“This really hurts.” Greer was still bitching. I reminded myself that I could be in a worse situation: I could be standing over that poor boy’s body. I could be that boy. Count your blessings; count your blessings. So I just stood there. “First off, you guys are more like some sick urban legend than an actual department, okay? Most of the Bureau thinks you don’t exist. You’re the Area 51 of the FBI.”
Good.
“But to find out you do exist … and to find out you’re all…”
“Heavily medicated?” I suggested. “Emotionally disturbed?”
“No. I’m heavily medicated and emotionally disturbed; I’m in the middle of my third divorce. You guys are all certified crazies.”
“That’s true,” I admitted. “We are.” And we had the charts to back it up.
But Greer wasn’t interested in a conversation; he wanted a rant. So he groaned and moaned and made yanking motions in his hair—which would explain his monk’s fringe—and shook his head and rolled his eyes. I expected him to burst into flames at any moment, and/or collapse into a seizure.
And his suit was dreadful: shiny at the elbows, frayed at the cuffs. His paunch was emphasized by the coffee stain between his third and fourth shirt buttons. I might be crazy, but I’d been able to drink without spilling since I was four.
He smiled, and it completely changed his face. He instantly looked younger and much less testy. He almost looked friendly. It was like a magic trick! A really good one with lots of mirrors and a pretty girl in an indecently short sequined costume. I wondered why he didn’t smile more often.
“Do you feel better now?”
He thought about it. “Yeah. I kinda do. Sorry. Thanks. Uh, I know you’re just following orders.”
“That’s true,” I teased. “I am.”
“I hate today. I’m supposed to be at my daughter’s baseball game right now.”
I nodded. “Fourth of July stuff.”
“Yeah! I’m the Number One Guy on the Grill.” That’s just how he said it, too. You could hear the capital letters. “I got all this hamburger meat at a huge discount—my cousin works for Lorentz Meats.”
“Oh, yum,” I replied, impressed.
He nodded. “I know! And about fifty kinds of brats, and now my wife’s gonna cook and she’d burn water. You should have heard all the bitching when my pager went off. And not just from me. My wife was pretty mad, too. Instead I gotta…”
“It’s unbelievable! Crazy people wearing sidearms?” He scraped at his shirt with a fingernail. “It’s like a bad joke.”
“Or a genius idea,” I suggested. “Set a thief to catch a thief, and all that.”
“No, it’s a joke. Did Congress approve this? Where’s your budget coming from? Are you telling me somebody looked at the proposal for BOFFO and said, ‘Yup, sounds like a plan. Here’s a check, and don’t worry, we’ll keep ’em coming year after year. Now let’s be careful out there’? I don’t believe it!”
I blinked. He didn’t? That was strange. How was this a puzzle? “It’s the government.”
A short pause. “Okay, well. That actually makes sense.” A fellow government employee, and thus tortured by the same payroll/health benefits/administration personnel, he had to admit the truth, even if he didn’t like it. “But come on. You’ve got kleptomaniacs pilfering at crime scenes—”
“He eventually bags anything he can’t help grabbing.”
“—agents who are convinced their reflections are out to get them—”
“How do you know they aren’t?”
“—agoraphobes who live in your office—”
“Yeah, but think of all the money’s she’s saving on commuting costs. And rent.”
“—claustrophobes in tents on the roof of your office building—”
“It’s cheap 24/7 security.”
“—a phallically obsessed department head—”
I didn’t really have an argument for that one.
“—and agents who … well…” He gestured vaguely at me.
“Who have multiple personality disorder, now more commonly known as dissociative identity disorder,” I supplied helpfully. “Sybil Syndrome. Please don’t ever call it that.”
“Yeah, that. And don’t even get me started on Pinkman.”
“Nobody wants you to get started on anyone.” Especially George Pinkman. I paused. “Since you know about us anyway, I figure there’s no harm in explaining.”
“Oh, goody.”
“What civilians and the occasional Fed don’t understand is, I’m effective because of my psychological quirks. Though quirks may not be the strongest word, to be fair.
