Two days later
FAITH HADN’T SLEPT, OTHER THAN DOZING FOR AN hour here and there, since the call came.
An early riser, even when she spent the night with Hendler, she’d walked into the condo’s kitchen and started coffee. She knew Hendler would probably stay in bed for another hour and a half or so, and Faith rather enjoyed the quiet time before the day began. She would probably wait until she got home to take her run. She had her own route, and it helped to organize her life by sticking to it.
She was sitting at Hendler’s kitchen table, wearing only the long T-shirt, drinking her coffee, lost in thoughts of Sean and Daryn McDermott and what she could possibly do to straighten out her brother, when Hendler appeared in the doorway.
One look at his face told her something was wrong.
“What is it?”
“Rob Cain called. They found the girl.”
“He said that last night,” Faith said. “Doesn’t he-” She broke off, staring at Hendler’s normally placid face.
“No, I mean they found her this morning. We’d better get dressed.”
By the time they’d reached the memorial, the crime scene unit was already there. So was Cain. So were other FBI agents. So was a swarm of the media.
When Faith had first seen the body hanging in the tree, she’d remembered Daryn, back at the safe house. At first there had been hysteria-What if he kills me?-and later, driving away from the house, a resigned air, almost a quiet acceptance-He’ll kill me, you know.
And then, when Hendler had finally taken her home, both Sean and her car were gone. She tried calling Sean’s cell every two hours, then every hour, with no answer. Not even voice mail.
She rented a car, a Ford Focus hatchback, and shuttled back and forth between her office and the house. She talked to Yorkton once.
“Even the most brilliant surgeon loses a patient now and then,” he’d told her, then proceeded to ask questions about departmental security.
She’d snapped at him that it should be fine, and quickly hung up.
No one understood, and she could talk to no one.
She’d found no evidence to support any of Daryn McDermott’s claims.
Or Sean’s, she reminded herself.
There had been no solid footing on which to build a Department Thirty case with Daryn. There was no independent confirmation that the Coalition for Social Justice was planning anything. Franklin Sanborn was a nobody. There was no evidence to suggest he even existed, much less that he would come after Daryn.
He’ll kill me, you know.
So she held it all in. Hendler knew her brother was gone, but he knew nothing else. He didn’t know how deep Sean’s involvement with “Katherine Hall” ran. He knew only that “Kat” had been a potential Department Thirty case, but had been rejected. That was as far as Faith could go. Even for a fellow Department of Justice agent-and her lover, she mused-she could go no further. Yorkton had cautioned her more than once about her involvement with Hendler, and she’d assured him she could manage it, could keep all the balls in the air.
And now it was crashing down around her, and there was no one in the world she could talk to about it.
Since the body was found on the grounds of a federal reservation, the investigation of the murder fell to the FBI. Rob Cain had worked the missing persons case of Katherine Hall, though, so he and Hendler were working closely together. They’d jointly assured the media that local and federal turf battles would not get in the way of solving this bizarre case.
If they only knew, Faith thought. If they only knew that I am withholding information from a murder investigation. That would strain, and might even end, her relationship with Hendler.
As the sun rose on the second day after Katherine Hall’s body was found, Faith finished her run. The run gave her no pleasure-her body was exhausted, and she hadn’t eaten much the last two days. When she rounded the bend and entered her block, she saw Hendler’s Toyota and an Oklahoma City police cruiser sitting in front of her house.
Hendler was waiting on her porch. Rob Cain got out of the passenger side of the patrol car, said a few words to the uniformed officer behind the wheel, and the car drove away. Then he turned to watch Faith as she jogged up to the door.
“How far do you run?” Cain asked her.
Faith shrugged. “It varies. Some days three miles, some days five or six.”
“Ever do any real long-distance running?”
“I’ve done marathons.” She saw no need to give the man details.
“So have I,” Cain said. “Back before the kids came along.”
Faith nodded. She unlocked the door and held it open. Hendler didn’t look at her as he went in.
“Coffee?” Faith said. “Scott? Detective Cain?”
Hendler shook his head, still not looking at her.
“Cream and sugar, please,” Cain said. “And call me Rob. We’re all professionals here, right? I think we can dispense with the titles.”
They all looked at each other. Cain glanced around the room, taking in the clutter. “What happened here?” he said, waving a hand toward her bookshelf.
Faith looked over her shoulder, saw where he was pointing. She still hadn’t picked up the dropped book or the shattered whiskey bottle.
“Sorry about the mess,” she said.
He looked back at her, knowing she’d evaded his question. In a minute she brought coffee into the dining room.
“What’s going on?” she asked, looking first at Hendler.
Hendler looked up at her with those soft eyes of his. They weren’t striking eyes, always looking vaguely tired. Hence the “Sleepy Scott” nickname. But they were open and they were faithful, and right now, they were troubled.
“Faith,” Hendler said, “Katherine Hall has just been identified as Daryn Anisa McDermott. She’s the only child of U.S. Senator Edward McDermott of Arizona.”
“Which explains, at least partially,” Cain said, “why her paper trail was so short.”
They all looked at each other for a long moment.
“Did you know about this?” Hendler finally asked.
Faith sipped her coffee, not really tasting it, weighing her options.
He’ll kill me, you know.
She pulled at her lower lip with her teeth. “Yes,” she said finally.
Cain leaned forward across the table. “What exactly do you for DOJ, Faith?”
“Special projects,” she said by rote.
“Uh-huh. And what exactly does that entail, and how is it connected to McDermott?”
Faith said nothing.
Cain shifted in his seat. “I’ve known Scott for three or four years now, and I trust him. He’s never tried to pull any jurisdictional nonsense on me, and has always bent over backwards to be helpful on the cases where we have a mutual interest.”
Hendler looked uncomfortable.
“But,” Cain said, “I’m beginning to get a feeling that some of the children in the federal sandbox don’t all like to play nice with others.”
“I suppose that’s true of any organization,” Faith said mildly.
“Did you spend some time with Daryn McDermott?” Cain asked.
“What difference does it make?”
“Did you kill Daryn McDermott?”
Hendler nearly came out of his chair. “What the hell was that all about? Holy shit, Rob, have you lost your mind?”
“We’re still waiting on the autopsy and ballistics,” Cain said. “The final reports should be in soon, maybe by this afternoon. But you know, that poor woman was killed twice. She was shot in the heart, and then someone tied that rope around her neck and lifted her into the tree, where they then tied the other end of the rope around a tree branch. That would need to be someone fairly tall, fairly strong, in good physical condition.”
“Rob, you’re out of line,” Hendler said.
“Am I?” He locked eyes with Faith. “Did you kill Daryn McDermott?”
“No,” Faith said without breaking eye contact.
“She was with me,” Hendler said. “From a little after nine o’clock that night, until you called me in the morning. She was never away from my side.”
Cain swiveled to look at Hendler. “So you’re closer than friends.”
No one spoke for a moment. Then Hendler said, “Yes, we are.”
Cain looked at Faith again.
“It’s not a secret,” Faith said. “We don’t broadcast it, but we don’t keep it a secret either. We don’t have any kind of formal professional relationship, so there are no protocol violations.”
“That’s good to know,” Cain said. “Okay, so you didn’t kill her. Let’s just assume that’s the truth. But I’m also assuming you know more about her than you’re telling.”
Faith hesitated, then nodded.
“Do you know who did kill her?”
Faith hesitated longer. “I’m not sure.”
“Tell me about Franklin Sanborn.”
“Haven’t we covered this?” Hendler said. “Sanborn’s a ghost.”
“So was Katherine Hall,” Cain said. “Kind of strange to be talking about a dead ghost, isn’t it? When I talked to her a few hours before her death, she said she was running from Sanborn, had had an abusive relationship with him, but that now he understood, now he wasn’t going to bother her anymore.”
Faith rubbed her cheek, touched her scar. “Franklin Sanborn’s not an abusive boyfriend. I can tell you that.”
Cain nodded. “When I first met you, that day at Barry’s, I thought you recognized the name. Our nice little lunch ended pretty quickly after his name came up. So if Sanborn’s not the abusive boyfriend, two questions come up.” He raised his index finger. “One: why did she say he was?” His middle finger went up beside the other one. “Two: who is he?”
Faith swallowed. Facts and feelings and shifting loyalties collided. Faith had declined to protect Daryn. Now Daryn was dead. Within a few hours after Faith cut her loose, the young woman was dead, shot and hanged from a tree.
Faith hadn’t thought anything about Department Thirty could make her feel guilt. Generally, everyone she dealt with was guilty of something. But now, the guilt had turned around. The girl had pleaded for protection and Faith hadn’t protected her. It was that simple. There must have been some kind of evidence, something Faith hadn’t seen. Maybe if Sean hadn’t been so twisted up in the middle of it, she would have seen what she needed to see to protect Daryn. And maybe Daryn would still be alive today.
Or maybe not, the cold, pragmatic professional voice told her.
It’s about the people, Art Dorian had told her when she first learned of Department Thirty’s existence. If we lose sight of the people, the rest of it doesn’t matter a whit.
Strange words to come from a Department Thirty case officer. Department Thirty’s first case officer, in fact. The words didn’t seem to jibe with the whole idea of the department. It was about information, wasn’t it? Not people. It had certainly seemed that way to Faith since she joined Thirty.
But she thought back, to some of the people she’d met in the last three years. There were the “ordinary” cases, people like Leon Bankston who were criminals, had been caught, and a straight exchange of information was made with them. But there were also people like Ryan Elder, and Eric Anthony and his beautiful deaf son, Patrick. And Alex Bridge, whom she now considered a close friend. All people that had butted up against the Department Thirty apparatus for one reason or another. And with them, the information had served the people, not the other way around.
But no amount of information had been there to save Daryn McDermott.
Or her brother. God only knew what had happened to Sean, what had been done to him.
Or what he’d done, she thought for the first time.
“Faith?” Hendler said.
