind of underwear I’m wearing. After he’s examined every contour of my body, he takes my smartphone—a basic iPhone—and looks it over before handing it back to me.
“Very good,” he says, clicking off his bug detector, the humming abruptly ceasing.
“Why the cloak-and-dagger?” I ask.
“Why?” He leans against the desk, his eyes fully on me. “Because I want to have a conversation with you, Emmy, and I want it to be just the two of us.”
43
STILL LEANING against the desk, Dickinson crosses his arms, shaking his head at me like he would at an insolent child.
“A private conversation,” I repeat. “You’re going to explain what the ‘easier path’ is that I should be following?”
“You know what the easy path is,” says Julius. He opens his hands. “Would it be so bad, Emmy?”
Would it be so bad, having a sexual relationship with him? I’d rather have a tooth removed with a pair of pliers and no anesthesia. I’d rather bathe in volcanic lava.
My cell phone rings. I look at the iPhone’s screen. My caller ID says “Mom.”
“Ah, Mommy’s calling,” says Dickinson, glancing down at my phone.
This is about the time of day my mother likes to call, after happy hour has ended, offering slurry words of love to her only remaining child. The alcohol unlocks emotions that nothing else can, that she’s bottled up over the years, that pour out as syrupy expressions of love and regret and then recede to their hidden chamber when she’s sobered up.
“I’ll get rid of it,” I say. I push a couple of buttons and the ringing ceases. Then I place the phone on the chair next to me.
“As we were saying.” A smile appears in one corner of Dickinson’s mouth.
“I’m not attracted to you,” I say. “No offense.”
Dickinson lets out a small laugh. “None taken, Emmy. None taken.” He looks at me and cocks his head. “You don’t get it, do you? That would just make it more enjoyable for me.”
It’s like an ice cube down the back of my neck. It’s all I can do to even stay in this room. It would actually be more arousing to him if I slept with him against my will. My revulsion would be his turn-on.
What am I willing to sacrifice?
Keep your job, Books said. You can be more effective on the inside.
“And…if I say yes?” I ask, my head turned away from him, unable to make eye contact.
“If you say yes, Emmy, then you get your job back. Starting now.”
I close my eyes. “What about this task force? Can we keep investigating these fires?”
Dickinson doesn’t answer. His eyes have glazed over. His tongue peeks out and wets his lips. He’s imagining it, I realize. He’s picturing us having sex right now.
A wave of nausea surges to my throat. I mentally block any image of this pudgy, tanning bed–bronzed man with the bad comb-over in a state of undress, me along with him.
“So,” I say, “if I sleep with you—”
“Or whatever else I want. I’m a man of many appetites.”
I drop my head, pinch the bridge of my nose, and let silence hang between us. Then I look up and say, “No, I can’t do it.”
Dickinson, he with the upper hand that he so cherishes, tries not to give me the pleasure of seeing his disappointment. Instead, he just shrugs. “Then you’ve just worked your last day with the Bureau.”
“You can’t fire me because I won’t sleep with you.”
“I’m not. I’m firing you because I still consider you mentally unstable. What is this you’re saying about my demanding sex?” He leans into me. “That sounds like something that would be your word against mine, doesn’t it, Emmy?”
“Maybe so,” I say. “Maybe not.”
“I think I heard it the same way as Emmy,” says Books, booming through the speakerphone.
Dickinson jumps from his spot on the desk, his face ashen, like he just spotted a rat scurrying across the floor. “What is…what is this?”
“That’s Books,” I say. “I guess instead of shutting off my phone, I must have answered it. He must have been listening this whole time.”
Still stricken from this turn of events, the blood draining from his face (and presumably his scrotum, too), Dickinson says, “The call from…your mother?”
Oh, maybe I changed the caller ID for Books on my phone to “Mom.” That could have happened in, say, the last thirty minutes or so, before I came up here.
“You look unwell, Julius,” I say. “Maybe you should have a seat.”
Dickinson staggers backward, away
from the phone and me, until he hits the wall. His mind is working overtime, trying to replay our conversation, recalling what he said that Books would have overheard, whether he can spin it a certain way, whether he can get away with an outright denial.
