On a recent visit to Los Angeles, my wife and I met Rehder for a long lunch at the Santa Monica Airport, at a restaurant he had chosen. Rehder ordered an Arnold Palmer, called the waitress “darling,” and showed us through a small stack of files holding black-and-white photographs, personal notes he’d written to himself in preparation for our meeting, and some newspaper clippings related to major cases he’d worked on. In fact, one thing I’ve come to realize over the course of many meetings with retired FBI agents is that they often arrive with files in hand, as if unable to fully leave behind the archives and documentary evidence so central to the agency’s investigations. These files are encyclopedic, full of data and references for making narrative sense of the events they describe. Our table at the restaurant was laminated with aviation charts of the skies around Southern California, giving our whole conversation an oddly diagrammatic feel, as if we were not only getting an X-ray of the city from a retired FBI agent but also somehow peering into the skies to see the flight paths and holding patterns otherwise only known to pilots and air traffic controllers.

Rehder has stayed busy in his retirement, he explained, and now runs a consulting firm called the Security Management Resource Group, “a professional firm providing effective and cost-efficient prevention solutions to robbery, violence, and other crimes at financial institutions, stores, and other corporate facilities.” His partner is a former head of security at Bank of America. Rehder’s expertise in all things bank-crime-related also led to the surreal accolade of having been tapped to serve as an outside consultant on the 1991 film Point Break, a thriller starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze and directed by a young Kathryn Bigelow, although he tends to laugh when telling that particular story. Rehder’s colleagues apparently ribbed him about the movie for years afterward.