Dr. Powell had gotten over his initial pique and launched into a long-winded monologue on ossicular vibrations. Don was the furthest thing from his mind; he was wondering how to work in an invitation for coffee when Terry suddenly stood up and closed her notebook.
"Thanks so much for your time, Doctor," she said sweetly, "Let me walk you out."
With her standing over him, he had no choice but to stand up himself, and once he did, she started subtly shifting him toward the door.
"We could discuss this some more," the doctor offered quickly as he backed into the hallway. "I mean, I'm sure you must have some questions about your friend's condition."
He was fishing, Terry could tell, hoping that she'd correct his use of "friend." Next, he'd giver her his pager number, tell her to call if she had any questions. Well, he could just keep hoping.
"Oh, no. No, I wouldn't want to keep you. I'm sure you're a very busy man." Terry played up the wide-eyed innocence on that line, daring him to confess that his Very Important Physician persona was just an act.
"Actually, not so busy. I mean, busy, of course, but…Hey, I usually don't give out my pager number to regular patients…" Powell stuttered.
This was getting embarrassing, so Terry finished it off with another smile: "Oh, I completely understand, Doctor. I know your time is valuable; I wouldn't dream of stealing you away from your regular patients."
She gave the word regular an ironic twist that Powell didn't like, but by the time he'd noted it, he was already standing alone in the hallway.
When she turned from the door to face Don, the nasty little burst she got from puncturing Powell's ego disappeared. Her partner was propped up on pillows nervously shredding a page of her notebook. She'd been the one to warn him away from those nervous habits of his, way back in school. At first she hadn't wanted to say anything. It was strangely endearing to watch him fiddle with whatever came to hand; besides, she hadn't wanted him to take it the wrong way. But finally she'd cornered him alone in a Laundromat off campus and explained that those unconscious habits made other people—clients, witnesses, other agents—really jumpy. He hadn't been insulted; Don had actually thanked her for the suggestion: "I really want to be good at this," he'd said plainly, "and I never would have noticed that." Cold turkey, all the little twitches had just ceased, at least when she was around, and that nervous energy was channeled somewhere else. As a behavioral scientist, Terry knew exactly how hard it was to break those kinds of habits. Nevertheless, Don Eppes now had one of the best poker faces in the game; during an interrogation, he could shout and threaten with the best of them, but he could also summon a physical stillness that was nothing short of eerie. Sometimes, Terry wished she'd never brought it up; guessing what Don was thinking was harder than it used to be.
Don was painstakingly tearing the paper into confetti until she sat down and then he immediately picked up the evidence notebook, flipped to a clean page, and started asking questions. He found it easiest to treat this like a standard investigation, so he numbered his questions for efficiency.
Where's Charlie?
What happened?
Whose fault?
All FBI agents ask that last question: they think in terms of law enforcement, of course, not morality. They want names of people who will be prosecuted for defying the laws that the Agency exists to uphold. Like most career agents, Don had a healthy cynicism about the whole thing. Still, Terry knew that even back at the Academy, he'd been keenly interested in questions of blame. He wanted to exonerate the innocent almost as much as he wanted to stick it to the perpetrator. "There are counselors for this kind of thing," she would tell him after he took time from an investigation to assure witnesses and victims that they were not culpable, just in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Yeah," he'd say, defensively, "I know. But it's a terrible thing to keep beating yourself up over what you could have done differently." He was so matter-of-fact about it, so unsentimental, she'd never known what to say to that.