Don could write a field report with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back. He'd had a lot of practice. Field reports are a constant at the FBI. If, as Charlie claims, a government office's order of magnitude is determined by the amount of paper it produces, the Bureau must be close to the top. A single case is often written up by several different agents over the course of the investigation, with copies filed with branch, local and regional offices. Additional copies go to Quantico, Langley and Guantanimo Bay, as well as the Pentagon and both houses of Congress. Occasionally, even the press outlets get copies, but that usually means someone's head is about to roll.
Don wrote excellent reports, which was one of the reasons he'd risen so quickly through the ranks. His trick was to pretend that he was writing to Charlie: someone very smart, but not familiar with FBI procedure. One of his instructors—an Academy fossil who'd been teaching procedural methods since J. Edgar Hoover was a recruit—had gone so far as to announce to the whole class that "Mr. Eppes has a particularly felicitous style, neither insulting nor assuming." Don took a lot of ragging over that one: "Oh, hi, Mr. Eppes, how felicitous to see you."; "How're you doing, Don? Neither insulting nor assuming, I hope?" It was nice, though, to be the best at something academic. He never talked about that instructor, but he'd never forgotten it, either. (He wondered whether Terry remembered? Of course not. That was just some professor talking out of his hat a million years ago. Why would she remember something like that?)
Charlie said Don was always getting stuck with reports because he could spell, but the truth was that Don usually offered to write team reports. Part of it was perfectionism: he wanted to see the job done right. But most of it was the knowledge that a report, once written, was hard to get rid of. It was sent to so many places and copied and filed and handed around. Sooner or later, someone, maybe some Charlie, would see it as part of a pattern. Reports were boring, yes, and formulaic, but they spoke for the dead and the disenfranchised. Don didn't mind a little extra work.
Don remembered that he had once written a report with his hand tied behind his back. Actually, the arm had been in a cast, but same effect. He had written reports at crime scenes, surrounded by gore and fingerprint dust. He had written on red-eye flights after three days in the field with no sleep. Once, due to overcrowding at the Academy, he'd been assigned a desk near the shooting range; the whole carrel had jumped six inches off the floor with every volley. Still, he'd always finished the report. Now, though, he just couldn't seem to focus.
He'd been staring at the same file for the better part of an hour, unable to tame his thoughts into a coherent paragraph. The voices on Terry's CD kept interrupting. Several times, he'd start a sentence, only to find that he was repeating himself. Even when the voices were silent, Don found himself anticipating them, daring them to speak up even as he hoped they wouldn't. They screamed, whispered, demanded, instructed, teased; they said terrible things and illogical nonsense. He found himself trying to answer them or predict what they would say next. David stopped once, on his way back from the coffee maker, and tried to talk but was apparently interrupted by the voices on his CD player. He rolled his eyes, scrawled a note on one of Don's discarded folders and went back to his own desk. "These voices are driving me nuts!" he wrote.
Don gave in after six hours. The last straw had been a call from the personnel division, a mix-up concerning an insurance policy held by one Ronald Epps at a branch office in Oklahoma. Trying to answer the soft-spoken secretary on the phone while listening to recorded expletives made him feel like his head was going to explode. Finally, he hung up on the poor woman and grabbed his jacket.
"I'm heading out early ," he told David on his way to the door, "I have to stop by the hardware store for Charlie."
David, frazzled and jumpy, looked up. His desk was covered with balled up papers and legal pads with crossed-out sentences. Radiating frustration, he stared at Don for a minute before recognizing him, then reached up and pulled off his headphones: "Say what?"