Angel Killer Read Free Page B

rumors. That you and your number crunchers are mining through personnel files to find leaks.”
    Ailes nods his head. “That’s a minor thing. More of an assist we’re doing for internal affairs.” He points toward the bullpen visible through the window. “Most of what we do here is quite boring. Even more so than the kind of forensic accounting you’ve been doing. Jennifer out there is finding ways to reduce the number of boxes on an expense report by half. Terribly dull. But exciting at the same time. If she can find a way to save twenty percent of the time each agent spends filling out forms, then that’s the equivalent of adding eight hundred agents into the field by freeing up their time from bureaucratic bullshit.”
    Ailes sets his glasses down and rubs his eyes. “We did a study that showed if you calculated the amount of time some supervisors spend going over incidentals like phone calls and fuel expenses, it’d be cheaper to keep all the cars running nonstop and never hang up a long-distance call. Inefficiency is the creeping death of bureaucracy and accountability. It’s what brought the Roman Empire down. While they were filing reports, the barbarians were storming the gates. You can bet at least one senator demanded a census of the number of invaders before he decided whether or not to support repelling them.”
    I say nothing. It’s a topic we’re all familiar with. When you join the FBI, you think your days are going to be spent going after bad guys. The reality is that you find more and more of your time being eaten up by paperwork and procedures and hierarchy, and it only gets worse. It’s how the Greenville Killer could have slipped away from us. If I hadn’t subverted the chain of command in my own way, he’d still be out there murdering people.
    The bureaucracy keeps getting thicker. Every few months another form comes along because some manager somewhere decided that if we all just spend an extra ten minutes filling it out, everything will be better, ignoring the hundred other geniuses who had the same thought about some other form.
    Ailes waves his hands in the air. “My goal here is efficiency. Helping you do your job faster. One of the ways we can do that is by making sure the right person is in the right job. Decide who belongs where. You don’t seem to care much for lines of authority. Are you better than the FBI?”
    “No.” The word blurts out of my mouth.
    “Yet you went around Miller. You could have told him your suspicions.”
    “He . . . he wouldn’t have believed me.”
    “How do you know? Did you try?”
    I shake my head. Miller is a well-intentioned accountant. He has no street experience. He wouldn’t believe a serial killer was hiding in a spreadsheet for a credit card case.
    I only saw because I grew up learning how to do suspicious things while looking innocent. I know how to create deceptions in front of people prepared not to be fooled. It’s in my blood. Hashimi was using a stolen credit card to purchase things that he didn’t want to appear on his own credit card statement. If you’re a professional thief like him, you’ll buy iPads, TVs, prepaid gas cards; things that have a high resale value. Not rope, bleach and cutting tools. Hashimi was hiding these purchases on the stolen cards because he was more afraid of someone suspecting he was a serial killer than a credit card thief.
    “Did you try?” repeats Ailes.
    “No. I didn’t.” I was new in the division. Miller had little patience for me.
    “Don’t you like it here? Are you sure you’re really FBI material?”
    So this is what it comes down to. I’m being asked if I’m happy in the FBI.
    I’ve asked myself that question a lot lately.
    It’s the kind of routine I always longed for after growing up in the back of a tour bus, sleeping in airports; the FBI has a kind of stability I always craved. I wanted to help people. I just didn’t know it would be so hard.
    People have been waiting for