The other thing his upbringing had done for him was to give him a fine appreciation for the tensions of status. Those tensions were particularly acute between federal agents and local officers, because both sides too often thought the federal agents were doing the important work and the local officers playing in the bush leagues. If the federal agent was around long enough he usually learned better, especially if he was attached to Behavioral Sciences. The world had changed in the last twenty years. Local officers, even in smaller cities, were no longer spending their time chasing joy-riding teenagers or breaking up fights in low-rent bars. They were engaged in war, fought with Uzis and hand grenades more often than Saturday night specials, with an enemy better funded and better organized than most governments. That, Gregor knew, was what cocaine had done to the country, and there was nothing bush league about it.
For this and many other reasons, Gregor had not wanted to give advice to Detective Lieutenant John Smith. The problem was, Gregor had no other way to get what he needed except by asking Smith to get it for him, and that asking constituted advice, no matter how subtle. If he’d still been with the Bureau, he could have tapped resources: called people who could get him what he needed on the side. Gregor supposed he could still do that. He had retired early. A lot of the men he had worked with, and almost all the men he had trained, were still on the job. They would have been happy to run a few checks for him or send out a request-for-information bulletin. Gregor didn’t want to ask them. In the first place, he didn’t like to call in favors except in cases of absolute necessity. Favors wore out, after a while, and there might come a time when Bureau contacts would be all he had to help him through a problem. Colchester had a perfectly well equipped, if not perfectly competent, police department. They were capable of doing everything he could think of needing done. In the second place, he was afraid that if he did go to the Bureau, and Smith found out about it, Smith would have a cow.
Gregor had been worrying about these things all night, in the intervals when he wasn’t worrying about the death of Andy Walsh, and he was worrying about them still when he was shown into the squad room at Colchester Homicide and escorted through the maze of desks to the corner carved out by Lieutenant John Smith. Smith himself did the escorting. His big body bounced and jiggled from one middle-of-the-room desk to the other, making contact with a lot of tired-looking people Gregor didn’t know and probably would never get to meet. The squad room was a scene of incomprehensible chaos. The desks had been crammed in next to each other and then jostled against once too often, so that they were all out of true. There were papers everywhere, on chairs and windowsills, on desks, on file cabinets, on the floor. Most of all, there was the noise. The room’s ceilings were high and uncushioned. The walls were made of plaster that had long since begun to dry and turn to dust. The glass in the windows hadn’t been changed since the building was put up and had therefore begun to ripple. The result was a gigantic echo chamber, magnifying and repeating even the slightest sounds. Phones rang and then rang again, and again, and again. Men shouted and then shouted again, and again, and again. A woman screamed and seemed to go on screaming for almost half an hour. No wonder the officers of Colchester Homicide are so disorganized, Gregor thought. They’ve been driven out of their heads trying to work in this place.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and Gregor and Smith had just spent three hours in the basement, going through lab files and morgue records and talking to technicians. At the time, Gregor had thought that odd. It was common courtesy to show a visitor to your desk first, unless the visitor was there especially to visit the morgue. There were things that might need talking about, in advance and in private. Now Gregor thought Smith had been doing him a favor. Nobody unused to the squad room would want to remain in it very long.
Smith had brought an armload of photocopies up with him from the basement. He threw these on his desk on top of a lot of other papers and sat down, motioning Gregor into the witness’s chair. He seemed to be entirely unaffected by the mess, although his own desk was much neater than most of the desks around it. There were papers scattered over it, yes, but his pens were all primly contained in a cardboard pen holder and none of his drawers bulged. He even had a little plastic tray with compartments for paper clips, rubber bands, Scotch tape, and tacks.
Gregor sat down in the chair Smith had offered him and stretched out his legs. It was after lunchtime and he was hungry, but Smith hadn’t said anything about lunch. He hadn’t even said anything about coffee, which Gregor thought of as the blood of police detectives. Without caffeine, they would all be dead.