Valley of Bones

Nine

Lorna follows Darryla Chambers down the Pine Sol-perfumed corridors of Jackson Memorial Hospital toward the locked ward run by the Division of Forensic Services. Darryla is a large woman, so large that much of Lorna’s field of view is occupied by her blue scrubs, the broad back and shoulders, the spectacular rolling buttocks. Darryla the Gorilla to the wards, but this is because of her size and not, as far as Lorna knows, because of either her ferocity or the color of her skin. She is actually a gentle and caring person, who brooks, however, no shenanigans from her criminous lunatics. As she walks, Lorna continues her reflections on large women. Judge Packingham is large, larger than Darryla, really, a set of shoulders like a linebacker in pads, her face flat and pale beneath a ridiculous little gray perm, those black robes accentuating the hugeness. Packingcrate they call her around the courthouse, the usual cruelty. A few decades back she had worked for Janet Reno in the state’s attorney, and they used to say that she was the box Janet had come in.

At the hearing the judge did the right thing, really the only thing she could have done given the agreement among the headshrinkers and the acquiescence of the prosecutor. Emmylou was deemed incapable of assisting with her own defense and remanded to Jackson for thirty days’ observation. The defendant sat quietly during the twenty-minute hearing and answered in a clear voice when the judge explained to her what was about to happen. She seemed to Lorna at that moment the furthest thing from crazy.

That was the day before yesterday, and now Lorna is about to visit Emmylou for the first time. She catches up with Darryla and asks, “How is she settling in?”

“Dideroff? Shoot, give me a couple more like her I could get rid of half my staff.”

“What do you mean?”

Darryla pauses to open a locked door with one of the large ring of keys she carries at her waist. She motions Lorna through, then follows, locking the door behind her.

“Spends most of her time writing in a school notebook. Besides that…well, the population always responds to new people, usually by getting upset. There’s a new mix on the ward, in the dayroom, you know? But this time, it seems like she calms everyone down.”

“She calms them?”

There is a nurses’ station inside the door, and Lorna signs in on a clipboard.

“Yeah,” says Darryla, “she reads them stuff from the Bible. And explains it, like it was the newspaper, not preachy or anything.”

The dayroom smells of people and bleach, not unpleasant really, compared with some of the booby-hatch dayrooms Lorna has experienced; this is because the inhabitants are the dangerous rather than the incontinent type of nut, and many are not nuts at all, but mere criminals feigning madness. Darryla gestures and Lorna sees that Emmylou is sitting on a couch with a book open on her lap. Two women, one black and one white, are sitting on either side of her on the peeling vinyl, and the black woman is stroking her arm. Emmylou’s lips are moving, but Lorna is too far away to hear what she is saying and something in the scene disturbs her so much that she does not wish to come any closer. She observes, however, that of the two dozen or so people in the dayroom, somewhat more than half are paying attention at varying levels to Emmylou, while the rest are conversing with the usual demons: some unseen, some on the screen of the television set hanging from the ceiling.

“You can use therapy room B,” Darryla says. “I’ll go get her for you.”

Lorna leaves the dayroom and walks down the hallway. A smiling figure blocks her way, and it takes her a moment to recognize Rigoberto Munoz. Rigoberto has been cleaned up and looks as normal as deteriorated schizophrenic street persons ever look: only mildly nightmarish. The man grimaces involuntarily and says, “Hi, Doc.” Lorna assumes a professional smile and they chat. Rigoberto is doing fine, is scheduled for release. To where? The man looks doubtful. He thinks his cousin in Hallandale will take him in. Lorna makes a winding gesture with her hand. “So that’s okay now?” Rigoberto shuffles and looks embarrassed. “Oh, yeah, no problem,” he says as his tongue shoots out and does an elaborate lip lick. Lorna is happy that Munoz no longer thinks his penis is being reeled into his abdomen by aliens, but she does not wish to know much more about his mental state or plans. It is not her job.

She excuses herself and enters Therapy B, which is a room about half the size of a high school classroom, containing nothing but chrome and plastic chairs in cheerful colors and a couple of Formica-topped tables. She sits and takes her notebook and tape recorder from her bag. In a minute or so, Emmylou comes into the room, dressed in a gown and a striped bathrobe and paper slippers. Lorna gestures to one of the chairs, and Emmylou sits in it. Lorna sees she is carrying the book she had in the dayroom; not surprisingly, it is a Bible.

“So you decided I was crazy,” says Emmylou, smiling, gesturing to the environment.

