by Robb T White
‘Don’t worry, Tom. You had no choice. The stepmother was screaming harassment through the veins in her neck.’
‘Doesn’t matter, plenty of grief and blame to go around.’
‘You can dump off whatever you can on me. I don’t care now. I’m the reason he’s been running free so long. I should have done more. I should have anticipated this. All that Wittgenstein rubbish made me think he was cold and methodical.’
‘Hey, you were only acting on the same profile as the rest of us were—which, come to think of it, your own people did.’
‘I should have seen it coming once we had Rissa Evans’s statement,’ she said. A voice in her head said: Stop with the hindsight and the regrets. What you did is what you should have done.
The air had a nip in it. Another New England autumn in full swing.
‘Logic, science, fantasy—I don’t know what’s the right way anymore,’ she said, reflecting on Wöissell’s chameleon-like ability. ‘I wanted to thank you in person for all that you did. I’m used to police departments stonewalling, not cooperating the way you did. If we don’t meet again, thank you.’
They shook hands out front.
A nice guy and a good cop, she thought. But another bridge burned.
Now she had to catch a plane to DC for what was going to be a brutal inquiry by dour men in three-piece suits. If she saw a token woman among them, she’d know the fix was in. With her luck, she’d be a killer in a skirt, entrenched male Bureau parlance for a woman who out-toughed men to prove she belonged, despite the fact that almost twenty per cent of the Bureau now comprised women agents.
My problem in a nutshell, Jade thought. I don’t belong.
Chapter 60
THE OPR REVIEW BOARD finished its written work in record time and came down on her back with all six pairs of feet—and one pair of flats. It turned out she had been right about the woman present on the committee. It was a stern rebuke in pedestrian, Bureau jargon that extended a full eight pages and came with a seventeen-page addenda for specific references. Her sins were many and they were counted, itemized, and logged with the requisite tags for future reference in the FBI vault. Only a FOIA request would expose her shame to public view, but it didn’t matter. She was walking dead, her career kaput—that much she already knew anyway.
A resignation letter was pro forma. If Kansas City was the dead letter office in the FBI, they didn’t have one for agents who had failed as dismally as she. The FBI didn’t mind some of its divisions failing to get results; for example, a bank robber knocking off twenty banks across the country could go on for a decade or two until the robber aged and became so rheumatoid he was caught limping out of a bank. That was fine. So long as he was caught at the end of the day. Every agent basked, merit letters were as plentiful as litter in a hurricane. But when they give you help, even for a short while, you had to get results, not the kind she drew from the tabloids.
Charles Tyrone Wöissell was in the wind. He had disappeared despite a state-wide manhunt that involved a thousand combined officers and FBI agents looking for him in the hours after the motel shooting. She was even criticized for her failure to put him down when he was standing just feet from her. That was the sole woman’s comment as if the Annie Oakley trick shooting was an obligation under gunfire.
‘But, surely, Agent Hui, you knew the imminent danger he presented after Lieutenant Huff of the Providence PD informed you of the massacre of his family?’
‘Ma’am, with respect, I was only just hearing it for the first time.’
‘A technicality,’ the man, a deputy AG from Justice, mumbled.
‘But you had to be concerned he posed the risk of great harm to the public.’
‘Is that a question, sir?’
‘No, just an observation,’ he said and folded his hands together on the table.
‘But the lieutenant did inform you he had your identity, is that not true?’
‘I believe Lieutenant Huff was expressing a precaution only, and an unlikely one at that.’
That drew ire from the woman and snorts from the men.
‘Still, Agent Hui, didn’t you …’
And on and on it went like that. ‘You didn’t …’ and ‘Why didn’t you …’ and ‘But you failed to …’ over and over, throughout the morning and into mid afternoon under the blistering, white-hot light of retrospection.
