The Brayton Hotel was downtown. L.A.’s central library was right across the street. It had been a while since Abby had done any research there, the Internet having rendered it largely unnecessary to comb the stacks. But there were some items she couldn’t find online. On its Web site, the L.A. Times archived its articles as far back as 1985, but included no photos. It was the photos that interested her. The library would have the complete editions-text and pix-on microfilm.
She decided to head downtown early.
It took her ninety minutes of scrolling through microfilm, but she found it.
An article in the Los Angeles Times, dated July 14, 1991, about Orange County District Attorney John Reynolds. He hadn’t been Jack then. The populist persona appeared shortly afterward, upon his entry into politics.
The story was a puff piece, a human interest item on the D.A. at home. A tough man on the job, but tender with his kids, ages seven and five. There was a description of Reynolds flying a kite with the children on a windy bluff overlooking the ocean. Daddy at home making pancakes-“griddlecakes,” as he charmingly called them-on Sunday morning before packing the kids off to church. His wife Nora speaking of her hubby’s soft side.
But not to soften up the D.A. too much, there was also much talk of his stern dedication to the law. Asked if he had any hobbies, he answered, “I like to put people in jail.” It was reported that he said it with a smile.
Buried in the story was a brief acknowledgment of the real reason for the sudden interest in the life of a district attorney-rumors of a run for political office next year. The Times story was obviously a way of testing the waters, and of putting out a favorable impression of the potential candidate.
None of which mattered. All that interested Abby was the photograph accompanying the article. The Reynolds clan at home-husband, wife, kids… and their housekeeper, Rose Moran.
Rose was in the background of the shot, serving up a plate of hot dogs at a family dinner in the backyard. In the fuzzy black-and-white photo her face was hard to make out. Abby fiddled with the knobs that controlled magnification and focus until the woman was centered in the microfilm reader’s blue crosshairs in blurry close-up. She had a sharp, thin face with narrow lips and close-set eyes.
Not Andrea Lowry. Even the passage of fifteen years could not turn this pinched bone structure into Andrea’s broader, squarer face.
There was no way Reynolds could have looked at Andrea Lowry and seen Rose Moran. His story was a lie. As lies went, it was a pretty good one, but not quite good enough.
Abby hated being lied to. It really frosted her corn flakes.
She fed a coin into the slot and printed out the page with the photo. Suddenly she was no longer worried about what she would say to Jack Reynolds. She had questions for him.
And she wanted answers.
8
Tess didn’t want to think about Abby. She wanted to forget she’d gotten the phone call last night. She wanted to put the whole thing out of her mind and make it go away.
This attitude sustained her during the first hour and a half of her workday, which began at eight fifteen with the weekly squad supervisors meeting. Her self-control continued when she returned to her office. It lasted long enough to allow her to dictate two letters and review three reports on ongoing investigations, sign out some mail, and initial a variety of paperwork, transferring it from her in-box to her out-box.
None of this was very glamorous, nothing at all like a day in the life an FBI agent in the movies, and yet she took a secret thrill in even the more mundane aspects of her job. She never took her position for granted. To be in charge of a regional field office was a major accomplishment for any agent, rarer still for an agent who was not yet forty, and almost unprecedented for an agent lacking a Y chromosome. Only fifteen percent of special agents were female, and before Tess there had been just one female SAC, whose resentful male colleagues had dubbed her Queen Bee.
There were plenty of agents who looked back fondly on the Hoover years, when women had been permitted in the Bureau only as support staff. Some of those nostalgic types were the old guard, dwindling as they hit the mandatory retirement age of fifty-seven, but most were too young to remember Hoover as anything other than an unsmiling face in one of the official portraits that hung in FBI offices everywhere. Still, they kept his traditions alive, including the casual, almost jocular misogyny that had been part of the Bureau’s culture from the start.
In her days as a street agent, Tess had heard herself referred to as a skirt, a split tail, and-her personal favorite-a breast fed. She tried not to take offense. A certain amount of ribbing and rough talk was normal in law enforcement. In theory the Office of Professional Responsibility could be summoned to investigate sexually derogatory comments, but the policy was rarely enforced. No agent, female or otherwise, wanted to be known as a troublemaker who couldn’t take a joke-not in an institution that valued loyalty to the team above almost any other virtue. Anyway, she was an SAC now, at one of the country’s larger field offices, and nobody called her a split tail these days. At least, not to her face.
Her office was large and well appointed, with the customary leather chairs and matching leather sofa, the properly intimidating desk with an American flag beside it, and a large bookcase stocked with reference volumes and the Bureau’s Manual of Rules and Regulations, known as the Big Manual; but the walls were curiously bare. Tess had eschewed the collection of photos known as an I-love-me wall, in which highlights of an agent’s career were illustrated for the benefit of visitors. Handshakes with the director or the president usually got the best display.
Tess had shaken her share of hands and had the photos to prove it, but they were in a cardboard box in a closet at home, not demanding attention on her wall. The only photos she had put up were a couple of cityscapes she liked-Miami and Phoenix, two cities where she’d been assigned earlier in her career, and Denver itself. And there was a photo of Hoover, of course. Not to display J. Edgar’s picture would be the ultimate act of sedition.
At nine forty-five the willpower that had carried her through her morning routine finally failed. There was no way around it. She had to know what Abby had gotten mixed up in. If there was a federal connection, Abby might come to the attention of the Bureau and be called in for questioning. Someone would link her to the Rain Man case. The truth would come out. Tess’s superiors would learn that for the past year and a half she had been covering up the participation of a civilian in a federal law enforcement action. And not just any civilian. Abby wasn’t some FBI groupie, she was an unlicensed private investigator, very nearly a vigilante, exactly the sort of person who should have no input into an official investigation. The repercussions would almost certainly prove fatal to Tess’s career.
Switching on her desktop computer, she used the Bureau’s secure intranet to connect with the mainframe in the Hoover Building in Washington, then logged onto the federal internal computer system. The FICS was a database containing the details of every FBI investigation, while affording access to the records of other federal law enforcement agencies as well. Through the system she accessed the U.S. Marshals Service and ran a keyword search on “Andrea Lowry.”
No hits. No Andrea Lowry was listed in the WITSEC program as a real name or an alias.
She returned to the Bureau’s own database and repeated the search. Nothing there, either. The FBI had never investigated any case involving Andrea Lowry-or if they had, the case was too recent to have been entered into the system.
So that was that. She had kept her promise, and it had cost her nothing. She could truthfully tell Abby that Andrea Lowry, whoever she was, had not reinvented herself with the help of the federal government.