morning, breaking only for a microwaved meal and a half an hour on the stationary bike. I leave every light on in the apartment and drag my couch against the front door before falling on my bed, exhausted and depleted.
When the alarm on my clock radio goes off, I feel like I haven’t slept a wink.
33
“MORNING, ROBERTA,” I say as I head toward Dwight Ross’s office holding a piping-hot cup of Starbucks.
Roberta, her gray hair pulled back and her eyes staring at me over her glasses, says, “What is that?”
“Just want to show my appreciation for everything the assistant director’s done for me,” I sing, suppressing my gag reflex.
“Mmm-hmm.” Roberta’s a saint for working with Dwight Ross. And she’s sharp too. She isn’t fooled by the ruse. Nobody in the building likes Dwight as much as I’m pretending to.
I walk into his office, and he calls out, “Oh, Emmy, that’s not necessary,” loud enough for Roberta to hear. But when I set the coffee down on his immaculate desk, he turns his wrist and taps on his watch. “I said eight, not eight oh three,” he says just above a whisper. “And it better be hot.”
One of these days, I promise myself, I’m going to put hemlock in that cup.
I go to my cubicle and boot up my computer. Other analysts begin arriving within minutes.
“Hey, lady!” says Bonita Sexton. She has the cubicle next to me and is part of my team on Citizen David; she’s grown accustomed to working with me primarily by phone or e-mail, not in person, during my extended absence.
“Hey, Rabbit,” I say. Her nickname’s due to her vegan diet, I think, or maybe her diminutive size. She was born in the early sixties to radical hippies in Chicago and still has it in her blood. She doesn’t wear makeup, leaves her hair long and straight, wears loose-fitting clothes. She even drives an electric car. She raised two boys as a single parent; one of them is an aspiring poet and part-time barista at a Starbucks in New Haven, and the other is a social worker in Tampa.
If you saw Sexton on the street, you’d assume she was a member of a commune, not an FBI employee, but she’s held this job for nearly thirty years. She’s always said that she stays for the benefits and the health insurance, because her older son has lupus. Yeah, that might be part of it, but her son is twenty-seven now and has his own insurance, and preexisting conditions are—for the moment, anyway—a thing of the past, and yet I don’t see her going anywhere. No, for Bonita Sexton, it’s about right and wrong, fair and unfair, and there is nothing she’d rather do than chase white-collar rip-off artists through webs of offshore bank accounts or track cargo shipments searching for human traffickers.
“The boss lady’s here!” says Eric Pullman. He’s the third part of our three-person team on Citizen David, the youngest of the trio. Pully is a computer geek’s computer geek. He has the pallor of someone who spends more time in front of electronic devices than outdoors. The hair on his head could best be compared to a mop. He has a long, skinny neck and oversize ears. Put him in a roomful of people, and he’ll stand in a corner and stare at the wall or pretend to be on his cell phone. Put him in front of a computer with a load of data, and he will make sense of it before you can say, By the way, I have a brush if you need it.
We are the analysts. If the special agents are the movie stars, wearing pancake makeup, moving authoritatively around the stage, and talking about search warrants and high-risk apprehensions, then we are the stage crew behind the curtain, quirky and unsightly, a band of talented misfits who use terms like anomaly detection, logistic regression, and inductively generated sequential patterns.
“We figured you were in hot water after the New Orleans article,” says Pully, leaning over the cubicle opposite mine, his chin perched on the divider.
“You think I’m not?” I say. “This is what we call a last chance.”
“So Dwit spared you, huh?” says Rabbit. She is no fan of Dwight Ross, whom she has dubbed “Dwit the Twit.”
“Anyway, I’m back in here full-time,” I say, “so you’ll have to get used to me again.”
“Shit,” says Pully, “what cubicle am I gonna use to surf porn now?”
I drop my head. “No sex jokes