She absorbed each accusation, some were popcorn, some were missiles that hurt and exposed her rawest nerves. She was complimented at the end of the meeting for answering every question asked without evasion, which made her bridle a bit because it sounded as if they expected her to assume a defensive posture. One of the men sitting at the end made a light joke about her being the beneficiary of two different OPR reviews in a matter of months. She didn’t laugh. The clock said three, the putative hour of Christ’s crucifixion.
She knew what it felt like sans nails.
Ironically enough, she thought, the OPR panel considered her biggest failure to be in leadership of the task force. She should have wrested control of it from Gilker from the start; it led to a diffuse effort when all agencies needed to be laser sharp. That stung worst of all; the final paragraph of the report was the biggest shovelful on her career.
… Agent Jade Hui should have had the experience, dedication, and tenacity to direct all aspects of this investigation. The committee notes you also failed with management’s support, and you lacked ability in selecting a cadre of investigators and support personnel and thereby assigning such personnel as the investigation dictated.
They proceeded to lecture her in serial murder investigations and the SAC’s duty to ensure relevant information is distributed to the entire task force as it may, as in this case, reflect interwoven incidents.
Getting off the plane in Fayetteville, she’d hoped Pete would be there to meet her. She was torn between sticking pins in a voodoo doll Gilker and apologizing to him for dragging him into the tumult, but she couldn’t seem to make an appointment with him despite the few carpeted yards of separation between his office and her carrel. He sent an intraoffice memo stating that agents with appointments had to knock unless summoned by him. The Hui Rule, as it came to be known. Throughout the week after her return from headquarters, she heard the familiar tap-tap-tap of knuckles on Gilker’s door and a sideways smirk in her direction.
She had the email ready for sending and the letter had been printed up with the date left blank for writing in as well as her signature. The Enter key dared her to hit it.
She wasn’t yet ready to pull the pin, however. For one thing, she wanted to resign from her Chicago home office, not this one.
Journalists from USA and the Sun Times still badgered her for interviews. Rumor had it a major publishing house in New York was putting out feelers to veteran crime reporters at Little Rock’s Democrat-Gazette and Providence’s Journal to contact her to get ‘her side’ as the agent most closely connected to Charles Wöissell, the maniac. The tabloids vied for naming rights as if he were a building; ‘New England Maniac,’ Arkansas Gouger,’ ‘Rich-Boy Psycho’ and ‘Concession Truck Creep’ were some of the first.
Lieutenant Huff called. He was dealing with his own review board. ‘I’ve got chips to call in,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’ He told her Rissa Evans was cashing in; she’d sold her story to one tabloid and had engaged a lawyer to negotiate a contract with Entertainment Tonight for a segment.
She was forced to leave all her belongings in the Hampton as long as the crime scene tape remained. Outsiders somehow found her number, no matter where she moved. Social media seemed to scout her everywhere she went. Fayetteville didn’t have a safe house but they found a place for her south of the university. Vans with aerials and news logos parked outside the Fayetteville office, one more indication of the damage in her wake, but it was better than her last place, a B & B where the owner slipped a handwritten message under her door, asking her to relocate so she would not be harassed daily.
&n
bsp; Agent Shaughnessy called to give her moral support.
‘Thanks, Cee, I’m fine.’
Shaughnessy barked a laugh at that lie.
‘That’s what those women all said before they were hanged from the oak trees.’
‘That was the Boston Commons,’ she said, ‘not Providence. The state motto is “Hope we have as an anchor of the soul.”’
In the morning, she promised herself to hit that Enter button, and tie it off; she would contact HR and take all the necessary formal steps to separate herself from the Bureau. She had no idea what her pension would amount to. There were many things in the coming days she would have to learn about being an ordinary civilian living by her wits. The last time she saw Bar-Jonah in passing, he averted his eyes. She was tainted goods for as long as she was an active agent. Even getting rid of an unwanted agent took some bureaucratic finagling—and paperwork.
‘Why not,’ she said to her mirror, ‘make a new start?’
