Chapter 1

I dropped my briefcase on the floor beside my desk and sank into my chair. It had been a long (working) weekend, and now it was Monday, and the work would just go on. I was sure Joe Sibliani, my boss, would give me some comp time if I asked for it, but I had four cases pending, and without a partner I wasn't going to be able to look for any slack time soon.

There was a post it note on my computer monitor that said "Happy Birthday - Joe" on it. It wasn't my birthday, so I knew Joe had something for me. The "happy birthday" part wasn't necessarily an indication that I'd like whatever he had. It had better not be another case, though. I knew that. I was already overloaded, and he knew it. The public didn't really understand what cutbacks meant in a government investigative agency. What they meant was that already overloaded public servants - and that's exactly what I was - decided to retire early, thus reducing the ranks of experienced investigators even more, until the whole investigative mission began to implode. And without a watchdog ... well, the wolf rules.

I levered myself up and out of my chair to go see Joe. I felt like I was in my sixties instead of forty-three. That came from too many hours at work, too many hours in the car getting to my next interview or case and back, and too little sleep. And I'm fifteen pounds overweight, but I don't have time to do anything about that.

Joe is just as overworked as the rest of us. He was behind a mountain of paperwork when I stuck my head in his office door.

"You bellowed?"

He looked up. "I didn't bellow. I left you a note. And it was even pink, which I felt was doing my part to spruce up your area and brighten your day."

"I'm overwhelmed at your enthusiasm" I said. "On second thought, I'm only whelmed."

"Well," said my boss, looking grave. "I think you'll change your tune when you see what else I got you. I managed to get you a new partner. Try not to ruin her, OK?"

"Her?" My eyebrows rose.

I have nothing against women in law enforcement, especially the kind we do, which is basically white collar fraud investigations. I was an MP in the Army for seven years, and while I had some great male partners, there is a kind of built in competition between males, even when they're friends. But when you have a female partner, a lot of that competitiveness just disappears. It's easier to be a real team with a woman. Of course there is the potential for sexual tension, but I've found that if there's any attraction to start with, it tends to ease off after you get to know each other well enough. Especially if she's married. I've never married, but I respect the institution. And jealous husbands can kill you just as easily as anybody else.

My surprise was more because fraud investigations don't seem to be a draw for most women. I don't know why. Maybe it's the attention to detail that's required, or the incredible crushing boredom of sifting through a mountain of paperwork to find one tiny clue. It is almost literally like looking for a needle in a haystack. But I've been doing it for sixteen years, and that gives you some perspective and time to refine your techniques. Suffice it to say I've developed a kind of magnet to search for that needle with.

"Yes, her," said Joe. "She's young, but she's motivated. It would be nice if she stayed that way for more than six months. You have a way of wearing down a partner, and I would prefer that in this economic environment, that you refrain from doing that this time."

"I'm not the one wearing anybody down," I said. "It's the job that's wearing people down."

"Don't start with me," said Joe, but there was no heat in his voice. He knew the deal as well as I did. "Just go solve something so I can throw that in the face of the bean counters."

"We're the bean counters," I pointed out, grinning.

He frowned. "I mean the ones who are fucking up our nice, not-so-comfy existence by cutting the funds we have to work with."

"Yeah," I said. "That's what all our customers say about us too."

"Go break in your new partner!" snapped Joe. "And I don't mean break her."

"Do I just get to pick any female I happen to see, or are you going to give me a name?" I asked, looking innocent.

He sighed.

"Kelani Tokorau," he said. "She should be in records, getting the rundown on the forms we use.

"Kelani," I said. "Interesting."

"No it's not. And behave yourself. This girl is young enough to be your daughter."

"I'm starting to get interested," I said, grinning again.

He looked straight at me. "Consider me her father, Bob. And you know how I feel about office romances. Don't make me transfer her. Or you, if she turns out to be as good an investigator as she is a good looking woman."

"Yes sir, Daddy, sir," I laughed. "When was the last time you saw me chasing a skirt around this place?"

"You haven't seen this skirt yet," he grumbled. "Now get out of here. Go solve crime!"

I left and, instead of heading back to my desk, which is what I would normally have done, I went in search of a skirt named Kelani.

