TEN

I drove us back to WMFO, told Lisa to go home and pack for a two-day trip to Virginia, down to Brookston. I let Karen Kilbride know where we’d be, that we expected to be back sometime Friday, then returned a few phone calls and ran through a pile of fresh mail on my desk while I waited for Lisa. I considered calling Kevin Finnerty to let him know where we were going and why, but decided to wait until we got back, until we’d done what we could to tie up the loose ends and present him with a done deal.

An hour later Lisa was in my office with a small blue overnight case in her hand and a purse slung over one shoulder, ready to go.

“One second,” I told her, then scribbled a note for Ted Blassingame, my principal relief supervisor, reminding Ted to run the ticklers tomorrow, to double-check the progress of several cases with short deadlines. I grabbed my raincoat.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We walked together through the deserted bullpen. There was a mandatory legal-training seminar down the hall and the agents on my squad wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. We were almost out the door at the other end before Karen called out to me.

“Puller,” she said, “wait a second.” She held up the phone in her hand. “You better take this. Says her name’s Annie. Sounds like she might need some help.”

I laid my raincoat over the edge of the nearest desk. “Give me a minute, Lisa.” I walked back to my office and grabbed the phone. I didn’t bother to use my chair.

“What is it, Annie? I’m just on my way out the door.”

“I need a man,” she said, then giggled. “I need a man real bad.” Another giggle, this one louder and longer. “You know where I can find one?” Laughter this time, a slightly manic sound that I recognized and could hardly stand to hear.

“Annie,” I said over her laughter. “Annie!” She stopped, then giggled again, then did nothing. “Where are you?” I asked her. “Damn it, Annie, where are you?”

“Your house, silly.” Giggle. “Where else would I come when I need to get laid?” Same semihysterical laughter. “How shoon—soon, how soon—can you get here?”

Shit. I looked around, saw Lisa through my glass wall, watching me. I sighed, then spoke into the phone again. “Half an hour. Promise me you won’t leave.”

She was giggling again as I hung up. I turned toward the door again just as Lisa came back through.

“Sorry,” I told her, “but I’ve got a problem. We’ll have to leave tomorrow morning.”

Lisa’s dark eyes flickered. “Annie? Nothing serious, I hope.”

I shook my head, but I was lying. To someone like Ann Fisher booze was as deadly as a loaded shotgun, but I was right to lie about it. Annie’s problem was hers, hers and mine. Lisa had no need to know about it.

“I have to help her with something is all,” I said. “Enjoy your evening. My house is on the way to Brookston. Pick me up at seven in the morning.”

She looked at me. “If there’s anything I can do …”

“Nothing. You really want to help, go home and figure out a way to find the truth in Brookston.” I smiled. “And bring some doughnuts and coffee when you come.”

I set a land-speed record getting to my dome in Fredericksburg, one eye on the traffic, the other in the rearview mirror for flashing red lights, but it was still thirty-five minutes before I walked through my front door. Too long, I saw when I got to the semicircular kitchen.

Annie was sitting at the table, her head in her hands, my bottle of Glenfiddich on the table next to her, a nearly empty glass next to it.

She turned as I approached, then lifted her head. Shit. Her watery eyes were dull and red, her blond hair spiking in all directions. She’d been giddy on the phone but now she’d gone past happy, past horny, straight on to outrage. A whole day in less than one hour.

“God damn you, Puller,” she muttered. “You and the fucking white horse you rode in on.”

I touched her shoulder but she jerked away.

“I’m sick of you,” she said. “Just because you show up when I call doesn’t make you better than me … not a goddamned bit better. Only difference is you won’t admit it.”

I glanced at the bottle, couldn’t remember how much had been in it last time I’d seen it. “What’s the damage?” I asked. “How much have you had?”

She shrugged. “Here, at your place?” She glanced at the bottle. “Don’t worry, I didn’t drink all your fucking Scotch.”

“Where did you start?”

“My house … my office … how the hell do I know?”

“Did you call your sponsor?”

“Fuck my sponsor. She’s just like you. Powerless, she keeps telling me … We’re all powerless. I’ll help you, she says, we’ll all help you. Bullshit. I don’t need her … I don’t need you. Go find somebody else to take care of your guilt.” She dropped her head into her hands again, her shoulders quivering as she wept.

My guilt. I shook my head. That’s the problem with sleeping with drunks. So charming most of the time, so eager to hear the story of your life, so quick to use it against you later. Used to make me mad, Annie’s claim that I wouldn’t have anything to do with her if I didn’t feel so guilty about ignoring her twelve-step ideas, but I knew better now. Knew she was right, mostly. That regardless which of us was right, it was a waste of time to talk about it.

I picked up the Glenfiddich and her glass from the table, took them to the counter, put the glass in the sink, the bottle in a cupboard to my left. Then I moved a step to my right to start a pot of coffee. Not for her, for me. It was going to be a long night.

Drowned out by the pounding water of my morning shower, the insistent sound of Lisa’s car horn on Thursday morning took a few moment to penetrate. I turned off the shower and toweled off before tiptoeing past the still-sleeping Annie Fisher, barefooting my way down the spiral staircase and cracking open the front door to peek past it. There sat Lisa, behind the wheel of her bucar, a two-year-old Pontiac something or other.