Deep in her guts she knew she was kidding herself. This was the only kind of life she wanted; she was meant to be an FBI agent, and it was being ripped from her by a psychopath who couldn’t handle whatever demons twisted around in his head.
She would think about it later. How she had come to work the next day full of resolve to take the punches the Bureau dished out, work hard, redeem herself, be the kind of Special Agent she intended to be when the diploma from Quantico was handed to her at the graduation ceremony.
Then the summons from Gilker at ten o’clock.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘I have your transfer papers right here, Agent Hui.’
No surprise. He’d always intended to deliver her up to Great Falls anyway.
‘This says Kansas City, sir.’
‘That’s correct, Agent Hui. I want to wish you the best of luck in your new posting.’
Without a word, she turned on her heel, performed a perfect jeté on the carpet as she’d done a thousand times in the ballet classes of her youth, and exited with a slam of his door. She went straight to her computer. She opened the letter file, hit SEND, and in seconds fetched it from the printer. Still warm in her hand, she took the sheet of three paragraphs into Gilker’s office, and without the preliminary knock, stepped up to his desk and placed the letter on it with a palm-smack. She signed it with a flourish and pushed it his way with a flick of her fingers.
Sayonara. Out the door. Past the rapt faces all trying not to look.
She’d remember those thirty seconds all her life.
PART 5
Chapter 61
Albuquerque, NM
‘HO-LY JESUS, NEW MEXICO of all places?’
‘You go where the job is, Cee.’
‘I guess you’re not half the snob I thought you were,’ Shaughnessy said.
She hadn’t heard from Cee Shaughnessy in over three—no, four—months. She’d been working for a Santa Fe law firm, a good one thanks to the clout of her DC mentor, an agent who stayed loyal to her throughout her ordeals: first, in that useless Smiley Face gig and then in the wake of the débàcle in Providence. She still didn’t know what word was the right one to apply to it: calamity, catastrophe, disaster. They all sounded so self-serving but tragedy was much too grandiose for a mere change of careers. Somewhere between Waterloo and misfortune lay the right word, and she was sure, in time, she’d come across it. Maybe she’d borrow Cee’s expression one day: clusterfuck.
She loved New Mexico from the moment she crossed the Colorado state line. She’d passed through it on her way to California in the late nineties and she’d flown over it a dozen times, but she’d never been there. The views, the wildlife, the deserts, the sunsets were spectacular. She took the High Road to Taos her first free weekend. In a weird turn of events, her acclimation to the Southwest was made easier by her dark looks; most people assumed she was Hispanic. Her surname didn’t affect their misperceptions and she seldom corrected anyone about it, especially the clients she dealt with every day, who gave it a Spanish j emphasis.
It was a good firm and she liked her colleagues well enough. It was one that didn’t hesitate to promote its women associates to partnerships. They wanted her to do torts until she got her legal experience up to snuff. Trial lawyering was pretty much out of the question; this firm had some first-class trial dogs on a leash and they handled the five per cent of the firm’s business that wound up in court.
It worked well for a while, maybe two months, and then she started to have those dreams again. Not the stomach-clenching ones she’d experienced after the cabin cruiser but the ones where she chased Wöissell down a long hallway under rows of fluorescent lights. She knew she was never going to catch him and at any second he could turn around and attack her. The endless running was what disturbed her more than the fear of having to do battle with him again. Everyone has unfinished business; she told herself to stop dwelling on it.
Then one afternoon in late January from her office, looking east toward the Sangre de Cristo Range, she found herself mesmerized once more by the sheer beauty of those burnt-orange mountains with a dusting of snow on the firs and piñon trees of their peaks. She knew her days as a personal injury lawyer were numbered.
That evening in yet another motel room, she read an article in the New Mexican that criticized the Albuquerque police department for using its weapons in fatal shootings more than any other major American city.
