Read Online Prayer by Philip Kerr - Free Book Online

you’re just some guy who used to live with them but who still pays for stuff and you might as well get used to this. But I certainly didn’t want to.
    It helped a lot that I could throw myself into my existing caseload as well as a closer investigation of what was in Bishop Coogan’s file; and in this I was lucky enough to have the assistance of Anne Goldberg, who was by general consensus the best investigative analyst in the Houston field office. As a member of our Field Intelligence Group, Anne handled the collection of raw information such as telephone records, webpages, bank details, and, of course, criminal backgrounds; as someone who’d worked as a journalist, Anne was very good at getting information out of other journalists—they’re always cagey about sharing information with the FBI. So she had several conversations with reporters from
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
, and
The Boston Globe
. Her greatest skill, however, was her ability to see patterns and shapes in assembled data, and this was the main reason why brick agents like me wanted to work with her. No one could make a link chart like Anne Goldberg.
    It’s not just bits of information that we like to connect in the Bureau, it’s each other, too. There are no lone wolves at the FBI. The brick agent I worked with in DT was Helen Monaco and, like me, she was ex-Counterterrorism. Helen’s first case had been working undercover on an FBI yacht in the Mediterranean; her role had been to act as the eye candy while a sting on some al-Qaeda Arabs went down. It was plain to see how someone thought she could play that role to perfection. Helen Monaco was everyone’s fantasy desert-island partner. In an effort to play down her looks and be taken seriously, she now wore weak-prescription and possibly unnecessary glasses, little or no makeup, and severe business suits, but no one was fooled by the Betty Bureau shtick. Helen Monaco could have worn a used trash-can liner and she’d still have looked like a hot babe. Not that I entertained any intentions toward her. Besides, I had the strong impression that she’d already been warned about me by Chuck Worrall. He had my card marked as a hustler, and until now, I’d thought that was good. It helped to keep my feet on the straight and narrow for Helen to think of me as someone with whom it wasn’t safe to share an elevator car.
    Helen had one other qualification that marked her out as an excellent partner. During the undercover operation on the yacht, she’d shot two al-Qaeda when they drew on one of her colleagues. One of the men she shot died; the other’s driving a wheelchair around the supermax prison yard in Florence, Colorado. Result.
    The three of us—Anne, Helen, and I—started to work the Philip Osborne case on Monday; and by Thursday, we had enough information to take it to the ASAC. I asked those two along because I figured that all three of us made a more convincing argument in favor of a proper investigation than just one line supervisor. Besides, I had a theory I wanted to test; actually it was Helen’s theory. Helen said that Gisela Delillo always gave me a harder time when there were other female agents present—almost as if she were trying to prove that there was nothing between us.
    While I lined some sharpened pencils up in neat little ranks beside my Bureau leather folder, Gisela made all of us coffee and then invited me to make the case against our unsub—the as yet unknown subject of an FBI investigation.

    “This is the strangest case for investigation I have ever presented,” I began. “Almost three weeks ago, here in Houston, the writer Philip Osborne suffered an acute shock that has left him mentally impaired, perhaps permanently. No explanation for how that shock came about has yet been discovered. At first it was assumed that he’d been attacked. But if so, it’s not clear how. Or by whom. There were some superficial wounds on him, only these would appear to have