“Not to mention, if Grogg goes quiet on them, or wants to screw them, they have a real problem. I have far too much that they want for them to fight with me. For them, cooperation and trading is the preferred alternative. And sometimes I have to get signed waivers from my clients to give them certain material.”
“This is impressive,” Anna said. “So how do you detect associations between people?”
“If we are doing an investigation and we see people in a car or at a meeting together. If other people are mentioned in a person’s garbage, maybe just a Christmas card, or a simple note, it all goes in. Every person that comes in contact with someone we might be even remotely interested in goes in the database-everything we can get on them. That’s one of the things the technicians do all day long. We try to search every public record on every person significant to any investigation. Maybe they show up on real estate title reports as buyer and seller or maybe partners in property or in a corporation. When we are gathering information nothing is too trivial to go in our database-even things that seem completely unrelated at the time. We love phone bills. And the computer remembers forever that Jack Jones had a postcard from Nick Smith in his garbage can. It’s a link, and we will never lose that link.”
“I’ll worry about the moral and ethical quagmire after we rescue my brother.”
“Uh-huh. My clients tend to look at it that way.”
Next Sam showed her the bunk rooms. For the women there were twenty bunks, dressing rooms, four tiled baths, and color. The room was cocoa with white trim, art and photos on the walls, dressers with wooden name placards, a wooden bookcase with some books and more photos.
“Now for the men.”
Although the color was the same and the baths were similarly tiled but with boy blue, there was no art or photographs; metal lockers stood in place of solid hardwood dressers, benches instead of chairs. It was much smaller, and the eight bunks were crammed together.
“Maybe you should ask the girls to fix up the boys’ place,” Anna said.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Inside you’re saying ‘Go to hell.’ ”
“It’s a place to sleep. When you’re awake enough to enjoy the scenery, you’re supposed to be outworking or on your way home.”
“I knew it.”
“And what were you talking to my mother about?”
“I’m way too sleepy and I’m going to go try one of the pretty bunks in the girls’ room.”
“This smells like revenge.”
“You can handle it.”
They walked down the hall to the larger dorm. Anna stepped inside and turned around.
Sam gave her a peck on the cheek.
“Not truly an inspirational kiss. But nice nevertheless.”
Sam turned to leave, anxious to get back to work. And somehow he didn’t like what had just happened to him. Turning, he walked back to her. As if she were expecting it, his lips met hers and their tongues explored their passion, which he found considerable.
“I shouldn’t be doing that,” he said. “But the only thing that seemed worse was not doing it.”
“Sam?”
“Yeah?” He stopped as he turned to leave.
“Now that I’ve seen where you work, I want to see where you live.”
Early in the morning Anna rose and found Sam sleepy-eyed and hunching over a cup of coffee in front of a computer screen. There was a certain oddity in this sculpted gym rat staring wide-eyed at dull narratives and mind-numbing details about lists of people that probably had nothing to do with anything that mattered. Sam was a jock in geek land, she thought. The entire main portion of the office was a myriad of computer screens, server lines, and phone lines, information coming in from France, Lebanon, and other faraway places, all supposedly relating in some manner either to her brother or to the men who seemingly had controlled him.
“Come to my place for brunch,” she said, watching him as he pointed and clicked.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to get a few winks in the boys’ room.”
“I’ll take a cab. And I’ll see you at eleven,” she said.
She had decided to remain in her Los Angeles home for the duration of the hunt for Jason. Like many other houses in Hollywood Hills, it was large and white and stucco with a red-tiled roof, something of a standard formula for the area. Individuality in the architecture of such mansions lay in shapes, corners, windows, what was round and what was square.
This house had two stories and about four thousand feet per story, with a third-floor lookout turret in which she occasionally read. The view from the tower was of brown hills and other white adobe red-tile-roofed homes. The turret had a bar that she seldom used because she drank only wine and the occasional Tom Collins. The house had a screening room, a library, a family room, a gathering room, and a living room. Most of the time she lived her life in the family room-kitchen area.
After arriving home she slept again. At 10:30 she awoke and looked at the luminescent red numbers on the clock atop the TV cabinet. Startled, she sat upright trying to think about homemade granola and what she would wear and what Sam would think.
She walked to the kitchen and crawled up on a stool overlooking the granite kitchen bar. She noticed that the pattern in the granite sort of shimmied, and hoped it wasn’t some weird neurological problem.
On the counter was an article about Steven Spielberg and the history of his moviemaking career including his youthful efforts at filmmaking. The man’s passion for the craft appeared relentless. Next to the article was Atonement, a novel that began with Briony’s passion for her play. Because she was just a child, Briony’s passion was unmetered by doubt. Anna could connect both with Spielberg and Briony.
Anna’s mother, being a Catholic, taught her that the chief end of man was to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. For Anna that seemed a distant way to define her life and not quite close enough to the pavement. Life for Anna was founded on a first truth. It was at once a revelation and a premise. The chief end of man was to make responsible use of his freedom.
In Anna’s mind people had the best chance of squeezing the most out of their choices if they focused their attention on just a very few simple things. Sometimes only one or two.
Such focused attention on a single detail of life was what Anna called passion and it was the bedrock of her being. Great lives could be formed around many kinds of passion: a passion for God, or the expression of man’s woes and triumphs as in art or theater. It could be growing roses in the backyard or being a good steward of some treasure.
If she had a steely spine, as some said, it was only her passion for a single simple thing. She wanted to use her lips, her body, and her mind to tell great stories. There were, of course, obstacles, and steel spines were good for overcoming them.
Now it was occurring to her that one passion might not be enough. Perhaps a second could be fit into the stuff of her life and she might use her freedom to cultivate this second passion as well, but as yet it had not been made simple. That was a prerequisite. She knew that a part of finding her second passion was in turning around Jason’s life and the damage she had done. She was deeply suspicious that this second passion might also be related to getting to know the right man.