By the end of that week, she had packed up and moved south to the capital. By the end of that month, she used a good portion of her pension savings to buy a half-share in a bail bonds office in a mall with an agent named George Smith, who was willing to stay long enough to teach her the ropes and see her through the licensing application process and wait for the other half of his fee when she passed the state department of insurance’s examination. Her background and fingerprint check was a snap and her law degree as well as her FBI background cleared all the other minor hurdles in a couple of weeks’ time.
When she took over, she filed a standard $5,000 surety company bond with the insurance commission and paid a local artist to paint her name over the glass front window: Jade Hui, Bond Dealer, 24 Hours Every Day. He added a tall saguaro cactus, even though it was native to the Sonoran Desert and found only in Arizona.
On the day her license came in the mail, George shook her hand out front, pocketed the other half of his asking fee and told her ‘good luck.’
The next weeks were busy and interesting as she learned the names and faces of the people in George’s file cabinet as well as the new clients coming through the door. George had a contractual ‘blanket’ bond agreement with the criminal court that guaranteed her a steady business. That first solo week kept her busy with DUIs and worried parents, felons calling from jail, relatives and friends of felons, people who were educated, uneducated, well-dressed and unkempt.
She loved the flavor of Indian, European, and Latin all mixed together. She felt as if she were a confessor for some of those people who all wanted to reveal the whole sordid catastrophe of their lives. She knew there were some who wanted to scam her and she did get burned by a couple of men and one woman. When George called her up from his retirement community in Florida to see how she was doing, she told him about them. He said, ‘It happens to everybody in the bond business.’ He gave her the name of a private investigator he used for skiptraces. She asked him if he missed the job, and he replied, ‘Hell yes, these old farts around here make me sick listening to them complain about every goddamn thing in their lives.’
She loved the sun, the warmth, the chili pepper ristras hanging from posts and porches and anywhere you could fix a bundle. Though her ancestral people, the Hui, were from the Northwestern provinces of China and were Muslim, she herself was raised on the fiery, adventurous cuisine of South China. The sidewalks downtown bordered by luminarias that reflected in the glass windows and the passing cars.
The weeks passed, became months, and her life achieved a normalcy she didn’t think she deserved.
She tried dating on a couple of sites and found the men pleasant enough, but she had no desire to start or maintain a relationship yet. She lived alone but she never thought of herself as lonely. It was the one subject Cee would bring up every time she called. She announced she herself had been ‘engaged’ for a month to a divorced woman she met through one of the sites Jade used.
‘You sound happy,’ Jade said.
‘I am. I wish I could give you some of this happiness.’
‘I am happy,’ Jade said.
‘No, you’re not,’ Celeste told her.
It was the certainty in her voice that startled Jade. The bond business had turned a corner and she was going to make a decent profit by year’s end. She was even thinking of hiring some clerical help. Maybe even getting a pet to share her free time at her new place, a small rental property a few blocks from the mall.
She had other routines that pleased her like the diner at the end of the same strip mall where the food was Mexican, home-made, spicy and full of interesting customers. The woman who ran it was a widow named Maria who laughed and joked with the customers. She took an instant liking to Jade, which put her off at first, but once she warmed to Maria’s laissez-faire attitude about everything, including the cooks and dishwashers who abandoned her without notice, and begged for their jobs back a week later, they grew close and Maria gave her plenty of good information as well as meals that were so satisfying and tasty she had to start worrying about the calories. Maria knew much about people, politicians, and the way things were done in Albuquerque. Jade realized she was one of George’s invaluable sources about the history of certain families who passed through his doorway.
Maria was constantly introducing her to everyone she thought might be useful for Jade to know and it became obvious these contacts, who trusted Maria, would trust her, too. Jade began to feel like a prodigal daughter, switched at birth, come home to her rightful mother. Maria once told her she must have been born in New Mexico in another life because she was the only person who never complained about the vicious summer heat and swirling dust. Jade told her a couple of winters in Chicago would cure anyone of complaining of heat forever.