“Of course, your relationship with me is equally intriguing. We seem to get along fine, then suddenly you claim that I am the worst boss in Christendom. It makes me wonder if Jason Story is the only person talking to reporters. It’s amazing, this persona I suddenly have. This image. The tyrant. The neurotic. The person who is somehow responsible for the violent death of my morgue supervision. Susan and I had a very cordial working relationship, and until recently, Ben, so did we. But it’s my word against yours, especially now, since any scrap of paper that might document what I’m saying has conveniently disappeared. And my prediction is that you have already leaked to someone that important personnel files and memoranda have vanished from the office, thus implying that I’m the one who took them.
When files and memos disappear, you can say anything you want about the contents of them, can’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ben Stevens said. He moved away from the doorway but did not come close to the desk or take a chair. His face was flushed, his eyes hard with hate. “I don’t know anything about any missing files or memos, but if it’s true, then I can’t hide that fact from the authorities, just as I can’t hide the fact that I happened to stop by the office tonight to get something I’d left and discovered you rummaging through my desk.”
“What did you leave, Ben?”
“I don’t have to answer your questions.”
“Actually, you do. You work for me, and if you come into the building late at night and I happen to know about it, I have the right to question you.”
“Go ahead and put me on leave. Try to fire me. That will certainly look good for you right now.”
“You are a squid, Ben.”
His eyes widened and he wet his lips.
“Your efforts to sabotage me are just a lot of ink you’re squirting into the water because you’re panicking and want to divert attention from yourself. Did you kill Susan?”
“You’re losing your goddam mind.” His voice shook.
“She left her house early afternoon on Christmas Day, allegedly to meet a girlfriend. In truth, the person she was meeting was you, wasn’t it? Did you know that when she was dead in her car, her coat collar and scarf smelled like men’s cologne, like the Red cologne you keep in your desk so you can freshen up before you hit the bars in the Slip after work?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about”
“Who was paying her?”
“Maybe you were.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said calmly. “You and Susan were involved in some money-making scheme, and my guess is that you are the one who initially got her involved because you knew her vulnerabilities. She probably had confided in you. You knew how to convince her to go along, and Lord knows you could use the money. Your bar tabs alone have got to blow your budget. Partying is very expensive, and I know what you get paid.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Ben.”
I lowered my voice. “Get out of it. Stop while there’s still time to tell me who’s behind It.”
He would not look me in the eye.
“The stakes are too high when people start dying. Do you think ft you killed Susan that you’ll getaway with it?”
He said nothing.
“If someone else killed her, do you think you’re immune, that the same thing can’t happen to you?”
“You’re threatening me.”
“Nonsense.”
“You can’t prove that the cologne you smelled on Susan was mine. There’s no test for something like that.
You can’t put a smell in a test tube; you can’t save it;’ he said.
“I’m going to ask you to leave now, Ben.”
He turned and walked out of his office. When I heard the elevator doors shut, I went down the hall and peered out a window overlooking the parking lot in back. I did not venture out to my car until Stevens had driven away.
The FBI Building is a concrete fortification at 9th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in the heart of D.C., and when I arrived the following morning, it was in the wake of at least a hundred noisy schoolchildren. They brought to mind Lucy at their age as they stomped up steps, dashed to benches, and flocked restlessly about huge shrubs and potted trees. Lucy would have loved touring the laboratories, and I suddenly missed her intensely.