A Hispanic LAPD detective saw them coming and avoided eye contact. He whistled to a uniformed officer who was trying to figure out how to attach a pink marker-flag to a square of sidewalk concrete and jerked his head toward their group. "Hey, Jimmy! Bureau's here. Show them around, and don't let them muck up my crime scene."
Jimmy dropped the marker on the sidewalk, pulled off his latex gloves, and trotted over to Gene's group. His smile was too enthusiastic for someone who had just been tagging vaguely-identifiable body parts.
Gene watched as the uniformed officer—J. Anderson by his name tag—walked straight to Doug and stuck out his hand. It never failed. Hidden in the human psyche lurks a primitive instinct that makes people assume the biggest guy is the man-in-charge. It helped the team put people off-balance without seeming to be deliberate.
"Special Agent?" Officer Anderson asked. He looked confident, but his inflection betrayed a touch of apprehension at presenting a part of his body anywhere near the massive, scowling man in the middle.
"That's Agent Goldman," Gene said as he reached out to complete the handshake. "I'm Special Agent in Charge Palomini, call me Gene, and these are my associates, Agents Bates, Brent, and Martin Palomini." The officer's grip was far too strong, carrying on the pointless tradition of local cops trying to prove that they're just as good as the FBI. Demonstrating that it's the cop who makes the badge only tended to make them grumpy, so Gene gave the hand a good squeeze.
"I'm Officer Anderson, Jimmy Anderson. You guys sure got here quick."
"Well, we were in the neighborhood," Gene answered.
Gene held Anderson just long enough for his crew to get past. Jimmy raised his eyebrows. "Um…if you guys want to stick with me, I'll show you what we know so far…." His voice trailed off as the agents ignored him.
Gene noted with pride how his team knew exactly what needed to be done. Jerri Bates approached the witnesses and singled out a crying cashier from the shoe store. She used her disarming looks and personality to pull out details other interrogators might miss. Doug Goldman and Marty Palomini made a beeline for the uniformed PD to make some needed friends, and Carl Brent honed in on the forensics crew to add his expertise to the decades of experience already present. Meanwhile, I get to play politics. Yippee.
Gene turned Officer Anderson toward the group of sport-coated detectives next to the wreckage and unveiled his best diplomatic smile. "Why don't you take me to the detective in charge? It's going to be a long night, so let's work together to make it shorter, okay?"
Anderson followed Gene, muttering a barely-heard mantra over and over to himself. "Mustache Martin, the other one's Gene. Mustache Martin, the other one's Gene."
* * *
June 23rd, 1:23 AM PST; FBI Headquarters, Wilshire Boulevard; Los Angeles, California.
The computer screen shuddered rhythmically, no doubt caused by something electronic in the rooms near Gene's makeshift office. His head throbbed in time to the pulses. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples for the hundredth time. It eased the pain only so long as he kept doing it and felt that much worse when he stopped.
Coffee, he thought. He grabbed his official Department of Justice mug, proudly emblazoned with the red, white, and blue shield with the bald eagle in flight on the front, and pushed his chair back from the desk. When we find this guy I'm going to beat him to a pulp with that olive branch. He shuffled down the hall toward the break room.
"You shouldn't drink that piss this late," Marty said from the hallway. He scowled in disapproval. "You won't sleep for shit tonight."
With a dismissive flick of his hand to stave off any more sage advice, Gene stepped around him. Marty seemed to think that once a man's ex-girlfriend could no longer nag him into a pounding headache, it became the sacred duty of the elder brother. Marty spoke behind him. "They found the phone, got prints. We forwarded them to Sam."
Samantha Greene was the invisible sixth member of the team. Two hundred and twenty pounds and five-foot-two, she hadn't passed the FBI's physical for field work in five years. Gene doubted she could walk a mile without dying, much less run three in thirty minutes. She was an expert marksman who practiced at the shooting range three times a week but had never worn a weapon on duty. It didn't matter.
Sam was the best field coordinator in the Bureau. She tracked the team with GPS, listened to and recorded their conversations over the COM, used gadgets and programs with other mysterious acronyms to perform astounding feats of technical magic, and crunched dizzying amounts of data for use in real time. She did all this from in front of a dozen computer monitors, safely ensconced behind a desk in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.