“We decided you couldn’t effectively help your own defense,” says Lorna primly. “Like the judge said, you’ve been sent here for observation and treatment. How are you doing on your meds?”

“They make me sleepy and dull.”

“We can have the dosage modified.”

“To zero?”

“Well…I’ll speak to Dr. Lopez and see if we can’t get you more comfortable. Meanwhile, you seem to be adjusting well. You’re writing, I understand.”

Emmylou nods and holds up her Bible, and Lorna can see that there is another, slimmer book clutched beneath it. “Uh-huh. Detective Paz got me these notebooks. I finished the first one already.”

“Well, I’m sure we’d like to read it. Darryla tells me you’re reading to the other patients. I saw you in the dayroom.”

“Yes, I like crazy people,” Emmylou says. “They do less harm than the sane, and many of them are close to God. One of the hard things about being crazy is that people stop looking at you like you’re a soul. And I touch them, and help them to pray, if they’re possessed. Sometimes it works.”

Lorna’s throat is suddenly dry, almost crackly and painful. She swallows, wishing she had thought to bring a bottle of water. She thinks she is nervous because she has not done any real therapy in a long time, assuming that is what this is. Could it be that she fears the mad? No, nonsense, put that out of the mind! A little initial nervousness, which she assuages by fiddling with the recorder. She falls back on the good old Rogerian ploy, affirm the patient by repeating her statement. She says, “Possessed.”

“Mm-huh. Of course, if I believe that, that’s another symptom of me being crazy, right?” Emmylou has been staring down at her hands and the Bible she carries, as if anxious to return to the sacred realms, but now she lifts her head and turns her eyes full onto Lorna’s. This is highly unusual. Crazy people do not go in much for eye contact. For an instant there enters Lorna’s mind the thought that Emmylou Dideroff is the furthest thing from crazy, that it is the hospital authorities and the psychiatrists and the guards and the real estate tycoons who control the city of Miami, and the people in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., running the government who are crazy; for an instant another world appears to her inward eye, a world as real as stone or bread. But just as quickly a lifetime’s defenses against this world take charge, and although the hairs stand up on her arms and a chill runs down her spine, she is able to pretend that nothing has happened, that she is in command of the situation, she with her Ph.D. and her pass out of here and this woman is an uneducated redneck lunatic murderess….

Lorna clears her throat and says, “So…you think you can exorcise other people just by touching them?” Thee — word in invisible quotation marks.

“Christ can,” says the other confidently. “That was the main kind of thing he did when he was among us, and he still does it. Sometimes he uses me, sometimes other people. But we can all do it our own selves, really, Christ is driving out demons from the inside of us all the time, or the world would be a much worse place than it is, if you can imagine that.”

“Mm. But…you don’t have a demon in you, do you?”

“Who says I don’t?”

“I thought you were conversing with saints.”

A stunned look appeared on Dideroff’s face. Her mouth gaped and then suddenly and surprisingly she bursts into hearty laughter, which she quickly brings under control, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Oh, Lord, I’m sorry. That just struck me so funny. Lord!”

Lorna has not joined in this laugh, although the valuable wordhebephrenia now swims up out of her memory, and she scribbles it down, followed a second later by a question mark. “Would you like to tell me what was so funny?”

“Oh, it’s hard to put into words. Just, really, you assuming that demons and saints can’t dwell in the same person, or not even that, because it’s pretty plain you don’t believe in either saints or demons dwelling in folks and you were trying to, I don’t know, catch me out with some kind of lawyer’s trick, when it’s just so plain that it’s just the ones who are most afflicted by demons who get to be saints. What you said, to a religious person, it’d be like saying, oh, because you’re sitting in the dark, that means youcan’t turn on the light! ” Here she lets out a little giggle. “That’s why I laughed. I’m sorry.”

Lorna decides to forget everything but this apology. “Emmylou, I’m not offended. I’m just trying to help you.”

“To…?”

“Pardon?”

“You’re trying to help me to…”

“I believe you’re mentally ill. I’m trying to help you get better.”

“So that I can be tried for murder.”

“Well, yes, so that you can aid in your own defense. But it seems to me that you could develop a pretty strong presumption that when you committed the crime you’re charged with, you were not legally sane.”

“I don’t see how that could happen. I haven’t got a mental disease and I sure didn’t murder Colonel al-Muwalid.”

