He looked … squashed.
Turning from the body, Dan encountered a man whose biological clock seemed to be suffering from chronological confusion. The guy had the smooth, unlined, wide-open face of a thirty-year-old, the graying hair of a fifty-year-old, and the age-rounded shoulders of a retiree. He wore a well-cut dark-blue suit, a white shirt, a dark-blue tie, and a gold tie chain instead of a clip or tack. He said, ‘You’re Haldane?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Michael Seames, FBI.’
They shook hands. Seames’s hand was cold and clammy. They moved away from the corpse, into a corner that was clear of debris.
‘Are you guys on this one now?’ Dan asked.
‘Don’t worry. We aren’t pushing you out of it,’ Seames assured him diplomatically. ‘We just want to be part of it. Just observers … for the time being.’
‘Good,’ Dan said bluntly.
‘I’ve talked to everyone else working on the case, so I just wanted to tell you what I’ve told them. Please keep me informed. Any development at all, no matter how unimportant it seems, I want to be informed.’
‘But what justification does the FBI have for stepping into this at all?’
‘Justification?’ Seames’s face creased with a pained smile. ‘Whose side are you on, Lieutenant?’
‘I mean, what federal statutes have been broken?’
‘Let’s just say it’s a national-security matter.’
In the middle of his young face, Seames’s eyes were old, ancient, and watchful. They were like the eyes of a reptilian hunter that had been around since the Mesozoic Era and knew all the tricks.
Dan said, ‘Hoffritz used to work for the Pentagon. Did research for them.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Was he doing defense research when he was killed?’
‘No.’
The agent’s voice was flat, without emotion or inflection, and Dan couldn’t be sure if he was lying or telling the truth.
‘McCaffrey?’ Dan asked. ‘Was he doing defense-type research?’
‘Not for us,’ Seames said. ‘At least not lately.’
‘For someone else?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Russians?’
‘More likely to be Iraq or Libya or Iran these days.’
‘You’re saying it was one of them who financed him?’
‘I’m saying no such thing. We don’t know,’ Seames claimed in that same bland voice that might easily conceal deception. ‘That’s why we want in on this. McCaffrey was on a Pentagon-funded project when he disappeared six years ago with his daughter. We investigated him back then, at the request of the Defense Department, and decided he hadn’t run off with any new, valuable information related to his research. We figured it was nothing more than what it seemed to be — entirely a personal matter having to do with a nasty childcustody dispute.’
‘Maybe it was.’
‘Yes, maybe it was,’ Seames said. ‘At first, anyway. But after a while McCaffrey apparently got involved in something important … maybe something dangerous. At least that’s certainly how it seems when you get a look at that gray room in Studio City. As for Willy Hoffritz … eighteen months after McCaffrey disappeared, Hoffritz finished a long-running Pentagon project and declined to accept any additional defense-related work. He said that kind of research had begun to bother his conscience. At the time, the military tried to persuade him to change his mind, but eventually they accepted his refusal.’
‘From what I know of him,’ Dan said, ‘I don’t believe Hoffritz had a conscience.’
Seames’s penetrating, hawkish eyes never left Dan’s. He said, ‘You’re right about that, I think. At the time Hoffritz did his mea culpa routine, the Defense Department didn’t ask us to verify his sudden turn toward pacifism. They accepted it at face value. But today I’ve been looking more closely at Willy Hoffritz. I’m convinced he stopped taking Pentagon grants only because he no longer wanted to be subject to random, periodic security investigations. He didn’t want to worry that anyone might be watching him. He needed anonymity for some project of his own.’
‘Like torturing a nine-year-old girl,’ Dan said.
‘Yes. I was in Studio City a few hours ago, had a look in that house. Nasty.’
Neither the expression on his face nor that in his eyes matched the distaste and disapproval in his voice. Judging from his eyes, in fact, one might suspect that Michael Seames found the gray room more interesting than repulsive.