Finally, with a slump to his shoulders, he seems to recognize that he’s lost this round. He said plenty to incriminate himself. And while he could get away with a denial when it was his word against a lowly research analyst, he knows that Books is a favorite of the director. All things considered, he seems to have decided it’s not a fight worth waging.
“You can’t do this,” he mumbles, but his heart isn’t in it.
“We just did,” I say. “Now sit down, Julius, while I explain to you what’s going to happen next.”
44
BOOKS AND I leave the Hoover Building together, a light mist spraying us. We head for his car in silence, still buzzing from our little escapade. Books was not completely at ease with it, the surreptitious eavesdropping of an assistant director’s conversation, but I prevailed on him that if Dickinson was going to make a move on me—and I was pretty sure he was, calling me in for a meeting after the close of business—then the only recourse was to fight fire with fire. (Pardon the pun.)
“What an asshole,” he says, once we are far removed from Hoover. “I mean, I knew the guy was a jerk, but…wow.”
“We probably should have asked for more,” I say. “We probably could have gotten more.”
We turn into the parking garage on Tenth Street Northwest, happy to be out of the escalating rainfall. Books doesn’t like rain. Never has. Snow, no problem. Blistering heat or teeth-chattering cold, he can handle. But he hates getting rained on. He doesn’t like wet clothes and damp hair, the messiness of it all. I, on the other hand, love the smell and feel and taste of rain on my face, the musty odor afterward, the feel of slick grass between my toes. Maybe Mother Nature was trying to tell us something about our compatibility.
“We’re the good guys, remember?” he says. “What we asked for is what we deserve, at this stage. Nothing more. I don’t want to waste the Bureau’s resources any more than Dickinson does, Emmy. Your investigation’s going to have to stand on its own two feet, and if it can’t, then we can’t force Dickinson to keep supporting it.”
He’s right. Still…it was kind of fun to place the noose around Dickinson’s neck and watch him squirm. There was a part of me that wanted to demand all kinds of things from him—a new office, a higher salary, a stipend—but I had Books, the voice of reason, tempering my excesses.
He’s always done that, I remind myself. He’s always smoothed over your rough edges. He was the anchor in the water, while you rocked up and down on the waves.
“It’s probably your last chance,” Books says to me. “So let’s hope it works.”
We reach his car, a new Honda sedan, and drive to Reagan National for our flight back to Chicago.
45
* * *
“Graham Session”
Recording # 11
September 10, 2012
* * *
I’m driving tonight, on my way back home. It’s a long, lonely drive with endless stretches of nothingness, just a well-lit highway and blackness on each side. It can mess with your mind, I can tell you.
Do you…do you know why I’m doing this? Why I’m recording these thoughts for you? I’m doing it because you think you know me, but you don’t. You don’t know anybody, really. And I can prove it to you.
Just use yourself as an example. You have thoughts that nobody else knows about, don’t you? Thoughts that you haven’t shared with a single human being, not your best friend or sibling—nobody. And sometimes it’s more than thoughts. It’s actions, things you do.
You could be the most generous and loving father, the most charitable of men, but if your buddies knew about those photographs of barely legal Asian girls you’ve downloaded to your computer, they’d remember that above all else—you’d be the pervert, first and foremost—so you keep it a secret. You could be a faithful wife who would never cheat on your husband, but if he knew that you touched yourself in the shower while thinking of the grade-school principal or some movie star, his opinion of you would change, so you hide it.
You don’t share those thoughts because you’re afraid your extremes will define you, that people will let those little nuggets overpower everything else they know about you, that finely honed image you’ve constructed. So you hide. You put on a mask. But don’t you see? Nobody can really know you unless they know your extremes. If all they know is the gooey, creamy center and not the ragged edges, the outer reaches of your personality, then they have an incomplete picture, a series of snapshots.
And do you think you’re special? Do you think you’re the only one who hides things about themselves? Of course not. Everyone does. Everyone around you has a sexual proclivity or a sadistic streak or some surrender to temptation that they bottle up inside, that they hide behind their Armani suits or fancy makeup or warm smiles or polite laughter. You don’t really know anybody in this world except, maybe, yourself.