“One second!” I shouted, sticking my wet head past the door jamb, but careful not to let her see the rest of me. “Just got to slip on my shoes!”

I could see her frowning at my breach of protocol. Under the rules of bureau carpooling, “one second” means the agent being picked up is at least half dressed and reasonably ready to go, while a wet head and hidden body indicates no such thing. She beeped twice more, stiletto-sharp blasts, but grinned as she did so, to let me know she was kidding, that she realized despite my churlish behavior I was still her supervisor. I couldn’t help grinning back. I was beginning to like the woman.

Eight minutes later I was in the passenger seat next to her, ready for the hour-long drive south to Brookston. She nodded toward the two styrofoam cups in the holder behind the shift lever. “One of those is yours,” she said, “and there are doughnuts in the sack.”

I sipped coffee as Lisa eased through the winding streets of my neighborhood, then headed east through downtown Fredericksburg and out into the countryside toward the little town in Cobb County that Judge Thompson had identified as the place where her aunt Sarah Kendall had died.

Lisa turned to me. “Anything I should know before we get there?”

“Enjoy the drive. You know what we’re looking for. No point wearing ourselves out on it before we get there.”

Through the Virginia pines, their branches sagging with rainwater from last night’s storm, we passed the villages of Sealston and King George, then hooked up to a meandering two-lane state highway east toward Westmoreland County.

“Gorgeous out here, isn’t it?” Lisa said. “The trees, I mean, and the pastureland. Hard to imagine it filled with soldiers killing each other.”

I’d been thinking the same thing. It’s part of living in the middle of all this history, but especially vivid in the open spaces, the few remaining acres that continue to resist the advancing real estate developers. The Confederates had held at Fredericksburg—despite the thousands of blue hats who died trying to clamber up Marye’s Hill to get at them—but a hundred and fifty years later not a shot is fired at the builders who seem determined to cover the battleground with “affordable housing.” Life is for the living, I know, but still. There’s plenty of room for everyone in this magnificent countryside. Why build tract houses on ground so recently bloodied?

“You haven’t been here in spring yet,” I said, “or for the change, the leaves turning just before they drop in the fall. Every shade of crimson and scarlet, twenty kinds of yellow, traffic on the Interstate stopping dead to watch.” I was quiet for a moment just thinking about it. “Almost makes the mud season tolerable.”

“Didn’t see much of that in El Paso, either mud or leaves changing. Two seasons is all we had. Colder than hell, hotter than hell.”

“Southern California for me, a little town outside San Diego. We didn’t even have two seasons. What we had ranged from ‘real nice’ to ‘totally awesome, dude,’ depending how close you got to the beach.”

I opened the doughnut sack, took a full breath of deep-fried lard, then plucked one out and held the bag out to Lisa. She made a face and I bit into the doughy sweetness and moaned with satisfaction. Lisa grunted, reached to turn up the windshield wipers, indicated her disapproval of my nutritional ignorance by stepping a little harder on the gas. A mile or so later she turned to me and ignored my suggestion we avoid guessing about the Thompson case until we got to Brookston.

“The judge told me,” she began, “that she left Cal before the commencement ceremony. That seems strange to me, considering her background, to miss such a significant day in her young life.”

“It does to me, too, but I don’t want to develop a theory before we even get to Brookston. It’s an easy way to shut off your mind to other possibilities. A bad way to do business, our kind of business anyway.”

“What’s the fun if you can’t take a wild guess?”

“It’s not supposed to be fun.” But it is, I didn’t tell her, if you do it right.

“I vote for pregnancy,” she said, ignoring me completely. “The old standby, I know, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still valid.”

“Nothing at the University of California showed her as pregnant, and she wasn’t when she got to Yale. The case agent in New Haven would have seen some evidence of it in the university medical-center records, or heard about it from former classmates.”

“And there’d be a child somewhere, obviously. On Brenda Thompson’s personal security questionnaire for sure.” She turned the wiper speed up, the heater down a bit. “Unless she left the baby in Brookston.”

I nodded. Abortion had been my first thought as well, but like I’d told her, I wanted to let it come out of our investigation, not go down there just to prove it. I told her that, but she continued to press her case.

“Let’s say she was six weeks pregnant at Cal, found out from an off-campus doctor, that way there’d be no university medical record to check. She makes a quick stop in Brookston to have an abortion, takes a couple of weeks to get her head straight again, then moves on to New Haven.”

“She’d know in six weeks? That she was pregnant, I mean?”

“If she had a reason to worry, yeah. Things happen. Sometimes a girl starts checking awfully quick.”

“Nineteen seventy-two,” I said, thinking out loud. “July. Roe v. Wade … Seventy-two or seventy-three, wasn’t it?”

“Seventy-one for the first arguments, reargued at the end of seventy-two, I think, then decided in January seventy-three.”

“But everyone knew how it would be decided.”

“Doesn’t matter, it was still illegal. If that’s what happened to Thompson, she’d have missed being legal by a couple of months.”

