Broken Dolls by James Carol Page A

job where you could make a difference. As soon as I was old enough I joined the Met.’
    ‘Do you still believe you can make a difference?’
    She considered this while she drank her tea. ‘Some days, yes, other days, no. On the whole, there are more yes days than no days. I guess if that changes then that’s when I’ll quit.’ She smiled that great smile. Her teeth were perfect, two neat white rows. ‘I reckon I’ve missed the boat for becoming a ballet dancer, but maybe it’s not too late to become an actress.’
    Federico arrived with our lunch. My food came without any embellishment. No salad or bread, just a slab of lasagne on a plate. It didn’t look much but Templeton was right, it tasted amazing. Templeton’s plate was piled high with a cholesterol overdose. Bacon, sausage, egg, beans, the works. I looked at her plate and wondered how she kept so slim.
    Templeton scraped some beans onto her fork. ‘So what about you? Why do you do what you do?’
    ‘I became a cop because my father was a serial killer.’
    ‘That wasn’t what I asked.’
    Templeton was right and we both knew it. She was staring again, but there was nothing warm and fuzzy about this stare. It was the sort of stare that would make an innocent man confess. This was the other side to Templeton, the cop side. The side Hatcher had warned me about. It was an uncomfortable insight into why she was so good at her job.
    ‘That explains why you joined the FBI,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t explain why you left, and it doesn’t explain why you do what you do now.’
    I fell quiet, debating the best way to answer. There were a number of reasons I could give. One big reason and a whole load of smaller ones. All of them were true, but none on their own gave the full picture. I’d given eleven years of my life to the FBI and for the last three I was their lead profiler. I’d been awarded the Medal of Valor for my part in a high-profile kidnapping that ended with the girl alive and the kidnapper dead.
    On the face of it my FBI career was a success, however, the reality wasn’t so clear-cut. I have always been an outsider, and I’ve always done things my own way. The problem is that the FBI isn’t a place for outsiders, or people who do things their own way. The organisation is massive, thirty-four thousand employees and an eight-billion-dollar annual budget. The emphasis is on the team, and the higher up the ladder I climbed, the more obvious it was that I didn’t fit in, that I would never really fit in anywhere. I made enemies in high places. Resentments festered. Politics came into play and I’ve never been much of a politician. Whenever my methods were called into question, I argued that I did what was needed to get the job done, but that argument wore thin pretty fast.
    Those were the little reasons. The big reason was those three words mouthed in that execution chamber at San Quentin prison eighteen months ago.
    We’re the same.
    Every major decision has a tipping point, a single event that shifts enough weight to one end of the scale or the other. That was the tipping point for me. I resigned from the FBI as soon as I got back to Virginia, just packed up my desk and left and never looked back. I knew my father was screwing with me, but it didn’t make any difference. Those three words hit harder than any bullet. I’d never murdered anyone in cold blood, and I sure as hell hadn’t gone out into a forest under a cold, dead moon and hunted down an innocent woman with a high-powered rifle and a night scope.
    But knowing wasn’t enough. I needed to prove to myself that we weren’t the same, and I couldn’t do that within the constraints of the FBI. That’s why I’d chosen the path I had, and that’s why I drove myself so hard.
    We were not the same.
    But.
    My cellphone buzzed in my jeans pocket. Templeton was still staring across the table at me, expecting answers. She was going to have to wait. I thumbed the phone to life. Hatcher