THIRTY-FOUR
Finnerty’s wife came home at two-thirty-four that afternoon. From our captain’s chairs in the van in Rock Creek Park, Lisa and I watched her move in and out of view as our cameras recorded her routine.
I found myself staring at my partner’s profile as she watched the monitors. In the tight space, the citrus-flower combination of her perfume and shampoo was intoxicating. I watched her breasts rising and falling with the rhythm of her breathing, then caught her glancing at me. She smiled a quick smile and turned away even faster.
Our behavior made me smile.
Ever since we’d become lovers we were going to absurd lengths to keep our new relationship from intruding into the workplace. Like a pair of animals circling a suspiciously dangerous watering hole, we waited for only the safest moments to drink. Needing the water to stay alive, needing to stay alive to drink the water.
Kevin Finnerty came home at five-seventeen, and I was happy to see it. According to Gerard, the ADIC never came home before nine o’clock. It was a good sign, especially on the evening before Brenda Thompson’s Senate hearings were expected to conclude.
An hour later the Finnertys sat down to eat dinner in front of the television. CNN, I realized, as I recognized the voice of Aaron Brown. Again I was impressed by the quality of the devices I’d hidden inside the house. Not only were the pictures of Finnerty and his wife sharp and clear, but the sound was even more perfect.
We listened as Aaron Brown delivered the latest news about the centuries-old battle in the Middle East. We continued to listen as he changed the subject to the mounting concern over flooding in San Antonio. But we really listened when the topic turned to Judge Brenda Thompson’s amazingly rapid progress through the confirmation process, and we were riveted to our headsets when the anchorman threw the story to Catherine Crier on Capitol Hill.
“… all the veteran Senate-watchers are agreeing, for once,” Crier was saying. “After the Clarence Thomas fiasco, the Judiciary Committee will do anything to avoid another spectacle of a black nominee for the Supreme Court being roasted alive by the senators. It appears certain that her hearings will end by noon tomorrow, that confirmation by the full Senate will follow immediately after lunch …”
I turned to Lisa.
“You were right, Puller. It is going to happen tonight.”
On the TV-room screen, Kevin Finnerty showed no reaction to the CNN story we’d just heard. He continued eating without a pause. On his plate was a real dinner, but his wife had only a salad. A bottle of wine sat on a small table between them. She was drinking from a large wineglass. There was no glass on his side of the table. She drank deeply, emptied the glass and reached for the bottle, poured out the few ounces left in it.
“Sweetheart,” she said to her husband. “Would you be kind enough to open me another bottle?”
“Why don’t we wait awhile, dear. Maybe a nice port after we finish eating.”
“I don’t want any port … just another bottle of the merlot.”
“No more wine, Margaret. You know what Doctor Abra—”
“Don’t bother then. I’ll get it myself!”
Lisa and I looked at each other. The sudden change in her tone carried a lot of backstory.
His wife started to get up, but Finnerty reached out and stopped her with his hand. “Sit down!” he snapped. “You will have no more wine! Don’t make me tell you again!”
Lisa spoke without looking at me. “Consistent son of a bitch, isn’t he? No better with her than he is with the rest of us.”
We fell silent as we continued to watch and listen, but Lisa turned away after a few minutes. I knew why.
Most people would argue that marital intimacy was exclusive to the bedroom, but they’d be wrong. I’d watched enough scenes like this one to know when people were really naked, and seeing it made both Lisa and I feel a little like perverts. And it didn’t help to know how few FBI agents would think we were crazy to feel that way.
Peeping is the lifeblood of a professional watcher, and the FBI is filled with people who relish the job. Just the prospect of catching sight of a naked woman can energize a team of watchers for hours, but the real brass-ring is actual copulation. The shrinks have a name for the disorder. Reaction formation, they call it. The phenomenon by which respectable people choose laudable careers that allow them to perform the same acts they would otherwise be sent to prison for.
Surgeons get rich by dismembering people, commodity brokers even richer for gambling on everything from orange juice to pork bellies. Priests gain heaven through extraordinary attention to the boys choir, fundamentalist pastors are free to beat their sons till they bleed. And FBI surveillance teams get overtime pay for watching people fuck.
Movement on the screen caught my eye.
“Looks like dinner’s over, Lisa. For Finnerty anyway. And wifey’s toasted enough to take her all the way through till morning.”
Mary Margaret was already nodding off, wineglass dangling from the tips of her fingers, a smallish puddle of purple merlot forming on the carpet near her feet. Finnerty walked out of the picture. I glanced at the office monitors, hoping to see him open the door and come through.
And he did.
He closed the door behind him, moved straight to the desk, around it to the high-backed leather chair. He sat with his back to the camera. His right hand reached out to the pewter-framed photograph at the head of the green blotter, to the picture of J. Edgar Hoover I’d seen earlier, the one with the intimate inscription. He straightened it, but his fingers lingered for a long moment before he let it go and went to work.
We heard drawers opening and closing, watched him open one or another file on his desktop, jot some notes, rearrange some pages, then go to another one. Fifteen or twenty minutes later he rose from his chair and walked across the carpet to the bookshelves against the wall to the camera’s right. He stretched on his toes to remove a single volume, then reached into the empty space. There was a loud click and the bookcase appeared to move. He grasped a lower shelf and pulled gently until the bookcase pivoted away from the wall. He stepped toward what had to be a recessed door. I met Lisa’s glance.
“Has to be a wall safe,” I told her. “Probably bureau-installed.”
She nodded. We turned back to the picture.
Finnerty appeared to be working a lock, until he stepped back and pulled open a grey metallic-looking door. Six feet high, I judged, much taller than a standard wall safe. In the next instant Finnerty stepped past it and disappeared into the wall.
Moments later he came back out with two files, one slender, one almost three inches thick. The thick one was dog-eared, the other pristine, but both covers were the same nondescript tan color the official bureau had long-ago abandoned in favor of the white and brown in current use.
The ADIC left the vault door open, returned to his desk, and chose the thick file first, opened it, and appeared to read. He made some notes, then opened the skinnier file and did the same thing, read a few pages, made more notes. Then he rose again and took the files back to his vault and disappeared into it once more. When he came out this time, his hands were empty.
Back at the desk, he gathered his notes, opened his briefcase, and laid them inside. Then he got up and walked out of the room, reappeared in the TV room, where he took one look at his passed-out wife and shook his head. He walked over to her, touched her shoulder, then shook it. After a long moment, she came to life, stared at him with wide eyes.
“Go to bed,” he told her. “I’ve got to work late, and I don’t want you sleeping in this chair all night again.”
She nodded, grunted as she got out of her chair and shuffled out of the room. Finnerty shook his head again, then followed her. My microphones followed the sound of his footsteps down the hardwood floor of the hallway toward the front of the house. A moment later we could hear the front door open, then close again. Finally, faintly, we heard the sound of his car starting.
“Shit,” Lisa said as she jumped toward the driving compartment.
“Drive,” I said as I crawled up to join her.