The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (3)

When she walked back into the senator’s reception area, Colles, Welp, and a legislative assistant named Leslie Born were huddled in a nook under a portrait of Colles shaking hands with the elder George Bush. They were arguing about something in low but angry tones; maybe the missing money. Colles saw Letty and snapped, “Get in my office. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Letty went into Colles’s private office and sprawled sideways in one of the comfortable leather club chairs, her legs draped over a well-padded arm. And why not? What was he going to do, fire her?

Colles came in five minutes later, slammed his door. “I apologize for snapping at you out there,” he said.

“You should. You were pretty goddamn impolite,” Letty said, dropping her feet to the floor.

“You’re right, I was. Because you’re not the problem. Let me tell you, sweet pea: don’t ever get yourself elected to the Senate,” Colles said, as he settled behind his desk. He was a tall man, big whitened teeth, ruddy face, carefully groomed gray hair. “There are more numb-nuts around here than in the Florida state legislature, which, believe me, was a whole passel of numb-nuts.”

“What do you want?” Letty asked.

Colles smiled at the abruptness. “We bore you. Okay. We bore me, most of the time. I used to be this really, really rich real estate developer down in Palm Beach County. Pretty young women would insist that I pat them on the ass and I was happy to do it. If I patted anyone on the ass in this place, my face would be on CNN at eight, nine, and ten o’clock, looking like a troll who lives under a bridge and eats children.”

“You could probably get away with patting Welp on the ass,” Letty suggested.

Colles faked a shudder. “Anyway, I got your letter of resignation. I put it in the shredder.”

“I still quit,” Letty said, sitting forward. “I don’t hold it against you, Senator Colles. You’re not a bad guy, for a Republican. I’m in the wrong spot. I realized that a month ago and decided to give it another month before I resigned. The month is up.”

“What? Tallahassee scared you?”

“Tallahassee was the best assignment I’ve had since I’ve been here,” she said. “If it was all Tallahassees, I might have decided to stick around.”

“Now we’re getting someplace,” Colles said. He did a 360-degree twirl in his office chair, and when he came back around, he said, “The Tallahassee thing was . . . impressive. If you’d been caught by the Tallahassee cops, I might have had to fire you. But you weren’t. I can use somebody with your talents.”

“Doing what? Burglaries?”

“As chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, I’ve made it my business to oversee DHS operations. There are a couple dozen of what I think of as mission-critical problems that they have to deal with, at any given time. I’m very often unhappy with the results.”

“I . . .”

“Shut up for a minute, I’m talking,” Colles said. “DHS investigators deal with all kinds of problems, security problems, some of them serious. Like, why can’t we protect our nuclear power plants from intruders? We had a guy down in Florida walk into . . . never mind. Anyway, these guys, these investigators, basically do paperwork and interviews. Too often, paperwork and interviews don’t get the job done. When there’s a problem, the local bureaucrats cover up and lie. They’re very good at that. That might even be their primary skill set.”

“Okay.”

“Now,” Colles said. “Have you been here long enough to know what a department’s inspector general does?”

“More or less.”

“An inspector general basically inquires into a department’s failures,” Colles said. He steepled his fingers and began to sound like a particularly boring econ lecturer. “They may look into complaints from whistle-blowers or, if it gets in the news, they can look at obvious fuckups. Like why Puerto Rico never got its Hurricane Maria aid from FEMA, outside some rolls of paper towels. They can also examine situations where a necessary investigation simply doesn’t produce . . . the needed results. We know there’s a problem, but the DHS investigators come up dry. Or they hang the wrong people, the bureaucratically approved scapegoats.”

“That’s unhelpful,” Letty said. She restlessly twisted a gold ring. She was bored, she wanted to move.

“It is. Of course, it’s fairly routine in governmental matters. People get hurt all the time, I can’t help that,” Colles said. “My concern is, the big problems don’t get solved. I’ve personally spoken with several of these DHS investigators, about their investigations. Actually, I didn’t just speak to them, I interrogated them in classified subcommittee meetings. They are serious, concerned people for the most part.

“What they aren’t, too often, is real good investigators,” Colles continued. “Or, let me say, researchers. They go somewhere with a list of questions, and ask the questions, and record the answers, but they don’t poke around. They don’t sneak. They don’t break into offices. What would really help over there is a smart researcher, somebody who knew about money and finance and crowbars and lockpicks and so on. You do. You have a master’s degree in economics and a bunch of courses in finance, and graduated with distinction from one of the best universities in the country. Which is why I hired you.”