Play with Fire

chapter Twenty-Two

“WELL, IF THEY won’t f*cking do it, then they won’t f*cking do it,” Sue Whitlavich said. Colleen O’Donnell’s boss was one of the smartest women she had ever met, and the one with the filthiest mouth – both considerable achievements, considering the number and variety of people Colleen knew.

While an agent at the FBI’s Chicago field office two decades ago, Whitlavich had gone to graduate school part time. The fact that she had excelled at both was a tribute to her intelligence, ambition, and the fact that in those days she had very little that could be construed as a life. Her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago was in Abnormal Psychology, but it was her dissertation, “Re-thinking the Monster: A Jungian Perspective on Serial Murder,” that had brought her to the attention of the Behavioral Science Section.

She’d transferred into Behavioral Science and spent the next nine years chasing (and mostly catching) serial killers before being promoted to Assistant Section Chief. Three years later, when her boss, Jack Crawford, had suffered his fatal heart attack, the top job went to Sue by virtual acclamation. But beginning a couple of years ago, the reports of her two best field agents had begun showing Sue Whitlavich that the world was an even darker place than she’d realized. Her vulgar paraphrase of Hamlet had been, “There’s more weird shit going on in the world than even I ever thought was f*cking possible.”

TV and the movies notwithstanding, the FBI didn’t have anything like an “X-Files Division.” But when a Bureau investigation stumbled across something that appears contrary to the generally accepted view of reality, it usually got dumped in the lap of Behavioral Science, and Sue Whitlavich almost always gave it to O’Donnell and Fenton. The work of those two agents was rarely discussed even within the Behavioral Science Section, and never discussed outside, if Whitlavich could help it.

“It’s not like Morris and Chastain won’t take the job,” Colleen O’Donnell explained. “They just can’t – not right now. They’ve taken on another assignment, and they feel obligated to finish that one before getting involved in something else.”

“I guess you’d have to say their sense of ethics is kind of admirable,” Fenton said, grudgingly.

“It would be a lot more admirable if it wasn’t being such a f*cking pain in the ass,” Whitlavitch said.

She slapped both palms lightly on her desk. “All right, we’ll hope Morris and Chastain find that book they’re looking for sooner rather than later, and in the meantime I’ll keep quietly nagging the AD to let us take the church burning file back from Civil Rights.”

“There was another one, night before last,” Fenton said. “Baptist church, down in Alabama.”

“Looks like the same signature on the ignition devices,” O’Donnell said, “and the body of the pastor was found in the rubble, next day.”

“Yeah, I saw the news,” Whitlavich said. “Whether that’s gonna make it easier or harder for me to change the Assistant Director’s mind remains to be seen. He can be a stubborn motherf*cker, sometimes.”

She opened a drawer, pulled a file from it, and tossed it on top of her desk. “Meanwhile, looks like a couple of women in Vegas have turned up dead, drained of all their blood. The local law’s trying to keep a lid on it, as you can imagine – don’t want to scare the old ladies away from the slot machines.”

O’Donnell picked up the file and began to page through it. “Vampire, you’re thinking? Or garden-variety psychopath who wants to be Bela Lugosi when he grows up?”

“That’s what you’re going out there to find out,” Whitlavich told her. “I’ve smoothed things over for you with Bernie Jenks at the Las Vegas Field Office – nobody should give you a hard time. If they do, let me know, and I’ll cut somebody a shiny new a*shole. Now take the file, and scoot.”

They scooted.

The main office for the Behavioral Science Section contained desks for two secretaries and an intern, an ancient Mister Coffee that nobody ever drank from more than once, an unreliable photocopier, and the agents’ mailboxes. The Bureau still had not embraced the digital age completely, so some official correspondence still came out on paper.

Fenton had pulled several sheets of paper from his box and was glancing through it is as O’Donnell said, “I hope we can get Morris and Chastain working on the church burnings pretty damn soon. All those guys in Civil Rights ever do is write legal briefs – they’ve got no clue what’s really going on.” She did not speak loudly – but, then, it was not a very large office.

“Maybe that guy whose name we gave them in New York will move things along,” Fenton said. He tossed everything that had been in his mailbox into a nearby trash basket. “Let’s get some lunch,” he said. “I hear the canteen’s got fried chicken, with watermelon for dessert. Yum.”

She looked at him. “It’s winter, Sachmo – remember? Watermelon’s out of season.”

He grinned at her. “Hell, I’m just jivin’.”

“Yeah,” O’Donnell said as they turned toward the door. “I be down with that.”

Ten feet from where they’d been standing, intern Walt Duran unobtrusively made a note and stuck it in his shirt pocket. Then he went back to the arrest reports he’d been given to sort.

Walt planned to apply for the FBI Academy next year, when he finished college. He was a Criminal Justice major at George Mason, an avid gamer, and one more thing worth noting – Walt Duran was an occasional stringer for the Branch Report.