Supervisor Bremer was in his office early, studying the file in front of him. Not a very large file, but interesting. He turned a page, reading, then reviewed the surveillance photos. He liked this kind of work—fast, smooth, easy, falling together perfectly without danger to his agents. From Myles Corbet’s information, the targets would probably be unarmed. Only once had one of Corbet’s drug busts turned up a weapon. Safe, easy operations, and they still scored on his tally sheet.
Bremer sensed Corbet was onto something big with this case. The kid was good—really good—and getting better. For once, Hanson had been right. Corbet was an unusual informant. His talent lay in pointing people out, sensing their weaknesses, and setting them up.
He closed the folder. By this afternoon, he would know the big Marin connection. A sale, and he’d have the guy.
“Hey, Dolph,” Agent Wilson called from the doorway of the office, “you have a minute?”
Ed Wilson was a man after Bremer’s own heart. Wilson would be going places in the bureau.
Suddenly, eight men in dark suits trooped into the office, one of them—Philips—carrying a cupcake with a lit candle, all singing “Happy Birthday to You!” Agent Phillips set the cake down in front of Bremer.
With unusual embarrassment and a silly grin, Bremer shook his head. “I’d almost forgotten my birthday.”
Wilson handed him a package. “A little something to show our esteem.”
Bremer pulled at the ribbon, ripped off the paper, and opened a box. Tenderly, he picked up a pearl-handled Colt .45 semiautomatic. The chrome plating picked up the fluorescent light. The gun looked almost iridescent.
“Beautiful,” he told them, truly admiring it, already in love with the feel of it in his hand. “Nonregulation, but … I’ll use it for special occasions. Now,” and suddenly his voice was all business, “let’s talk about our plans for this afternoon. Someone get Corbet over here.”
Myles had set up a separate telephone in the basement apartment he had at his parents’ home, the phone’s only function to receive his police messages. He hated that phone, hated the way it screamed for him to leave his studies. On this morning, he was expecting Bremer to call for finalization on the Mick Crogan case. Every few minutes, he had looked over, waiting for it to ring. Then, when he was most involved in what he was writing, it had, shattering his concentration and pushing aside his thoughts.
“Yes?”
“Bremer wants you over here. On the double.”
Myles left the house quietly, through the side entrance of the basement, the door that made his room a separate apartment. On the way to the station, he mulled over the Crogan case.
Actually, he called it the Crogan/Simpson case, exceptionally pleased with the way he’d set it up. Once again, he reminded himself that although he’d been forced into the game, he’d received a special kind of heady power, one that was capable of deciding someone’s fate. And right now, he was determined to use that influence.
Greg Simpson had been the reader for one of his undergraduate classes. New to the university, he didn’t know Myles or his reputation. When Myles had picked up his first midterm exam paper, he’d been horrified to see that Simpson had handed him a B, clearly visible in bold marking pen. Myles had never received a grade below a solid “A” in his life.
During office hours, he’d asked Greg to review the exam again, but Greg had been adamant. He’d had two hundred undergrad papers to read, he explained, and it seemed as if all two hundred students wanted a reread. Between his own classes and research, teaching, and his dissertation, he simply didn’t have the time. As Myles became angrier and more aggressive, Greg had lost patience, mumbled something about “getting a life,” and had walked away down the corridor, leaving Myles standing in an empty hallway, seething, and holding a crumpled exam in his clenched fist.
Biding his time over the next few weeks, Myles had worked his way into Greg’s social life. In fact, by that time Greg had sheepishly made an awkward apology. He’d learned a bit more about Myles—his history and reputation, the name of his father. At the first party, Myles had evidence that Greg smoked, but to bust Greg for smoking pot wasn’t enough. Everybody smoked. He needed something more substantial, a quantity that would put the bastard away for a few months.
On the night he overheard Greg ask Mick Crogan about a lid, he’d followed Crogan from the party. Another week, a few careful questions, some personal surveillance, and he’d built a police file. The target was the dealer, Mick Crogan. He simply had to make sure Greg Simpson was there when the cops came through the door.
The following weekend, Agent Ed Wilson walked into a party, mingled easily, and quietly made arrangements to meet Mick for lunch. A few days later, Wilson bought five kilos from Mick to “send back East.” Two weeks after that, another fifteen.
At Myles’s insistence, Wilson, pretending to run into Greg outside the Life Sciences Building, had discreetly asked for a friendly quarter ounce and had gotten it.
To add to Myles’s good fortune, they had stumbled onto the Marin dealer.
Wilson was to be walking into the Marin house today. In a few days, Myles would be able to add three more arrests to his record—Greg Simpson, Mick Crogan, and the dealer in Marin. That would bring his total arrests to twenty-five.