And here was Scott Hendler, a good man, arguably a great one, who somehow saw things in Faith that she didn’t see in herself.
Faith shook her head. What would happen if she told enough of the truth to put aside some of the lies? Could she walk the tightrope? What would Yorkton say?
To hell with Yorkton.
A woman was dead, a woman Faith could have protected.
“I think,” she said to Cain, “that she told you Sanborn was an abusive boyfriend just to get you to back off.”
Cain looked surprised.
“We all empathize with a woman who’s been in an abusive relationship,” Faith said. “She’d been gone without a trace for two weeks, now she’s back with no explanation. If she’s hiding something, she wants to get rid of you as quickly as she can.”
“So she tells him a story that she thinks will get him to back off the questions,” Hendler said.
“She was lying from the get-go,” Cain said. “But she wasn’t trying very hard at it. I could see that right away. That’s why I decided to cut it short. That’s why I called you and wanted to meet with you in the morning.” He turned his coffee cup around a couple of times. “I just didn’t think the circumstances would be what they were.”
“Faith,” Hendler said, “who is Sanborn?”
Faith took a deep breath and swam out into treacherous waters. “I don’t know, but I can tell you who Daryn told me he was.”
Cain took out a small spiral notebook and a pen.
“We know Sanborn’s not real,” Faith said. “At least not by that name. Just like we know Katherine Hall wasn’t real by that name.”
“At least we know that now,” Hendler said.
Faith glanced at him. They would have a long, private talk sometime soon.
“Point taken,” Faith said. “Daryn told me that Franklin Sanborn was one of the leaders of a radical political group called the Coalition for Social Justice.”
She went on to give a carefully sanitized account of what Daryn had told her-the Coalition’s goals, its involvement with the terrorist attack downtown, the “target” list that turned out to be a fantasy. She omitted Sean’s role altogether, and never mentioned the fact that Daryn had requested any kind of protection.
When she finished, Hendler gave her a long look. By now he expected her to dance around the issue of Department Thirty with “outsiders,” namely anyone outside the DOJ structure. But Faith suspected he was dismayed that she’d left out her brother completely.
“And what’s your role in all this?” Cain asked her directly, barely waiting a breath after she’d finished. “Why would this girl, this senator’s daughter who has strange ideas of social justice and likes to stick it to her father, be telling you all this? Don’t insult my intelligence by telling me ‘special projects,’ either.”
“I can’t answer that,” Faith said.
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t. And won’t. I’m not trying to hold up your investigation, Rob. I hope you believe me on that. I want to know who killed Daryn McDermott just as much as you do, and probably more so.”
“You know,” Hendler said, “that probably within a few hours there’s going to be a shit storm over this. The fact that she’s the daughter of a U.S. senator.”
“I know,” Faith said.
Cain looked at both of them, then stood up. “For the record, Faith, I’ve never seriously considered you a suspect. But I had to bring it up. I wanted to see how you’d react. You’re a pro. I’m sure you understand.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Also for the record, I’m royally pissed off that you know more than you’re telling me. Pardon my language.”
Faith shrugged.
“Under normal circumstances,” Cain said, “I could hold you as a material witness, charge you with obstruction, all that good stuff. But if I did that, I’m guessing that my bosses would get calls from somewhere east of here. And that’s never good.”
Faith said nothing.
“Of course, we’re all going to be getting some of those calls pretty soon, from Senator McDermott.” Cain leaned against the table. “Daryn McDermott’s address is listed as a condo in the Georgetown area of D.C. Her father, being a senator from Arizona, has a place outside of Phoenix. I wonder what this girl who had no ties at all to Oklahoma was doing here, why she wound up dead in downtown Oklahoma City. She was a long way from either Phoenix or Washington. Food for thought, isn’t it?”
Hendler stood up. “I’ll drive you back downtown, Rob. Would you head on out to the car and wait for me?”
Cain nodded to both of them and left the house. Faith walked Hendler to the door.
“Answer me this,” Hendler said. “When you called me over to Bricktown on the morning the shit hit the fan downtown, did you know then who she was? Please tell me the truth. When I drove your brother, and you drove that girl, to the Edmond house, did you know then? I need to know.”
Faith put a hand on his shoulder, then slid it over to the back of his neck. She touched him lightly there. “I found out just after that,” she said. “After we got to the house.”
“That’s the truth?”
“That’s the truth, Scott.”
Relief swept across Hendler’s face. “I believe you. We’ve been down this road enough times that I know you wouldn’t tell me an outright lie, that you’d just say you couldn’t answer.”
Faith nodded. “I do the best I can. I worry that it’s not enough sometimes, but I guess once you do the best you can, you can’t do anything else.”
“That’s a fact. Anything from Sean?”
“No, and I don’t know what to think.”
“Faith…”
Faith recognized the tone and saw what was coming next. “I don’t think he’s capable of murder, Scott. I think he’s an alcoholic, and I think because of that he’s easily led sometimes. Daryn McDermott certainly manipulated him. But I don’t think he’s capable of doing what was done to her.”
“But you’ve said you really don’t know him anymore,” Hendler said gently.
“That’s true, but…we both saw the body. If Sean had killed her, it would have had to be a crime of passion. That was no crime of passion. That was someone making a point, someone delivering a message. The gunshot, the hanging, the location of the body.”
Hendler smiled a little. “See, I knew there was still a cop lurking under all that Department Thirty secret-agent stuff.” The smile faded. “It would make things a lot easier if we could talk to Sean, though.”
It took Faith a minute to catch his meaning. “I don’t know where he is, Scott. He even took my car, for God’s sake. I’m not hiding him.”
“Okay, then. I hope you’re right about him. It’s just…this is a murder investigation. Even if you didn’t mention it to Rob, I have to consider it. I have to think about it. You understand that, don’t you?”
She stroked his cheek. “You’re such a good man, Sleepy Scott. Yes, I understand that.”
“Maybe you should lie low for a few more days. I’m sure your boss has already told you that. Departmental security and all that.”
“And all that,” Faith echoed.
“Dinner tonight?”
“Dinner sounds great,” Faith said. “Maybe we can grab onto a little something normal in the midst of all this.”
“Maybe so,” Hendler said. But he sounded doubtful.
Hendler dropped Cain off at the Investigations Division downtown, and each promised they’d be in touch later in the day.
For once, Cain didn’t mind that the Bureau was the lead jurisdictional agency on the case. Scott Hendler was faced with the unpleasant task of contacting Senator Edward McDermott.
At his own desk, Cain listened to his voice mail messages. Most were from the media, all of which he deleted. They could contact Public Information if they wanted a statement. One was from his wife, wondering if he would be able to take their older daughter to her choir rehearsal that evening.
Absolutely, he thought. It might get me away from this madness for a while, get me back to what’s real and where people are just who they’re supposed to be.
The last message was from the medical examiner’s office. There would be a short delay in processing the report on the autopsy of Katherine Hall. Cain made a mental note to let the ME’s office know the deceased’s real identity. He wondered what the holdup was in getting the report.
He hung up the phone and logged onto his computer. He didn’t have access to quite as many databases as the U.S. Department of Justice did, but he could still go a lot of places and peek into a lot of dark corners.
He thought for a long moment, then began clicking his mouse and working his keyboard, seeing what he could find out about one Faith Kelly.
FAITH AND HENDLER HAD CHILI AND BEER AT DIFFERENT Roads, where they listened to Faith’s friend Alex Bridge and her band, The Cove of Cork, play Celtic and American folk music until nearly midnight. They didn’t talk about the case. They were two normal people who cared about each other, out for a low-key evening on the town, two normal people de-stressing after a normal week.
For a while Faith even believed it.
She’d muted her phone while listening to the music, but she checked it every fifteen minutes or so, hoping against hope for a message from Sean. She tried to be furtive, but caught Hendler looking at her a couple of times when she was checking the phone.
“Relax,” he mouthed to her.
They’d gone back to her house to spend the night. They made love gently, tenderly. There was nothing frenzied or hurried about it. It wasn’t even about passion, Faith thought. It was connection, two people who needed to be with each other, and to express what they meant to each other. It felt good, and for a while Faith really could believe they were just two normal lovers.
She woke early, ran, showered, and dressed. Hendler was in the shower when she left. She pulled the curtain aside, leaned in, and kissed him.
“You’ll get your hair all wet again,” he said, wiping shampoo out of his eyes.
“So what?” she said.
“See you later,” Hendler said.
She was in her office by seven thirty, and at five minutes after eight her phone rang. It was Yorkton, and he was uncharacteristically blunt and straightforward.
“Do you have a televison?” he said without identifying himself.
“Not here in the office.”
“Find one, quickly.”
“What channel?”
“Pick one,” Yorkton said, and hung up.
Yorkton had sounded genuinely alarmed, and Yorkton never sounded alarmed. Faith jogged down the hall to the Marshals Service office. Several of the deputies were gathered around a TV set in one corner of the “bullpen” area. They looked up when she came into the room. Someone said, “Oh, no.” Several stared openly.
The group parted as Faith came closer. Chief Deputy Mark Raines, looking as always more like a banker than a U.S. marshal in his charcoal gray suit and his gold-rimmed glasses, stepped aside.
“Faith, you need to see this,” he said.
Faith stepped in front of the screen. The set was tuned to CNN. The graphic at the bottom of the screen read: The Capitol, Washington. News conference of Senator Edward McDermott (AZ).
“Oh, no,” Faith said.
“Didn’t I already say that?” someone said behind her. She thought it sounded like Leneski.
Senator Edward McDermott was a large, florid-looking man in his late fifties. His hair was completely silver, his eyes a dark brown-Daryn’s eyes, Faith thought. He wore a perfectly tailored suit that fashionably hid much of his bulk. He wore glasses, but kept taking them off and putting them on again, using them as pointers, waving them around. Faith wondered if he really needed them to see, or if they were just props.
