Files in hand, we walked quickly down two hallways until we got to room 303. Warren suddenly stopped and I almost rammed into him from behind. The door to his office was open two inches. He pointed to it and shook his head, signaling that he hadn’t left it that way. I raised and dropped my shoulders, signaling back that it was his call. He leaned an ear toward the crack and listened. I heard something, too. It sounded like the crunching of papers, then a swishing sound. I felt a cold finger moving over my scalp. Warren turned back to me with a curious look on his face when suddenly the door swung inward and open.
It was like dominoes. Warren made a startled move, followed by me and then the small Asian man who stood there in the doorway with a feather duster in one hand and a trash bag in the other. We all took a moment to get our normal breathing going again.
“Sorry, mister,” the Asian man said. “I clean your office.”
“Oh, yeah,” Warren said, smiling. “That’s fine. That’s good.”
“You left copy machine on.”
With that, he carried his goods down the hallway and used a key attached by a chain to his belt to get into the next office down. I looked at Warren and smiled.
“You’re right, you’re no Deep Throat.”
“You’re no Robert Redford. Let’s go.”
He told me to close the door, then turned the compact photocopy machine back on and moved around behind his desk, files in hand. I sat in the same chair I had been in earlier in the day.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start going through them. There should be a synopsis section in each protocol. Any kind of note or other significant detail should be there. If you think it fits, copy it.”
We started going through the files. As much as I liked him, I didn’t like the idea of letting him decide in half of the cases if they fit into my theory. I wanted to look at all of them.
“Remember,” I said, “we’re looking for any kind of flowery language that might sound like literature or a poem or whatever.”
He closed the file he was looking at and dropped it on the stack.
“What?”
“You don’t trust me to do this.”
“No. I just. . . I want to make sure we’re both on the same wavelength about this, that’s all.”
“Look, this is ridiculous,” he said. “Let’s just copy them all and get out of here. You can take them to your hotel and go through them there. It’s quicker and safer. You don’t need me.”
I nodded and realized it was the way we should have done it all along. For the next fifteen minutes he operated the copier while I took the protocols from the files and replaced them after they were copied. It was a slow machine, not made for heavy use.
When we were done he turned off the machine and told me to wait in the office.
“I forgot about the cleaners. It might be better if I just take these back to storage, then come get you.”
“Okay.”
I started looking through the copied protocols while he was gone but was too nervous to concentrate on them. I felt like running out the door with the copies and getting away before anything could go wrong. I looked around his office to try to pass the time. I picked up the photo of Warren’s family. A pretty, petite wife and two kids, a boy and a girl. Both of preschool age in the photo. The door opened while the frame was still in my hand. It was Warren and I felt embarrassed. He paid no notice.
“Okay, we’re ready.”
And like two spies we snuck out under cover of darkness.
Warren was silent almost all the way back to the hotel. I think it was because his involvement was over and he knew it. I was the reporter. He was the source. It was my story. I felt his jealousy and desire. For the story. For the job. For what he’d once been and had.
“Why’d you really quit, man?” I asked.
This time he dropped the bullshit.
“My wife, family. I was never home. One crisis after another, you know. I had to cover them all. Finally, I had to make a choice. Some days I think I made the right one. Some days I don’t. This is one of those that I don’t. This is a hell of a story, Jack.”
Now I was silent for a while. Warren drove into the hotel’s main entrance and headed around the circle to the doors. He pointed through the windshield to the right side of the hotel.
“See down there? That’s where Reagan got it. I was there. Fuckin’ five feet from Hinckley while we were waiting. He even asked me what time it was. Almost no other reporters were out there. Back then, most of them didn’t bother staking his exits. But they did after that.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, that was a highlight.”
I looked over at him and nodded seriously and then we both laughed. We both knew the secret. Only in a reporter’s world would it be a highlight. We both knew that probably the only thing better than witnessing a presidential assassination attempt as a reporter was witnessing a successful assassination. Just as long as you didn’t catch a bullet in the crossfire.
He pulled over at the door and I got out and leaned my head back into the car.
“You’re showing your true identity there, pal.”
He smiled.
“Maybe.”
16
Each of the thirteen files was thin, containing the five-page protocol questionnaire supplied by the FBI and the foundation, and usually just a few more pages of ancillary notes or testimonials to the pressures of the job from colleagues of the deceased.
Most of the stories were the same. Job stress, alcohol, marital difficulty, depression. A basic formula for the police blues. But depression was the key ingredient. In almost all of the files depression of one sort or another was reported as attacking the victim from inside the job. However, only a handful mentioned that the victims were troubled by any specific case, unsolved or otherwise, that they had been assigned to investigate.
I did a quick read-through of the conclusion segment of each of the protocols and quickly eliminated several of the cases from my investigation because of varying factors ranging from the suicides being witnessed by others to their taking place under circumstances precluding a setup.
The remaining eight cases were going to be more difficult to whittle down because each, at least in the summary remarks, seemed to fit. In each of these cases there was some mention of specific cases burdening the victim. The burden of an unsolved case and the quotes from Poe were really all I had as far as a pattern went. So I stayed with it and made it the standard by which I judged whether these eight remaining cases could be part of a series of false suicides.
Following this as my own protocol led to the dropping of two more cases when I found references to the suicide notes. In each, the victim wrote to a specific person, a mother in one, a wife in the other, and asked for forgiveness and understanding. The notes contained nothing resembling a line of poetry or, actually, any kind of literature. I dropped them and then I had six.
Reading one of the remaining files I came across the victim’s suicide note—one line, like those left by my brother and Brooks—in an addendum containing the investigator’s report. Reading the words sent a chilling, electric surge through me. For I knew them.
I am haunted by ill angels
I quickly opened my notebook to the page where I had written the stanza from “Dream-Land” that Laurie Prine had read to me from the CD-ROM.