So that’s why I’m telling you everything about myself. I want you to know me. I want you to know everything. Because you definitely know my extremes, don’t you? You know my secrets. Should that define me? It probably will, but it shouldn’t. I’m more than just these things you know about. That’s not all me.
For example, did you know that I would never, ever hurt an animal? Did you know that I sponsor one of those children in a Third World country for thirty dollars a month? Did you know that I once paid for a neighbor’s funeral and tombstone because his widow couldn’t afford it?
Yeah, that really fucks with your head, doesn’t it? You want me to be some evil person because that’s easy to understand. You don’t want to know that I can be generous and compassionate. That doesn’t fit into your nice, comfortable construct. That doesn’t make sense to you, because you’ve painted me with one brush, one color, and there’s no room for any others on your mental palette.
I just don’t think it’s fair, that’s all. I don’t expect anyone to canonize me, but at least recognize that I’m a complex person like anyone else. I mean, at least I’ve taken off my mask for you. That’s more than you can say, isn’t it?
[END]
46
THE COOK COUNTY Medical Examiner’s Office is a great beige cement block with windows that some architect tried to pretty up with an angle or two at the edges. The blast of cold air as we enter is downright delightful. I never thought I’d be this happy to arrive at a morgue; the rental car’s air-conditioning had coughed tepid air at the four of us on the short drive from the FBI’s Chicago office. While Sophie Talamas may be dewy and rosy-cheeked, Denny Sasser, Books, and I just look like blotchy, irritable suits.
The harried-looking receptionist shows us to a tiny, windowless conference room. We all sink into the somewhat battered chairs, and I pick up a Vogue magazine, as if there’s any chance I’ll read it.
“So he killed a couple in Nebraska,” says Books. “And then a shoe salesman in Denver.”
“Right.”
“Where’s he going this week, Emmy?”
Like I know. Seattle? Austin, Texas? Burlington, Vermont?
Dr. Olympia Janus finally enters the conference room. She is a handsome woman, tall and straight and strong-looking. Her hair is short and black with strands of soft gray, and she wears simple, square black glasses attached to a beaded chain around her neck. She is wearing sensible shoes—Dansko?—and classic-cut gray pants with a blue cotton blouse.
“Hi, Lia,” says Books. Denny Sasser stands to greet her as well.
“Books and Denny! Nice to see both of you.”
Introductions all around, everyone shaking hands with her. Dr. Olympia Janus is an FBI special agent and forensic pathologist. The Bureau doesn’t often conduct its own autopsies, but when it does, it’s usually Lia Janus who performs them. She was at the Twin Towers, she was at the Waco and
Ruby Ridge standoffs—she’s been everywhere that mattered to the Bureau.
This was my one final chance, the one concession I got from Dickinson—that he would let Lia Janus autopsy our two Illinois victims, Joelle Swanson and Curtis Valentine. If she says there’s no foul play, I said to Dickinson, I’ll go away quietly.
My heart speeds up as she takes her place at the head of the table and lays two thick case files in the center of the table. She is all business. Professional. Guarded. But not at all aggressive.
“I appreciate all of the background information you got for me, Denny, on the two victims,” she says. “It was helpful.”
“That’s what I’m here for.” Denny has been doing the fieldwork, gathering whatever information he could about Curtis Valentine and Joelle Swanson while delicately tiptoeing around the local authorities.
Lia Janus looks around the room and releases a heavy sigh.
“Well,” she says, “you have certainly gone and confused things for some perfectly good coroners.”
Is that good or bad? It sounds good…right?
“I’ve conducted more than a thousand autopsies in my career,” she says. “I’ve seen people maimed and butchered and tortured, crushed and beaten and cut and burned. I’ve seen everything, guys. It’s impossible to surprise me.”
And? And?
“After examining the bodies of Joelle Swanson and Curtis Valentine, you can put me down as surprised,” she says.
“They didn’t die of smoke inhalation?” I ask, jumping the gun, unable to help myself.
“Actually, they did,” she says, turning to me.