He was holding a few sheets of paper in one hand, and he was speaking directly to the camera. By his side stood a perfectly groomed blond woman in her thirties. The current wife, Faith guessed.
“I’m not speaking just as a senator from Arizona,” he said. His voice was deep and resonant, no doubt honed by many courtrooms and campaign speeches. “I’m speaking as a father, as a family man whose job just happens to be in elective office.”
“Oh, give me a break,” Leneski said, behind Faith.
“You know by now that my daughter-my beloved Daryn, only twenty-four, with her entire life ahead of her-was murdered three days ago. It was brutal beyond words, a senseless act of depraved individuals with no respect for human life. But it goes deeper than that, much deeper.”
“What was she doing in Oklahoma?” shouted a reporter on the screen. McDermott shook his head. “I don’t have any answers. But I have many, many questions. Suzanne and I-” he nodded toward the blond woman, “-will be flying to Oklahoma City in a few hours to claim Daryn’s body, to take her back home to Arizona for burial in our family plot. That’s what she wanted.”
Liar, Faith thought. Daryn never felt at home in Arizona, and only went there when you went back to campaign.
“But my friends,” he went on, “something startling came to my attention the night Daryn was killed.” His posture seemed to soften. “You know that she and I disagreed about many things politically. She had some ideas that were, frankly, outside the mainstream. She’s done some things of which I do not approve, could never approve. I don’t know how much of that was youthful rebellion, but as wrong as many of her ideas were, she was passionate about them and believed in principle.” He held up the papers. “She’d been traveling. We hadn’t talked or seen each other in…well, in quite a while. But the night she died-only hours before her life was so violently ended-she wrote to me. She sent me this e-mail.”
Faith felt stones descend into the pit of her stomach.
“I won’t read all of it to you, because some of it is intensely personal. But there are parts of it that should concern all of us. Every American who believes in openness of government and the rule of law should hear what my daughter wrote a few hours before she was killed.”
Sounds like a campaign speech, Faith thought.
McDermott took off his glasses. His wife laid her hand on his forearm. “She wrote:
I’m scared, Daddy. Really, really scared. You know I’ve always had an agenda to promote, and I met some other people that felt the same way I do. We formed a group, and we were planning to travel around the country, doing demonstrations and helping people understand our agenda. I was out here in Oklahoma when I met them, so that’s been our headquarters. But Dad, after I was around these people for a few weeks, I realized they didn’t want the same things I did. These people are violent! They want to destroy banks to show how money corrupts our political and social system. I agree with the idea, but they’re talking about terrorism, Dad!
McDermott stopped. His voice had cracked the last time he read the word Dad.
He waited a moment. Faith stared at the screen. She thought the veneer of the politician had just melted a little, and she was finally seeing the Edward McDermott who’d lost his daughter. He may have been a terrible father, but in the final analysis, he was still a father and his daughter had been taken from him in a horrible manner.
McDermott cleared his throat. His wife’s hand moved from his forearm to his shoulder. He looked at her as if drawing strength. “She goes on:
I couldn’t go through with being a part of terrorism. That’s not what my ideas are all about. On the way to the first target, a bank in Oklahoma City, I called the FBI. The other leader of the group threatened me. He said he’d have me killed, Dad. He said he’d come after me and kill me.
McDermott lost all semblance of control, bowing his head and turning at an angle away from most of the cameras. Faith saw tears rolling down the man’s cheeks.
“Jesus,” said someone in the room with Faith. A man’s voice, but she couldn’t tell whose. She felt eyes on her.
Suzanne McDermott gently took the papers from her husband’s hands and stepped to the microphone. She looked poised and confident. “Let me,” she said to her husband, then looked at the cameras. “I’ll read you the rest of what the senator wanted to share with you from my stepdaughter’s e-mail. She says:
I knew I shouldn’t have been with that group, but I really believed we agreed on things. I knew I was guilty of conspiracy to commit terrorism. But I thought I could still stop them if I told someone. I knew the government would want this information. Maybe even you don’t know about this, Dad, but there’s a part of the government that will give protection and new identities to people who’ve committed crimes, even terrorism-related crimes, if you have information for them.
“Oh my God,” Mark Raines said. Faith had never seen his composure slip before.
I went to them. I asked them to protect me. This government agency is called Department Thirty.
Faith’s cell phone began to ring.
Suzanne McDermott kept reading.
A woman named Faith Kelly was assigned to be my case officer. She asked me all kinds of questions and said she’d investigate my information. Then she came back and said she couldn’t find any evidence. No evidence! I was all the evidence they should have needed!
Faith felt a chill crawl down her spine. Her phone stopped ringing, then started again.
This Kelly woman told me they couldn’t protect me, since my information didn’t check out. She just sent me on my way, and here I am, Dad. I’m very, very frightened. These people I was with-I think they’ll kill me. I just wanted you to know, in case something happens. I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry I disappointed you so much. I never meant to hurt anyone, and I tried to do the right thing.
Now Suzanne was crying as well. She stepped away from the microphone. Her husband had composed himself and stepped back in front of the cameras.
“My daughter, my only child, wrote this to me a few hours before she was murdered. By the time I checked my e-mail in the morning, she was hanging dead in a tree in Oklahoma City.” The glasses went on, then came off again. He pointed them straight toward the cameras. “Department Thirty. Remember that name. You’re going to be hearing it more and more, because I’m going to find out what happened. If they could have protected my daughter from these terrorists, and they didn’t, because this case officer, this Faith Kelly, could find no evidence, and then my daughter was killed…” He put the glasses back on and used his index finger to jab the podium. He spoke slowly, precisely. “There will be hell to pay. Hell to pay.”
Reporters started shouting questions.
“Faith?” said Deputy Derek Mayfield, the first person who’d befriended her when she was assigned to the Oklahoma City Marshals Service office.
Faith’s phone was ringing again. She barely registered that Mayfield and others were talking to her.
Faith watched the screen, even as the cameras pulled back to show a long shot of the Capitol steps, then cut back to the news anchors in Atlanta.
But I couldn’t, she thought. I couldn’t protect her. There was nothing to support her story. Nothing!
Only Sean. Only her brother supported Daryn McDermott’s story, and he was gone.
I should have protected her anyway.
She remembered Daryn hanging in the tree.
Faith shook her head and backed away from the TV set. They were all watching her.
“Faith, what can we do to help you?” Raines asked.
Faith shook her head.
“I have to go,” she said.
She turned and ran from the office.
She finally anwered her phone when she was alone in her office.
“Go to ground,” Yorkton said. “I’m already transferring our funds into emergency accounts. Do you have your own emergency identity in place?”
Every Department Thirty employee was required to have two sets of identity papers, ready for emergencies, that would allow them to travel and move freely without being associated with the department. Faith’s primary emergency identity was Kimberly Diamond, with an address in Independence, Missouri.
She nodded numbly. “Yes.” She checked the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet. Her small travel bag was there and packed, as it always was.
“Don’t go home,” Yorkton said. “Leave your office and don’t go back. All your case files are on disks, yes?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then. Take them with you and go to a hotel. Stay in cell phone contact.” Yorkton sighed. “I never thought this day would come. Our existence is now public knowledge, but I may be able to fix it.”
“Fix it? How in the hell could you fix it?”
“I’m not sure yet. I don’t know Ted McDermott. He’s a social issues crusader, hasn’t ever served on the Judiciary Committee, so I’ve never had dealings with him. I’ll think of something.”
“I don’t see how-”
“You don’t have to see how. That’s my job.” Yorkton’s voice sounded far away. “The attorney general’s already called me. The president’s already called him. I know the president likes you, Officer Kelly, but I don’t know if that’s enough. He understands political reality, and the political reality has just changed, quite dramatically.”
“What about my cases?”
“Let them know they’re all right, they’re still secure, and that they will stay that way. They shouldn’t be compromised by this. Call them, then go to ground. I’ll talk to the other case officers. Where’s Simon?”
“He’s with Bankston, the new case, in Kansas.”
“Call him too. He’ll need to go to his emergency identity as well.” There was a long pause. “Go to ground,” Yorkton said for the third time, then hung up.
“My God,” Faith said, still holding the phone. Just a little while ago, she’d kissed Hendler good-bye in her shower. They’d acted like normal people. They’d been sure of their own reality, even if everything about them was shifting. Now not even that was safe.
Faith unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk and took out the envelope that held Kimberly Diamond’s life: driver’s license, Social Security card, birth certificate, even credit cards. Bank account information, ATM cards. Five thousand dollars in cash. A fresh, untraceable cell phone. A gun.
She thought of Sean, wondered where he was. Wondered if her brother was capable of murder.
No. I refuse to go there.
She grabbed all her things, the travel bag, the Diamond envelope. After a moment’s contemplation, she pulled the stuffed fish off the wall and shoved it into her bag. She might never see this office again.
And now, she thought, Sean and I are both fugitives.
She ran out of the office and locked the door behind her.
“HOLY SHIT,” HENDLER MUTTERED.
He and at least twenty others had grouped around the TV in the break room of the FBI’s new complex on Memorial Road in far north Oklahoma City. After McDermott said Faith’s name, all eyes shifted to Hendler.
When the broadcast was over, most of the others left the room, heading back to their own areas. Hendler stayed behind, sitting at the oval table, staring at the TV, even after he’d turned it off.
Department Thirty had been outed.
Hendler couldn’t believe it. It had gone about its mission wrapped in secrecy for so long that it was generally accepted in DOJ that this would always be the case. You just ignored anything about Thirty, did your job, and hoped you didn’t cross paths with one of their cases.
McDermott had actually said Faith’s name on national television.
After all she’s been through already, Hendler thought.
He tried calling her and got voice mail at all three numbers-office, home, and cell. He had to figure that Yorkton was in damage control mode, and had probably sent Faith somewhere. Faith had told him one night a few months ago that she had actually created a new identity for herself, one that she would have to use in case of a departmental security emergency.
