The peeps in the Wednesday home office group met for lunch two days later. I was on high alert from my own adrenaline plus two huge glasses of iced coffee. Pete, naturally, was already in his usual seat at La Cuisine Délicieuse. I just waved at him and Darby as I sprinted to the ladies’ room. By the time I got back, the only chair left was the one beside Pete.
Major moment, right? Except it wasn’t. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the dryness of his cheek etched with fine-lined squares and rectangles, like guys with sandblasted skin who’d served a couple of tours of duty in Iraq. Except my blessed contact in the bureau’s HR department, Jillian King, had done a background check and said the man I knew as Pete Delaney had no military record. So maybe he had a little vacation cabin in Death Valley.
But other than speculating on the state of his cheek and that he kept his nails short enough to keep them perpetually clean, the only news from the lunch was that Pete ordered the day’s special, saumon froid en gelée. When he told that to the waiter, Lucy Winters, the data miner, squished her mouth and nose into a yuck pucker and said: “Jelly? You should text your order with the green puke emoji.” Then Pete snapped: “Cut it out.”
The following morning, Kath Nakamura, the number two at the Joint Terrorism Task Force, called around eleven to tell me her instincts had been right, that the Pete Delaney matter could not be run from New York. “Let me make a couple of calls, see if I can get headquarters involved and also get you attached to it.” My spirit soared until she added, “Don’t start packing.”
I walked out of my office, followed by Lulu, figuring I’d go for a run with her, but then I saw the pile of manuscripts on my desk. Granted, it wasn’t a tower, but I started feeling guilty about some novelist checking her email ten times a day to see if any word had come from the United States or the UK about an English translation. Instead of grabbing one of them, I took my iPad down to the backyard to read an e-edition of a book that was moving toward bestsellerdom in the Arabic-speaking world. Lulu sniffed the grass and finally found a treasure—a crumble of two-week-old hot dog roll.
For the first time in ages I stopped trying to put the jigsaw pieces of Pete Delaney’s life into a clear picture. I became absorbed in the universe of the novel. It was based on the life of Huda Sha’arawi, an Egyptian aristocrat and dissident who led women to protest British rule, refused to go around veiled, and wound up being the organizer and guiding force of the country’s feminist movement. The writing might not have been exquisite, but Huda was a combo of Carrie Chapman Catt and Eleanor Roosevelt—maybe even more daring—and the narrative had the thrust of a train racing from Alexandria to Cairo.
Just as I was contemplating the amazing turn my own life had taken—choosing Arabic 101 because Intro to Russian was oversubscribed—my phone vibrated in my cleavage. It was Unknown Number, which turned out to be Kath Nakamura. She was halfway through her first sentence before I realized who was talking.
“—and no way through the New York office, as I suspected, though I gave it a shot. Strictly headquarters. This is what I’ll do: go through the people I know in the Crim Div, find out who will be handling this, and try to get you inserted.”
“Thank you!” I said, probably too effusively because I was still in thrall to Huda Sha’arawi’s fervor.
“You’re not doing yourself a favor by getting overenthusiastic. You know how it is. You’re only a contract worker now, and your field is antiterrorism. Not the dream pairing for this kind of case. But if you really want it, write a full report with as many bullet points as you can shoot into it. Detail, specifics could weigh in your favor. Listen, since you’re the one who is bringing this matter to the bureau, they would expect a complete report anyway. But go all out, with short sentences. Don’t get clever, Corie.”
“I swear, they’ll think I’m from Idaho or wherever—”
“That is exactly what I’d like you to avoid.”
“Right,” I said. Lulu was rolling on her back in the grass making loud snrrr, snrrr growls.
“I hope it’s your guy Pete who did the hit in Galveston. Because that could bring part of the case up to New York, and I’d like to be able to sneak out of my office and check out what’s happening as the investigation progresses.”
Kath was evidently intrigued, which told me that even though she might not like the snark in my reports, she was buying into the reasoning behind my suspicions.
