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in the movies, and yet she took a secret thrill in even the more mundane aspects of her job. She never took her position for granted. To be in charge of a regional field office was a major accomplishment for any agent, rarer still for an agent who was not yet forty, and almost unprecedented for an agent lacking a Y chromosome. Only fifteen percent of special agents were female, and before Tess there had been just one female SAC, whose resentful male colleagues had dubbed her Queen Bee.
    There were plenty of agents who looked back fondly on the Hoover years, when women had been permitted in the Bureau only as support staff. Some of those nostalgic types were the old guard, dwindling as they hit the mandatory retirement age of fifty-seven, but most were too young to remember Hoover as anything other than an unsmiling face in one of the official portraits that hung in FBI offices everywhere. Still, they kept his traditions alive, including the casual, almost jocular misogyny that had been part of the Bureau’s culture from the start.
    In her days as a street agent, Tess had heard herself referred to as a skirt, a split tail, and—her personal favorite—a breast fed. She tried not to take offense. A certain amount of ribbing and rough talk was normal in law enforcement. In theory the Office of Professional Responsibility could be summoned to investigate sexually derogatory comments, but the policy was rarely enforced. No agent, female or otherwise, wanted to be known as a troublemaker who couldn’t take a joke—not in an institution that valued loyalty to the team above almost any other virtue. Anyway, she was an SAC now, at one of the country’s larger field offices, and nobody called her a split tail these days. At least, not to her face.
    Her office was large and well appointed, with the customary leather chairs and matching leather sofa, the properly intimidating desk with an American flag beside it, and a large bookcase stocked with reference volumes and the Bureau’s Manual of Rules and Regulations, known as the Big Manual; but the walls were curiously bare. Tess had eschewed the collection of photos known as an I-love-me wall, in which highlights of an agent’s career were illustrated for the benefit of visitors. Handshakes with the director or the president usually got the best display.
    Tess had shaken her share of hands and had the photos to prove it, but they were in a cardboard box in a closet at home, not demanding attention on her wall. The only photos she had put up were a couple of cityscapes she liked—Miami and Phoenix, two cities where she’d been assigned earlier in her career, and Denver itself. And there was a photo of Hoover, of course. Not to display J. Edgar’s picture would be the ultimate act of sedition.
    At nine forty-five the willpower that had carried her through her morning routine finally failed. There was no way around it. She had to know what Abby had gotten mixed up in. If there was a federal connection, Abby might come to the attention of the Bureau and be called in for questioning. Someone would link her to the Rain Man case. The truth would come out. Tess’s superiors would learn that for the past year and a half she had been covering up the participation of a civilian in a federal law enforcement action. And not just any civilian. Abby wasn’t some FBI groupie, she was an unlicensed private investigator, very nearly a vigilante, exactly the sort of person who should have no input into an official investigation. The repercussions would almost certainly prove fatal to Tess’s career.
    Switching on her desktop computer, she used the Bureau’s secure intranet to connect with the mainframe in the Hoover Building in Washington, then logged onto the federal internal computer system. The FICS was a database containing the details of every FBI investigation, while affording access to the records of other federal law enforcement agencies as well. Through the system she accessed the U.S.