Our fatigue is often caused not by work,
but by worry, frustration and resentment.
Dale Carnegie (1888-1955), American writer
The task force that paired FBI Special Agent Amber Watson and DPD Detective Sergeant Lexcellent hadn’t provided them with much of a mission profile, just “work together, get along, and don’t screw this up.”
The Bureau and the DPD had suffered a run of bad interdepartmental relations. It happened now and then, depending on the caseloads of each office, the types of cases and the personalities who worked them. After a bad jurisdictional storm the previous year over a case the FBI supervisor grabbed because he thought would enhance his career, the Detroit police chief called on the FBI boss for lunch. Four hours later the joint task force—the JTF—was born.
Foster Heath Benoit III was the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge—the SAC—in the Detroit office. He was acknowledged far and wide as the biggest tool in the tri-county law enforcement shed. Benoit hated the idea of lowering himself to cooperating with locals only slightly less than he hated looking to his own superbosses in Washington like a tight-lipped, tight-assed, self-aggrandizing roadblock. It was a tough balancing act.
A JTF wasn’t going to resolve much friction between the city and the feds, but this special agent in charge aspired beyond simple, pedestrian federal service. He needed to be seen in Washington as a get-it-done kind of office runner, even when he hardly ever got anything done himself. And his was a hot command.
With its Patrick V. McNamara Federal Building location only a few miles down Michigan Avenue from the Middle Eastern hotbed of suburban Dearborn, since 9/11 the Detroit office had become one of the most coveted commands in an FBI more sharply refocused on terrorism than at any time since World War II.
Benoit’s entire career had been built on a foundation of good work done by his subordinates. His was a classic case of If my people are working well, my job is done. Some would say that was effort enough and Benoit’s credit and impressive career had been earned nonetheless. Most others, however, just thought he was an effete, ass-kissing idiot child who appropriated the best work of his subordinates and used it to fuel his own advancement.
This actually was true. It did nothing to dispel the childhood axiom, “Cheaters never prosper.”
It helped not at all that he was a snobby, condescending native of tony Grosse Pointe itself, best known of the wealthy conclave of suburban Detroit Grosse Pointes that boasted some of the richest families in America. His spectacular family wealth allowed him to live there in his old family compound, and commute downtown in his own high-performance S65 AMG-Mercedes sedan instead of a government-issued G-car. Most of his agents lived in more prosaic neighborhoods. They often drove high-mileage beaters bearing white U.S. Government license plates.
The Byzantine Detroit experience wasn’t how most FBI offices ran. Before they were advanced to command, most special agents in charge had been hard-working street agents, up-from-the-ranks men and women who had done plenty of grunt work they believed in, and well, before being selected to run a field office. But the Detroit office, and the offices in which Benoit had served before, were not such places.
Enter Special Agent Davis Allen Kennedy—an American by birthright, and a Texan by the grace of God.
In any law enforcement job where special agents are in charge, the SAC acronym is pronounced “the sack.” Benoit’s first posting as the SAC was in the old Houston office with Special Agent Kennedy, an equally notorious FBI case agent. Mr. Kennedy was a former active-duty special agent from the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division who, though a man who had spent his entire adult life enforcing laws, carried a healthy disdain for most authority.
In the Houston office, it was commonplace for Mr. Kennedy, hearing Benoit referred to as the SAC, to remark in an aggravated Texan twang, “Sack? SACK? Sack ’a whut? Sack ’a SHEE-IT?!”
Mr. Kennedy had taken an immediate dislike to Benoit’s habit of pulling himself, and his career, up by the bootstraps of his agents. Everyone else in that office was weary of it too, but Mr. Kennedy was a man of action when he took a notion.
After connecting socially with his boss’s wife a few times, and hearing tale after tale of Benoit’s additional failures at home, Mr. Kennedy connected with Mrs. Benoit in her own marital bed over most of his last year in that office. Mr. Kennedy’s most trusted colleagues saw the photos.
Over time, Benoit was transferred to a succession of new posts to command and Mr. Kennedy’s career took him elsewhere, too. But like a virus, Benoit and his legend preceded him. It spread with every passing month until pretty much every FBI agent of any longevity around the country now found an opportunity, one way or another, to comment about his own supervisor in a mock Texan twang.
“Sack? SACK? Sack ’a whut? Sack ’a SHEE-IT?!”
Amber Watson never understood how men in positions of authority so often thought that entitled them to positions from the Kama Sutra, but Benoit, in all his creepy, bad-breath-having, extra-cologne-wearing Old Guy ways, was a lion of his breed.
The first time Benoit cornered Amber in a hallway and stuttered a nervous, breathy come-on, she thought it was some bizarre hazing ritual of the new girl since it was clearly out of bounds for her boss to hit on her. She laughed out loud and asked, “Has this sort of thing ever worked for you before?”
Amber had been drop-dead gorgeous all her life, and wasn’t even offended, most times, by the rude passes men sometimes had made at her over more than three decades of police work. She had badged up against walls more than one civilian senseless or drunk enough to press her too hard in a bar or a parking lot.
Cops or law enforcement types got a wry smile and a good-natured bird flipped in their direction. Because they were her brothers in arms, even the dipshits deserved some slack as they were declined. But while cops and law enforcement types were brothers in arms, they often had egos that couldn’t contemplate the prospect of failing to attract this woman.
Rejection made such men gruff or lewd. They would rationalize failure by teasing her about being a lesbian, or any other reason that didn’t lay the stinking carcass of No thanks! at their feet, like a cat returning a dead rat to its owner. It was too often the general fate of women who work in a male environment, when men mistake testosterone for charm.
Suddenly, at the crime scene, Amber felt the need to be appreciated in authentic terms. There was going to be a boatload of work to do on this case, she knew, and it started now. She looked down to the dead guy again, scrubbed growing fatigue from her eyes and thought, who are you really, dude?
“Trace, I’m going to go make a few calls. I’ll be by the car if you need me.”
Tracey didn’t look up. “Okay hon,” she said absently. She punctuated the sentence by popping her gum and going to one knee, tenderly pulling the rest of the rubber sheet from the mysterious, dapper dead guy.
Amber walked away and in just a few steps was sitting in her car. She started it and pushed a black button in the lower frame of her rear-view mirror.
“OnStar ready,” responded a well-modulated female voice.
“Call.” Amber pulled the power window switches and the door glass rose in both doors between her, the street, and the crime scene.
“Nametag please.”
“Super Trooper.”
“Calling, Super Trooper ...”
Amber’s mouth turned up at the corners in her secret smile. Yes, she thought, my boy makes me feel good. Tomorrow was Friday and had been looking a lot like a personal day off on her timesheet if she could have gotten it. This had been her last best chance to get out of town for a while. Not now, though. Personal time was always secondary to the demands of the job. This was the mission she signed up for and she knew her Super Trooper would relate to that.
Then she was going to have to call Benoit about the well-dressed, short-haired dead guy du jour with the Arabic name, the fake credentials, and his very interesting official-looking business cards. Benoit’s OnStar nametag was NTAC, pronounced EN-tac. It stood for No-Talent Ass-Clown.
Sure it was silly, but it made her grin.