He wanted to talk to her, just hear her voice, know that she was okay. Of course he knew Faith handled everything that came her way, but there were times when she wasn’t as tough as she wanted everyone to think. He’d seen glimpses-just a few tiny snapshots of her vulnerability-over the last two years. There weren’t many, but Hendler was mindful of the fact that he was the only person in the world who got to see them. He carried the knowledge with him, saving it like a child with a weekly allowance.
He felt a presence in the break room, and looked up to see Leo Dorsett, the special agent in charge of the Oklahoma City FBI field office. Dorsett was a good boss, and Hendler liked working for him. He was a superior administrator and generally stayed out of the way and let his agents do their jobs. Hendler had been eternally grateful that Dorsett handled the call to Senator Edward McDermott himself yesterday. Dorsett had felt that in the case of a United States senator, a call from the SAC instead of a field agent might be in order.
“How you doing, Scott?” Dorsett said.
“Okay.”
“No, you’re not, but be that as it may, I have to say this. You need to stay away from your girlfriend until all this is resolved. After the case is closed, deal with your personal life however you like, but until then, you need to back off.”
“Look, Leo-”
Dorsett held up a hand. “You know I don’t like internal conflict, and you know I hate dealing with people’s personal issues. But this is a professional matter now.”
Hendler nodded. “You’re right, it is. It’s just not something I thought would ever come up.”
Dorsett shrugged. “Neither did I, or anyone else. Do I need to move you off the case? Perkins can run it.”
“No. I was there, Leo. I saw Daryn McDermott hanging in that tree. I’m on it.”
“Okay, good. Keep in contact with that city cop Cain. There’s going to be political pressure to make sure we’re all talking to each other. We’re about to be under a big magnifying glass.”
“I understand.”
Dorsett left the room. Hendler waited a few more minutes, then went back to his desk. He spent a couple of hours on paperwork, then called Rob Cain.
“Rob, it’s Scott Hendler.”
“My favorite fed,” Cain said.
Hendler heard outdoor sounds in the background. “Where are you?”
“I was just getting ready to call you. There’s something you need to see, since we’re working together.”
“Where?”
“Southeast High School on Shields Boulevard. Meet me in half an hour, in the parking lot as it faces Shields. I’ll be next to a dark green Jeep Cherokee.”
Hendler had a mental image of the morning he’d met Sean Kelly. He and Faith had been out for a run together, and they’d rounded the corner onto her block and seen a dark green Jeep Cherokee sitting in front of her house. At first, until she saw the driver, Faith had been nervous to the point of reaching for her weapon. Then she’d recognized her brother.
“I’m on my way,” Hendler said.
Southeast High School had once been one of Oklahoma City’s thriving schools. Then as populations shifted, enrollment dropped off rapidly, to the point that it was actually closed, only to reopen within a few years as a technology-oriented specialty school.
It sat on Shields Boulevard, a few blocks south of the notorious strip of motels. Its sign was blue and white, an S and an E under the stylized logo of a Spartan, the school’s mascot. School was out for the summer, but a few cars were scattered in the parking lot. Hendler pulled into the main gate and immediately saw the Jeep, under a tree at the far south end. He nosed the Toyota over and saw Cain, along with two patrol officers.
Hendler got out of the car and shook hands with Cain. “What’s up?”
“Tough day,” Cain said, not answering him.
Hendler nodded. “What’s this?”
They walked around the back of the Jeep. “School’s out, but there’s some maintenance going on, so there have been contractors in and out. One of the guys spotted the Jeep sitting over here, but thought it must belong to someone else on the crew and they just wanted to park it over here out of the sun. Couple of days go by, the Jeep hasn’t moved. The guy comes over, thinks it might be abandoned or might be a gang car or something.”
They’d arrived at the passenger side door, which was standing open. Hendler smelled it before he saw it. Then he saw the dark stain that covered the beige upholstery.
“He said since it had that really strong metallic smell, that he figured the blood was fairly fresh. He called 911.”
Hendler looked up and down. “So she was killed in the car and then taken to the tree.”
“That’s an assumption. I’m still waiting on the autopsy report. There’s been a little holdup. I’ve been trying to light a fire under the ME’s office, but all I get is that they want to be certain of something.”
Hendler had squatted down at the edge of the open car door, and he turned to look up at Cain. “So they have some doubts?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see, I guess.”
“Anything else here?”
“Oh, we’re just getting started. After the lab people got through, we searched the vehicle.” They walked to the front of the Jeep. Several plastic bags, all bearing evidence tags, were lined up on the pavement. “Number one: a forty-caliber semiautomatic Glock 23. It was in the glove box.”
Hendler looked at the gun, felt it through the plastic. “Nice weapon.”
Cain nodded. “And a favorite of some law enforcement agencies and officers.” He pointed to the next bag. “Number two: registration and insurance verification card, showing that the vehicle belongs to Sean Michael Kelly of Tucson, Arizona.”
Hendler kept his poker face.
“Number three,” Cain said. “Arizona license plates, found under the rear seat. As you can see, it has Oklahoma plates on it now. I ran them as soon as we got here, before we found the others. The Oklahoma plates were stolen a couple of weeks ago, from a Mr. Martin Guerrero, who doesn’t live far from here. The Arizona plates show registration to Sean Michael Kelly of Tucson, Arizona.”
“You’ll send the gun for ballistics tests,” Hendler said, struggling to keep it together. First Senator McDermott, now this. Not Faith’s brother, he thought. Please, let this be a mistake.
“Yep,” Cain said. “I’ve taken the liberty of doing some checking, first on your friend Faith, and then on Sean, who is her brother, as it turns out. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“I knew her brother was named Sean,” Hendler said carefully.
“Uh-huh. They grew up in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Father, Joseph Kelly, captain of detectives, Evanston PD. Mother, Maire Kelly, homemaker. Sean is eighteen months older. He graduated from Illinois with a degree in criminal justice, applied for Federal Law Enforcement Academy in Georgia, got accepted, graduated middle of his class. Joined Customs, assigned to Tucson seven years ago. Several citations for outstanding investigative work. But he’s currently on administrative leave pending dismissal, due to excessive consumption of alcohol, leading to reckless endangerment of the lives of officers and civilians. I’ve ordered his federal personnel records, including fingerprints and DNA sample.”
Hendler nodded. He knew it had to be done, but that didn’t make it any easier.
“Faith Kelly graduated from Illinois with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in criminal justice, top of her class. Second in her own class at the Academy, joined the Marshals Service. But let’s back up a second. Even though she’s obviously very bright, she graduated high school a year later than she should have. School records for ages thirteen to fourteen are missing. It’s as if she was just gone for that year. You know anything about that?”
Hendler shook his head in genuine surprise. He’d never heard Faith mention such a thing, not even once.
“Hmm,” Cain said. “Well, anyway, she made up for lost time. The Marshals assigned her to Oklahoma City and she was on a fast track here. Then two years ago, she disappears from the Marshals Service’s payroll but is still listed as being employed by the Justice Department.” He looked at Hendler. “I guess we know now what all that means, don’t we? That must be when she joined DOJ’s little Department Twenty.”
“Thirty. What’s your point?”
“My point, Scott, is that none of this looks very good for your ‘special projects’ girlfriend and her brother. I’m fairly willing to bet that’s Daryn McDermott’s blood in there. And what do you say are the odds that gun fired the shot that killed her? We’ve got Faith Kelly working for some secret little department that kind of twists around the whole concept of witness protection to where it looks more like terrorist protection-”
“Now wait just a damn minute, Rob-”
“And we’ve got her alcoholic brother with the victim’s blood in his truck.”
“You don’t know that’s Daryn McDermott’s blood.”
“Not yet I don’t. But I will pretty soon. What kind of little game are we playing here, Scott? I know you’re honest and a good cop, for a fed, but all bets are off about your girlfriend and her brother.”
Hendler waited a moment. “How do you want me to respond to all that? Do I know who killed Daryn? No, I don’t, but I want to find out. Did Faith kill her? No, she didn’t. Did her brother?” He raised both arms, then dropped them to his sides. “I don’t know. God, I hope not.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“No.”
“Does she?”
“No.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes, I am. She told me that he took her car and disappeared, and she hasn’t heard from him since the night Daryn was murdered.”
“What did he do, take her car to use as a getaway after using this one to kill Daryn?”
“Now you’re speculating,” Hendler said. “There’s no evidence of that.”
“You’re right,” Cain admitted. “But speculation often leads to the trail that takes you to evidence, doesn’t it?”
“Look, Rob, I see where all this is pointing. I’m not blind to that, whether you want to believe it or not. And I told Faith so yesterday. Her brother has a problem with booze, and he spent time with Daryn.” He sighed. “That’s what I know right now.”
He remembered driving Sean to the safe house in Edmond. He’d tried to talk to him, but Sean was obviously distraught, hands shaking. He’d muttered a few words about Daryn, but had otherwise said little.
Was Sean obsessed with Daryn? Hendler wondered. Faith hadn’t told him anything about the connection between Daryn and her brother. He knew-and now the world knew-that Daryn had gone to Faith for protection, and Faith had found no evidence to warrant her staying under Thirty’s protection. But he still didn’t know how Sean Kelly fit into all of it.
“Tell me something,” Cain said. His tone had softened, as had his posture. “Scott, I can tell how you feel about her. You don’t have to say anything. I’m big on body language, and it was clear to me that first time I met her, back at Barry’s. I also know you a little bit, and I’ve seen what a stand-up guy you are. I know this isn’t easy for you, thinking that maybe the brother of the woman you love could be a killer.”
Hendler looked at him and nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
“You know I have three kids, right? My son is ten, my older daughter eight, and my baby girl is three.”
“I didn’t know the exact ages, but I knew you had three.”
“They’re the best part of my life, Scott. I would do anything for them.”
“If you’re saying that Faith or I-”
Cain held up a hand. “No, just listen. What you don’t know is that my older daughter isn’t really my daughter. She’s my niece.”