“A sociopath thinks nothing of bending a few rules to get his man. And a kleptomaniac knows how to take things away from a bad guy right under his nose. A histrionic can turn in an Oscar-worthy performance in any undercover situation. Like that.”
“Mmmm, sure. Just like that. Uh-huh.”
“So, are we at all helpful?”
“You’re being rhetorical, I guess.”
I answered myself. “Sure we are. Are we a pain in the tuchus? Yes. Worth the hassle to get the job done? Well, we have an eight-figure budget that sails through congressional budget justification every single year. What does that tell you?”
“That I should have voted for the other guy.”
I giggled. “Do you have anything else to get off your chest?”
He gave me an odd look. “What are you, my therapist?”
“No. Just someone who wants to catch this guy. Like you.”
“Catch him.” He nodded slowly. “Yeah, well. I don’t want to catch him. I want to hang him by his testicles until they fall off.”
“It’s good you’ve got goals.” In this instance, he had my sister’s goals.
“I’m sorry you had to leave your family on a family holiday.”
“You, too.”
I didn’t volunteer anything, and when I didn’t say anything he sighed, then opened the front door for me. “Come on. Kid’s in the basement.”
Thus making the basement the place I didn’t want to go. But I had work to do. We all did, thanks to the killer.
chapter eleven
“You know what we can do,” I told Greer politely when we had the illusion of privacy. “You know we succeed—perhaps in spite of ourselves. No one wants to hoard leads. My partner and I do not care about the credit.” George opened his mouth, but I pressed my thumb and index nails together and he closed it so fast I heard his teeth click. “Our bosses want the win for their own reasons”—budget, budget, and budget—“but we want the killer caught and stopped. So let the bosses fret the paperwork and the numbers, while the field agents do what they do. What we do.”
“Yeah.” Greer rubbed his chin, which was wide and blue with stubble. He looked like a cartoon character. “Yeah, caught and stopped is good. Lettin’ somebody else fret the paperwork is also good.” He squinted at me. “You’re different from before.”
No doubt.
George snorted. “You’ve got no idea. Sag here is what we call the woman with many faces.”
I was impressed that he had been restraining himself with only a mild threat of violence, but occasionally George could see the big picture: an interdepartmental squabble made us all look bad, left unsightly marks on our records, and inadvertently aided the killer. Agent George Pinkman would not be able to achieve his dream of beating a suspect to death if we could not play nicely long enough to find said suspect.
“Are you doin’ that thing where you’re different people?”
“All the time,” I assured him.
“Yeah, okay.” Anyone in law enforcement dealt with the odd and unusual. You adapted—quickly—or found a new line of work. Greer had been at this a long time. “You made some good points when we talked last. And you got that JBJ freak.”
JBJ freak = the June Boy Job killer. Small wonder it kept coming up. The Twin Cities wasn’t known for its plethora of serial killers, and J
BJ had been active up until a few weeks ago. A family’s legacy of racism and murder led to the serial killings of blameless teenage boys over the course of decades. Catching the killer had not been as satisfying as I’d hoped. In the end, only the wrong people got hurt. As they often do. In the end, I was only tired. Oh, and shot. That was when I realized how much I wanted Dr. Gallo … and how much Cadence did not.
(We have the baker; Dr. Gallo is a fantasy. A fantasy getting entirely too cozy with Officer Rivers, I suspect. Why did I insist we have this insipid chat by the soda machine?)
Greer was looking from me to George, and from George to me. “Okay. I shouldn’t have mouthed off like that. But I was surprised to see you.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, ‘oh.’ Come on, don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
What is going on here? “I have never subscribed to the notion of bullshitting a bullshitter.”
“C’mon. You know. My boss sent me down here because you guys weren’t supposed to get the squeal.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” Greer looked around as if making sure a tech wasn’t sneaking up on us, ears cocked to eavesdrop. “I don’t blame you for coming down—there’ve been times I showed up places I wasn’t supposed to be. But you better check with your boss.”