“So you’re essentially thinking that this Frank is actually Pete Delaney?” I asked.
“I am not as committed to the Pete Delaney theory as you are. But I know far, far less about the case than you do. What I believe is that whoever Frank is, he isn’t a go-between but the assassin himself.”
“I’m not saying that on occasion he might not have a need to bring in someone else,” I told her. “But then I can practically guarantee you that the someone else would be dead as soon as his or her part of the job was done.”
It was close to five the following day, Friday, when I heard from headquarters, which at the bureau passed for the speed of light. Could I submit a report on my suspicions and my follow-up by the following Tuesday? Could I? I finished it early Monday, after a weekend of the big reveal of the pets Eliza had created for her new Sims game and also taking her shopping for the perfect sneakers and shirt to wear on the bus up to the Adirondacks for her three-week stint at Camp Belasco, where the kids put on a Broadway musical a week.
Josh and I saw some movie I couldn’t recall three minutes after we left the theater. I was too preoccupied thinking about my report, so I took Josh’s word that it was thoughtful but could easily have been cut by a half hour. Later, over pizza, I considered for three seconds confessing the truth about the Galveston trip but then unconsidered. Even though I was dying for him to read what I’d written about the Pete Delaney case—and to let me know if anything I did was illegal or ill considered—there was no way I would risk telling him I’d been less than truthful with him. A lot less. And my omission wasn’t some marriage-lite secret like: I spent nine hundred bucks on a pair of Manolos two years ago. It was: I’m tracking a guy who lives less than a mile away in a white colonial who seems to be a professional killer.
Once I sent in the report—a bonanza of bullet points, conclusions, and several yellow highlights—I waited. After all my years at the bureau, I understood patience: witnesses didn’t cooperate on a timeline; the top people in Counterterrorism and, I assumed, the Crim Div, weren’t fans of the snap decision. I understood patience, but I wasn’t particularly good at it. I did get a couple of manuscripts read and reports written, but time just slogged along. Finally, just as I was setting the table for Shabbat with Dawn’s sterling silver, I got the call from headquarters. No info, but at ten on Tuesday, I should be at the J. Edgar Hoover Building and ask for Carlos Ruiz of the Criminal Investigative Division.
Actually, I was a little wowed that they wanted my actual presence. Usually, in dealing with DC, it was text or teleconference. A double wow because the word was that the Crim Div had a tighter budget than Counterterrorism, so it was a biggish deal that they were flying me down.
Under ordinary circumstances, I would have recognized that an explanation to Josh was long overdue. But I guess I was upset. No, I was really angry that he’d been going off for panels and seminars without a peep that it was part of his having a grand strategy to move up to the court of appeals. (Well, for whatever reason, I hadn’t peeped either, though unlike Josh’s activities, my involvement with Pete hadn’t been part of a game plan.)
In the past, when he wasn’t leaving Eliza and me to bond, Josh and I relished the time after dinner, wallowing in normality: talking, reading quietly, watching a couple of episodes of some series, having our film festivals—courtroom dramas, espionage thrillers, musicals. We did deals, so for each of his Swedish films on the nature of reality, I got one classic rom-com. But that had been then. Now I mostly got Josh’s charmer smile as he went to his study to work on his ascension to judicial heaven.
Anyway, it took nearly an hour at headquarters to make it up to the presence of Carlos Ruiz. He was deceptively cool looking, with clothes that actually fit as opposed to nearly all the men in the bureau who seemed to be following some unwritten requirement to buy their suits one size too large. His brown hair was longish, brushed back, and a tiny bit mussed up, and his brown eyes were supersize: there were handsome special agents, but Ruiz looked more MSNBC than FBI. But by the time the first few minutes were up, I could tell he was a by-the-book federal law enforcement type. He definitely had read my HR file and had spoken not only to my supervisors in Washington and New York but also to special agents I’d worked with.
