Book of Souls

The chief of police and the fire marshal personally peppered Will with questions all day, cornering him in the hospital corridors, pulling him out of Nancy ’s room, ambushing him in the coffee shop. An electrical wire to the furnace blower motor had been disconnected, causing a deadly buildup of carbon monoxide. The safety cutoff switch had also been disabled. Compounding it all, the Lipinskis didn’t have CO₂ detectors. This was a deliberate act, no doubt, and Will could tell from their initial questioning that he was a “person of interest” until the discovery of a broken bulkhead lock led them to believe he was more likely a victim than suspect.

The fact that he was ex-FBI and Nancy was active-duty didn’t escape them, and by midafternoon, the Manhattan office of the FBI had pretty much elbowed the locals out of the way and taken control of the investigation. Will’s former colleagues circled him warily, waiting for the right moment to grill him.

They tagged him making one of his shuttles between his wife and his son. He was only mildly surprised to see Sue Sanchez approaching, her high heels hammering the floor. After all she was Nancy ’s supervisor. On the other hand, he was repulsed to see John Mueller with her.

Will and Sanchez always had a relationship based on mutual distrust and animus. Years earlier, he had been her supervisor. By self-admission, Will was a piss-poor boss, and Sue was always sure she could do a better job than he. She got the chance when he was busted down a grade for having an “inappropriate relationship” with another supervisor’s admin.

On a Friday she reported to him, on a Monday the roles were reversed. Their new chain of command was nightmarish. He responded to her by being asinine and passive-aggressive. If it hadn’t been for his need to stick it out for a couple of years to get his full pension, he would have metaphorically and perhaps literally kicked her officious Latina ass.

Sanchez was his superior during the Doomsday case, and she’d been the stooge dispatched to remove him when he got too close to Shackleton. A chain of puppet masters had used her as a tool, and she still resented not knowing why she’d been ordered to terminate him, why the Doomsday case had entered a deep freeze without resolution, and why Will had been given an absurdly attractive early-retirement package.

As fractured as Will’s relationship was with Sue, it was worse with John Mueller. Mueller was priggish, by the book, an agent more concerned with process than results. He was a ladder-climber, anxious to get out of the field as early in his career as possible and rise in the bureaucracy. He resented Will’s cavalier, insubordinate attitude and his moral transgressions, the drinking, the womanizing. And he was horrified that Nancy Lipinski, a young special agent with the potential to be a Mueller clone, had been turned to the dark side by Piper and had even married the scoundrel!

For Will’s part, Mueller was a poster child for everything wrong with the FBI. Will had worked cases to put bad guys away. Mueller worked them to accelerate his career. He was a political creature, and Will had no time for politics.

Mueller was the original lead special agent on the Doomsday case, and had it not been for his sudden incapacitating illness, Will would never have been assigned to the case. He would have never worked with Nancy. He would have never hooked up with her. The Doomsday case might have been solved. An entire chain of events would have been avoided if Mueller hadn’t had a little clot that shot into his brain.

Mueller had fully recovered and was now one of Sanchez’s pet poodles. When the call came in that Nancy and her family had been deliberately targeted, her first move was to get Mueller to drive her to White Plains.

In an empty visitors’ lounge, Sanchez asked Will how he was and offered condolences. Mueller waited for the brief, human exchange to conclude, then jumped in hard with an unpleasant edge.

“The police report says you were away from the house for an hour and a half.”

“You read the report perfectly, John.”

“Drinking at a bar.”

“In my experience, bars are pretty good places to find a drink.”

“You couldn’t find a drink at the house?”

“My father-in-law was a great guy, but he only drank wine. I felt like a scotch.”

“Pretty convenient time to be out and about, wouldn’t you say?”

Will walked two paces, grabbed him by the lapels of his suit jacket, and pushed the smaller man against the wall with a thud. He was tempted to hold him with one hand and smash his face with a closed fist. When Mueller started to thrust his arms upward to break the hold, Sanchez shouted at both of them to stand down.

Will let go and backed off, his chest heaving, his pupils pinpointed in anger. Mueller smoothed his jacket and smugly shot Will a grin that seemed to say, this is so not over between us.

“Will, what do you think happened last night?” Sanchez asked evenly.