The Big Bad Wolf

I WAS A PART of the large surveillance detail near the house in Highland Park, and I thought we were going to take Lawrence Lipton down soon, maybe within hours. We'd been told that Washington was working with the Dallas police. I stared absently at the house, a large two-story Tudor on about two and a half acres of very expensive real estate. It looked pristine. A redbrick sidewalk went from the street to an arched doorway, which led to a sixteen-room house. The big news that day in Dallas was about a fire in Kessler Park that had incinerated a 64,000-square-foot mega mansion. The Lipton spread was less than a third that size, but it was still impressive, or depressing, or both. It was around nine in the evening. A supervisory agent from the Dallas office, Joseph Denyeau, came on my earphones. "We just got word from the director's office. We have to back off immediately. I don't understand it either. The order couldn't be any clearer, though. Pull back! Everybody head to the office. We need to reconnoiter and talk about this." I looked at my partner in the car that night, an agent named Bob Shaw. It was pretty obvious that he didn't understand what the hell had just happened either. "What was that?" I asked him. Shaw shook his head and rolled his eyes. "What do I know? We go back to the field office, drink some bad coffee, maybe somebody higher up explains it to us, but don't count on it." It took us only fifteen minutes to get to the field office at that time of night. We filed into a conference room at the field office, and I saw a lot of weary, confused, and pissed-off agents. Nobody was saying much yet. We'd gotten close to a possible break on this case, and now we'd been ordered to pull back. Nobody seemed to understand why. The ASAC finally came out of his office and joined the rest of us. Joseph Denyeau looked thoroughly disgusted as he threw his dusty cowboy boots up on a conference table. "I have no idea," he announced. "Not a clue, folks. Consider yourselves debriefed." So about forty agents waited for an explanation of the night's action, but one didn't come, or wasn't "forthcoming," as they say. The agent in charge, Roger Nielsen, finally called D.C. and was told they would get back to us. In the meantime, we were to stand down. We might even be sent home in the morning. Around eleven o'clock Denyeau got another update from Nielsen and passed it on to us. "They're working on it," he said, and smiled wryly. "Working on what?" somebody called from the back. "Oh, hell, I don't know, Donnie. Working on their pedicures. Working on getting all of us to quit the Bureau. Then there'll be no more agents and, I guess, no more embarrassing screwups for the media to report. I'm going to get some sleep. I'd advise all of you to do the same." That's what we did.