At first he seemed to be taking my good reviews as a given, which surprised me. Not that I thought he’d view me as a nut job, but I’d assumed that he’d be more curious as to what about Pete Delaney had piqued my interest. But that minor mystery was solved within the hour, when someone came to take me down for a lie detector test and interview.
All special agents have to take the test, and in Counterterrorism—as in the Joint Terrorism Task Force—we were good for at least two a year. I was fine with it. It was just me and the usual nonjolly polygraph tech; this one needed orthodontia or had a lemon wedge stuck between her upper lip and gum. There was also a guy, jacket off and draped over the back of his wheelchair. The sleeves of his starched white shirt were rolled up, or more exactly, folded crisply three times to under his elbow.
As the tech put on the blood pressure cuff and assorted skin sensors, he said, “We’ll start with a series of the usual questions, just to get a good baseline, then I’ll ask some others.” The polygraph looked far more sophisticated than the ones I had experience with in New York, and the sensors didn’t have wires but instead seemed to send readings via Bluetooth.
“Okay,” I said.
Since there wasn’t any Hi, I’m Joe, I realized, in the first minute or two while the equipment ran, it was an excellent opportunity for me to give them a baseline reading of myself in anxiety mode, so that there wouldn’t be a huge disparity between me giving my name and saying where I lived and my getting unsettled by his inevitable questions about my feelings toward Pete Delaney. Having been involved in lots of polygraph tests before, both as a bureau employee and as a special agent with a witness or subject, I figured they’d inevitably get to wondering about me. Is she an ex-lover trying to get even? Does she have some kind of obsession, maybe sexual, about this particular guy? Did she become a wack job after retiring and somehow focus on him?
The guy in the wheelchair, who I assumed was a shrink from Quantico, looked tough-minded and was eying me as if I were a fruit fly in an experiment. They wouldn’t have sent up someone who looked to be at a high level for just a routine interview with a contract employee. He looked pretty astute. Still, I was nervous about how he’d interpret my answers to questions eliciting responses to wack job? Despite all I’d discovered about Pete, maybe I’d tripped off the deep end after choosing to live a normal life and hadn’t noticed.
So as Lemon Lady stuck the last of the electrodes to an area uncomfortably close to my armpit, I thought about stuff that would agitate me, like if I really loved Josh so much, how come I couldn’t make up my mind whether or not to have a baby with him. I pictured myself running my usual route in Shorehaven, past lawn after lawn, down to the bay, and while it was aesthetically more pleasing than running in Manhattan or Washington or Queens, it was boring as shit and when I’d sounded Josh out about maybe moving to Brooklyn, he’d recoiled before saying something like: Well, it’s certainly something to think about after Eliza graduates because, listen, we’ve both agreed on the value of not throwing any more changes at her because she’s made such an excellent adjustment. Blah, blah, blah.
Then, as the shrink was asking, “Are both your parents still alive?” I made an effort to dismiss Josh from my mind and thought about me kicking the shit out of some guy in a tae kwon do exhibition, even though I’ve never studied tae kwon do, except for a elementary classes with Eliza. However, at that moment, mental kicking felt like a good way to get my blood pressure up a little. He crossed his arms over his chest. Whatever the wheelchair was about, he appeared powerful, with big muscles in his forearms and broad shoulders: the strength combined with his focus made me wonder if he was a Paralympic-type athlete.
Other than registering a little agitation at the start, just to avoid any suspicion that I was overly reactive later on, I had no need to beat the machine. The easiest way to deal with being connected to a lie detector was to tell the truth. The shrink, who’d moved his wheelchair closer to me, was using a method of questioning developed by the CIA, where the testers give you a question designed to elicit potential deception. They then look at and listen to how you react in the next five seconds, which is the crucial time—before your brain can kick in and mediate what you say or do.
