The secured review room in Bellweather, Maryland, had no windows and one table, and by the time I arrived Inez Carver already had three boxes open on it, each labeled in her small, precise handwriting.
"Records office released her full personnel file this morning," she said, not looking up. "Appointment date, 1979. Twenty-five years, give or take, before anyone put handcuffs on her."
I had asked for Inez specifically. She was younger than most senior examiners, methodical in a way that occasionally irritated people who wanted conclusions faster than she was willing to produce them, and she had never once worked a case I had any stake in.
"Start wherever you'd start," I told her.
She started with a film canister, battered at the edges, a label reading INTERNAL TRAINING — ACCESS DISCIPLINE, dated eleven years back. "This was in with her training jacket. I thought you'd want to see it before I logged it."
We ran it on the room's old projector because the digital transfer hadn't been made yet. The picture was grainy, lit by the flat fluorescent light of some long-gone classroom, and the woman standing at the front of it, narrating proper handling of sensitive material to a row of new officers, was Della Merrick.
I had forgotten, until that moment, that I had sat through a version of this exact session in person. I remembered her voice being warmer than the film captured, more patient with a slow question than the script required.
"You knew her," Inez said. It wasn't quite a question.
"I recommended her for an instructor panel. Maybe 1993. Possibly earlier." I kept my eyes on the frozen frame rather than on Inez. "She was good. Genuinely good at it. People trusted what she told them. I did too. She sounded like someone who believed every word, though I can't tell you now what she actually believed."
"That's useful information for the review."
"It's also a conflict, if anyone wants to call it one."
Inez finally looked at me directly. "Do you want it called one?"
It was a fair question and I took longer answering it than I should have. There is a particular kind of cowardice available to a man in my position — not denial, nothing so crude, just a quiet editing of the record so that his own name appears a half-step later in it than it actually belongs.
"Put my recommendation in the file," I said. "Dated, sourced, exactly as it happened. If the review is worth anything, it has to survive including the people who vouched for her."
Inez wrote it down without comment, which I took, correctly, as a kind of respect.
We went through the rest of the personnel jacket methodically — her appointment as a sworn federal investigator, her postings, her commendations, two separate reassignments that on paper looked like career advancement. The access authorizations ranged across counterintelligence files and military information; her instructional work had been only one part of the career. Each document by itself looked routine. Together they showed how much the agency had entrusted to her, year after year, and how little my memory of a capable teacher could tell us about what she had done with it.
"Twenty-five years is a long time to be inside something," Inez said, closing the last folder. "Either she was extraordinarily careful, or we were extraordinarily inattentive. Probably it's not one or the other."
"Probably not," I agreed, though I did not yet know how much of the second half of that sentence would end up attached to people I had worked beside, or to work I had done myself.
I thought about the training film on the drive back to Alderwick, about the warmth in Della's remembered voice as opposed to the flat instructional tone on the reel. I had treated that warmth as evidence of something it could not prove. A person could teach a sound lesson while betraying the institution that taught it; whether she had felt sincere was beyond me. The review would have to hold her demonstrated competence beside the allegations without letting one explain away the other. It would have to do something similar with my judgment.