“I’m guessing they don’t get too many white patrons in here,” she said.

“That’s the point,” he said. “We don’t have too many black people to worry about.”

A waitress took their order. Two beers.

“Okay,” Lancette said. “You had your fun. You got me here. Anyone white walks in the door and we’ll know it. So what do you want?”

With his index finger, Walters drew small circles in the sticky film covering the tabletop.

“Really, it’s what you want—or wanted.”

“And what’s that?”

“An ICEMAN report.”

The front door opened; a shaft of streetlight sliced through the smoke. Walters raised a hand to block the beam. Lancette turned to see three black men in overalls entering.

“Doubt they could get anyone here that fast,” he said.

“They? You mean us?”

“Hard to think of it that way sometimes. Too many of us who are not us, you know. It’s a big place.”

“Okay, okay. The ICEMAN report. What are you talking about?”

“Listen to this,” he said.

Walters was a psychiatrist and worked in DA/MA/P. He had been with the Agency seven years. He joined it after a short stint as deputy head of penal research with the Michigan Department of Corrections. He spent his first two years at the CIA in the euphemistically named Occupational Health/ Behavior Rehabilitation office, the office that looked after the many agency employees who had become too familiar with alcohol and controlled substances. It was known throughout the Agency as Dry Out. Then Walters graduated from Dry Out to MA/P.

The morning after the President was shot, Walters received the ICEMAN request. It came in the standard form, containing a written physical description of the assassin and various photographs that Lancette had selected. Walters read the report and realized he possessed a clue to the most awful crime decades.

He had not recognized the man in the photographs. But the tattoo that was etched into the killer’s chest—the letter M pierced by a dagger—seemed familiar to him. He could not recall where he had seen it. Perhaps on an inmate in Michigan? He probably had stared at hundreds of tattoos there. Or on one of the hundreds of CIA people he had counseled, treated, interviewed, or screened? He was not sure.

The request for information was urgent, so he quickly wrote up a memo. It was short:

The undersigned believes he once encountered a person bearing a tattoo similar to the one found on the subject’s chest. (An arrow through an M.) The undersigned cannot recall where he saw the tattoo previously. But he believes there are two possibilities: (a) when he was working with inmates in Michigan correctional facilities; (b) when he was treating employees of CIA. The undersigned is trying to recall more precisely.