And after that first five seconds, they start looking for verbal and nonverbal clues, like if rather than give a direct answer, you respond: What do you mean by that, it tells them you’re buying time to think. Once he began with the stimulative questions, I felt relieved. He’d clearly read my bullet-pointed report many times over, and an hour and a half later, when Lemon Lady was pulling off the electrodes with surprising gentleness, he gave me his first and only sign of humanity—a nod. I sensed it was a benevolent nod, but then he said, “My colleague will escort you to a holding area. Mr. Ruiz will meet you there in about an hour.”
I wasn’t delighted with his use of “about an hour.” Sixty-one minutes? Two hundred forty minutes? On the way to the holding area, which turned out to have all the graciousness of a waiting room in Penn Station, I used the ladies’ room. If I hadn’t thought about hidden cameras, I would have run cold water over my wrists for a while, just for some cool relief.
I hadn’t expected anyone at headquarters to leap up, based on my report, and say: Yes, your suspicions were correct! (Though I thought it was a superb combo of detail and clarity.) But I was irrationally shaken that they’d spent so much time checking to see if I was crazy.
It took about twenty minutes more in the waiting room to go from shaken to crabby. I was aware the bureau didn’t serve lunch, so I reached into the hobo bag I was carrying (a Mom/Dad birthday gift) and ate one of the two Kind bars I’d bought that morning at the airport. Ever since a short trip to Yemen in 2006 to observe the debriefing of an allegedly repentant wife of a terrorist, when I ate a plate of grayish stuff a guy called goat and a woman called chicken, I liked to travel prepared. Eating food veined with a bluish-green line was problematic, though I recognized my duty to my country not to offend its (then) ally.
Time dragged on. I was rereading Great Expectations, which I kept on my phone, for maybe the fiftieth time. I was on the verge of having to pee again when a woman came to get me and take me to back to Carlos Ruiz. “You did well on the polygraph test,” Ruiz said. Though he didn’t actually smile, his expression seemed more benevolent.
“Thanks.”
“At the beginning of the polygraph test, you worked yourself up, didn’t you? To soften any strong reaction if a tough question surfaced.”
“I thought I was being subtle.”
“No. The psychologist is one of our best and the equipment is better than it used to be.” Ruiz smoothed his forehead with his thumb and middle finger. Especially with controlled people, I always like to watch what part of themselves they touch first. I interpreted his smoothing as a tender caress to the intellect he was proud of and prepared to use. “What was the reaction you didn’t want us to see?”
No point in trying to game this guy, so I said, “It was about what made me think initially something was off about Pete Delaney. I had a strong sense that he was hiding something or at least keeping part of himself under wraps.”
“Where’s the problem in that?” he asked.
“It’s that when I first realized the offness, I remember I shuddered, and I’m not the shuddering type. But it was because of the recognition that he was close to me. Living the most normal life possible in the suburbs but having to hide part of myself. My connection, my former employment, with the bureau. The legend that I graduated with a major in Middle Eastern studies and that I went directly into publishing. Hiding my job but also hiding an aspect of my personality.”
“And that is …?”
Since I was in total truth mode now, I said, “My aggressiveness. My need not just to see beneath surfaces, which is what empathetic people do, but also to seek out deceit, evil intent, bullshit. Find out how it is being expressed and why.”
“You look for this in everyone you meet?” He spoke suavely, with cool and maybe a touch of irony. Or maybe he was a cold guy and I was just creating a character I liked better. “Do you?”
I gave one of those dumb snort laughs, which of course mortified me. It was the situation: maybe he was just trying to unsettle me because I really hadn’t passed the polygraph test and he wanted to see what I was hiding. I told the truth, but there could be a false positive, even with the Bluetooth equipment. Or possibly he didn’t think it was worthwhile to follow up on my report. But then why had they brought me down to Washington? Or maybe he just thought I was being frivolous: I tended toward those snort laughs when first conversing with handsome men. It was amazing that I didn’t snort myself out of a relationship with Josh.