Hendler cocked his head.
“My wife’s brother was a batterer. He used to beat his wife almost every day, and after Leah was born, he beat her too. She was a baby, less than two years old, and he was hitting her with his fists, day after day. One day he shoved his wife down a flight of stairs. She hit her head.”
“Did it kill her?”
“No, but I wish it had.”
“What?”
“She’s been in a coma for eight years. She’s in a nursing home in Stillwater. Beth’s brother went to prison for attempted murder. We sued for custody of Leah, and the judge granted it. A year later, we went a step further and legally adopted her. She’s my daughter now. But it doesn’t change the fact that her biological father-my own wife’s brother-did what he did. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t wonder how my wife, the best and gentlest and most compassionate person who ever walked on this earth, could be the sister of that monster.”
Hendler nodded. “You didn’t have to tell me that.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Cain walked away and Hendler heard him talking in low tones with the uniformed officers on the other side of the Jeep.
Hendler waited a moment, looking at the evidence bags: the gun, the registration and insurance papers, the Arizona license plates.
Did you do it, Sean?
And if you did, why?
For God’s sake, why?
He thought of Faith. He called her again, got her voice mail again. “Hey, it’s me. Call me when you can,” he said. “I’m thinking about you. I need to hear that you’re okay. Call me, or come by if you’re able to. I’m going to work at home for the rest of the day, trying to organize my thoughts on some new evidence that just came in.” He waited a moment. “I need to talk to you about this.”
He shook hands with Cain again before making his way back to his own car. “Good work on all this. I mean, good police work. Everyone should appreciate the local-federal cooperation.”
Cain saw that he was straining to lighten the mood. The detective held his hand in his grip a moment longer than necessary. “You want to talk, off the record, let me know. I mean that.”
Hendler looked at him for a long moment. “I know you do.” He started walking toward the Toyota, but stopped and turned back to Cain. “Thanks for the perspective, Rob.”
Cain nodded. Hendler pulled out of the parking lot. Cain watched him the whole way.
As Hendler turned onto Shields, another car pulled from a side street and dropped into traffic one car length behind him.
FAITH’S LAST ACT AS HERSELF-AT LEAST FOR A while-was to return the Focus to the rental agency at Will Rogers World Airport. Then she walked around the corner to a different rental counter and, as Kimberly Diamond, signed out a Chevy Suburban.
Since I’m a new person, I’ll rent something that Faith Kelly would never get, she thought as she got into the huge Suburban and drove out of the airport.
And now what?
Yorkton had told her-three times, no less-to go to ground. In order words, stay out of sight. It had been a few hours since Senator McDermott had pronounced his public indictment of Faith and Department Thirty. By now, she suspected the media would have found her house. Her home phone was unlisted, but they had their ways-property tax records, that sort of thing. They would be camped out on her quiet street in The Village. They would be talking to her neighbors. Unlike “Katherine Hall,” Faith didn’t hang around with her neighbors. They were mostly families with kids, or retired people. She was the only single person on the block. They would tell the reporters about Faith Kelly being polite but standoffish, keeping to herself most of the time, but making sure her lawn was mowed and her house maintained.
The obvious answer was to go to a hotel and simply stay there and do nothing. Let Yorkton go into damage control mode. Forget about all that had happened.
She remembered Daryn-He’ll kill me, you know-and she remembered Sean, the last time she’d seen him, sprawled drunk on her couch after she’d dropped Daryn off at “Kat’s” apartment.
Sober up, she’d told him. We need to talk.
Then Daryn was dead and Sean was gone.
How could she forget? She might be using documents that identified her as Kimberly Diamond, but her life and her memory and her mistakes all belonged to Faith Kelly. It was a strange twist on the whole idea of Department Thirty. She’d worked with people to assume new identities, had counseled them on leaving their old lives behind.
And now here she was, in the same position her cases had been.
But it’s temporary, she told herself. Yorkton will work this out.
Or so she hoped.
Her own cell phone had rung incessantly, and she’d finally turned it off after a while. Driving north on Meridian Avenue from the airport, she finally turned it on again to check the messages. There were calls from her friends Alex Bridge and Nina Reeves, from Chief Deputy Raines, from her old college friend Jennifer Ghezzi in St. Louis, from her father, and from Scott Hendler.
“Faith, what’s this all about?” her father said on the message. “You call me and tell me what this means.” Click.
Hendler’s message was from a little more than an hour ago. She listened to it twice. He was being her friend, her lover, and an investigator, all at once.
“Oh, Scott,” she said.
She knew she would have to check into a hotel as Kimberly Diamond, sit and do nothing. But that could wait, at least for a while.
I need to hear that you’re okay, he’d said.
And Faith realized, with increasing clarity, that she needed him as well. Needed him to just be there, to be normal and sane and even-tempered, even needed his silly word games.
She headed toward Edmond.
Half an hour later, she turned off Danforth Road onto a side street and parked in front of the condominium fourplex where Hendler lived. It was less than a mile from the Edmond safe house. Hendler’s Toyota was the only vehicle in the lot. He’d told her that the other three units were all occupied by either young single professionals or couples with no kids, who all worked during the day. There were times when he was working a big case that he would escape here in the afternoon to organize data, write reports, and such. It was much quieter than his desk at the FBI field office. Faith smiled. They’d spent a couple of afternoons here engaged in other, less formal activities as well.
All of the condos were split-level, and Hendler’s faced away from the street. Faith walked through a wide breezeway, turned the corner, and rang his doorbell.
She waited a long moment, then knocked.
The condo had two bedrooms, and Hendler had set up the second one as his computer room. It was farthest from the door, and sometimes when he was working back there he wouldn’t hear the knock or the bell the first time, especially if he was wrapped up in whatever he was doing.
Faith waited another minute, then pounded the door with her fist. Even when he was wrapped up in work, it wasn’t like him to not answer the door for this long.
“I’m going to work at home for the rest of the day, trying to organize my thoughts on some new evidence that just came in. I need to talk to you about this.”
Faith walked very quickly back to the Suburban, where she’d left it in the parking lot beside Hendler’s Toyota. She pulled Kimberly Diamond’s new Glock out of the glove compartment and, holding it close to her body, jogged through the breezeway and back to the condo.
She and Hendler had given each other keys to their respective homes a few months ago, when they began spending more and more nights together. She found her key ring and put the key in the lock.
Turning it, the key met no resistance. There was no click.
It was already unlocked.
“Oh, shit,” she whispered. Hendler never left his doors unlocked for any reason.
She pushed the door open and stepped into the room, the gun coming up in her hand.
Nothing in the corners.
Everything looked perfectly normal, the same as it had looked the last time she saw it, the morning after Daryn McDermott died. She and Hendler had left hastily after Rob Cain’s call, and she hadn’t been back here since.
The living room was done in deep blues and browns, the furniture tasteful but not expensive. Hendler wasn’t a neat freak like her brother, but he was certainly a better housekeeper than Faith was. Things were well organized, put away. There was no dust. There were several pictures of windmills and train depots, Hendler’s two artistic passions. He’d developed into a fairly talented photographer and had taken several of the photos himself in various places he’d traveled.
Faith took a deep breath and closed the door behind her. “Scott?”
She heard nothing.
“Scott, it’s me! Hello!”
The kitchen was empty. The bathroom and Hendler’s bedroom-the room they’d made love in so many times-empty. The bed was neatly made.
She found him in the computer room.
His desk chair had been spun around and was facing the wrong direction, away from the desk. The computer monitor was still on, a screen saver of three-dimensional pipes scrawling across it.
Hendler was a couple of steps in front of the chair, toppled toward the far wall. He’d fallen straight to the side, as if he had been kneeling and simply fell over. Blood had pooled under his head, and there were a few splatters on the floor and the wall.
Her gun slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. She moved forward tentatively, like a child taking its first halting steps.
Then something broke inside her and she rushed to him. He was on his side, his feet pointing toward her.
“Scott!” she shouted. “Scott, no! Dammit, no, no, no!”
The first thing she touched was his arm; then she ran her hand up to his shoulder. There was drying blood on his neck. She saw the wound, one fairly small entry at his temple.
Execution style, was how they described such things in movies.
More blood and tissue. Red, white, gray. She picked his head up. No exit wound on the other side. A small-caliber gun, most likely, the round still lodged in Scott Hendler’s brain. Some of his blood had gotten on her hand, a little more on her shirt.
Not this man, she thought. Not this one. Please.
From the angle of his body, he’d been on his knees when he was shot. They’d forced him to his knees.
She tried to think, but no thoughts would come. Hendler couldn’t be dead. That was all, that was the extent of her mental processes. He…could…not…be…dead.
She needed him, after all.
Not this man, she thought again.
She held his head for a long time. She wasn’t sure how long. Faith blinked over and over, but felt no tears. There was nothing in her, not even grief. Not even anger. There was nothing to feel.
She finally lay his head down and touched his face with her fingertips. He was already starting to cool.
She gently backed away and just stared for a long moment. She’d seen death before, and had even taken a life herself, but this…there were no words, no thoughts, that could process it.
Faith tried to think analytically. She moved around the body and touched the office chair. It was still warm. She sat in it, swiveled to face the desk.
She leaned forward and was about to touch the computer keyboard’s space bar when she thought, You’re contaminating the crime scene.
She knew this had to be connected to everything else that had happened. Daryn McDermott, Kat Hall, Sanborn…her brother. There was no other explanation.
“Trying to organize my thoughts on some new evidence that just came in,” he’d said on the phone message.
His yellow legal pad sat just to the left of the computer. She recognized Hendler’s neat printing. She read the notes he’d written himself, and her stomach turned.
Daryn dead in SK Jeep??? SK gun, Cain to ballistics-SK obsessed with Daryn?
Sean Kelly.
The “new evidence” he’d mentioned-they must have found Sean’s Jeep and his gun, with some evidence to suggest that Daryn had actually been murdered there.