“Well, then who did, Emmylou?” Lorna snaps. “The invisible man?” Lorna felt herself blush. The damned woman has made her lose her clinical perspective, although she immediately excuses this as another result of being out of practice. To her surprise, Dideroff seems to be considering this rhetorical outburst as a legitimate question. Her face is grave as she answers. “Yeah, I’ve been giving that some thought, all right. It’s my fault in a way. I thought I could carry it all myself, but he won’t be carried. He’s been waiting and waiting, I can see that now, he counted on my pride, and now he’s away loose, doing his work.”

“Who? Who’s been waiting?”

“The devil, of course. And his minions on earth. Another sin to my score, I guess.”

Lorna writes down “paranoid ideation” and “religious mania” on her pad.

“Minions?”

“Mm-huh. The spirit that destroys don’t ever have much of a recruiting problem, and he don’t tell me his plans. A little murder ain’t nothing to him, but as far as the why of it, your guess is as good as mine. He’ll wreck things here on earth for the pure fun of it, he likes when there’s misery and despair and for people to give up on the Lord. Oh, my, that poor man probably hasn’t got an idea what’s happening to him.”

Lorna was lost. Her pen stuttered to a stop. “What poor man?”

“Why, that policeman. Detective Paz. I felt him fly right out of me and stick to him and he saw it too, only he’ll never admit it, that’s the pity.”

“Okay, Emmylou, let me get this straight. You think the, ah, devil that was in you jumped out of you and into Detective Paz?”

“Mm-huh.”

“And that would mean he’s no longer in you, right?”

Lorna is looking at the woman as she says this, and so she sees something remarkable happen. The person she has been talking to disappears and is replaced by someone else. The blue eyes turn from mild to icy; the very bones of the face seem to recompose themselves into something less, or more, than human. Lorna is familiar with the expression “it made her blood run cold” but has heretofore considered it a mere figure of speech, but it is actually, she now finds, a good description of what she now feels.

The new Emmylou says, in a quite different voice, one that seems to penetrate Lorna’s head without using her eardrums at all, “It don’t work that way, honey. My name is Legion.” And she smiles, showing more teeth than Emmylou Dideroff actually has in her mouth.

This cannot be happening, Lorna thinks, and closes her eyes. It is all she can do to keep from screaming. When she looks again she sees yet another change come over Emmylou. Her body stiffens, she cocks her head unnaturally to the left, as if straining to hear something, or attempting to dislocate her neck. Her mouth opens, her eyes flutter rapidly, a blur of lashes. She stands, she reaches for something invisible to Lorna, and falls forward. Lorna catches her and now she does cry out.

To Lorna’s surprise and relief, Mickey Lopez is not particularly exercised over the day’s session with Dideroff, nor does he regard it as a failure. They meet later that morning in the office he keeps in the mental health center. Mickey is his usual avuncular, supportive self. “Okay, you moved fast, but she challenged you, and I think you did the right thing,” he says after listening to the tape.

“I did?”

“Yeah, entering the fantasy, as if you wanted to participate in it, this cops-and-robbers game she has going, with the devil tossed in. But you can’t get distracted.”

“No.” Doubtfully.

“Right. Look, my dear, there is an impairment here, and now we know it may have a neurological basis. She had an atonic seizure, yes? Seizure, religious hallucinations, we’re now maybe looking at epilepsy with a focus in the medial temporal lobe, it’s practically diagnostic. What you need to remember isshe is crazy,you are not. Sane, presenting yourself as sane, you pose to her delusional system a serious challenge. You can regard that system almost as a person in its own right. It wants to survive, yes? When you push it, as you did here, it will fight back, or retreat from contact, which is what we just saw. The devil, or whatever, is chasing her, and she can’t talk to you, so she checks out.” Lopez leans back in his chair and bridges his hands, a typical gesture, but here in the plain institutional office and not his well-appointed shrink’s lair, it seems thinner, more ticlike. Is Mickey as confused as she is? She rejects this thought. He continues, “So in these delusional cases, we must do two things simultaneously: one, we encourage the person to spin out their tale, we become confidants without ever actually validating the delusional system.” An admonitory finger: “A subtle point. It separates the men from the boys in this business.”

“So to speak,” says Lorna. “And the other?”

“You tell me.”

Lorna considers this for a moment, grateful for the show of confidence, if that is what it is. “Well, I guess to deal with, I mean, to try to locate the underlying cause, the lesion, or neurosis, or trauma, and help the patient work it through, using appropriate means.”

