The Maze

expectantly. She hated to disappoint him, but there was no choice.

    "Not all that much, sir, just enough so I can write reports and hook into the databases I will need to do my job."

    To her unspeakable relief, he smiled. "Good, I wouldn't want any real competition in my own unit. I hear you had wanted to be a Profiler, but ultimately felt you couldn't deal with the atrocities that flood the unit every moment of every day and well into the night."

    "That's right. How did you know that? I just left Mr. Petty less than fifteen minutes ago."

    "No telepathy." He pointed to the phone. "It comes in handy, though I much prefer e-mail. I agree with you, actually. I couldn't do it either. The burnout rate for Profilers is pretty high, as I'm sure you've heard. Since they spend so much time focusing on the worst in humanity, they wind up having a difficult time relating to regular folks. They lose perspective on normal life. They don't know their kids. Their marriages go under."

    She sat forward a bit in her seat, smoothing her navy blue skirt as she said, "I spent a week with them. I know I saw only a small part of what they do. That's when I knew I didn't have what it took. I felt as if I'd failed."

    "What any endeavor takes, Sherlock, is a whole lot of different talents. Just because you don't end up profiling doesn't mean you've failed. Actually, I think what we do leaves us more on the normal side of things than not.

    "Now, I asked to have you assigned to me because academically you appear to have what I need. Your academic credentials are impressive. I did wonder, though. Why did you take off a year between your sophomore and junior years of college?''

    "I was sick. Mononucleosis."

    "Okay, yes, here's an entry about that. I don't know why I missed it." She watched him flip through more pages. He hadn't missed it. She couldn't imagine that he'd ever miss a thing. She would have to be careful around him. He read quickly. He frowned once. He looked up at her. "I didn't think mono took a person out for a whole year."

    "I don't know about that. I just wasn't worth much for about nine or ten months, run-down, really tired."

    He looked down at a page of paper that was faceup on his desktop. "You just turned twenty-seven, I see, and you came directly to the Bureau after completing your Master's degree."

    "Yes."

    "This is your first job."

    "Yes." She knew he wanted more from her in the way of answers, but she wasn't about to comply. Direct question, direct answer; that's all she'd give him. She'd heard about his reputation. He wasn't only smart; he was very good at reading people. She didn't want him reading anything about her that she didn't want read. She was very used to being careful. She wouldn't stop now. She couldn't afford to.

    He was frowning at her. He tossed her file onto the desktop. She was wearing a no-nonsense dark blue business suit with a white blouse. Her hair, a deep auburn color, was pulled severely back, held at the base of her neck with a gold clamp.

    He saw her for a moment after he'd butted her into the petunias in Hogan's Alley. Her hair had been drawn back then. She was on the point of being too thin, her cheekbones too prominent. But she'd taken him, not lost her composure, her training. He said, "Do you know what this unit does, Sherlock?"

    "Mr. Petty said that when a criminal took his show on the road, we're many times called in by the local police to help catch him."

    "Yes. We don't deal in kidnappings. Other folk do that brilliantly. No, primarily we stick to the kinds of monsters who don't stop killing until we stop them. Also, like the ISU, we do deal with local agencies who think an outside eye just might see something they missed on a local crime. Usually homicide." He paused and sat back, just looking at her, seeing her yet again on her back in the petunia bed. "Also, like the ISU, we only go in when we're asked. It's our job to be very mental, intuitive, objective. We don't do profiling like the ISU. We're computer-based. We use special programs to help us look at crimes from many different angles. The programs correlate all the data from two or more crimes that seem to have been committed by the same person in order to bring everything possibly relevant, possibly important, into focus. We call the main program the PAP, the Predictive Analogue Program."

    "You wrote the programs, didn't you, sir? And that's why you're the head of the unit?"

    He grinned at her. "Yeah. I'd