“Oh God,” Faith said.
She’d defended her brother to Hendler, saying she knew Sean wasn’t capable of murder.
Or was he?
Had he committed two murders? Had he been so obsessed with Daryn McDermott that he’d had to kill her, and then murdered Hendler when he began to have suspicions of Sean, with a growing amount of evidence against him?
No. He’s my brother.
She turned around and faced Hendler’s body. Her throat tightened.
It couldn’t be.
Why would Sean kill Hendler, then leave evidence right here, the evidence that implicated Sean in Daryn’s murder?
He’s my brother.
And he might be a murderer.
The phone rang.
Faith jumped. It was the phone on Hendler’s desk, right beside the computer. She looked at the caller ID and recognized the number at the FBI field office.
She listened to it ring four times, then stop as the call went to voice mail. The ringing seemed to jolt her into reality. Faith considered her options. She could call 911 and wait, be a good citizen. But how would Kimberly Diamond of Independence, Missouri, explain that she had a key to FBI Special Agent Scott Hendler’s condo? Plus, the odds were that at least someone who responded to the call might know her. Wouldn’t work-Faith Kelly had to be out of sight.
She could leave and place an anonymous call. But they would want to know how she knew there was a dead man in the condo. And she couldn’t answer questions.
Or she could leave him.
Faith folded her hands together, squeezing them until they hurt. To the extent that she had allowed him to be, Scott Hendler had been there for her whenever she’d needed him, no questions asked. He’d trusted her even when she gave him no reason to do so. He’d gone against his own better judgment at times in order to give her the benefit of the doubt.
She may have loved him, though Faith wasn’t sure she knew what that meant. She was certain that he had loved her, and it may have cost him his life.
She squeezed her hands tighter. She bowed her head until her lips touched one of her knuckles. She closed her eyes.
It wouldn’t be long before someone found him. One of his FBI colleagues, perhaps. Maybe his parents or his brother would call and be concerned when they couldn’t reach him. He’d grown up right here in Edmond, and his parents lived barely two miles away. He had dinner with them every week. Faith had met them-they were good people. They would be utterly devastated. In a very real way, they might never recover from their son’s murder.
Yes, he would be found.
And she would be gone. She would pick up her brother’s trail. Finding Sean was no longer an exercise in family dynamics.
She bent down and touched Scott’s cheek again. “I’m sorry, Sleepy Scott,” she said. She felt like she should cry, but she had no tears. She couldn’t feel anything at all, not yet. It frightened her to think of what it would be like when she finally did allow herself to feel.
“Not now,” she said. She stood up and went into the bathroom. She took a towel out of the linen cabinet and wiped down every surface she had touched.
She would do this investigation her way, and she couldn’t have the FBI or the Edmond Police Department or anyone else considering her a suspect while she was doing it. She felt a coldness begin to descend on her.
She pulled off the page of Scott’s legal pad that had his notes about Sean on it. She was only buying time-she suspected that others, particularly Rob Cain, had the same information. But she needed a head start. She already had a new identity and clean, untraceable money. That would help.
She took one long look back. “I’m sorry,” she said again, and left the condo.
She started the Suburban and let it idle for a moment. She pulled out the Kimberly Diamond cell phone and, in a burst of impulse, called the number on Rob Cain’s business card.
When Cain’s voice mail greeting came on, she said, “This is Faith. I’m going to fix this, once and for all. If you find out anything-about Daryn or about Scott-let me know. You’ll know what that means pretty soon. I-I don’t know what else to tell you, Rob. Scott trusted you, and I think I have to trust you. I hope you’ll return the favor. Call me at this number if you find out anything.”
She clicked the end button, put the phone away, and pulled out of the parking lot, back into afternoon traffic on Danforth Road. Everything seemed so normal, just an ordinary suburban street on an ordinary suburban afternoon.
Faith blinked again and again. The tears formed in her eyes, but not a single one fell.
EVEN BEFORE SENATOR EDWARD MCDERMOTT had finished speaking, the director of Department Thirty had been summoned to the attorney general’s office.
Yorkton ran Department Thirty from an unassuming gray stone building in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, one hundred miles from Washington. It was close enough to D.C. for easy access, far enough away to be removed from the regular business of government.
The AG was Yorkton’s only boss. There were no deputies or associates or assistants in between the two. Each attorney general since the Nixon Administration had functioned in this role, some wanting weekly reports from Department Thirty, some wanting as little contact with it as possible.
The current occupant of the office fell somewhere between the two, and while Yorkton couldn’t really say he liked the man-he was a political appointee, after all-he admitted the AG was intelligent, capable, and seemed to be honest. He generally let Yorkton do his job and kept his hands off Department Thirty’s internal operations.
The two men sat in the AG’s sumptuous office at the Justice Department with no aides, no secretaries, no in-house lawyers.
“Tell me,” the attorney general said. “Is it true?”
“Substantially, yes,” Yorkton said.
“What do you mean, ‘substantially’? I have no patience with your vague answers. If we’re going to control this, I need to know what’s real and what’s not.”
Yorkton nodded. “My case officer-”
“The Kelly woman. She was Art Dorian’s, wasn’t she?”
“Yes. Very talented young woman. Has a tendency to be volatile at times, but she does the job.”
“Yes, I know. So?”
“What Senator McDermott said was true, as far as it goes. His daughter came to us and requested protection-”
“How did she even know about us?” the AG interrupted. “Did you wonder about that?”
Yorkton gritted his teeth, forcing himself to be calm. “Yes, of course I did. That still hasn’t been answered. But she came to Officer Kelly, who did the preliminary intake work. She investigated the different aspects of it, the girl’s claims that this Coalition for Social Justice was set to initiate further acts of terror at banks across the country, and that its leader, a Franklin Sanborn, had threatened to kill her. As I’ve already told you in my report, Kelly found nothing. No evidence of any kind to support any part of her story. I sent field officers to the places she specified that these terror cells were hiding. They were all old abandoned buildings. As far as we can tell, Franklin Sanborn doesn’t exist.”
“So why?” the AG said. “Why does Daryn McDermott want us to protect her if there’s no terrorist group and she’s not in danger?” He spread his hands apart. “Obviously, there was a danger to her. She thought so, to the point that she sent her father-a man with whom she does not get along-this impassioned e-mail message.”
“I can’t explain it,” Yorkton said. “Daryn McDermott has a history of unusual behavior that was designed to either get attention, embarrass her father, or both.”
“Oh, so being shot to death and strung up in a tree was an attention-getting ploy? It was to embarrass the senator? Come on, you can do better than that.”
Yorkton shrugged. “I don’t have an answer. But I trust my officer. If Kelly says there was no evidence, I believe there was no evidence. If we protected every small-time criminal who was afraid of their own associates-”
The attorney general crashed his fist down on the desk. “This was no small-time criminal! This was the daughter of the senior senator from Arizona. Ted McDermott is the point man on the president’s social agenda, and his daughter was brutally murdered after she’d asked for Department Thirty to protect her. Now McDermott’s on national TV throwing around Thirty’s name and your officer’s name. We have to put a stop to it. Right now. Do you understand me? Plug this before it gets any worse.”
Yorkton drummed his fingers on the arm of the deep leather chair. “Maybe we could convince Senator McDermott to just back down a bit, until we are able to figure out what’s really going on here.”
“And how do you aim to do that? The man’s daughter was just murdered!”
“What do you know about him, about the senator? He’s never been involved in oversight of law enforcement or intelligence, so I’ve had no dealings with him. Is there anything about him, any information”-Yorkton drew out the word-“that would be useful to us?”
The attorney general leaned back in his own chair, steepling his fingers and looking over them at Yorkton.
“Do you have a dossier?” Yorkton asked.
“I won’t answer that. But I do happen to know that the man is actually one of the biggest hypocrites in Washington. And that’s saying something, isn’t it?”
Yorkton didn’t want to debate hypocrisy in the political establishment. “What do you mean?”
“His daughter was renowned for a, shall we say, open sexuality.”
“Yes?”
“Let’s just say she came by it naturally.”
Yorkton waited a moment. “McDermott is firmly in the camp of social conservatism. Am I to assume that his daughter’s sexual escapades were not near as embarrassing as revealing his own would be?”
“That’s a fair assumption.”
The two men looked at each other for a long moment.
“You have the evidence?” Yorkton said.
“It’s with my other ‘special files’ on the legislative branch. I’ll make it available to you if you think there’s a chance it will work. Otherwise I won’t spend the administration’s political capital on it.”
“I’ll see that it works.”
“You think you can blackmail a U.S. senator into backing off talking about his own daughter’s murder? Even though the girl was out of control, she was still his only child, and what happened to her was horrible.”
“Agreed,” Yorkton said. “But Department Thirty is not culpable in her death, and Senator McDermott must be persuaded to stop acting as if we are.”
“Yes,” the Attorney General said. “What about your other cases?”
“All secure,” Yorkton said quickly. “Our budget is off the books, and there’s no way any of our other cases will be affected.”
The attorney general stood up. Yorkton took his cue and started for the door.
When he’d put his hand on the ornate doorknob of the huge wooden door, the attorney general stopped him and said, “You understand that any information you use with McDermott did not come from me.”
“Of course I understand. I do know how the game is played.” Far better than you do, he thought.
“Good. I’ll get the evidence to you later today.”
Yorkton nodded to him and left the office. In half an hour he was out of Washington and back in the rolling Virginia hills.
Of course, Yorkton hadn’t told the attorney general everything. He never did. He only revealed to his superior as much as he needed to know to help Yorkton accomplish what had to be done. Otherwise, there could be trouble. A superior who knew too much of day-to-day operations could be very dangerous, far more dangerous than Senator McDermott or his late daughter.
He hadn’t told the AG about Sean Kelly being the one who brought Daryn McDermott to the department. Faith had been forthright with him about her brother’s involvement, and in return Yorkton protected his officer.
