Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [50]
“I’ll take care of it.”
“All right.”
About this time I had started to experience blackouts, nanoseconds of sleep that, like it or not, shut down the brain. I was fading in and out, with no defenses. After the grueling and unresolved encounter with Andrew, I could not grasp what else might possibly be expected of me. The rebuke came then, through a flickering daze.
“You were a kid once, too,” I heard Galloway say.
I went up to my pod and ate the tuna sandwich. I made some arrangements, and when they were complete, left a message on Kelsey Owen’s voice mail, reporting what I had done:
“Hi, Kelsey, it’s Ana Grey. I wanted you to know that I had a talk with the SAC about your theories, and based on my conversation with him, I have gone ahead and placed three agents on undercover assignment at different S&M bars in the Valley. Actually, one is a regular black leather bar and two are dungeons run by a dominatrix, where sadomasochists go to be punished with whips and racks, but I’m sure you’re familiar with the pathology. I think if we’re looking for a sadist, we should look where sadists hang out, don’t you?
“By the way, little lady, if you think this is your ticket to profile school, think again. There’s a code around here called not ratting each other out that even the brass catches on to. You want to tell me something, have the guts to tell me in person.
“And one more thing. I take pride in my work. It’s hard, what we do—to treat people fairly, whether they’re the good guys or not. Sitting down and interviewing the victim is one thing. But to sit down and interview a rapist, or someone who has done something that, in your past, you were a victim of yourself, that’s something else. That’s a result of time on the street.
“Not everyone can do what we do. I’m the kind of person who, when I hear the national anthem, I get all teary-eyed. It’s a feeling. Patriotism. I don’t know. But whatever that feeling is, you have it or you don’t. Like I said, I will keep you informed.”
My legs were responding only stubbornly as I passed beneath the portico of the Federal Building, not letting up in their complaints of stiffness and neglect; shoulders and neck were being just as petulant, as I had not been to the pool since the case began, but we all dragged on, discombobulated body parts trying to keep up the march. The evening was muggy and overcast, and glancing at the disinterested sky, I remembered one fragment of a dream in which an owl had put its spiky wing around me.
In the Bureau garage, four male prisoners were chained to a bench. I made them for Chinese mafia. There had been rumors of a deep cover operation about to end in a bust down in Garden Grove that involved the chief of police and a string of sex parlors owned by local Asians. This must be it.
Two of them were businessmen wearing coats and ties, two looked like delivery boys in bad seventies shirts. They were sitting down, handcuffed with arms behind their backs. The handcuffs were locked to a thick chain that ran around the bench. Two agents I recognized from the white-collar-crime squad were walking a fifth prisoner, also wearing a suit, toward the cubicle where he would be fingerprinted and photographed. It was slow going because of the ankle irons.
In the doorway of the cubicle—similar to the office where the manager of a parking lot might tally the ticket stubs—was Hugh Akron, looking like a shoe salesman eager to sell you shoes, but actually he was an English photographer who was working freelance for the Bureau. It would be his job to place the prisoners up against the wall—the most nondescript wall in the world, a little dark from head grease, a nothing piece of drywall—and snap their mug shots. He also did weddings.
A tall, spidery man pushing sixty, Hugh favored oversized blue-tinted aviator glasses and bowling-style shirts made of rayon. He had been doing this a long time and it showed, in the strong knobby forearms and curved spine that thrust the narrow head forward, in the practiced joviality of a natural-born hustler. The scams he ran