I served a tour in Korea while I was in the Army. Korean women don't age well, for the most part. But when they're young, they're amazingly good looking. There is a cultural thing going on which makes a Korean girl act humble and submissive. Trust me. At heart she is anything but submissive. And there is usually some language barrier to overcome, and if you don't understand what your man just said, it's not odd to simply sit and hope that further edification is forthcoming. So a lot of GIs come to the wrong conclusion and snap up the cute young things. Then they take them home to the U S of A where the girl can really flower. Sometimes it even works well for the couple. I know this because I had a lot of soldiers working for me at one time or another who had a Korean wife.

Suffice it to say that the primary lesson I learned was not to assume that that darling young sloe-eyed girl, who casts her eyes to the floor and smiles and nods, is anything other than a tiger who isn't unhappy at the moment.

This became important when I sauntered into records and saw Millie, our records clerk, showing pieces of paper to a young woman.

Kelani was Oriental.

Then I actually took time to think about the name. Kelani was Polynesian, most likely Hawaiian.

Many among the unwashed masses of maledom think that all slant-eyed women look the same, and behave the same. Nothing could be further from the truth.

While I'm not an expert on the subject, I was aware that Polynesian women are a little different than Korean women. I haven't known as many of them, only two, in fact, and neither of them well. But the sense I got was that they were more assertive and less subservient on a cultural level to begin with. That culture also ascribes the same level of importance to pleasure that the Koreans do to work. Captain Cook thought that the Polynesian girls were trying to seduce his sailors, when in reality, they were just curious as to whether these white men would make them feel any better than the men they were used to. It wasn't seduction. It was just how they lived their lives. Of course interacting with the white man fucked all that up, but that's another story.

Millie looked up and said something. Kelani turned to look at me.

Korean and Chinese women have round faces. Japanese women have a longer, thinner face, with lighter skin and a more delicate epicanthic fold in the eyes. Chinese and Korean women look sturdy, and are. Japanese women look delicate and fragile, which they can be.

Polynesian women are a mixture of the two, with an oval face and almond-shaped eyes with a tilt that is there, but isn't obvious about it. They are taller than Korean women, but shorter than their Japanese counterparts. Generally, they are shapely and rarely have either flat chests or huge breasts. They look athletic, rather than stout. Kelani was all of those things, though softened somehow. There was a component to her looks that I couldn't classify. She had the requisite thick, blue/black, straight hair that draped down her back, held from misbehaving with a jeweled band. It wasn't a pony tail. It was more like the short train of a wedding gown. Except it was black, of course.

I realized my heart rate had increased from its normal 70 beats per minute to my training heart rate of about 125 bpm.

This girl wasn't merely good looking. She was ravishing ... gorgeous ... incredible. There weren't adjectives of a lofty enough nature to classify her.

I suddenly realized I was in deep, deep trouble. Then I realized I was going to be in even more trouble when the two women staring at me saw the tent that was about to develop in the front of my slacks.

"I'll be in my office when you're finished with her," I said.

Then I turned and hurried to my desk, where I could sit down and hide my growing erection.

Kelani appeared within five minutes. She stood hesitantly in the doorway and looked at me.

The standard setup for a field agent in the D.C. Inspector General's office is a room about twelve by twenty feet, within which there are two standard issue five foot desks, two four drawer file cabinets, two what I call night stands, two desk chairs, and two straight-backed interview chairs. If you're a GS-12 or above, you can usually get a couple of bookshelves. Otherwise you have to supply your own. Toss in the odd personal items of decor and there isn't a lot of excess room. Cover the desk with a computer monitor and keyboard, plus piles of case files and supporting documents, and ... well ... it looks like bureaucratic Hades.

It can be, actually ... but never mind that.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," I said back.

"Uh ... I'm Kelani ... I think we're going to be working together?" Her voice had that lilting accent that many people mistake for British, but which I knew to be Australian. She didn't sound too sure of what she had just said. That's not strange. Being dropped cold into a government operation can be a confusing and even frightening experience. And she couldn't be a day over eighteen, so she had no experience. Except I knew that to be an Agent, she had to be at least twenty-one. Which was patently impossible for this woman.

"Are you an intern?" I asked.

Her cheeks turned pink. "I just graduated from FLETC," she said, her voice suddenly hard. It was the first exhibition of a trait I would see many times in the future, and come to respect.

