Living Proof, стр. 14
Dopp became resigned to the fact that he would always be a sinner in God’s eyes. It was a trade-off he had struck the moment he first touched her. As selfish as it was, he would rather die now than live without his wife, and so there was only one thing for him to do: spend his life making it up to God. Working at the DEP seemed a good place to start, and over the years, he had risen steadily to chief. But whenever some fate turned against him, as with their struggles to have a baby, Dopp knew why. He was not angry; he only wished that Joanie did not have to suffer for his heresy. Yet God, working in His mysterious way, must have known that any pain Joanie endured was a thousand times worse for Dopp than his own.
After Abby’s birth, Dopp had thrown himself into his work, hoping it would prove his true devotion to God, and thus spare his family any further hardship. Seeing himself not only as an embryo advocate, but also a patient advocate, he pushed for a new department initiative to leverage doctors’ monetary motivations against them. It was his idea to set doctors’ pay contingent upon their patients’ appraisal of their compassion during treatment. Although patients could technically lie and underpay, Dopp assumed that people who were satisfied with their treatment would want to pay for their doctor’s services; however, this initiative would be impossible to implement and monitor without greatly increasing the DEP’s budget. Keeping it steady for next year was already his foremost worry, as the liberals in the state assembly were anticipating the upcoming budget negotiations with glee, knowing that for the first time in a decade, they were equal in number to their foes: just plentiful enough to pose a threat to the conservative agenda.
Dopp took a deep breath, kissed the picture of his daughter’s smiling face, and set the frame down on his desk. Then he picked up the inspector’s report with the missing signature and studied it again. He would have to face the rogue old-timer directly, and the sooner, the better.
He pressed a button on his desk phone that connected him straight to his driver.
“Hello?” came a familiar voice.
“Hey, Mark,” Dopp said. “Got some time?” It was their running joke; Mark’s full-time job was to stay on call for him.
“I think I can squeeze you in.”
“See you in five.”
* * *
Trent sat riveted to his computer screen. He was staring at the profile of Arianna Drake on NYfaces.com, a ubiquitous social networking website. Dopp had instructed him to search for a way to base their initial meeting on what would seem to be a common interest, to make it appear unplanned. So Trent had turned to scrutinizing her profile for details he could use.
He had seen the page before, when he was compiling background information on her for last week’s presentation, but this time her picture was new. She was sitting on a swing that was dashing forward like a whooshing pendulum. Her head was thrown back and her black hair reached her waist, flying in all directions. The picture captured her mid-laughter, eyes squeezed shut. Beneath a yellow sundress, her tan bare legs stretched up to the sky.
Her joy was like a fistful of mud flung into his face, but he could not wrench his gaze away from the screen. He stared at her curves, coyly outlined under her dress. She had no right to be beautiful, he thought irritably. And he had no right to think it.
He became further frustrated by the relative lack of personal details she provided on her page. This assignment required him to be secretive himself, so in preparation, he had erased his own profile page, and Dopp had erased his name from the department’s website. As a government agency, it wasn’t difficult for them to have their contacts at all the major search engines get rid of any leftover web crawl data relating to Trent in his current capacity. There was no longer an online trace of Trent Rowe, agent, only Trent Rowe, ex-reporter. His trail stopped after the last article he had written several years earlier. Dopp had decided it was safer for him to use his real name and cover only his current path, rather than invent a fake persona that would be risky to sustain: This way, they wouldn’t have to worry about her seeing his driver’s license, credit cards, or mail.
On Arianna’s profile page, the fields of home address and contact information were left predictably blank. She listed herself as single, which made his strategy clearer. At first, he had considered becoming a regular sperm donor, so as to establish a patient–doctor relationship that he could then try to exploit. But that route would be slow, since he could go in only once a week to donate, at which time, he would have little contact with her. Dopp convinced him it would be faster, albeit riskier, to approach her as a potential beau, since apparently she did not already have one. If she fell for him, Dopp reasoned, perhaps she would confide the truth about her clinic. It was a one-shot gamble, though; if she rejected him, they would have to give the case to another undercover agent. Trent had decided not to worry Dopp by telling him about his recent track record with women; he also realized, with relief, that he would not be telling Arianna about his job, the one handicap he most encountered. If only it were so easy in his own life to assume an alter