PITF office¶

The PITF office is the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Paranatural Incident Task Force: a run-down former barbershop on three floors, with a Vietnam-era armory in its steel-walled basement, where Diane keeps the desks running and the team files its reports between cases.


Type	Location (headquarters)
Aliases	The office; task force HQ; headquarters; the barbershop; D.C. barbershop; home base; the basement arsenal
Region	Washington, D.C., five or six miles south of FBI headquarters, toward the edge of the city
Inhabitants	Diane, the task force; Big Bill visits
First appearance	Radford Horror 01

Description¶

When Andrew Howard first arrives on May 24, 1992, the address is a derelict barbershop in a Black neighborhood that has not been used in a couple of years, with water damage and a maze of document boxes. An FBI agent carrying boxes out to a Crown Vic explains that the building used to belong to the Capitol Police, who sold it to the FBI rather than pay to remove the asbestos, and that the FBI had been using it for document storage. A Safeway is down the street (Radford Horror 01).

The building has three floors (Radford Horror 01):

Ground floor. The barbershop itself, with barber chairs, washbasins, a little sports radio and a public bathroom.
Upstairs. A couple of rooms and a bathroom. A telephone hangs on the wall behind the boxes, next to a desk with a surprisingly nice IBM PC, the first color-screen computer Andrew has seen, and a modem.
Basement. A steel door with a keypad lock, built nothing like the rest of the building; see below.

By October 1992 the office has been improved. In Appalachia 01 it has four window air conditioners, a roof that no longer leaks, a front desk downstairs in front of the barber fixtures with a bell to call for Diane, a VHS player and a small CRT television, and a pile of E.T., Alien and Close Encounters tapes and posters sent by people who thought they were funny. Diane buys supplies from what she calls the "petty cash", which is actually drug money, and the alien mascot OJ keeps watch (Appalachia 01). See OJ the stuffed alien.

Notable places within¶

The basement arsenal. Behind the keypad door is a steel-walled panic room. Kurt Larson guesses 0-0-0, then fetches luminol and a blacklight, finds which keys glow and cracks the code as 4-5-1. Inside are Vietnam-era arms: M16s, a napalm launcher, a box of hand grenades, a disassembled RPG and landmines. Kurt shakes a landmine to test it and mentions that "Todd used to buy them" (Radford Horror 01). By Radford Horror 08 the lockup holds flamethrowers, machine guns, landmines, claymores and an alien weapon (Radford Horror 08). The basement also has a gas heater, which is unreliable (Roulet Estate 01).
The downstairs bathroom. Full of document boxes to the ceiling on the first day. While it is being cleared, a medicine cabinet turns up, taken off the wall and tucked behind the plumbing, holding two half-gallon jars labeled "Ephedrine" and "Mandrax", which Diane calls old "stakeout candy" (Radford Horror 01).
The fire lane out front. A 1961 Lincoln Continental covered in parking tickets sits here on the first day and becomes the team's loaner car; see 1961 Lincoln Continental (Radford Horror 01). In Appalachia 01 a nearly new 1991 Ford Explorer is parked in its place (Appalachia 01).

History of events there¶

The Radford Horror¶

On May 24, 1992, at about 7 a.m., Andrew finds the address. Inside he meets Diane, who has big dated hair and is chain-smoking and spinning slowly in one of the barber chairs. She has been told to report here for a task force assignment and cannot tell whether the place is "a barbershop or maybe a slum". Andrew hands her the Lincoln's parking tickets and she goes off to find a phone to call the FBI about them. Andrew hauls boxes and, with the bathroom still full of them, pees in a barber sink while Diane sings "Natural Woman" (Radford Horror 01).

The rest of the team arrives around 9 a.m.; Dick "The Biz" Baxter has been watching the building from across the street for hours. Huell Kendrick tapes a World Trade Center postcard to his spot, and Kurt says the towers "will stand for a thousand years". Kurt opens the basement arsenal. Andrew gives Diane a speech about benevolent aliens guiding humanity, and she resolves to trust "the institution and you personally" (Radford Horror 01).

