.
Roy and Monica sat with Sandra on the couch in her living room, as the Crime Scene Unit and the various on-duty police officers wrapped up their work and departed. Sandra was now leaning into Monica’s shoulder and crying, and Roy believed it was as much due to the grilling from the FBI as to Meg’s disappearance. They clearly believed she knew more than she was saying.
He would not ever forget these bastards. He had already permanently etched their names into memory. Agents Cross and Potenza had swept in and took over, poking through Meg’s room, disrupting the CSU’s work, coming out to the living room to badger Sandra, and even suggesting to Lt. Moore that he needed to step up patrols, as if he wasn’t short on personnel. Roy had encountered Feds before, but all the ones previous were always decent sorts, never an obnoxious pair like this one. These two resembled stereotypes from a bad movie.
Payton and Cipolli also showed up, not long after the Feds. The duos got into a discussion just one punch short of a fist fight, concerning the paper the Feds were making CSU officers hang over the weird writing on Meg’s wall. Cross finally agreed to take it down for a few minutes, so they could have their own look at it. The detectives came back into the living room with studiously blank expressions, and Roy wondered what they had seen in the odd looking characters.
We have some special training in Spook matters, Payton had told him that day at breakfast. Top secret stuff. I really would prefer to tell you patrol officers everything I know. It would help you guys a lot, but it’s against the rules.
Roy could see in their expressions that the writing on the wall somehow related to that training. They weren’t obvious about it, but they shot each other meaningful looks and gave everyone else noncommittal answers when the subject came up.
What Cross and Potenza said about Jack, however, was the worst of it. According to the FBI agents, Jack now appeared on the list of known NTEs , Non-Typical Entities, which was Fed-speak for spooks. They didn’t say why he’d shown up there, but in their books, once he showed up, Jack became a suspected accomplice in both that abduction and the previous sixteen. The subject from that night, and the female spook seen at the scene, were also persons of interest, of course.
To Roy, this was BS, and he said so. They just looked at him, with no response and steady stares, and he remembered these were the idiots who had asked for him to be put on leave. He survived the fire, and that made him a person of interest too. It occurred to him that they might just be randomly shooting in the dark.
He was happy to see them leave. In the end, they had done nothing except pour salt in Sandra’s wound. Gradually, others left as well, until only Moore, Payton, Cipolli, Roy and Monica remained. He and his girlfriend would take Sandra to counseling when the office opened, and the detectives claimed they wanted to help ‘ward off reporters’, although the initial wave of media had already come and gone. The Lieutenant now made ready to leave, but he paused first to speak to Sandra.
“Ma’am,” he stated starkly, “I’m not sure what you think of your ex-husband, but he and I have worked together far too long for me to believe their ridiculous theory.”
Sandra looked up at him, and nodded. “I know that, Lieutenant. Jack doesn’t have anything to do with this. It isn’t possible.”
To Roy, she seemed oddly confident about that, even though he knew she had a basic trust in her ex that was almost unheard of in a divorcée. It had been an unusual separation, of course. She was slowly coming to pieces in the role of policeman’s wife, and Jack regretfully abided by her wishes, having found himself in the strange position of divorcing out of love. He even knew that she had thoughts of reversing the situation, accepting that the divorce was a mistake and remarrying. But somehow, to Roy, her tone spoke of some knowledge other than mere trust.
