The Poet (1995)

by Michael Connelly

  Bledsoe looked from me to the book and then back at me again.

  "You apparently thought you owed him enough to risk your job to make his widow's life a little easier."

  "Yeah, look what it got me. A piece-of-shit office with a piece-of-shit license on the wall. I sit in a room where they used to cut babies out of women. It's not very noble."

  "Look, everybody on the force knew there was something noble about what you did, else you wouldn't be selling any insurance. You did what you did for your partner. You should follow through, now."

  Bledsoe turned his head and looked at one of the photos on the wall. It was him and another man, arms around each other's neck, smiling with abandon. It looked like it had been taken in a bar somewhere during the good days.

  " 'The fever called living is conquered at last,' " he said, without looking away from the photo.

  I slapped my hand down on the book. The sound scared us both.

  "Got it," I said and picked up the book. I had bent the pages of the poems where the killer's quotes had been taken. I found the page with the poem "For Annie" on it, scanned until I knew I was right, then put the book on the desk and turned it so he could read it.

  "First stanza," I said.

  Bledsoe leaned over to read the poem.

  Thank Heaven! the crisis The danger is past, And the lingering illness Is over at last And the fever called "Living"

  Is conquered at last.

  19

  As I hurried through the lobby of the Hilton at four, I envisioned Greg Glenn slowly making his way out from behind his desk and heading toward the daily news meeting in the metro conference room. I needed to talk to him and I knew that if I didn't snag him first he'd be holed up in that meeting and the weekend meeting that followed for the next two hours.

  As I approached the elevators I saw a woman stepping through the open doors of the one available car and quickly followed her in. She had already pushed the 12 button. I moved to the rear of the car and checked my watch again. I thought I was going to make it. The editors' meetings never seemed to get off on time.

  The woman had moved to the right side of the car and we had settled into the slightly uncomfortable silence that always comes when strangers are enclosed in an elevator. In the polished-brass trim on the door I could see her face. Her eyes watched the lights over the doors that marked our ascent. She was very attractive and I found it hard to turn away from the reflection, even though I feared she would turn her eyes and catch me. I imagined that she knew I was watching her. I've always believed that beautiful women know and understand they are always being watched.

  When the elevator opened on twelve I waited for her to step out first. She turned to the left and headed down the hall. I turned right and headed to my room, stopping myself from taking a backward glance at her. As I approached my door, pulling the card key out of my shirt pocket, I heard light steps on the hallway carpet. I turned and it was her. She smiled.

  "Wrong way."

  "Yeah," I said and smiled. "After a while it's all a maze."

  Dumb thing to say, I thought as I opened the door and she passed behind me. As I entered the room, I felt a hand suddenly grip the back of my jacket collar and I was shoved into the room. As this happened another hand went up under my jacket and grabbed onto my belt. I was slammed facedown onto the bed. I managed to hold on to the computer bag, not wanting to drop a two-thousand-dollar piece of equipment, but then it was roughly yanked out of my grasp.

  "FBI! You're under arrest. Don't move!"

  While one hand stayed on the back of my neck and held me facedown, the other hand patted my body in a search.

  "What the fuck is this?" I managed to say in a voice muffled by the mattress.

  Just as suddenly as they had gripped me, the hands were gone.

  "Okay, up. Let's go."

  I turned and raised myself until I was seated on the bed. I looked up. It was the woman from the elevator. My mouth dropped open a little. Something about being handled so easily by her, and her alone, burned me deeply and anger flushed my cheeks.

  "Don't worry. I've done it to bigger and badder men than you."

  "You better have an ID or you're going to need a lawyer."

  She pulled a wallet out of her coat pocket and flipped it open in front of my face.

  "You're the one who needs the lawyer. Now, I want you to take the chair from the desk, put it in the corner and sit there while I go through this place. It won't take long."

  She had what looked like a legitimate FBI badge and ID. It said Special Agent Rachel Walling. Once I read that I began to get an idea of what was going on.

  "C'mon, chop, chop. In the corner you go."

  "Let's see the search warrant."

  "You have a choice," she said sternly. "Go to the corner or I take you into the bathroom and cuff you to the drain trap under the sink. Make it."

  I stood up and dragged the chair into the corner and sat down.

  "I still want to see the fuckin' warrant."

  "Are you aware that your use of coarse language is a rather lame attempt to reestablish your sense of male superiority?"

  "Jesus. Are you aware that you are full of shit? Where's the warrant?"

  "I don't need a warrant. You invited me in and allowed me to search, then I arrested you after I found the stolen property."

  She stepped back to the door, her eyes on me, and closed it.

