Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Chapter 7

A man in a luxurious quibble sits in the parking lot atop the police HQ. He reads the above-fold headlines, then carefully places the newspaper on the back seat. He's General Felix Buckman. He's a police general. The novel sketches the command structure (above Felix are Grand Marshall, and above that a mysterious Director) but the impression the book gives is that Buckman is the head of all natpol in at least Los Angeles if not California. He's coming in to start his day when the day shift is just ending. He's mid fifties, known by all, concerned for his subordinates well-being. He walks through the office of now empty and clear desks for agents, and notices one desk still messy: this is McNulty's desk. To Buckman, McNulty is an enthusiastic dummy; a necessary kind that must be tolerated. Buckman starts reading what he's working on; apparently there is a Jason Taverner, and he doesn't exist.

His assistant, Herb Maime, meets his boss as he reads McNulty's notes. The notes are weird and interesting enough that Buckman gets Maime to call McNulty at home. Buckman quickly interrogates McNulty about what he's found so far. Jason Taverener, handsome dude, apparently wealthy, got Kathy the forger to make *unusually good* forgeries, good enough to pass a pol checkpoint. Then, briefly, what happened last chapter. Taverner still had a tracker dot on him, and a good thing too: trying to find out more from the world data banks has shown that he's missing from all of them. What was a low level thing with ident cards is now maybe national security - the ability to remove oneself entirely from *all* databases is extraordinary. Where does Taverner get his money? Who does he work for?

Well, now he has the eye of the General of Police.

In his office, Felix finds his sister, Alys, asleep on his couch. This is intensely irritating to him. She's mid thirties, and dressed no-shit like a punk. Skin-tight black pants, a man's leather shirt, hoop earrings, with a metal studded belt with a wrought-iron buckle. I guess this is also fetish gear, (which Alys is totally into) but if Felix is the model of law and order, Alys is rebellion and personal power personified. She also *may* be his fraternal twin, but honestly it's difficult to tell if that's just drug talk later on Alys's part or Dick just forgetting he wrote both characters with a 20 year age gap.

Anyway, she's stoned, and so *of course* she uses Felix's shit to break into the police HQ to pass out in his office. Naturally Felix gets into a puritanical snit about it. One thing here is that it's really difficult to tell if anything Alys does is actually illegal - her position as family of a police general would likely make her immune to consequence, but as the two discuss it the issue is that it bothers the shit out of felix to have a sister who's basically a chaos imp implacably opposed to everything good, IE The Law. Alys brings up her being a political weakness to her bro, which he dismisses, as she's already "well known" to the six marshals and the one director above him. The argument continues through Buckman's suite of offices, with even Buckman threatening to shoot her not phasing Alys. Just while he's working himself into a good puritan fury about what a degenerate pleasure seeker she is, McNutly calls. His thesis is confirmed: his staff compared all of Taverner's bioinformatic data, and none of it exists anywhere on earth. Jason Taverner is not only an alias, he's someone with no paper trail at all. He doesn't exist.