“No,” I said. “I don’t go around trying to look into the soul of everybody I meet. It’s just that if some quality in a person strikes me as false or weird, then I have the need to figure it out.”
“Your father’s with the NYPD?”
“Retired detective. My mom’s an actress. Both jobs train you to seek out motivation.”
Ruiz waited, then waited some more. Finally I got bored with looking at him, as I often did with needlessly handsome men, and his desk was nothing to write home about as there were no books or papers on it. I started feeling around my teeth with my tongue to make sure there were no residual fragments of cashew or blueberry from the nutrition bar, and I’d gotten to my lower left canine when he cleared his throat.
“And we know who your husband is,” he finally said.
“Right.”
“I’ll be running the investigation, but I’d like to keep you on for the time being.” I nodded. “I have some thoughts about how to approach him, so let me run them by you.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll use a cell phone that’s linked to a phony name and identity. I’ll call this guy, Frank, and leave a message.”
“What’s the name you’re using?”
“Mike Costa. Why?”
“I’d give another fake name initially.” This was the point where men who would rather not work with women exhaled with excessive patience before speaking. He did not. “He’d expect a potential client to try to hide his identity?” I would have preferred his or her identity, but not for me to quibble.
“Right, or at least any potential client who’s cautious and intelligent. Let him pull it out of you.”
“Not a bad idea. I’m going to lowball him about payment, whatever amount he sets. I want to see how much of a pro this Frank is.”
“Do you have your story set?”
“I’m having problems cutting my wife loose. I want a fast divorce and she’s holding me up.”
“Is there a reason she’s holding you up, or is it to be difficult, pry more money out of you?”
“It’s that she found out I have a girlfriend … who’s pregnant. I want our baby to be legitimate.”
“That’s good,” I said. “I like the detail, rather than just ‘I hate my wife.’” I was about to add: When do you think you’ll do it? But then he opened a drawer and handed me a headset. No mic, but at least he wanted me listening in. I put the headset on and said a small prayer of thanksgiving that he hadn’t offered me earbuds shiny with someone’s wax.
Ruiz hadn’t closed the drawer, and as he picked up the receiver of his landline, he kept glancing down into it as he pressed a series of numbers. He waited a second, then put in a 1, then the area code and the number I’d gotten. My mouth went sticky and dry; my heart slammed against my rib cage. It seemed he wasn’t going through the same thing, because when I looked over toward him on the second ring, he seemed in neutral gear, as if he were listening to a computerized voice offering a menu of choices.
After the fourth ring, we got voicemail: “This is Frank. If you want me to call back, leave your full name and phone number. I also need the name of whoever referred you. I’ll get back to you within twenty-four hours.” That was it. Well, I didn’t expect: Have a nice day.
“Frank,” Carlos Ruiz said, “my name is Ted Jamison. You can reach me at …” And then he gave a number that I was pretty sure was Houston. Actually, I did hear a little Texas in Ruiz’s pronunciation. Maybe it had been there all the time and he was just ramping it up. “I got your number from, uh”—he sounded as nervous as I felt, but from his expression and posture, he still seemed in neutral—“a guy, you know, a friend of a friend. His name’s Billy Gregson. Uh, I’ll be waiting for your call.”
He hung up. He breathed while I gave a major sigh of relief. “Did the voice sound like Pete Delaney?” he asked as he reached out for the headset he’d given me.
“No.” I felt bummed and also bad that I had somehow let Ruiz down. If he was disappointed, he definitely didn’t show it. “Maybe Pete was using some really sophisticated voice-changing equipment,” I went on. “But even then, the accent wasn’t the same. Pete sounds midwestern, that kind of default American accent you hear on TV where you don’t really notice any accent. Frank sounded, I don’t know, maybe a little Chicago, and I don’t think I’m getting that just from the area code. When he said something like ‘If you want me to call back,’ the ‘back’ had that flat Chicago sound. Not that I am a dialogue expert, but I have a good ear. To me, it didn’t sound like Pete.”