And her brother as well, he thought as he rolled westward on Interstate 66.
But Yorkton thought he knew Faith Kelly well enough by now to understand how she would react to all of this. He already knew she had concerns about her brother-specifically, Sean Kelly’s alcohol addiction. The unspoken words had been there, in both the calls she’d placed to him about this case. Her brother’s involvement was a puzzle to her, something she couldn’t quite grasp yet.
He’d told her quite emphatically to go to ground, to assume her emergency identity. She would, but if Yorkton knew Faith Kelly like he thought he did, she wouldn’t be sitting around in a hotel room waiting for the storm to blow over. She would use the new identity to cover herself as she delved deeper into what had happened. And she wouldn’t stop until she had the truth, even if the truth was personally painful for her. Faith Kelly was funny that way.
An irritating quality for Department Thirty, Yorkton thought.
But even Yorkton had to admit that it was occasionally a useful quality to have.
Faith’s hands hadn’t stopped trembling since she’d left Hendler’s condo. She was amazed she’d been able to hold the big Suburban on the road. The way her hands shook reminded her eerily of Sean when he was either too drunk or “not drunk enough.”
But her mind was in fast-forward. If Sean had killed both Daryn and Hendler, he didn’t have much of a head start. The sickening realization came to her that she was now proceeding as if she knew her brother had killed two people, one of whom was her lover. She wasn’t viewing it through a prism of doubt any longer. She knew Sean’s frame of mind in the time leading up to Daryn’s murder. His behaviors were classic obsession, the “if I can’t have her, no one can” syndrome that so often arose in crimes of passion.
But she’d told Hendler that Daryn’s killing didn’t look like a crime of passion. It was more of a message, a point being made.
Then again, that had been when Hendler was still alive. Before he’d discovered new evidence implicating Sean. Before Faith’s entire world had shifted under her feet. Before she’d found Hendler’s body, she’d been relatively sure of certain things, even if she inhabited the insane gray world of Department Thirty.
Now she was sure of nothing.
Nothing but the fact that she would find her brother.
And then what, Faith?
She stuffed that thought way down. It led to places she wasn’t sure she could go.
Coming from the north, she drove down May Avenue through The Village. When she passed her street, she glanced down the block eastward and counted four news units in front of her house. She grimaced.
She drove two blocks south on May, turned into the residential area, and drove two blocks farther. Then she backtracked north until she was a block north of her house, having given her own block a wide berth.
She parked the Suburban-at least that fits in this neighborhood, she thought wryly-exactly one block north of her house, got out, and locked it. She jogged across the street, trying to remember which of the homes on this street had the dog in the backyard. She caught a flash of memory-out for her predawn run one bitter cold winter morning three years ago, she’d been chased through this neighborhood by the man she knew as Dean Yorkton. It was her first exposure to him.
She walked up the driveway to the nearest house. The dog was two houses down, or so she thought. She unlatched the wooden gate and carefully entered the backyard. She knew the family who lived here was named Robertson, the husband was in sales, the wife was an obstetrics nurse, and they had two daughters. They were rarely home, either being at work or on the go with the girls’ various activities. There were no cars in the driveway.
She climbed the wooden fence, feeling splinters digging into her hands, then dropped into her own backyard on all fours. Her house had privacy fencing, so even if the news people were standing right at the fence, they wouldn’t be able to see her unless they were on stilts. Faith wouldn’t have put it past some of them, but she saw no sign that any of them were staking out the backyard.
She stayed in a crouch all the way to the back door, reached up and unlocked it, then crawled inside, just in case they were close to her windows and could feel the movement inside. Moving with agonizing slowness, she crept down the hallway to her bedroom.
Her computer was already on. She logged into her e-mail, then navigated to her “Sean” folder. She’d saved her brother’s e-mails over the last few years. There weren’t many, so she’d saved what little communication she’d had with him.
If she was going to get inside her brother’s head, try to track him, she had to know him better. She had to think like him, to feel the way he felt, to know what he knew. Before the days of Department Thirty, Faith had been a deputy U.S. Marshal, albeit for a short time. But one of the Marshals Service’s mandates was tracking fugitives. She’d had a couple of spectacular successes, even helping to apprehend one of the nation’s most notorious counterfeiters a couple of years ago, after he’d been at large for more than fifteen years.
She began to read the few short e-mails, committing passages to memory:
…my best buddy here in Tucson, a geeky little guy named A. J. Helms. Reminds me of that guy back in high school, Norm Delton. Remember him?
…my SAC here, big guy named Weller. You’d appreciate him, sister. He’s completely no-nonsense…
…moonlight in the desert, down by the border. You can see for miles. Sure ain’t Chicago, where all you can see is the next building over…
What did you think of the tiger’s eye? Got it in a little town called Arivaca, about 20 mi. from the border. An old hippie couple sells them. I got to see the guy bend the wires around the gem and then put it on a string. “How much?” I ask him. “Three bucks,” he says. Three bucks! I’m cheap but not free…
…there’s this cantina in Sasabe, half a mile from the port of entry. I never go in there unarmed. But the Jack is cheap and the beer is cold and the bartender’s wife makes the best flour tortillas you’ve never tasted. Sure as hell ain’t Chicago.
Faith nodded. Sean had come to really love Arizona, just as she’d adopted Oklahoma. She knew that much. It was a start. He was on the run-he would seek out a place he knew, and Arizona was the most logical choice. He wouldn’t go home to Chicago. That would mean dealing with their parents, and in his current state, he wouldn’t want to do that.
But would he do something as obvious as returning to Tucson? If Sean had just committed two murders and had deceived his sister-arguably the only person in the world who could help him-would he circle around to the beginning?
The average cop might dismiss it as too obvious. No criminal would be that stupid, they’d argue. That’s the first place we’d look.
But he wasn’t just a criminal. He was her brother, and she knew things that the average cop didn’t. Given his struggle with alcohol, it seemed almost paradoxical, but she knew Sean would seek out a situation where things were ordered and tidy and he knew where everything was. He would seek the familiar. He always had. As a child, he didn’t like family trips because he didn’t like being away from familiar sights and sounds.
Over the last seven years, Arizona had become his familiar.
“Yes,” Faith said.
She made a few notes, names and places: A. J. Helms, Weller, Arivaca, Sasabe.
She called Southwest Airlines and booked the first flight that would connect to Tucson. Given how much Faith hated flying, that alone was testament to how serious the situation had become. She used Kimberly Diamond’s credit card and it went through with no trouble at all. Good old Yorkton, she thought.
Her travel bag was already packed and in the Suburban. Her new gun was in it, the Glock that was licensed in Missouri to Kimberly Diamond. She would break it down and put it in her checked baggage. She had the carry permit in her purse, along with her other ID.
She walked back into the living room, glancing at the shattered glass on the floor. She’d meant to clean it up, but as always, other things intervened.
A tide of disgust, anger, and even pity rose in her.
God help you if you did it, Sean. God help both of us.
She took a step, then froze. She looked back. The broken glass was on the hallway side of the bookshelf. Just the other side of it was a book, open and upside down on the floor.
He’d even been messing with her bookshelves. It wasn’t like Sean to leave something lying on the floor, though. Faith bent down, then stopped when she saw which book it was.
Her heart stopped.
She stood absolutely still for a moment. She heard the sounds of the news crews outside, people walking around, voices, car sounds.
She turned the book over and read the dust jacket.
“Oh my God,” Faith whispered.
She snapped the book closed. No longer thinking about hiding herself from the media, she ran full speed for the back door.
Now Faith knew why she recognized the name of Franklin Sanborn, and it changed everything.
SHE ARRIVED IN TUCSON AFTER TEN P.M., AND when she stepped out of the airport terminal, was amazed by both the dryness and warmth of the air. It was only early June, yet the temperature was still in the eighties this late in the evening. Still, the clean, clear air of the high desert felt good in her lungs.
“Kimberly Diamond” rented a car, then a motel room close to the airport, where she spent a fitful night. At nine a.m., she called the Tucson office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and asked to speak to Special Agent Helms.
“Helms,” he said a moment later.
“Agent Helms, my name is Kimberly Diamond. I’m an attorney, and I’m representing Sean Kelly in his termination hearing. I’d like to meet with you for a few minutes today, if you can spare the time.”
There was a long pause. “I don’t know that I can tell you anything that would help Sean. Everything’s in the record.”
“Yes, it is, Agent Helms. But I understand Agent Kelly has considered you one of his closest friends in Tucson.”
Another pause. “Yes, we’re pretty close.”
“I’m not interested in facts and figures that are in the record. I’m interested in a more personal view of Sean Kelly.”
“I really don’t know that I’m supposed to talk to you. Everything is-”
“-on the record. Yes, we covered that.” Faith stopped, knowing how most men reacted to silence from a woman.
Helms cleared his throat. “Maybe a few minutes at lunch.”
“Just name the place.”
“There’s a Mexican restaurant on Oracle, just up the street from the office. Noon, maybe?”
“I’ll be there.”
“I really don’t know if I can help, but Sean…well, Sean needs something. I’ve tried to help him before, and…” Helms’s voice trailed away, and Faith wondered what Helms had been through with her brother.
“We’ll talk at noon.”
Armed with directions from the desk clerk at the motel, Faith drove the rented Suburban-might as well be consistent, after all-north on Oracle Road, one of the main north-south drags in Tucson. She skirted the Miracle Mile, with its diners and motels and 1950s-style “tourist courts,” and passed a huge automotive dealership larger than anything she’d seen in Oklahoma. Oracle then branched into a commercial area-at least one indoor shopping mall, numerous strip shopping centers, restaurants.
