Roy had been in Boston for seven hours. Three hours were spent sitting in a gray Explorer with a Massachusetts plate and somebody else’s gum in the cupholder, parked in a loading zone on Vassar Street with the engine running. Across the sidewalk was the back of a long concrete building with a number on it instead of a name. Hurley and Tran had gone in at five past five.
He had not gone in with them. It was their interview in their territory, and two was the right number. Three federal agents in a small lab would turn a scared academic into a scared academic with a lawyer.
Ben Meyer had landed in Denver on Sunday afternoon, and by Monday morning the briefing was in a different room with a different map. Meyer had called him at six.
“Somebody needs to run the backgrounds on Hale and Reed,” Meyer said. “Schools, old jobs, anybody they might call. You’re the best paper man on the squad.”
“I know what that means, Ben.”
“It means you’re the best paper man on the squad.”
That was true. It was also exactly what you said to someone you were moving out of the way. Roy had said the same phrase to others, two different times.
So he had driven to Denver International Airport, parked in long-term parking because who knew when he’d be back, caught the next United flight, and flown to Boston with his notebook and his bag, which mostly had dirty clothes in it now from the past few days.
He had written a list on the plane. Hurley had read it in the lobby of the field office and said, “Fine,” in a tone that meant it was fine. She was in her fifties and had been in Boston her whole career. Tran was twenty-six and had the look of someone who had been told that morning that he would be working with a supervisor from out of town. Roy had given Tran three of his cards, the ones with only his cell number on them.
“If she’s useful, give her my card,” he had said.
Somebody tapped on the window.
It was an MIT police officer, a young woman in a navy jacket, pointing at the loading zone sign. Roy got his credentials out of his inside pocket and started to hold them up to the glass, then thought better of it. It was a loading zone. He put them away, rolled the window down, and said he was sorry. He pulled forward forty feet to a meter and put a quarter in it that he had found in the cupholder next to the gum.
His back hurt from the plane and he was hungry. It was irritating to be sitting outside somebody else’s interview, and he was too tired to pretend otherwise.
On the plane he had wrestled with who might have been in the third chair in Basalt. In the end, he only wrote down two. The third principal was a name on a Delaware certificate with an address in Wilmington that two hundred thousand other companies used. Odom had pulled everything on it and it resolved to nothing. You did not send two agents into MIT to ask a professor about a nominee.
At twenty to six Hurley and Tran came out of the building. Hurley walked like her feet hurt. Tran was carrying the folder under his arm and looked pleased with himself. Roy was jealous and wished he was twenty-six again.
Hurley got in the front and put her seatbelt on. Tran got in the back and handed Roy his notebook over the seat without being asked.
“She’s fine,” Hurley said. “She’s scared of the news, not of us.”
“She was friends with Hale?”
“Same year. Doesn’t sound like they were close. Last contact January or February, about a job. Hale was hiring. Rosen told her the kid who applied wasn’t good enough.”
“Did she give you anything?”
“Hale gave a talk in that building a few years ago. Rosen ran the series and invited her. That’s the closest thing to a connection. No recording.”
“Okay.”
Roy opened Tran’s notebook.
Tran wrote like a court reporter. He had taken down every answer word for word, in small block capitals, with the question in front of it. Tran was good.
He read the whole thing slowly while Hurley ordered pad see ew for two on her phone.
Is this a good likeness — MAYBE. IT COULD BE. I’M NOT 100% SURE. SHE WAS A LITTLE OLDER WHEN WE MET.
Last spoke — JANUARY. MAYBE FEBRUARY.
Contact last week — NO.
Any contact, 3rd party etc. — NO.
Discuss her work — NOT OFTEN. SHE KEPT TO HERSELF. … I’M NOT EVEN SURE HER ADVISOR KNEW …
Recording? — NO.
Visited CO facility — NO. Know Reed — YES. Family in MA — I DON’T KNOW.
Anyone else come to see you today — NO. SHOULD I EXPECT SOMEBODY?
At the bottom Tran had written, in smaller letters, Subj closed laptop when we knocked. Coffee on floor by desk.
“What’s this about the laptop?” Roy asked.
“She closed it when we came in,” Tran said.
“Everybody closes their laptop,” Hurley said without turning around. “I close my laptop when my husband comes in.”
Roy decided Hurley had been doing this long enough to be right about laptops.
He went back to the top and read down the answers only.
Maybe. January, maybe February. Not often. I’m not sure. I don’t know. Should I expect somebody?
No.
The question about the recording was the only answer on the page that didn’t come with anything else. In nineteen years of asking people whether there was a record of something, almost nobody had ever said no without adding something. There might be. I’d have to check. Not that I know of.
He didn’t know what that meant. Probably it meant there was no recording.
He got his own notebook out of his coat and copied the line exactly as Tran had written it. Recording? — NO. Under it he wrote Rosen, MIT, ran seminar — Hale talk (yr?). He looked at it, then underlined the NO.
He thought about calling Odom and telling her to pull whatever MIT had on the talk. He could hear what she would say. So? And if he sent it to Meyer it would go on a list and maybe be checked in a week by somebody who didn’t know why it was there.
He put the notebook back in his coat.
“Did she take the card?” he asked.
“She took it,” Tran said. “I gave her yours.”
“Good.”
“You want to go back in?” Hurley asked.
“No,” Roy said. “It’s fine.”
He dropped them at the field office in Chelsea and took the Explorer, which they said he could have until tomorrow. The hotel was on the other side of the river. The map on his phone told him to take Memorial Drive to Storrow Drive. He got onto Memorial Drive without any trouble but the directions on his phone didn’t match the road.
He went around the rotary at the end of the bridge twice. The second time a man in a Subaru leaned on his horn the whole way around.
“Fuck,” Roy said.
He took the third exit because it was the one he hadn’t tried yet. It went to Cambridge.