“Like maybe he hadn’t been feeling right, was having chest pains. Or maybe it had to do with the pacemaker he got eight or nine months ago?” Marino has begun to bluster, and Benton isn’t answering. “But I can see you aren’t going to tell me shit. In other words you’re being a typical FBI dickwad.”

Benton isn’t really, and were Marino not so distracted by his discomfort and fatigue, by his usual power struggles and insecurities, he might realize what’s glaring. Briggs had a top-level security clearance and regularly advised military leaders, the secretary of state and various directorates including the Departments of Defense and Justice.

He attended social events at the White House and was accustomed to briefing the president. For obvious reasons he’s of keen interest to the U.S. intelligence community, which isn’t going to insert itself directly into the domestic investigation of his death. The CIA is sneakier than that.

Typically it uses the FBI as a liaison or a front because global spymasters aren’t supposed to deal directly with domestic medical examiners, cops and the likes. That’s a sanitized way of saying that in the real world the CIA is the invisible witch rubbing the FBI’s crystal ball, diverting and deploying its agents and experts like a squadron of flying monkeys.

What happens next suddenly and without warning is they descend upon your scenes, your witnesses, your offices, paper records, database, labs, morgues, your very homes and families. There’s no regard for what damage might be done, and cops like Marino may never know what hit them or the reason. Having a major case overtaken by the Feds is every investigator’s nightmare—especially if the agents involved are secretly doing the bidding of some cloak-and-dagger organization like the CIA.

I watch Marino watching Benton look around, assessing, contemplating, carrying himself as if he has the right to be here while I scarcely know the smallest thing about my mentor, my friend found dead in a pool. What pool? Was this at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware? I know he swam there religiously when he was overseeing the Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs.

Or was Briggs traveling? He would use the hotel pool if there were one. But I have a feeling I know, and it would be tragically ironic. It would seem like an Old Testament judgment as I envision the quaint stone house in its charming Bethesda neighborhood off Old Georgetown Road. Briggs bought the property decades ago. One of the draws for him was its close proximity to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where we once worked together.

“Here.” Marino looms over me, and I realize he and Benton have stopped talking.