FLETC, which is pronounced Flet-see, stands for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. It's in Glynco, GA, not far from the Atlantic coast, and is where all federal law enforcement personnel go through basic training. You wear a blue uniform at FLETC if you're in basic training, and are therefore referred to as a Smurf by all the other students. Those other students are already members of the federal law enforcement community, whether it be the Park Service, Border Patrol, Internal Revenue Service, and on and on. The exceptions are the FBI and CIA, which train their Smurfs, or whatever they're called, elsewhere. But even they send their people to the advanced courses at FLETC. But Smurfs had it the worst, because they were the not-even-rookies-yet that everybody else looked down on. And it was a demanding course, with a lot of attrition. Which was why people who graduated from Smurf school didn't appreciate being mistaken for mere interns.

"Oh," I said. "You look about seventeen."

"I'm twenty-three!" she said, getting even pinker.

"Well, I'm Bob, and that's your desk," I said, pointing at the other desk in the room. It had at least a hundred and twenty pounds of paper piled on it in manila file folders that were stacked a good two and a half feet tall. "Welcome aboard."

She stood there, looking beautiful.

"Are those my cases?" she asked, sounding a little less sure of herself.

"Those are our cases," I said.

"How many are there?" she asked, sounding awed as she took a couple steps toward the mountain of paper.

"At the moment only four," I said.

"That's four cases?" she gasped.

"Sorry," I said. "I misspoke. There are actually only three on your desk. I'm working on the fourth one here." I patted the three stacks of folders, each a foot tall, that covered a third of my desk.

"That's insane," she said.

"That's the biz we're in," I replied.

"What do I do?" she asked.

Ahhhh. She had just scored a point. Instead of trying to impress me with her self-perceived talents and value, she was willing to ask for direction. It was a good sign. I realized I had just thought about her as a criminal investigator for the first time. That was a good sign too. Then I realized I was staring at her chest.

Oh well. Baby steps.

Actually, it only took Kelani six days to get up to snuff on our cases, which was better than impressive. She was intelligent and had an eye for detail. She asked a lot of questions and had this way of stating "truths" that she then let me either confirm or correct. It was actually quite helpful to me too, because I had to present the cases to her in some coordinated, logical fashion. In the process something jumped out at me in one of them which turned out to lead to the missing piece of the puzzle that solved the case. I actually gave that lead to her as her first lead to run down. Then I used that case for her to learn how to write a final report on and present to the AUSA, which stands for Assistant United States Attorney. He took the case, but only because it was Kelani presenting it. He wanted to keep her in his office for as long as possible, and the only way to do that was to accept the case. I almost laughed, watching him drool over her.

By then we had been working together for two months, and I had learned how to shut my libido down upon command ... sort of. It, meaning my libido, was a little like this mixed breed Black Lab puppy I had when I was a kid. When I came home from school that dog went absolutely apeshit until I had spent at least ten minutes paying attention only to her. Then she'd calm down and be a normal dog.

When Kelani first came in in the morning my libido acted like that dog. I got an erection, had wild, crazy fantasies, and then slowly doused the fire with buckets of reason. Necessity is the mother of invention, so I invented a tradition where, for the first fifteen minutes of each day, we went over what we had done the day before, and what we were planning to do on that day.

While I stayed seated at my desk.

So she couldn't see what she had done to me.

I said it was to make sure we both knew what the other was doing, but it was really just a way to let my vital signs return to normal after the adrenaline rush of seeing her for the first time each day.

I'm serious. She was that good looking.

Still, it was a rocky start for her because we didn't build the normal intimacy between partners that usually happens. I just couldn't take her out to drink beer and shoot pool and chase women. Or merely admire women if he was married. And then there was the sudden influx of visitors to my office with urgent, complicated, time consuming questions. They were all males, of course, and at least half of them were married. Doug Masters is in his fifties, has grandchildren and has been married to the same woman for thirty years, and even he came in and drooled over her. I talked to Joe and he had a meeting, while Kelani was out on an interview, and basically told the guys she had a Samoan boyfriend who was jealous, who had threatened my life, and who was being kept on a short leash by his girlfriend. That was all a lie, of course, but at least the gawkers slacked off and only salivated from afar.