The bedside phone rang early the next morning. It was 7:18, according to the clock on the nightstand; normally I’d have been up for a couple of hours by this time, but despite the peaceful neutrals adorning my room, I’d had trouble falling asleep. I’d channel-surfed until midnight, then gotten caught up in a PBS documentary about the “lost boys of Sudan,” the many thousands of boys whose families were killed and whose lives were destroyed by a genocidal civil war in Darfur. As I watched, I tried to imagine my young grandsons, Walker and Tyler, in similar circumstances. What if my son and his wife were hacked to death by machetes in front of their sons? What if the boys were taken captive and forced to fight—forced, at ages eight and ten, mind you, to murder other children’s families—in the service of the very men who’d killed their own parents?
In bleary-eyed hindsight, it hadn’t been wise to watch such a disturbing show so late at night. But I wasn’t sorry I’d seen it. It was easy, all too easy, to ignore the inhumane treatment inflicted on millions of vulnerable people around the world. The United States and the United Nations had stood by while nearly a million people were massacred in Rwanda, and had dragged their feet while tens of thousands were raped and murdered in the Balkans. After watching the Sudan documentary, I still didn’t know what to do, but I decided I wanted to do something to make a difference, however small, for people who didn’t have the rights and freedoms I’d enjoyed all my life. During the night, as I’d tossed and turned, I’d resolved to donate regularly to Human Rights Watch.
Now, still groggy from troubled sleep and violent dreams, I took a while to answer the phone. It was Angie; no surprise there, since she and her husband were the only people who knew where I was staying. “Good morning,” she said. “How are you?”
“Uh, great,” I mumbled.
“You don’t sound great. You sound comatose.”
“No, I’m fine,” I insisted. “That’s just the serenity talking. Any news?”
“Only that there’s no news.” She sighed. “My lawyer says he might not hear anything till late in the day. Maybe your devilish buddy Grease will get faster results. Meanwhile, I was calling to see if you might want to take a look around the crime lab while we’re waiting. Scope out the competition, long as you’re here.” She hesitated. “Oh, and if you’d be game to look at something that’s just come in—a skull that a guy’s dog dragged in from the woods . . .”
In fifteen minutes I was showered and shaved and dressed, waiting for Angie down in the lobby, beneath the fragile, illusory canopy of glowing glass bubbles.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement occupied three square buildings, three stories apiece, a couple of miles east of downtown Tallahassee. Actually, although it looked like three buildings, it was technically only one building, composed of three identical squares, joined—just barely—at diagonally opposite corners of the middle square. I’d Googled “FDLE” while I was waiting in the Duval’s lobby for Angie to pick me up, and one of the hits took me to a satellite photo. Zooming in on the complex from low orbit, I’d gotten the feeling I was gazing down on three diagonal tic-tac-toe squares, each of them measuring two hundred feet across. In the middle of each square, the satellite photo showed a large garden courtyard, whose grass and trees looked inviting even from hundreds of miles overhead.
Angie turned off a winding, tree-lined street into a parking lot that fronted the complex. Even though I’d seen the satellite photo, I was unprepared for how big it looked at ground level. FDLE had nearly two thousand employees, and the headquarters complex looked large enough to hold most of them. “This is quite a place you’ve got here. I’m envious.”
“Envious? Isn’t your ivory tower fancier than this?”
I snorted. “Obviously you didn’t visit the Anthropology Department when you were in Knoxville.” She shook her head. “We’re housed in the bowels of the football stadium, underneath the stands.” She looked at me skeptically, as if she thought I was pulling her leg. “I’m serious. They bricked in the space under the stands. In the 1940s and ’50s, Stadium Hall was the football players’ dormitory. When it got too run-down for the jocks, UT built a new athletic dorm and put nonathletes in the stadium. When it got too dilapidated for the regular students, the university gave it to the anthropologists. But hey, I’m not bitter.”
“I’ll never complain again.”
She swooped past the main entrance—a glassy lobby in the center building—and bore right, to the southeastern corner of the complex, in the direction of a sign that read EVIDENCE. Unlike the glassy main entrance, the evidence-intake door was inconspicuous, tucked in the corner of the southeastern square. Even with the help of the sign, I’d have had trouble locating this entrance.