Alex laughed. “That’s a relief to know. But you said you need my advice.”
“I want this mess cleared away before I step down, and the president agrees. It’s where you come in. I want to lean on your woman’s intuition. If one of those eight women on Otto’s list is the killer, I think you could spot her before any of us could.”
“You want me to interview them?”
“Not until tomorrow. I’ll give you the list of names, and I’d like you to spend a couple of hours this afternoon going through their personnel files, see if anything jumps out at you. Look at their photographs, study their eyes. Toby Berenson thinks sometimes whatever’s going wrong shows itself in the eyes.”
Berenson was the Agency’s psychologist. The suicide rate among CIA field officers was much higher than the general population. And so were the rates of drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide. He claimed to be able to detect the early signs by looking into the officer’s eyes.
“I’ll give it a try, Mr. Director,” Alex said. Her eyes were the same as they’d always been: neutral. But she was happy Page had pulled her file from Rencke’s list.
“Let me know by morning.”
TWENTY-NINE
It was past eight when Schermerhorn got up from where he’d been seated in front of Otto’s computer in an upstairs bedroom and went to the window to look outside. A car passed, but the streets in this part of Georgetown were almost always quiet, according to Otto.
“Makes it easier to spot someone trying to sneak up on you,” he’d said.
“But not impossible for the right man,” Schermerhorn had replied.
None of the photos Otto had brought back on his iPad rang any bells, nor did they even when displayed on the much larger screen upstairs. After dinner, Otto had retrieved the Agency’s complete dossiers on each of the thirty-seven possibles, and Schermerhorn had spent a couple of hours going over them.
“Nothing?” McGarvey asked at the door.
“No. It’s quiet out there.”
“I meant in the files. Did you recognize any of them?”
“There were two or three guys who looked possible. But unless their files were faked, none of them ever had the field experience the rest of us had.”
“How about the eyes?”
“No. But there’s a problem with the files.”
“What’s that?”
“There were supposed to be nine women, but I only count eight. One’s missing.”
Otto appeared on the monitor. “She’s Dorothy Givens, Walt Page’s secretary,” he said. He was seated at the kitchen counter, eating a piece of leftover pizza.
“That’d be just like Alex. She could be anyone anywhere.”
“I’ll be right up,” Otto said.
“It’d explain how your killer got their intel. If it is Alex, she would have bugged the director’s office.”
“It’s clean,” Otto said, pushing past McGarvey. “We checked.”
“Physically checked?” Schermerhorn asked. He’d heard this sort of crap before. It was part of one of their training evolutions. Look for the unexpected. Think out of the box.
“Old-fashioned,” one instructor had told them. “Like opening someone’s mail — paper mail. Peeping through keyholes, looking through bedroom windows.”
“His office was swept.”
“Maybe she put a water glass to her ear and listened through the wall,” Schermerhorn said. He was frustrated. Otto was supposed to be the best — but that was electronically. And now his worry that he wasn’t safe even here spiked.
Otto grinned. “You’re right, but she checks out. You can’t believe the hoops someone wanting that job has to jump through. She came out clean.”
“You picked her in the first place. Where’s her file?”
“Page vouched for her.”
“Her file, or don’t you guys give a shit?”
McGarvey nodded, and Otto shrugged and went to the computer. With a few keystrokes, he pulled up the secretary’s file. Schermerhorn got the feeling he’d been had.
The photograph of a woman with a broad smile filled the screen, and Schermerhorn’s first instinct was to step back. But he didn’t know why. The face was more or less the same shape, a little heavier than Alex had been. And the lips were filled out. In Germany and later in Iraq when they’d made love — more accurately when they’d had sex — she had complained that her worst features were her small boobs and skinny lips.
“But I know how to use them, don’t I?”
“No complaints from me,” he’d said.
As he looked at her image on the screen, he was pulled in from the get-go; yet staring at it, he also wasn’t sure.
“Well?” Otto asked.
“She’s squinting.”
“It’s called smiling. Dotty does a lot of it.”
Alex almost never smiled in the old days. And when she did, it was as if she were laughing at you. Nothing about her rare smiles had any warmth in them. She measured people by what they were worth — to her personally.
But she’d also been an expert at disappearing right in front of your eyes. Usually she didn’t have to move; instead, somehow, she instantly became a stranger. Someone you’d never seen before.
The last time they had made love, he had rolled over onto his back, still inside her, and when he looked up into her face, he didn’t know who he was making love to. The woman above him was someone he’d never met. And the effect had been so extraordinary, instantly his mood had drained completely away and he couldn’t wait to get free.
She’d laughed. “What’s the matter, Kraut? The cat got your ardor?”
And an instant later she was the Alex he’d been making love to, but the cat or something had gotten his ardor.
It was in Iraq the week before she and George had started on their rampage, as they’d called it. “Teach ’em a little respect,” George had said, and Alex had agreed wholeheartedly.
Nothing was ever the same for any of them after that, though Alex and George were the one subject all of them avoided, at all costs. The two of them were taboo. They were afraid to even approach them, the same as if the two of them were dangerous IEDs ready to explode and kill them all at the slightest touch.
In fact, thinking about them now, Schermerhorn remembered that when they got to Ramstein and George wasn’t with them, they were relieved. No one wanted to bring up his name. Not even Alex had mentioned him.
They were debriefed individually, but so far as he knew, no one was asked about George. He became the forgotten man in everyone’s minds. Left behind somewhere in Saudi Arabia.
All that came back to him in a rush as he stared at the image of the DCI’s secretary.
“The DCI was in California, Thursday, two days before Coffin was killed,” Otto said. “His secretary took Friday off and wasn’t back at her desk until Monday morning when the director was back. Common practice.”
“As his secretary, she potentially had access to everything he knew,” McGarvey said.
“That included personnel records for everyone,” Otto said. “She is in a perfect position to know what the killer knew.”
Schermerhorn couldn’t tear his eyes from the image on the screen. “Did you know that when Alex was sixteen, she murdered her stepfather? She told Tom about it one night in Munich. The two of them were drunk, and he’d asked her something stupid, like, if it came to it, could she actually pull the trigger to kill someone? ‘In a heartbeat,’ she said. ‘Been there, done that already.’”
“It was in her initial interview,” Otto said. “But no charges were ever filed.”
“Of course not. Even at that age, she was too good to get caught. But she told Tom that when her stepfather tried to rape her, she stabbed him in the heart, then cut off his dick and peeled his face with a fish-filleting knife.”