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“HE WAS AN EXCEPTIONAL WORKER. Smart as a whip. No—smarter, actually. It was really something. Almost not human, I’d guess you could say.”
Sean and Michelle were in Leon Russell’s office at the IRS in Charlottesville. Russell was short and wide, with thick white hair. He wore a short-sleeved shirt with a T-shirt underneath and suspenders. His fingers were stained with nicotine, and he twitched a lot, as though the absence of a cigarette in his hand was messing with his mind.
“That’s what we heard too,” said Sean. “What were his duties here?”
“He was the troubleshooter. Anything out of the ordinary that no one else could figure out, we went to Edgar.”
“What sort of person was he?” asked Michelle.
“Kept to himself. We’d sometimes go out for a beer after work. Edgar never joined us. He’d head home to his farm. I think he liked to read.”
“Did you ever go out to the farm?”
“Only once, when I was interviewing him for the job.”
“How’d you come to know about him?”
“Friend of a friend. At his college. I keep contacts everywhere. People with exceptional talent I get a heads-up on. Edgar really stood out. He’d been out of school for a while, doing what I’m not sure. But I called him up and he came in for an interview. Impressed the hell out of me. I had one of those old Rubik’s Cubes on my desk. He picked it up while he was talking to me, and kept messing it up and then solving it over and over, just like that. I’ve never been able to do it once. It was like he could see every combination in his mind. Bet the guy could’ve been a hell of a chess player.”
“I didn’t realize the IRS went all out for that kind of talent,” said Sean. “It’s not like you can compete with the salaries on Wall Street.”
“Edgar had no desire to go there. Don’t get me wrong. He probably could’ve come up with some derivative algorithm that would’ve made him billions. Or designed some software in Silicon Valley that would have made him equally rich.”
“But no interest?”
“He had his farm, his books, his numbers.”
“Numbers?” asked Michelle.
“Yeah. Guy loved numbers, what he could make them do. And he loved complexities. He could take a ton of different sections of the tax code—income, gift, estate, corporate, partnerships, carried interests, capital gains—and visualize how they all worked together. Did it for fun. For fun! Do you realize how remarkable that is? The tax code is a freaking nightmare. Even I don’t understand all of it. Not even close, in fact. No one does. Well, except for Edgar. Every page and every section and every word. Probably the only one in the country who did.”
“Pretty unique,” said Michelle.
“Oh, yeah. Made our little office stand out, I can tell you that. Other places wanted to snag him. I mean in the IRS system. They tried, but he was content. He didn’t want to move. Thank God for me. The performance bonuses I got because of that guy, well, let’s just say my retirement will be a lot better because of him.”
“I understand that he went to D.C. a lot,” said Sean. “Is that because he was the only one in the country who understood it all?”
Russell’s amiable expression changed. “Who told you he went to D.C. a lot?”
“Is that not true?”
“Depends on how you define a lot.”
“How would you define it?” asked Michelle.
“Once a week.”
“Okay, did Roy meet that standard or not?”
“I’d have to check my files.”
“Is the office here that big?”
“It’s bigger than it looks.”
Sean switched gears. “So he was working here when he was arrested?”
Russell leaned back and studied them both, his hands resting on his belly. Over his shoulder was a shelf full of thick white binders with sleep-inducing titles on the spines.
