Agent X by Noah Boyd Page B

affectation. He calls the bad guys ‘thugs’ and ‘hoodlums.’ When I asked him about Sundra, he gave me the rundown and told me that the investigation was at a standstill. Then he cocks his head to the side in thought and says, ‘You know, she’s an African-American, too. You could probably find her, because these people would talk to you.’ And you think the leadership was bad when you were in. Then he reassigns the case to me as if he had just had some sort of movie-of-the-week life-altering epiphany.”
    “I take it you haven’t had any luck getting those African-Americans to tell you where she is?”
    Bursaw grinned. “Don’t start,” he said. “So I pull the file and find out that very little had been done after the first thirty days. I made up my mind right there to jump on it with both feet.”
    “Not to belittle your altruism, but what does she look like?”
    “You’re right, she is good-looking. Which doesn’t hurt. But I figure with what she did for my cousin, she must be a good person and deserves to have someone searching for her for real.”
    “A Bureau employee disappears and no one is making it a priority?”
    “At first they did have the full-court press on it, but when they found that she was in major debt . . . well, like you always said, they prefer the theory that requires the least amount of work. So they decided that she probably just took off for parts unknown and changed her name or got married or both so she could wipe the slate clean.”
    “Define ‘major debt.’ ”
    “Almost fifty K on credit cards alone.”
    “Isn’t it hard to run up a bill that big without enjoying some of society’s moral taboos?”
    “You don’t spend much money, do you, Steve? Even though you won’t read it in the file, I think that’s what they thought,” Bursaw said. “It wasn’t drugs. She’d just had a physical and been screened. And all her phone records and credit-card receipts have been checked, so it’s unlikely that she had a gambling problem. But she did like nice things. She’d recently bought a house and had a nice car. From what I’ve been told, she always dressed much better than the rest of us government humps. With that kind of taste, fifty thousand isn’t such a big leap.”
    “So they’re trying to put it to sleep, and you’re going to make them pay for it by embarrassing them with their ineptness.”
    “I would like nothing better, but I’m not sure anyone will notice.”
    “You haven’t changed much, Luke.”
    Bursaw smiled slowly. “As if I have to explain the joys of belittling management to you. The good news is that I’m not getting any pressure to solve it. The bad news is, there’s something wrong with it that I can’t figure out.”
    “Wrong how?”
    “Okay, let’s assume she took off to get out from under that debt. The search-warrant inventory at her house showed that she left everything there, and I mean everything. She had a fairly new laptop computer. It was still there. Seven-hundred-dollar shoes that hadn’t been worn. And for me, maybe the toughest thing to explain, her designer suitcases were still there. The price tags still on them.”
    “Have you called the locals to see if there’ve been any other incidents of women missing under similar circumstances?”
    “Some sort of serial thing, yeah, I thought of that, but you know what a mess that can start. I do have some feelers out, though.”
    “When did you last check her credit cards?” Vail said.
    “I look at them once a week. Nary a blip anywhere.” Bursaw took another sip of his beer. “I’d like you to look at it.”
    “What is it that you think I can do? I didn’t go to an Ivy League school.”
    “I don’t know, maybe I’m on tilt with this. Maybe I’m trying too hard to show the world how smart I am or, more likely, what a moron my supervisor is. I don’t know. You were always good at finding things no one else could. Maybe take a look at the file. See if I’m