Dellray had trouble thinking of the Scruff as a confidential informant, which sounded like something out of a Dashiell Hammett novel. Most CIs were skels, short for skeletons, meaning scrawny, disgusting little hustlers. Which fit the Scruff to a T.
"He's a tick," Dellray admitted. "But Jackie, this guy he heard it from's solid."
"I know you want it, Fred. I understand." The ASAC said this with some sympathy. Because he knew exactly what was behind Dellray's request.
Even as a boy in Brooklyn, Dellray had wanted to be a cop. It hadn't mattered much to him what kind of cop as long as he could spend twenty-four hours a day doing it. But soon after joining the Bureau he found his calling--undercover work.
Teamed with his straight man and guardian angel Toby Dolittle, Dellray was responsible for sending a large number of perps away for a very long time--the sentences totaled close to a thousand years. ("They kin call us the Millennium Team, Toby-o," he declared to his partner once.) The clue to Dellray's success was his nickname: "the Chameleon." Bestowed after--in the space of twenty-four hours--he played a brain-dead cluckhead in a Harlem crack house and a Haitian dignitary at a dinner in the Panamanian consulate, complete with diagonal red ribbon on his chest and impenetrable accent. The two of them were regularly loaned out to ATF or DEA and, occasionally, city police departments. Drugs and guns were their specialty though they had a minor in 'jacked merchandise.
The irony of undercover work is that the better you are, the earlier the retirement. Word gets around and the big boys, the perps worth going after, become harder to fox. Dolittle and Dellray found themselves working less in the field and more as handlers of informants and other undercover agents. And while it wasn't Dellray's first choice--nothing excited him like the street--it still got him out of the office more often than most SAs in the Bureau. It had never occurred to him to request a transfer.
Until two years ago--a warm April morning in New York. Dellray was just about to leave the office to catch a plane at La Guardia when he got a phone call from the assistant director of the Bureau in Washington. The FBI is a nest of hierarchy and Dellray couldn't imagine why the big man himself was calling. Until he heard the AD's somber voice break the news that Toby Dolittle, along with an assistant U.S. attorney from Manhattan, had been on the ground floor of the Oklahoma City federal building that morning, preparing for the deposition session that Dellray himself was just about to depart for.
Their bodies were being flown back to New York the next day.
Which was the same day that Dellray put in the first of his RFT-2230 forms, requesting a transfer to the Bureau's Anti-Terror Division.
The bombing had been the crime of crimes to Fred Dellray, who, when no one was looking, devoured books on politics and philosophy. He believed there was nothing essentially unAmerican about greed or lust--hey, those qualities were encouraged everywhere from Wall Street to Capitol Hill. And if people making a business of greed or lust sometimes stepped over the border of legality, Dellray was pleased to track them down--but he never did so with personal animosity. But to murder people for their beliefs--hell, to murder children before they even knew what they believed--my God, that was a stab at the heart of the country. Sitting in his two-room, sparsely furnished Brooklyn apartment after Toby's funeral, Dellray decided that this was the kind of crime he wanted a crack at.
But unfortunately the Chameleon's reputation preceded him. The Bureau's best undercover agent was now their best handler, running agents and CIs throughout the East Coast. His bosses simply couldn't afford to let him go to one of the more quiescent departments of the FBI. Dellray was a minor legend, personally responsible for some of the Bureau's greatest recent successes. So it was with considerable regret that his persistent requests were turned down.
The ASAC was well aware of this history and he now added a sincere, "I wish I could help out, Fred. I'm sorry."
But all Dellray heard in these words was the rock cracking a little further. And so the Chameleon pulled a persona off the rack and stared down his boss. He wished he still had his fake gold tooth. Street man Dellray was a tough hombre with one motherfucker of a mean stare. And in that look was the unmistakable message anybody on the street would know instinctively: I done for you, now you do for me.
Finally the smarmy ASAC said lamely, "It's just that we need something."
"Somethin'?"
"A hook," the ASAC said. "We don't have a hook."
A reason to take the case away from NYPD, he meant.
Politics, politics, polifuckingtics.
Dellray lowered his head but the eyes, brown as polish, didn't waver a millimeter from the ASAC. "He cut the skin off that vic's finger this morning, Billy. Clean down to the bone. Then buried him alive."
Two scrubbed, federal-agent hands met beneath a crisp jaw. The ASAC said slowly, "Here's a thought. There's a deputy commissioner at NYPD. Name's Eckert. You know him? He's a friend of mine."
The girl lay on her back on a stretcher, eyes closed, conscious but groggy. Still pale. An IV of glucose ran into her arm. Now that she'd been rehydrated she was coherent and surprisingly calm, all things considered.
Sachs walked back to the gates of hell and stood looking down into the black doorway. She clicked on the radio and called Lincoln Rhyme. This time he answered.
"How's the scene look?" Rhyme asked casually.
Her answer was a curt: "We got her out. If you're interested."
"Ah, good. How is she?"
"Not good."
"But alive, right."
"Barely."
"You're upset because of the rats, aren't you, Amelia?"
She didn't answer.