She is rewarded with a smile for this conventional answer, which goes only a little toward relieving her of her doubts. Mickey was not there in Therapy B, did not see the woman’s eyes. Or her teeth. He says, “Yes. Easy to say, difficult to do, of course. Now, the meds may help.” He checked the file on his desk. “We have her on Haldol, two milligrams tid. How’s she doing?”

“She complains of drowsiness.”

“Yes, well that’s normal the first couple of weeks. We should start her on Dilantin too, for the seizures. But she’s social, not withdrawn?”

“Very social, apparently, the belle of the ward. She calms the place down, I’m told.”

He chuckles. “Yeah, her and the Haldol. Anything else?”

“What if she won’t talk to me anymore?”

“That’s always a possibility, she’s fitting you into her paranoid delusion. Let me know if that happens, and we’ll up her dosage or try another med.”

“I’m not sure that’s indicated, Mickey. There’s something about her…I don’t know, it seems crazy”?here they both laughed?”but, you know what they say, even paranoids have real enemies.”

Now Lopez’s smile cooled. “So, what…you think she’s coming off a genuine trauma? Some abuse?”

“Yes, and I’m concerned that we don’t have a real file on her. She has no background, no relatives to talk to…I don’t know, she seems so…nonimpaired compared to the typical NP remand, really centered and calm….”

“So she’s writing her life story for you, right? You’ll read it and you’ll come to a conclusion. If she’s been to heaven and talked with the angels, that’ll be one outcome, and if she was in with a gang of Colombiandrogeros, that’s another. Meanwhile, she’s safe and warm and we’re in no rush. You have to get your paper out of this, remember?”

Lorna does, with some shame. They talk technicalities for a few minutes and then Lopez says he has another meeting. As she leaves, he speaks: “One more thing, kiddo. Don’t fall in love.”

“In love?”

“Yeah, don’t fall in love with the patient. Everyone knows about transference, but it works the other way too. Obviously something about this woman appeals to you. At some level, you don’t really want to believe she’s crazy, yes?”

A shrug. He says, “Just watch it is all I’m saying,” and gives her a big, warm, Mickey Lopez-faux-Jewish smile.

After this, Lorna drives downtown and meets with a group of retail-chain personnel managers about testing programs that might reveal a propensity for dishonesty in potential employees. She is smooth and cool and much appreciated by the conclave of middle-aged men and women, and she wonders yet again why she does not restrict her practice to such bland services. The environment, an elegant office suite in a NE Fifth Avenue high-rise, is terrifically beige and has a great view of the bay. It is roach free, nor does it smell of Pine Sol, all of these features a nice change from her usual venues. Why, then? A last scrap of youthful idealism?

“Sheer dumb, honey-child,” said Betsy Newhouse when Lorna puts the question to her lightly an hour later at their gym. “I keep telling you that the rich need good done for them just as much as the poor and they pay a lot better. I mean, let’s face it?if they had anything on the ball, they wouldn’t be poor.” Lorna laughs in spite of herself, although not very vigorously, as she is struggling, as always, to keep up with Betsy on the StairMaster. This is one of the pleasures of the freelance life, the two women agree; they can come to the gym when they please, when it is empty. For Betsy, who is in real estate, this means access to whatever machine she needs to hone each muscle group to perfection, while for Lorna it means not having to strip naked in front of many women. Other than them there are only two men and a woman in the place, the latter being, delightfully, in far worse shape than Lorna feels herself to be.

“I have a social conscience,” puffs Lorna. She is streaming sweat despite the artificial chill of the air-conditioning, and she imagines her face looks like prime rib. She casts an admiring glance at her friend, who is stepping easily, dry as a bone, her breasts solid as bisected baseballs in their spandex casing. Lorna does not wish to think about what hers are doing: a pair of pups fighting in a gunnysack is a phrase she once heard on the street in reference to a jogging woman (not her) by a couple of construction workers. Ever since, she has never been able entirely to expunge it from her mind.

“There’s a procedure for that now,” says Betsy. “You could have it removed along with a tummy tuck. Oh, listen, we have to go to De Lite after. They’ve gotpesetje this week.”

“What?”

“It’s this great Albanian goat cheese, unpasteurized and zero fat. Zer-o.” Lorna voices appreciation of the Albanian nation’s cheese-mongers and agrees to the date, although she wishes Betsy would not suggest surgical modifications quite so often. It reminds her of Rat Howie, and also of her late mother, whose body was whittled down to a nubbin by surgery of the noncosmetic variety during her last year of life. Surgerynot, is Lorna’s prayer, or would be, did she ever actually pray. Slow Lorna must keep on climbing the endless staircase (such a symbol of her life so far!) when Betsy completes her allotted generation of ergs.