“Sound advice. We shall obey. Thank you”—I held out my hand, and saw it swallowed by Greer’s paw—“for your time and courtesy.”
“Real different,” Greer added, and shambled back toward the scene.
George and I looked at each other.
“Okay, what the fuck? We’re only here because Gallo called me? Michaela didn’t send us?”
“Excellent questions.”
“Paperwork fuckup?”
“Such things happen. And the apartment was too neat. And it’s strange having Dr. Gallo there.”
“Uh, okay, at least you’re making perfect sense. You heard my subtle sarcasm, right? You picked up on that?”
“I have to think about this,” I told him.
chapter twelve
I blinked. I’d gone from the new driveway of our perfect house to George’s awful car in half a blink. “What happened?”
George took that as a cue to piss and moan for the next few minutes, pulling the car over (“See, see? I’m lucky I didn’t need stitches or a lobe transplant. You know I’ve got a rare blood type! Cross-matching for a transplant could have taken months!”) twice (“You’re not looking. Look. Look! Looooooooook!”) to show me the hideous damage Shiro had inflicted on his unsuspecting earlobe with two fingernails. Ha!
“What?” he demanded.
“What?”
“You laughed!”
“That was out loud?” Hmm. I should probably start keeping an eye on that. “Sorry.”
“There was a time you never would have laughed at my pain.”
Not out loud, anyway. But George was right. (He’d never know how much pain it caused me to even think that; if I had to say it to his face, my throat would constrict enough to suffocate me.) Once I would have been so bound by courtesy, so imprisoned in my “Can’t we all get along” mind-set that I couldn’t have laughed. But now—
“Bwah-hah-hah!”
George glared, then put his blinker on and pulled back into traffic. “Fucking unreal,” he muttered while I chortled in the next seat.
Did this mean I was getting better, or worse? I’d have to ask my shrink.
“Other than your poor mangled earlobe, what’d I miss?”
“Sue Suicide struck again.”
“Darnitall!”
“Ooh, do you kiss your shrink with that mouth? Yeah, this time he nicked the guy’s femoral.”
“Bled out? The poor, poor man!”
“No. According to Shiro, he died of a salt imbalance.”
“Oh. That hypo thing. Hyper thing? You bleed enough to freak out your system and that’s what ends up killing you? I dunno. Sounds made up.”
“I know, right? But it looks like that’s what ended up killing him. Gallo was there and he backed—”
“Max Gallo? The doc who runs the blood bank? What, did he lose the coin toss for Musical MEs?”
(Some counties were small enough or understaffed enough that local doctors took shifts to cover duties required by a medical examiner’s office, rotating on a month-by-month or year-by-year basis.)
“No, check this—the vic was his patient.”
“What?” I made no effort to hide how appalled I was. This wasn’t the first time Max Gallo had been found lurking near a crime scene. It wasn’t even the first time this month. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“Nuh-uh. He went over to check on the guy, found him, called us. Then Greer showed up—”
“I am so glad I missed all this,” I said, appalled.
“Chickenshit. Anyway, Greer huffed and he puffed but he didn’t blow us down. In fact, he was the least of our problems over there.”
“Why do I have the feeling that’s not good news?”
“You’ll get the crime-scene photos, but check this—the killer laid the guy out on a shower curtain in the middle of an immaculate living room. Not much of a mess. Shiro said it was too neat and she didn’t like what Greer had to say—”
“I mentioned I was glad to miss that, right? Yeesh. He’s not too keen on us.”
“Didn’t notice. Also, when I called him fat he got less keen.”
“You didn’t.” Even as I gasped that, I couldn’t believe I couldn’t believe it. “You did.”
“Yeah. But Shiro smoothed it over. Except I’m calling her Sag now.”
“That sounds like a terrible plan.” Maybe it only felt like I missed an hour or so. Perhaps it had been a month, or exactly one year. Much happened in not much time, darn it. Sag? Sag? How long was that going to go on? Was he trying to get beaten to death? And if he thought Shiro was saggy, did that mean he thought I was? And why did I care?
