The Bureau could use him internally, he was told. Critical incidents, stress management, the Undercover Safeguard Unit, basically psychological services for law enforcement with an emphasis on agents coming up from deep cover. Included in the mix were the supervisory special agents, the profilers. Since the Behavioral Science Unit was still relatively new to training and development, the Bureau should be more than a little concerned about what the profilers were exposed to on a regular basis and whether it interfered with intelligence gathering and operational effectiveness. At this point in the somewhat one-sided dialogue, Agee asked Pruitt if the FBI had given much thought to paper assessments of the offenders themselves, because Agee could help with that. If he could have access to raw data such as interview transcripts, evaluations, scene and autopsy photographs, the entirety of case files, which he could assimilate and analyze, he could create a meaningful database and establish himself as the resource he ought to be.
It wasn’t the same thing as sitting down with a murderer, but it was better than being Florence Nightingale with a bedside manner, a support system while the real work, the satisfying work that was recognized and rewarded, went to inferiors who didn’t have nearly the training or intelligence or insight he did. Inferiors like Benton Wesley.
“Of course, you don’t need manual data analysis if you have artificial intelligence, if you have CAIN,” Agee told Carley as they’d looked at photographs in Rupe Starr’s library. “By the early nineties, statistical computations and different types of sorting and analysis were being done automatically, all of my efforts imported into Lucy’s nifty artificial-intelligence environment. For me to continue what I was doing would have been akin to cleaning cotton by hand after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. I was back to evaluating agents-that’s all I was good for in the eyes of the F-ing-BI.”
“Imagine how I feel knowing the president of the United States is getting credit for my ideas.” Carley, as usual, had made it about her.
Then he’d given her a tour of the mansion while the other guests partied several floors away, and in a guest room, he took her to bed, knowing full well that what had excited her wasn’t him. It was sex and violence, power and money, and the conversation about them, the entity of Benton and Scarpetta and Lucy and anyone else who fell under their spell. Afterward, Carley wanted nothing else and Agee wanted more, wanted to be with her, wanted to make love to her for the rest of his days, and when she’d finally told him that he must stop writing her e-mails and leaving her messages, it was too late. The damage was done. He couldn’t always be sure who overheard his conversations or how loud he was, and all it had taken was one lapse, one voicemail he was leaving on Carley’s phone while his wife happened to be outside his closed office door, about to come in with a sandwich and a cup of tea.
The marriage ended quickly, and he and Carley maintained infrequent long-distance contact; mostly he kept up with her in the news as she moved into a variety of media venues. Then almost a year ago he read a story about plans for a show, The Crispin Report, pegged as hard-biting journalism and cop shop talk with an emphasis on current cases and call-ins from viewers, and Agee decided to contact her with a proposal, maybe more than one. He was lonely. He hadn’t gotten over her. Frankly, he needed money. His legitimate consulting services were very rarely used anymore, his ties with the FBI having been severed not long after Benton’s were, in part inspired by the situation with him, which was viewed as sticky by some and as sabotage by others. For the past five years, Agee’s ventures had taken him elsewhere, a scavenger mostly paid pit tances in cash for services he rendered to industries and individuals and organizations that profited handsomely from their ability to manipulate customers, clients, patients, the police, he didn’t care who. Agee had done nothing but bend the knee to others who were inferior to him, traveling constantly, quite a lot in France, sinking deeper into invisibility and debt and despair, and then he met with Carley, whose prospects were equally perilous, neither of them young anymore.
What someone in her position needed most of all was access and information, he’d pitched to her, and the problem she was going to encounter was that the experts essential to her success wouldn’t be willing to appear on camera. The good people don’t talk. They can’t. Or, like Scarpetta, they have contracts and you don’t dare ask. But you could tell, Agee had said. That was the secret he taught Carley. Come onto the set already armed with what you need to know, and don’t ask-tell. He could hunt and gather behind the scenes, and supply her with transcripts so her breaking news could be backed up, validated, or at least not disproved.
Of course he would be happy to appear on the air with her whenever she wanted. It would be unprecedented, he’d pointed out. He’d never been on camera before or in photographs and rarely gave interviews. He didn’t say it was because he’d never been asked, and she didn’t volunteer that she knew that was the reason. Carley wasn’t a decent person, and neither was he, but she’d been kind enough to him, as kind as she was capable of being. They tolerated each other and fell into a rhythm, a harmony of professional conspiracy, but it had yet to become anything more, and by now he’d accepted that their night of Bordeaux in the Starr mansion was not to be repeated.
It wasn’t a coincidence, because he didn’t believe in them, that what brought Agee and Carley together originally would be part of a bigger destiny. She didn’t believe in ESP or poltergeists and was neither a sender nor a receiver of telepathy-any information that might come her way too masked by sensory noise. But she trusted what was in the Starrs-specifically, Hannah, Rupe’s daughter-and when she disappeared, they instantly seized it as an opportunity, the case they had been waiting for. They had a right to it, had claims to it, because of a prior connection that wasn’t random in Agee’s mind but an information transfer from Hannah, whom he’d gotten to know at the mansion and had introduced to his paranormal preoccupations and then introduced her to people here and abroad, one of them the man she married. It wasn’t inconceivable to him that Hannah might begin to send telepathic signals after she vanished. It wasn’t inconceivable that Harvey Fahley would send something next. Not a thought or an image but a message.
What to do about him. Agee was extremely anxious and getting irritated, having replied to Harvey ’s e-mail about an hour ago and hearing nothing further. There wasn’t the luxury of time to wait any longer if Carley was to break the news tonight, and do it with the forensic pathologist who had autopsied Toni sitting right there. What could be better timing? It should be Agee sitting right there. That would be better timing, but he hadn’t been invited. He wouldn’t be asked when Scarpetta was on the show, couldn’t be on the set or in the same building. She refused to appear with him, didn’t consider him credible, according to Carley. Maybe Agee would give Scarpetta a lesson in credibility and do a favor for Carley. He needed a transcript.
How to get Harvey on the phone. How to engage him in a conversation. How to hijack his information. Agee contemplated e-mailing him a second time and including his own phone number, asking Harvey to call him, but it wouldn’t help if he did. The only way it would suit Agee’s purposes would be if Harvey dialed the 1-800 number for the hearing-impaired Web-based telephone service, but then Harvey would know that he was being monitored by a third party, a captioner who was transcribing every word he said in real time. If he was as cautious and traumatized as he seemed to be, he wasn’t going to allow any such thing.