This is a good point. Also, was Ray lying about the secretary? I don't remember Hastings ever mentioning his secretary knowing this information, I believe it was only himself and Ruth Davenport.cgs027 wrote:Don't forget that it's also heavily implied that Mr. C was on the scene when Ruth Davenport was killed (heck, The Final Dossier pretty much spells this out). Which makes things even sloppier with respect to Ray. If Mr. C was there, he already had access to the coordinates, they were written in LARGE font on her arm for pete's sake. So... why all the pestering of Ray for the coordinates (Ruth and the school secretary would no doubt have the same exact info)?!? And likewise, it is completely redundant to have Diane crib them off the pic of Ruth's arm and send them to him...Mr. Reindeer wrote:It’s pretty convoluted, that’s for sure. I still have doubts about how much L/F thought this kind of stuff through. In retrospect, it seems pretty obvious that Gordon and Albert were much further ahead of the audience than most of us initially assumed. For instance, given the Lois Duffy history, they clearly suspected Mr. C was some sort of second Cooper from the moment they met him in prison — if not before. It seems absurd that they wouldn’t know Cooper was Ray’s boss, unless Ray deliberately kept it from them...which I suppose is possible. The very idea of a covert FBI subsection that is kept top-secret even from most Bureau members revealing its existence to a street-level career criminal is inherently absurd. It’s never made particularly clear what Ray was tasked by the FBI to do, aside from getting the coordinates. The question becomes one of “chicken or the egg.” Did the FBI recruit Ray because he had a preexisting relationship with Hastings’s secretary, which Mr. C subsequently caught wind of? Did Mr. C find Ray first, and the FBI employed him because of that (this assumes the FBI did have knowledge of Mr. C and his operations)? Whatever the order of events, there has to be some connection. It would be profoundly stupid for Ray to miraculously end up as both a Blue Rose informant and Mr. C’s henchman through pure coincidence.
Thanks for the responses to everyone:)