  "I didn't invite you anywhere. You try that shit and you'll crash and burn. Do you believe any judge is going to believe I was stupid enough to invite a search if I had stolen property in here?"

  She looked at me and smiled sweetly.

  "Mr. McEvoy, I am five feet five and weigh one hundred and fifteen pounds. That's with my gun on. Do you think a judge will believe your version of what happened? Would you even want to reveal what I just did to you in open court?"

  I looked away from her and out the windows. The maid had opened the curtains. The sky was beginning to lose the light.

  "I didn't think so," she said. "Now, you want to save me some time? Where are the protocols you copied?"

  "In the computer bag. I committed no crime in getting them and just having them is not a crime."

  I had to be careful of what I said. I didn't know if Michael Warren had already been found out or not. She was going through the satchel. She pulled out the Poe book, looked at it quizzically and threw it on the bed. She then pulled out my notebook and the sheaf of copies of the protocols. Warren had been right. She was a beautiful woman. A hard shell but beautiful just the same. About my age, maybe a year or two older, her hair was brown and falling to just above her shoulders. Sharp green eyes and the strong aura of confidence. That was what was most attractive about her.

  "Breaking and entering is a crime," she said. "It came under my jurisdiction when it was determined that the documents stolen belonged to the bureau."

  "I didn't break into anything and I didn't steal anything. What this is, is harassment. I've always heard that you bureau people get upset when somebody else does your job for you."

  She was leaning over the bed looking through the papers. She straightened up, reached into her pocket and pulled out a clear plastic evidence bag with a single sheet of paper in it. She held it up for me to look at. I recognized it as having been torn from a reporter's notebook. There were six lines written on it in black ink.

  Pena: his hands? after-how long?

  Wexler/Scalari: the car? heater? lock?

  Riley: gloves?

  I recognized my own handwriting and then it all tumbled together. Warren had torn sheets from my notebook to mark the spots of the file we had pulled. He had torn a page with old notes on it and somehow had left it behind when he returned the files. Walling must have seen the recognition in my face.

  "Sloppy work. After we get the handwriting analyzed and compared, I think it'll be a slam dunk. What do you think?"

  I couldn't even manage a fuck you this time.

  "I'm se
izing your computer, this book and your notebooks as possible evidence. If we don't need any of it, you'll get it back. Okay, we're going to go now. My car's right out front. The one thing I'm willing to do for you to show I'm not such a mean girl is take you down without the cuffs. We've got a long ride down to Virginia, though we might beat some of the traffic if we get going now. Are you going to behave? One false move, as they say, and I'll put you in the back with the cuffs on as tight as a wedding ring."

  I just nodded and stood up. I was in a daze. I couldn't meet her eyes. I walked toward the door with my head down.

  "Hey, what do you say?" she said to me.

  I mumbled my thanks and I heard her soft laughter behind me.

  She was wrong. We didn't beat the traffic. It was Friday evening. More people were trying to get out of the city than most nights and we crawled along with them as we crossed the city to get to a freeway. For a half hour neither of us spoke, except when she cursed at a traffic snarl or a red light. I was in the front seat, thinking the whole time. I had to make a call to Glenn as soon as possible. They had to get me a lawyer. A good one. I saw that the only way out was to reveal a source I had promised I would never reveal. I considered the possibility that if I called Warren he would come forward and confirm that I hadn't broken into the foundation. But I discarded it. I had made a covenant with him. I had to honor it.

  When we finally made it south of Georgetown the traffic opened up a little bit and she seemed to relax, or at least remember I was in the car with her. I saw her reach into the ashtray and pull out a white card. She put the dome light on and held the card on the top of the steering wheel so she could read it while she drove.

  "You have a pen?"

  "What?"

  "A pen. I thought all reporters carried pens."

  "Yes. I have a pen."

  "Good. I'm going to read you your constitutional rights."

  "What rights? You've already violated most of them."

  She proceeded to read from the card and then asked if I understood them. I mumbled that I did and she handed me the card.

  "Okay, good. I want you to take your pen and sign and date the back of that."

  I did as instructed and handed the card back. She blew on the ink until it dried and then put the card in her pocket.

  "There," she said. "Now we can talk. Unless you want to call your lawyer. How'd you get into the foundation?"

  "I didn't break in. That's all I can say till I talk to a lawyer."

  "You saw the evidence. Are you going to say that's not yours?"

  "It can be explained . . . Look, all I'm saying is I did nothing illegal to get those copies. I can't say anything more without revealing . . ."

  I didn't finish. I'd said enough.

  "The old can't-reveal-my-sources trick. Where were you all day today, Mr. McEvoy? I've been waiting since noon."

  "I was in Baltimore."