After this climb, Lorna hits a few other machines, somewhat less vigorously than her trainer would like, and then waves to Betsy and motions upward. Betsy waves back and shows five fingers, meaning she will be along in a notional five. The dressing room is deserted, Lorna happily observes. Moving like a thief cleaning out a bank vault, Lorna strips, grabs a towel, and heads for a shower stall. With a towel wrapped almost around her, for she is too generously built for the stingy gym towels, she weighs herself, although she knows she is not supposed to do this every day, and is pleased to find that she has dropped a full pound since the previous visit, or perhaps a little more, as the towel must weigh half a pound at least. As she steps past the shower curtain, however, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror and sees not a figure that would have made Auguste Renoir fall to his arthritic knees in worship, but galaxies of hopeless lard. She does not cry in the shower, although she has before this, any number of times. She dresses, and she and Betsy go to eat. The Albanian goat cheese tastes like library paste and chalk, but Lorna is a good soldier and snaps up far more of it than Betsy does, without complaint. Zero fat.

Toward the end of the day, Paz got a buzz from Major Oliphant’s secretary, requiring him to report forthwith, which he did, garnering several speculative looks from other detectives as he passed. The major was behind his desk, in shirtsleeves, drinking from his FBI mug and eating what looked to Paz like a churro. Oliphant offered coffee, which Paz accepted and got it in a cup marked with a Treasury seal and the legend THIRD ANNUAL COMPUTER FRAUD CONFERENCE, DENVER.

Oliphant gestured with the pastry and said, “You got me hooked on these things, Paz. These’re not anywhere near as good as yours, though.”

“They have to be fresh, sir. Thirty minutes out of the fat and you might as well use them to pack bearings.”

“We could set up a fryer outside my office.”

“Good plan, sir. I could be the departmentalchurronista.”

“You’d like that, would you?”

“I’m always ready for a new challenge, Major.”

Oliphant chuckled, a dark organic sound. “Well, I called you in about an old challenge. The Trianon affair. Christ, it sounds like one of those things you learned in grade school, that caused the First World War, but I can never remember the victim’s name.”

“Jabir Akran al-Muwalid.”

“Right. I got an interesting call from Washington today, a buddy of mine who shall remain nameless, passed on a heads-up about our case. Your partner talked to a guy named Floyd Mitchell recently? About David Packer?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t get much out of him. Mr. Mitchell is tight with information.”

“That may be because Mr. Mitchell doesn’t exist, and that fact stays in this room. Mitchell is a cutout. Every major intelligence operation has one. A local PD calls asking for information on some name, like your guy did, and the girl brings it up on the machine, and a bell goes off and she goes ‘Hold for Mr. Mitchell,’ or Blake, or Fox, and the call shunts to the duty officer on the case and he spreads snow on the inquirer, and they hope he goes back to sleep.”

“And are we going back to sleep?” asked Paz.

“Maybe we should. My guy there tells me this is high level. That call rang a lot of bells. Your Mr. Packer is one well-connected fellow.”

Oliphant tossed his bad churro into his waste can, followed by the bag and waxed paper, nice swished shots, and then took a drink from his FBI mug. “National security is a funny business. I never had much to do with it in the Bureau, never much wanted to. Nowadays, of course, everyone running around with their head cut off, I guess every swinging dick is involved in it somehow.”

There was a pause. Oliphant seemed to be making his mind up about how much to tell Paz about whatever this was about. Paz said helpfully, “What was it you did for the Bureau, sir, if you don’t mind me asking.”

“Oh, the usual. Bank robberies, kidnaps, fugitives. Bread and butter stuff. Taught at Quantico for a couple of years. I enjoyed that. Then I got interested in computer stuff and I headed up a special task force on kiddie porn. We busted a couple of major traffickers, which gave me a lot of satisfaction. Then I was deputy SAIC in New York, where I met the chief, and here I am. Things have changed, obviously, last couple of years, since the events in New York. And we, I mean the Bureau, is ill-suited to carry out the national security mission. In fact, the last time we tried it we made fools of ourselves, spying on movie stars while the fucking Russians were taking everything that wasn’t nailed down. The reason is that we’re trained to make cases, to collect evidence for criminal prosecutions. That’s where the gold has always been, how you get promoted. Now you say you want us to stop things from happening, a whole different kind of op. Well, how the fuck do you do that?”