“You’re disappointed?” Ruiz asked.
“Yes.”
“Get over it.”
“I have.”
“No. Hey, I didn’t mean to be rude. Maybe it wasn’t Pete. Maybe it was Pete flattening his a’s. Maybe he just hired some kind of service to record the message.” I must have looked dubious because he added: “Small business owners with some kind of accent do it all the time. Someone with default English, like you call it, or a Chicago accent could make a living doing that kind of thing. What I want you to hear is his callback. I’ll be a little nervous, evasive. Whatever it takes to keep him talking more than he usually would.”
“Good. That sounds good. I guess I should go back to New York then?”
He nodded. “I’ll record it, send you the audio over the usual channels. Just call my voicemail to let me know when you get home.”
“If it’s not Pete, will you still keep working on the case?” Not even a second later I shook my head realizing what a dumb question that was. It wasn’t as if they’d let some guy doing murder for hire take a walk just because he wasn’t Pete Delaney.
“Relax,” he said, sounding on the borderline of kindness. “We’re on it. You did a good job on this thing. Now it could be you’re dead wrong about Pete, taking a gut feeling and running too far with it. But even though the boat guy couldn’t ID him, you got an ID from that guy in the shooting range, where he was talking about shooting bear. So I put my money on your being on the right track, and even if it’s not your Long Island guy, the investigation seems spot-on.”
I stood and we were about to shake hands when his cell phone went ting-ting, high-pitched wind chime sounds. He yanked open his drawer, then tossed the headset to me. I got it on fast and nodded. He answered, “Hello.” Then he waited, then shook his head. “Hello?” he said again. “This is Ted.” Texas was back in Ruiz’s voice.
“Frank,” the caller said. “You have a situation you need help with.” It was less a question than a statement.
“Kind of,” Ruiz said.
“Don’t shit me. I’m busy. I’m selective about what I take on.”
“It’s my wife,” Ruiz said. He pushed a piece of paper toward me and handed me a pen. I wrote: “Can’t tell. If Pete, using a voice changer. Deeper, but cadence same. ‘Selective’ business resemb how he talks.” He leaned over his desk, pulled the pen from my hand, and made a big question mark over “cadence.” Then he went back to talking. “Listen, the marriage hasn’t been good for years. The problem is, she thinks I have a girlfriend—”
As the caller was saying, “Cut to the chase,” I took the pen back and scribbled: “intonation + rhythm of words.”
“The actual fact is, I do have a girlfriend. More than a girlfriend. I am in love and she’s pregnant.”
“The girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Which one do you want to get out of your life?”
“My wife,” Ruiz said, sounding a little stunned that such a question had to be asked. For such an all-business guy, he was a good actor. “Where do you live?” the caller asked.
“In the Houston area.”
“This isn’t some game. When I ask you a question, I need an answer right away. Let’s do it again. Where do you live?”
“It’s an area called West University. Technically West University Place.”
“Address.”
“Fifty-two Thirty-Four Williams Street.” The caller didn’t say anything, and Ruiz continued in a shaky voice: “That’s my actual address. Look, you’re not—”
“Stop right now. We haven’t discussed my fee. I haven’t checked you out. I need to get an idea of what would be the best possible outcome in your mind.”
“You mean, I have to, I get to choose how—”
“Right now, all you’re doing is pissing me off. You don’t get to do anything until I call you back. And I’m not going to call you and say ‘Ted.’ Tell me your name.”
A couple of seconds’ wait, then Ruiz said: “Mike. Michael Costa.”
“If you check out and if I’m interested, I’ll call you back within forty-eight hours. I’ll tell you my fee then. No haggling. I’m the best there is and you’re going to get what you pay for. You will say yes or no. If it’s yes we need to talk details of transferring payment. If it’s no …” And then the caller hung up.