  "Doing what?"

  "That's my business. You have the originals on those protocols, you can figure it out.

  "The McCafferty case. You know, interfering with a federal investigation can get you charged with additional crimes."

  I gave her my best fake laugh.

  "Yeah, right," I said sarcastically. "What federal investigation? You'd still be down there in your office counting suicides if I hadn't talked to Ford yesterday. But that's the bureau's way, right? If it's a good idea, oh that's our idea. If it's a good case, yeah, we made that case. Meantime, it's hear no evil, see no evil and a lot of shit goes by unnoticed."

  "Jesus, who died and made you the expert?"

  "My brother."

  She didn't see that coming and it shut her down for a few minutes. It also seemed to have the effect of breaking through the shell she surrounded herself with.

  "I'm sorry about that," she finally said.

  "So am I."

  All the anger about what had happened to Sean welled up inside of me but I swallowed it back. She was a stranger and I couldn't share something so profoundly personal with her. I shoved it back and thought of something else to say.

  "You know, you might've known him. You signed the VICAP survey and the profile he got from the bureau on his case."

  "Yes, I know. But we never spoke."

  "How about if you answer a question now?"

  "Maybe. Go ahead."

  "How did you find me?"

  I was wondering if Warren had somehow put her on to me. If I could determine that he had, then all bets were off and I wasn't going to go to jail protecting the person who had set me up in the first place.

  "That was the easy part," she said. "I had your name and pedigree from Dr. Ford at the foundation. He called me after your little meeting yesterday and I came up this morning. I thought it might be wise to safeguard those files and sure enough I was right. Just a little late. You do quick work. Once I found the page from a reporter's notebook, it was pretty easy to figure out you'd been there."

  "I didn't break in there."

  "Well, everyone associated with the project denies talking to you. In fact, Dr. Ford specifically remembers telling you that you could not have access to the files until the bureau signed off on it. And funny thing, here you are with the files."

  "And how'd you know I was at the Hilton? Was that written on a piece of paper for you, too?"

  "Bluffed your city editor like he was a copy boy. I told him I had important information for you and he told me where you were."

  I smiled but turned and looked out the window so she wouldn't see it. She had just made a mistake that was as telling as if she had said outright that Warren had revealed where I was.

  "They don't call them copy boys anymore," I said. "It's politically incorrect."

  "Copy person?"

  "Close enough."

  With a straight face I looked over at her for the first time while in the car. I felt myself making a comeback. The confidence she had so expertly stomped into the bedspread in the hotel room was getting a second life. Now I was playing her.

  "I thought you people always worked in twos," I said.

  We were stopping at another red light. I could see the freeway entrance up ahead. I had to make my move.

  "Usually," she said. "But today was busy, a lot of people out, and actually, when I left Quantico, I thought I was just going up to the foundation to talk to Oline and Dr. Ford and to pull the records. I wasn't counting on a custody arrest."

  Her show was falling apart quickly. I was seeing it now. No cuffs. No partner. Me in the front seat. And I knew that Greg Glenn didn't know where I was staying in D.C. I hadn't told him and I hadn't made the reservation through the Rocky's travel office because there hadn't been time.

  My computer satchel was on the seat between us. On top of it she had stacked the copies of the protocol files, the Poe book and my notebook. I reached over and pulled it all onto my lap.

  "What are you doing?" she asked.

  "I'm getting out of here." I tossed the protocols onto her lap. "You can keep those. I've got all the information I need."

  I pulled the door handle and opened the door.

  "Don't you fucking move!"

  I looked at her and smiled.

  "Are you aware that your use of coarse language is a lame attempt to reestablish your superiority? Look, it was a nice play but you ran out of the right answers. I'll just catch a cab back to the hotel. I've got a story to write."

  I got out of the car with the things and stepped onto the sidewalk. I looked around and saw a convenience store with a phone out front and started walking that way. Next I saw her car cut into the parking lot and park in my path. She jerked it to a stop and jumped out.

  "You're making a mistake," she said, coming quickly toward me.

  "What mistake? You made the mistake. What was that charade all about?"

  She just looked at me. She was speechless.

  "Okay, I'll tell you what it was," I said. "It was a scam."

  "Scam? Why would I scam you?"

&
nbsp; "Information. You wanted to know what I had. Let me guess, once you had what you wanted, you were going to come in and say, 'Oh gee, sorry, your source just copped. Never mind, you're free to go and sorry about the little misunderstanding.' Well, you better go back down to Quantico and practice your act."

  I walked around her and headed to the pay phone. I picked the receiver off the hook and the phone was dead. I didn't let on, though. She was watching me. I dialed information.