On June 15, 1992, the air conditioning is broken, it is about 100 degrees inside, and the work order will not bring anyone for days. Kurt gets the unit blowing weakly with a grinding noise. Diane takes some of the drug money from Radford, which she calls "the budget", to buy window units, and installs two that take the edge off the heat but make the lights flicker. The desks and chairs requisitioned after Radford have finally arrived, and the roof leaks, with another work order pending. The seized heroin goes into the trunk of the Biz's car for the Marblehead trip, and Kurt sets up hourly check-ins with Diane before the team leaves (Radford Horror 08). See Marblehead.

The Things in Appalachia¶

In Appalachia 01 the team has been treated with more respect since Marblehead, and the rest of the FBI has stopped bullying it. On Monday, October 4, 1992, they watch Close Encounters in the office, Andrew shivering from vaccine side effects. Their own car is being held for radiological contamination, which is why the Explorer is out front. Diane brings up the dossier that sends them to Dahlonega, Georgia (Appalachia 01). See Dahlonega.

The Walkers in Skin¶

In Walkers 01, shortly before the 1992 election and after the team's trip to New York, Andrew is stuck at the office with two reports left, doing the paperwork alone while the others kill time. The Biz recovers from his heart attack and practices magic tricks, Kurt hunts for a holster for his P90, and Huell collects pogs. Diane asks how to deal with "crazy people" who come by, including a woman whose dead mother is haunting her, and the group settles on a tip box; Diane then announces she is off to Wally World for crafts supplies. Chester, a recurring nuisance, is "getting really aggressive", and Huell has used Kurt's shovel on him. That evening Alberta Wilmarth knocks on Andrew's door, not the office's, to ask him to force the Mormon church to exhume her mother. The next morning Big Bill tells Andrew over the phone that it is his task force and the FBI will pay for the plane tickets to Utah (Walkers 01).

The Roulet Estate¶

Roulet Estate 01 includes a flashback card reading "Twenty-five days ago", set on Christmas Eve 1992. After fifty-three days of paperwork, Andrew is typing his last report on the Utah disaster on a terrible brand-new computer. Diane has decorated the office, probably with money from the cocaine stash. The evening runs as follows (Roulet Estate 01):

The heater. Kurt, avoiding paperwork and acting on dad instinct, goes to fix the banging basement gas heater. Its igniter is unreliable, so gas builds up and pops when it lights.
Stolen power and cable. Diane plugs in the Christmas tree, which twinkles for four seconds before the breaker trips and Andrew's report vanishes. Kurt breaks into the neighbors' building to flip their breaker, restores power and notices that the neighbors now have cable, which the team takes too.
Holiday plans. Kurt is staying with his family, the Biz is going to Las Vegas, Huell will be home alone until he sees his daughter after New Year's, and Andrew will visit his mother.
Carolers. Salvation Army carolers collect at the door; Huell donates what is left of his cigarettes and the Biz a gold nugget from Georgia.
Secret Santa. The gifts include a hand-knit sweater from Diane for Andrew, a fake alien fetus in a jar from Kurt for Andrew, a gold Dunhill lighter and cigar cutter from Andrew for Huell, and a floppy disk marked "Mystery Government Files" from the Biz for Kurt.
Big Bill's news. Big Bill arrives, eats biscochitos and half a gingerbread man, and tells the team that the President-elect, Ross Perot, believes the task force is a cover for Bush weaponizing the FBI against his political enemies. Perot asked him to resign and will disband and reassign the task force on Inauguration Day. He also hands Andrew a padded envelope with no return address that an FBI courier left for him. Andrew opens it outside in the slush and finds a foil-wrapped letter and a pencil sketch of trees, which open the Roulet case (see Foil-Wrapped Letter).

Trivia¶

Dante jokes that the task force's abbreviation is "Pitfa" (Radford Horror 08).
Kurt's luminol-and-blacklight trick for the keypad is a rare case of his gear paying off right away (Radford Horror 01).