Paz had no idea. After a moment he asked, “So Packer was involved with the victim, and you learned he was a national security menace?”

“Huh? Oh, no, that’s not the point. My friend wanted me to know that the people who put him on the watch list were kind of a peculiar outfit. You haven’t come across any references to anything called the Strategic Resources Protection Unit? The acronym is pronounced ‘serpu.’ “

“No. What is it?”

“Well, strategic resources need protection is the idea. Chemical plants, pipelines, power grids. Transshipment terminals, especially petroleum terminals. If someone had something like six bombs in the right places?the Gulf, Saudi, Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, and so on?they could cut sixty percent of our petroleum deliveries off for months. It’s a fairly vulnerable business, or so I’ve been told. Anyway, this SRPU has that job, both here in the States and overseas.”

“That makes sense, then. The vic was in the oil business.”

“Really?”

Paz related what they had learned from Michael Zubrom, including the odd business of the missing cell phone.

Oliphant said, “Okay, so this Zubrom suggested that the victim had secret knowledge of an oil find and…what? He was using diverted oil to raise money so he could develop it? That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know a hell of a lot about it, but I always thought oil fields were developed by oil companies, and they spent in the multiple millions to do it. So a couple of hundred K is not going to make a dent in that. Besides if the Sudanese government knew about a big find, they’d be negotiating openly. I mean oil isn’t like some kind of hidden treasure, with a map,X marks the spot, you go down there with a truck one night and you’re set for life.”

“Oh, you’re baffled too?” said Paz. “Good. I thought I was losing it. Plus, this new thing. The victim is on a watch list of an outfit that’s supposed to protect let’s say oil fields, refineries, from terrorists. Was he a terrorist? It doesn’t look like it, unless that was what the oil sale was for, money to set up a terror network.”

“It’s something to think about. Did we find any money?”

“Not that kind of money. I got Morales checking wire transfers out of that Jersey bank Zubrom sent his payment to, but I don’t have any high hopes. Those guys are pretty tight with their information, and they’re not going to be impressed by a cop from Miami.”

“No, they’re not that impressed by the FBI either. I hate that you didn’t find a cell phone.”

“Yeah, me too. Among other things, it casts doubt on Dideroff’s guilt, or at least suggests that she didn’t act alone.”

“Did she act at all?” Oliphant’s tone had been speculative, collegial; with this last he was a boss again and staring directly at Paz.

He shrugged and answered, “Sir, you know what we know, except I arrested her and I saw something there. She could have killed him. For a couple of seconds she had that killer look. Whether she did or not…” Another shrug. “She’s not what you would call a regular person.”

“What about the giant confession she’s supposed to be writing?”

“Apparently still scrawling away. I’m dying to curl up and read it.”

“I bet. Look, I’m going to talk to Posada, get you both on this thing full-time. You need to find out more about this victim and our suspect, where they intersected, and we’re no longer just interested in strengthening the case against Dideroff. I want to know the whole story if possible. Use what she writes, but don’t stop there. I want her life story checked and cross-checked. Find out who our Arab was and what he was doing in Miami besides selling a shipload of oil. It can’t just be that. He could have done that from anywhere. He was in Miami for a reason. He was after something and someone was after him, and he knew it, or he wouldn’t have told your oil guy about getting some backup. Maybe he did get some backup?if so, find out what or who it was.”

“Okay, sir, but would you like to tell me why we’re putting a full-court press on something that looks a lot like a grounder.”

Oliphant made an impatient gesture. “Oh, hell, you know damn well it’s not a grounder anymore. You ever have a rat die in a wall? It doesn’t matter how much deodorizer you spray, there’s still that stink that sticks in the back of your throat. This thing has a stink like that. People are fucking with us, major players are playing us, and I’m goddamned if I’m going to be played. We need to go into the walls and find the rat.”

Paz took a breath and asked, “Sir, this wouldn’t have anything to do with why you left the Bureau?”

Oliphant stared at him so long that Paz was forced to drop his eyes. “That’s really none of your business. But if anything from my FBI experience ever becomes relevant to this case, I’ll bring it to your attention. Are we done?”

Paz stood. “Yes, sir.”

Oliphant was still staring at him. “You getting enough sleep, Jimmy?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t look like it. You got red rims on your eyes and you yawned three times in the last half hour. Maybe you need to lay off some of that Cuban coffee.”

“Yes, sir,” said Paz, “maybe I do.” He was in the hallway before he realized that Oliphant had steered the conversation away from revealing why the name David Packer had caused the security gates to slam down at the State Department.