“You know what they say about close.”

She was quiet for a minute.

“Got to be it, though,” she said. “Abortion’s still a pretty hot item for a Supreme Court nominee … so hot that David Souter wouldn’t even admit to talking about it.” She shook her head. “Had the nerve to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee he’d never even discussed the issue. Hard to imagine Thompson getting away with actually having one, an illegal one to boot.”

I nodded. It was hard to forget about Justice Souter’s ludicrous assertion, and how willing the senators had been to believe it, to do anything rather than face up to an issue that still topped the list of litmus tests for new nominees to the high court. Even with a legal abortion on her sheet, Brenda’s nomination would be dead before it got started.

I stared past Lisa and out the driver’s window. Rain slanted past us, from clouds low enough to touch the treetops.

“And that brings us straight back to motive,” I said. “With stakes that high—the Supreme Court—you can throw out the rule book. The Greeks launched a thousand ships for one face. Compared to that, Thompson lying about her past to save her one chance at immortality seems downright reasonable.”

Lisa slowed as we approached a logging truck, stacked high with telephone-pole-size logs. She edged into the oncoming lane, looking for an opening to pass, then slid back into line.

“Miscarriage,” she said. “There’s miscarriage to consider as well. Or a stillbirth. Maybe even sudden infant death after a normal birth. If Thompson had a baby who died within minutes or hours, she might have chosen to leave it out of her personal history altogether. Might have been too painful to take with her into a new life.”

“That’s why I don’t like to guess. Her time in Brookston might just as easily be unrelated to any kind of pregnancy. She might have been an alcoholic, or a pothead. She was sure as hell at the right college for that, at the right time as well.” I paused. “Maybe she stopped in Brookston to dry out, to get her head together for law school.”

She nodded. “You’re right, that could be exactly what we’re looking at. I suppose she could even have gotten herself arrested in Brookston. Stopped for speeding maybe, with an ounce of grass in her car. Cops took that stuff pretty seriously back then.”

“I like the idea, but if that happened she’d have a rap sheet. Our NCIC check would have picked it up.”

“A 1972 arrest? There was no National Crime Information Center back then. Gotta be a bunch of records never got transferred over to the new system … especially from rural departments like Brookston.”

“Can’t eliminate the possibility, that’s for sure.”

“So what’s the plan?” she asked. “Down there in Mayberry, I mean.”

I reached for the last doughnut, took a moment to eat a bite. “Let’s start with the sheriff’s department. Hit the county clerk’s office, then maybe the hospital. That should give us some idea what we’re up against.”

She nodded and we fell silent, stayed that way until we crossed the line into Cobb County. The Pontiac’s digital clock read eight-ten when we left the highway and drove down Main Street, a solid stretch of classic small town one-story buildings that could have been lifted directly from the back lot of a movie studio.

The Cobb County Courthouse was a mile or so down Main, and carried out the same nostalgic motif. Green lawns, white brick construction, red-shingled roof. Parking was out back. The lot was empty except for three green-and-white patrol cars along with a couple of unmarked units, the stripped-down Fords and Chevys that fool no crooks anywhere. Lisa parked our bucar next to one of them and we grabbed our briefcases.

It continued to rain as we hiked up the long flight of steps, swung the twelve-foot high oak door out of the way and entered the sheriff’s office. Inside it was all wood and fresh varnish. The smell reminded me of the front pew I’d grown up in back in California, and I tried not to inhale any more of it than I had to. Behind a chest-high counter, a uniformed woman smiled at us.

“What can I do for y’all?” she asked.

I showed my credentials. “The sheriff around?”

She lifted a phone, spoke into it briefly, then turned back to us. “Sheriff Brodsky should be with you in a few minutes.” She waved toward a couple of plain wood armchairs against the nearest wall. “Y’all can sit right over there until he comes.”

We retreated to the chairs. Above them, on the beige-colored wall, hung the green-and-gold official seal of the sheriff’s department.

Ten minutes later we were still sitting there. Four more minutes passed before I coughed politely and made a show of looking at my watch. The officer at the counter smiled.

“Shouldn’t be but another minute or two.”

I nodded, then told myself to relax. We’d come without an appointment. Not many people kept us waiting like this, but sheriffs were among the few who did.

A door behind the counter opened suddenly, and a powerfully built man wearing the same uniform as the receptionist emerged from it. He moved to a small gate to the right of the counter, opened it, and approached us. We stood to meet him.

“Edward Brodsky,” he said, his voice blunt, his brown eyes reflecting the wariness FBI agents become accustomed to seeing from the locals.

I showed him my creds, introduced Lisa, then gave him the opportunity to extend his hand. He didn’t.

“My office is just down the hall,” he said, then turned and strode back through the same gate and doorway from which he’d just come. Lisa and I had to hurry to keep up.

I inspected the lawman’s back as we walked down the long corridor. Brodsky was as much a descriptor as a name. The sheriff was wide enough across the shoulders to show home movies on, his brown hair short and sprinkled with gray. A perfect stereotype, I decided. Life imitating art. A man whose friends probably called him Bull.

Inside his office I saw that I was wrong.