what does "referring reports to him"mean? Irv knew he would never make it. He would make every effort, and he could reach the field quickly, but experience had taught him that he wasn't adept at talking his way past policemen. (He was right. He and his wife raced to the airport and were stopped at a barrier.) Still, he thought, he could do something about Sarah, and hanging up he called Barefoot Sanders. To Goldberg, unschooled in the Florentine intrigues of the federal government, it seemed that a U.S. attorney with jurisdiction over one hundred north Texas counties ought to have sufficient authority to provide Sarah with an honor guard of Secret Service and FBI men. Even on a normal day it was more complicated than that. Sanders was without authority over either the Service or the Bureau's Dallas office, which, although it was as much a part of Justice as he was, had a maddening habit of referring reports to him with notes explaining that they "might be of interest to the Justice Department." And this day wasn't normal.