It was natural that Carley with her journalistic passions would be less interested in the paranormal and more drawn to the bookcase of photo albums, all bound in Florentine leather, the rogues gallery of Rupe’s so-called friends, as Agee referred to the most popular section in the rare-book room. For a long stretch of solitary hours on the third floor of that massive house, Agee and Carley cynically perused decades of pictures, the two of them sitting side by side, pointing out the people they recognized.
“Amazing the friends money will buy, and he thinks they mean it. That’s what I’d find sad if I could bring myself to feel sorry for a multi-fucking-billionaire,” Agee said to someone who trusted no one because she was as amoral and just as much a user as anyone Rupe Starr might ever meet.
Only Rupe never made Carley any money. She was simply an attraction for the other guests, the same thing Agee was. You couldn’t even get an interview at Rupe’s special club without a minimum of a million dollars, but you could be a guest if he liked you and thought you were an amusement of one sort or another. He’d invite you to dinners, to parties, as entertainment for his real guests. The ones with money to invest. Actors, professional athletes, the newest wizards on Wall Street would descend upon the Park Avenue mansion, and for the privilege of making Rupe richer would get to mingle with other luminaries whose commodity wasn’t cash. Politicians, television anchors, newspaper columnists, forensic experts, trial lawyers-it could be anyone in the news or with a good story or two who fit the profile of whomever Rupe was trying to impress. He researched his potential clients to find out what moved them, and then he would recruit. He didn’t have to know you to put you on his B list. You’d get a letter or a phone call. Rupert Starr requests the pleasure of your company.
“Like throwing peanuts to the elephants,” Agee had told Carley on an evening he’d never forget. “We’re the peanuts, they’re the elephants. Heavyweights we’ll never be, even if we live to be as old as elephants, and the unfair irony is some of these elephants aren’t old enough to join the circus. Look at this one.” Tapping his finger on the picture of a ferociously pretty girl staring boldy into the camera, her arm around Rupe. The year written on the page was 1996.
“Must be some young actress.” Carley was trying to figure out which one.
“Guess again.”
“Well, who?” Carley asked. “She’s pretty in a different way. Like a very pretty boy. Maybe it is a boy. No, I think I see breasts. Yup.” Moving Agee’s hand as she turned the page, and her touch startled him a little. “Here’s another one. Definitely not a boy. Wow. Rather gorgeous if you get past her Rambo clothing and no makeup; she’s got a very nice body, very athletic. I’m trying to remember what I’ve seen her in.”
“You haven’t and you’ll never guess.” Leaving his hand where it was, hoping she might move it again. “Here’s a hint. FBI.”
“Must be organized crime if she can afford to be in this Starr-studded collection.” As if human beings were no different than Rupe’s precious antique cars. “On the wrong side of the law, that’s the only FBI connection she could have if she’s filthy rich. Unless she’s like us.” Meaning the B list.
“She’s not like us. She could buy this mansion and still have plenty left.”
“Who the hell is she?”
“Lucy Farinelli.” Agee found another photograph, this one of Lucy in the Starr basement garage, sitting behind the wheel of a Duesenberg, seeming intent on figuring out a priceless antique speedster she wouldn’t hesitate to drive and maybe did on that particular day or some other day when she was in Starr Counting House, counting out her money.
Agee didn’t know. He hadn’t been to the mansion at the same time Lucy had, for the simple reason that Agee would be the last person invited for her entertainment or pleasure. At the very least she would remember him from Quantico, where as a high-school wunderkind she’d helped design and program the Criminal Artifi cial Intelligence Network, what the Bureau simply referred to as CAIN.
“Okay, I do know who that is.” Carley was intrigued once she realized Lucy’s connections to Scarpetta, and especially to Benton Wesley, who was tall with chiseled granite good looks, “the model for that actor in The Silence of the Lambs,” in her words. “What’s his name, who played Crawford?”
“Pure horseshit. Benton wasn’t even at Quantico when it was filmed. Was off in the field somewhere working a case, and even he will tell you as much, arrogant prick that he is,” Agee said, more than just ire aroused. He was feeling other stirrings.
“Then you know them.” She was impressed.
“The whole gaggle. I know them, and at best they might know about me, might know of me. I’m not friends with them. Well, excluding Benton. He knows me rather intimately. Life and its dysfunctional interconnections. Benton fucks Kay. Kay loves Lucy. Benton gets Lucy an internship with the FBI. Warner gets fucked.”
“Why do you get fucked?”
“What is artificial intelligence?”
“A substitute for the real thing,” she’d said.
“You see, it can be difficult if you have these.” Touching his hearing aids.
“You seem to hear me well enough, so I have no idea what you mean.”
“Suffice it to say I might have been given some tasks, some opportunities, if a computer system hadn’t come along that could do them instead,” he’d said.
Perhaps it was the wine, a very fine Bordeaux, but he began to tell Carley about his ungratifying and unfair career and the toll it had taken, people and their problems, cops and their stresses and traumas, and the worst were the agents who weren’t allowed to have problems, weren’t allowed to be human, were FBI first and foremost and forced to unload on a Bureau-ordained psychologist or shrink. Babysitting, hand-holding, rarely being asked about criminal cases, never if they were sensational. He illustrated what he meant with a story set at the FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia, in 1985, when an assistant director named Pruitt had told Agee that someone who was deaf couldn’t possibly go into a maximum-security prison and conduct interviews.
There were inherent risks in using a forensic psychiatrist who wore hearing aids and read lips, and to be blunt, the Bureau wasn’t going to use someone who might misinterpret what violent offenders were saying or had to continuously ask them to repeat themselves. Or what if they misinterpreted what Agee said to them? What if they misinterpreted what he was doing, a gesture, the way he crossed his legs or tilted his head? What if some paranoid schizophrenic who had just dismembered a woman and stabbed out her eyes didn’t like Agee staring at his lips?
That was when Agee had known who he was to the FBI, who he would always be to the FBI. Someone impaired. Someone imperfect. Someone who wasn’t commanding enough. It wasn’t about his ability to evaluate serial killers and assassins. It was about appearances, about the way he might represent the Almighty Bureau. It was about being an embarrassment. Agee had said he understood Pruitt’s position and would do anything the FBI needed, of course. It was either do it their way or no way, and Agee had always wanted to get close to the fire of the FBI ever since he’d been a frail little boy playing cops and robbers, playing army and Al Capone, shooting cap guns he could barely hear.