“Don’t bother me with details. Now we’re heading back to talk to Michaela.” He was silent for several minutes and I let him think. His earlobe sure looked like it stung. Heh. “Shiro’s right,” George said at last. “The apartments are too neat. And I don’t think the killer’s fixing these places up before he leaves. Or when he gets there. How’s he getting his victims to cooperate in their murders after they bust out the Swiffer and do the housework?”
“If we knew how, we’d know why.”
“Yeah, yeah.” George didn’t say much the rest of the way back to the office. I let him think. Truth be told, I sort of enjoyed the contemplative silence.
chapter thirteen
BOFFO’s offices were in downtown Minneapolis, a logically planned grid I’d always loved. Tough not to: you could get a Cinnabon the size of your head on your way to picking up a breakfast bagel. And if it was ten below outside, who cared? There were skyways, miles of them. Knowing how to navigate the entire downtown area without once going outside made me feel
(like a rat scurrying after cheese)
safe.
BOFFO’s shiny blue glass-and-steel skyscraper wasn’t the tallest building downtown; that honor belonged to the IDS center. (It being the tallest could have something to do with why people liked to jump off of it and plummet to their deaths: I jumped off the IDS and all I got was this lousy T-shirt and accompanying fatal head injury.)
(Oh my God that was so mean!)
It wasn’t the oddest-looking building, either—that’d be the Capella Tower, which rose straight and tall until the architect got bored and plunked a big cylinder on top, and then got really bored and stuck a big wire halo on top of that. It wasn’t the oldest—that was the Lumber Exchange Building, proudly slouching over the landscape since 1885. It wasn’t especially beautiful, either—that’d be the Wells Fargo Center. The BOFFO building wasn’t known for a gorgeous upper-floor light show (Target Plaza South) or looking like a smart kid had built it out of shiny, uneven Legos (AT&T Tower). It didn’t look like someone had plunked a big black crown on it
(Qwest Building) or like it was sponsored by the letter H (Hennepin County Government Center) or like a two-dimensional triangle (Marriott City Center). It also didn’t boast a clock wider than Big Ben (Minneapolis City Hall).
(Sorry—I would have been a tour guide, but I wasn’t up to the stress. Federal law enforcement was much more relaxing.)
What our small, shiny building had instead of all those things was us: claustrophobes, agoraphobes, paranoids, sociopaths, kleptomaniacs, DIDs, depressives, manics, manic-depressives, schizophrenics, obsessive-compulsives, somniphobes, psychotics, neurotics, and Republicans. Not to mention a platoon of psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists to tend to our many and weird needs, as well as a kitchen, therapy rooms, offices, cubicles, pop machines, printers—everything we needed to rule the world. Uh, fight crime.
Maybe I’m projecting, or maybe it’s just me, but we were more than a collection of medicated, armed individuals. For some of us, BOFFO was the first place we were ever made to feel welcome, and we were proud of our unofficial motto: No matter how crazy you are, we need you! And our other unofficial motto: BOFFO: We do more while heavily medicated than most people do all day.
It was downright humbling, when you thought about it.
Anyway, our small, shiny skyscraper wasn’t the FBI field office; it only housed BOFFO. The field office wasn’t even on the same block; it was over on Washington Street, and thank goodness. We of BOFFO should be kept away from … well … everyone. But especially other people with guns. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair to contaminate the field office. Some breeds of insanity are like viruses: people who hang too close can catch it.
That was also humbling, but in an entirely different way.
George parked in the underground garage, and we used our IDs to get into the elevators and up to the second floor, where our cubes were, along with our colleagues, our boss, and our kitchen. The fridge was full of containers that had threatening notes taped to them: Touch this yogurt and die, DIE, DIE!!!!!!!! and I’m watching you and I’ll know if you take my sandwich and Fuck you, don’t touch! Ignoring those notes had proved, um, perilous.