Free The Dead Man by Joel Goldman Page B

mentioned her pending marriage, making me wonder whether Leonard's hope was built on inside information.
    "Hope is good. So, who took my picture?"
    "There's a video camera in the wall behind Nancy's desk in the lobby. HR freezes the frame and pulls it off to make the ID card. Saves having to stand you up against the wall for a photo shoot."
    I had noticed the camera but not given it much thought. "Not bad. Who was in charge of security before I got here?"
    "I was," Sherry said as she left my office. "See you at lunch."

Chapter Fifteen
     
    I hadn't done any due diligence about my new employer either in my meeting with Harper or since then and it was showing. I hadn't considered whether I had taken someone's place and what impact that might have. All I had done was skim through the binder Harper gave me and piss off Detective McNair. None of that told me where the land mines were buried and I had just stepped on one.
    Wendy was my best excuse for not focusing on my new job. I didn't think she had risen from the dead to confess to having stolen the drug ring's money because I hadn't stopped believing that she was innocent. I held onto the hope that if she was guilty of anything, it was of not being strong enough to contain her addiction, that her last couple of years of sobriety had given way to a final, fatal binge, making her vulnerable to the people behind the drug ring.
    If I were wrong, what I had learned in twenty-eight years as an FBI agent would prove true once again. While there are more unintended consequences than conspiracies, more careless acts than crimes, and more people with good intentions than evil motives, crooks, even the ones you love, will never cease to amaze and, too often, break your heart.
    Lucy was right that Ammara Iverson would cut me out of her investigation. I couldn't allow Ammara or anyone else to pass final judgment on my daughter and would fight to save whatever was left of her memory. Milo Harper was afraid that dreams could kill. I was focused on the other side of the equation, keeping my dreams of Wendy alive.
    Sherry Fritzshall's resentment toward me was palpable. She had instructed Nancy to hold me in the lobby until she arrived and then made certain that Leonard and Anne from HR tied me to my desk until she could hamstring me with a day of interviews, tossing in lunch with her and a meeting with the boss in case I didn't know what to with my free time. Tomorrow, she'd probably ask me to take inventory of the office supplies, promising me a key to the men's room if I found the missing paperclips.
    I would meet with the project directors but not on an assembly line that guaranteed canned responses regardless of whether their answers matched my questions. Interviews were much more productive when the subject hadn't spent the day rehearsing.
    I needed to get a feel for the institute on my own without being fed forms, schedules, and histories. The best way to do that was to walk the halls and listen to the chatter that bubbles up everywhere there are people who are convinced they are underpaid and underappreciated, which describes everyplace with a clock that gets punched twice a day.
    I stepped onto the elevator, activating the buttons by swiping my key card across a sensor. No card, no access. It was a basic security measure to prevent the kind of walk-in traffic that liked to wander hallways looking for unguarded purses and laptops or assault women in the bathroom. I punched the button for the fifth floor, a random start.
    Office buildings are office buildings. There are only so many windows, corners, and cubicles. Toss in rooms for files, breaks, supplies, conferences, and toilets and they all look alike after a while. This one also had labs, libraries, auditoriums, and lots of locked doors. I decided not to use my master key card during business hours since barging in unannounced wouldn't win me any friends.
    I stuck to the open areas occupied by support staff and the break rooms,