The North Face of the Heart - Dolores Redondo Page 0,4
man in a suit dropped into the seat on the other side of Amaia.
“Assistant Inspector, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I thought you’d be in the break room with the others.” He gave her a smile to let her know his aggrieved tone was just an act. The smile lasted maybe a bit too long. Amaia deliberately looked away.
Emerson had been assigned as her point of contact, the agent responsible for orienting her, helping her get the most from the course, accompanying her, introducing her to her instructors, and using his own devices and passwords to provide access to the material she needed for the assignments. From time to time he got a bit too friendly.
“I came early to get a good seat. This is a subject that particularly interests me.”
“Seems you’re not the only one.” Emerson looked around the room, almost full by now. “Looks like our agent Dupree has a lot of fans. Ever hear him speak before?”
“I went to a lecture he gave in Boston three years ago, when I was a graduate student. I stood in line, got his autograph and a quick handshake. The schedule says Dupree’s going to conduct our seminar this afternoon. I want to be ready.”
Emerson raised one eyebrow and gave her a patronizing smile.
She saw he was dying to tell her more. “You know something I don’t?”
“Special Agent Dupree has his own style. His teaching methods can be unusual. He’s not an instructor; he heads a strike team. He does lecture from time to time, and sometimes he drafts an article for the Bureau’s intranet. It’s really unusual for him to agree to help train the Europol group.”
“You work for him, don’t you?”
“Not exactly . . . ,” Emerson was pained to admit. “Sometimes I travel with his team. I’d really like to be assigned to his unit, and maybe someday I will be. Right now I’m on the communications support team with Agent Stella Tucker, who works for Dupree. So I do work for him, but only indirectly. Profiling requires lots of different skills. They mostly use field agents on their strike teams, but quite a few support functions are based here. We back up the field agents looking for bad guys.”
He said “bad guys” as if talking to a child and gave her another one of his phony smiles. He changed his tone when she didn’t react. “Agents stationed here support all three strike teams. I specialize in data analysis. It doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s vital for their work.”
The conference room light dimmed, and the buzz of conversation died away as if controlled by the same switch. A spotlight came up on a bare lectern.
Agent Dupree emerged from the right side of the stage and walked into the pool of light. Dupree was slim and elegant, his short hair carefully combed, just as she remembered. The dark circles under his eyes emphasized the pallor of his complexion; he looked like a man who never got enough sleep. He wore a perfectly tailored midnight-blue suit, a matching tie, and a white shirt. He was clean shaven.
Dupree took his place behind the lectern. He appeared to have no text or notes. Amaia wondered if he’d had a script pre-positioned on the lectern; if so, that attention to detail might be a clue to his character. She made a mental note to watch to see if he picked up any papers afterward.
The brief bio in the course program said he was forty-four years old, a native of Louisiana with degrees in law, economics, art history, psychology, and criminology. For the past year he’d headed one of the three working groups at the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit.
Dupree raised his chin, put one foot forward, and shifted his weight to the other. His hands rested easily on his hips as he looked out at the faces in the auditorium.
He reached out and tapped the microphone. A thunderous sound filled the hall. He leaned forward slightly, looked up, and spoke to someone she couldn’t see at the back of the auditorium. “Could you please put some light on the audience? When I can’t see them, I feel as though I’m just talking to myself.” His voice was resigned. “I feel like that often enough already.”
The lights brightened just enough so Dupree could make out their faces.
He surveyed the rows of seats as if looking for someone. When he got to Amaia, he kept his gaze on her for a couple of seconds, then