She found the restaurant on the south end of a shopping center and went in. She glanced around for single men who looked like federal agents. She found him in a corner booth. A. J. Helms was in his midthirties, as tall as Sean but rail thin. He wore glasses and had a lot of gray in his light brown hair. He wore the requisite white shirt and dark suit of a federal agent, but looked uncomfortable in it, as if he were more used to jeans and T-shirts. Faith was wearing jeans herself, with a light blue tank top. She also wore a pair of stylish gray cowboy boots, the first time she’d ever worn them. Hendler had bought them for her as a joke for her birthday last year.
Since you’re becoming more of an Okie than I am, he’d said, laughing. It had seemed appropriate to Faith-important, even-to wear them now.
“Agent Helms,” she said.
He turned, stood up, and froze.
“You’re no lawyer,” he said.
Faith shook her head. “No, I’m not.”
He studied her. “You’re Sean’s sister. Faith, isn’t it?”
“Sorry for the deception. May I sit down?”
Helms indicated the seat. “He had a picture of you in his cubicle at work. You’re in DOJ, right?”
Faith sat down, watching him. He showed no indication that he’d connected her name to Senator McDermott’s statement yesterday. “Yes,” she said.
“He’s very proud of you. He probably never told you that. Wouldn’t be his style.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Faith said. Proud?
“He’s an alcoholic, you know.”
“I know.”
“A few months ago,” Helms said, “when he really started going downhill, Sonny-that’s Sonny Weller, our SAC-had him referred for counseling and AA. I even volunteered to take him to the AA meetings. There’s a meeting place just a few blocks from here. I dropped him off, I picked him up. I later found out that he’d sneaked out the back after I dropped him in front, then came strolling out the front an hour later when I came back to get him. What he didn’t realize was that I checked with the person who ran the meeting, and no one remembered him. It’s a small group, and Sean does tend to stand out in a crowd.”
Faith smiled. “That he does.” The smile faded. “Have you talked to him? I mean, recently.”
Helms fidgeted.
“Yesterday? Maybe you picked him up at the airport?”
Helms furrowed his brow. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m his sister. I’m worried about him. I want to talk to him.”
“And after that?”
Under the gangly, awkward exterior, A. J. Helms was extraordinarily perceptive, Faith realized. “I’m not sure,” Faith said. “So he did get in touch with you yesterday?”
“No.”
“He didn’t?”
“No, I mean he did get in touch, but it wasn’t yesterday.”
Faith sat very still.
“Let’s see, today’s Friday, so it would have been Tuesday. Tuesday night. And he didn’t fly in. He said he’d driven all day. He showed up at about ten o’clock that night at my house, driving a little Mazda Miata with Oklahoma plates. He just wanted to crash for a few hours, he said, so I let him. He was still asleep when I got up in the morning. When I got home from work in the afternoon, he was gone.”
Faith’s mind raced. If Sean was in Arizona two and a half days ago, he couldn’t have murdered Scott Hendler in Edmond at midday yesterday. The time frame fit. If he’d left Oklahoma City sometime after Daryn was killed, in the early morning Tuesday, and drove straight through, that could have put him at A. J. Helms’s door in Tucson at ten o’clock that night. If he stuck to interstate highways, the drive from Oklahoma City to Tucson was about fifteen hours.
She could almost hear Scott Hendler’s voice: Okay, I’ll play devil’s advocate here. He could have turned around and driven back. If he left Arizona, say, at noon on Wednesday, he’d be in Oklahoma City early Thursday morning.
In plenty of time to kill you, Scott, Faith thought, and for a moment her eyes clouded.
But it made no sense. If Sean murdered Daryn, why would he then leave town immediately, drive over a thousand miles, sleep for a few hours, turn around and drive back to commit another murder?
And now Faith knew something she hadn’t known until yesterday. The secret of the book. The secret of Franklin Sanborn.
Sean couldn’t have killed Hendler.
About Daryn, she was less sure. The issue was much less clear. Sean may have indeed been led to kill Daryn, fueled by his own obsessions, but also driven by the fact that he had been very carefully and skillfully manipulated.
You bastard, she thought. You may have manipulated Sean into committing one murder, and set him up for another.
She had to find her brother, and then they would hunt down the man who had called himself Franklin Sanborn.
“Is there somewhere he would go?” Faith asked. “Here in the area, someplace that was special to him. Somewhere…I don’t know, that he felt safe. Does that sound strange?”
Helms smiled. “Yes and no. Was he always so anal-retentive? A place for everything and everything in its place. Was he like that as a kid?”
“I guess he was,” Faith said. “I don’t think you notice such things for what they are when you’re a kid. He was always neat, I was always a slob. That’s the way we looked at it then.”
Helms was nodding. “Cleanest desk in our office. Organized, efficient. Until the bottle started getting the best of him, he was the most efficient agent I’d ever seen.” He leaned back against the booth. “There were only a few bars he used to go to. He had certain places he liked to go to drink. He knew what to expect there, places where nothing ever changed.”
“One of his e-mails a year or so ago mentioned a cantina in a town called-”
“Sasabe,” Helms finished. “Man, what a strange deal that was. With all the operations we did along the border, he got to like those little border cantinas. Sasabe is really remote. It’s the most desolate port of entry along the entire Mexican border. But Sean liked to go to that place anytime we were in the area. I went with him once and had a couple of beers.” He shook his head. “Not my kind of place. You felt like someone was going to jump you at any minute and if you didn’t have a weapon of some sort you might not make it out of there. But Sean never had any trouble there.”
“Can you give me directions?”
“Look, Faith, you don’t want to go there. I’m sorry, but with all due respect, the only women who go in those kinds of cantinas are women who are offering their services, if you know what I mean. You could get into real trouble.”
“No offense taken. But you don’t know me very well, either.”
“So I don’t.” He took a pen from his pocket and grabbed a napkin from the dispenser on the table. He drew a detailed map.
Faith stood to go and thanked Helms.
“Sure,” Helms said. “If you find him, tell him he’s welcome to crash on my couch anytime. Tell him AJ’s concerned about him.”
“I will.”
“Oh, and Faith?”
Faith had already taken a couple of long steps, and had to turn back to face Helms.
“Good luck with the whole Department Thirty thing. Senator McDermott’s a grade-A jerk, and his daughter was really screwed up. Most people in Arizona aren’t surprised she wound up getting herself killed. But watch your back. The senator doesn’t do anything if he doesn’t think it’ll benefit him politically.”
“You knew, the whole time we sat here and talked.”
Helms smiled. “You take care, now.”
“I will,” Faith said.
Clutching the napkin with the directions to Sasabe, she went back to the Suburban.
Sean didn’t kill Scott, she thought.
The thought gave her something to hold on to, something she could grasp. Her brother hadn’t killed her lover.
But Hendler was still dead. A gaping hole had still been seared into her life.
But now she knew who had done it-or at least who had seen that it was done-and she knew why. There were still puzzle pieces-mostly about Daryn McDermott-that didn’t fit, things about the girl that didn’t add up. There was no reason for her to have been a part of it. She shouldn’t have had to die.
But I’ll find out soon enough.
Directions in hand, Faith drove toward Sasabe and the Mexican border.
FAITH HAD NEVER REALLY SPENT TIME ALONG THE Mexican border, and certainly not in such a remote part of the world as Sasabe, Arizona.
It seemed an unforgiving landscape, cactus and sage and hard-baked desert ground. But there were always mountains on the horizon, seemingly unreachable, frowning down at the desert below. In some ways, Faith could see her brother in a place like this. Change would come slowly here, if at all. The desert and the distant mountains would always stand their ground, harsh and inscrutable. Sean would always know what to expect here, at least on the surface.
The cantina was hard to miss. As far as Faith could tell, it was the only place of business in the town of Sasabe. Her Miata, covered in dust, was parked squarely in front of it.
She parked the big Suburban away from the cantina’s door so that it couldn’t be seen from inside. She strapped her extra-large fanny pack, the one she used when she ran, around her waist. Her gun went inside it. She stepped out of the SUV, the stiff boots crunching gravel.
The cantina’s door was propped open with a trash barrel. Faith walked through it and stood for a moment, adjusting to the dim light. She saw the bar, two old men at the far end of it, smoking foul-smelling homemade cigarettes. There was the bartender with the droopy mustache, just drawing a beer.
One table was occupied by two Latino men in their twenties, each with a name across the left breast of his uniform shirt. They wore dark work pants and boots.
Everyone looked at her.
Sean had always been better at languages than she, and Faith suspected that seven years on the border had improved his Spanish, while her own was stuck somewhere in high school.
“Buenos días,” she said.
No one spoke.
“Hablo Inglés?”
One of the old smokers snorted out a laugh, but otherwise the place was silent.
Faith walked slowly to the bar, feeling the eyes on her. She’d left her purse in the van-she wasn’t that crazy, after all-but transferred some money and Kimberly Diamond’s driver’s license to the front pocket of her jeans. She reached into the pocket, pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, and laid it on the bar.
The bartender spread his hands apart.
Faith placed a second hundred beside the first.
The bartender stared at her, eyes lingering on her breasts. He finally shook his head.
“Don’t get greedy,” Faith said, “or you won’t even get the two hundred.”
The bartender looked at her impassively. A voice from the table said, in lightly accented English, “Don’t worry about Juan. We don’t get many six-foot-tall redheads in here.”
Faith turned to look at the table. “I’m only five ten. Where’s the man who drove that gold Miata?”
“I just got here,” the guy said. The patch on his shirt read Bobby in ornate cursive lettering.
“Me too,” said his partner, whose patch read Ramón.
“The guy’s a redhead, like me,” Faith said. “You wouldn’t have missed him. He’s tall, about six three, broad-shouldered. He was probably drinking like a fish.”
Ramón snorted.
“What are you, his sister?” Bobby said, and Ramon snickered.
“Yes,” Faith said.
Both men sobered. Bobby had clearly meant the remark as a joke and hadn’t expected Faith’s direct, matter-of-fact reply.
One of the old smokers said something to the other. Both kept staring at Faith. Faith sensed something there and stared back at them, green eyes digging into their brown ones.
The older of the two, who looked to be in his seventies, had a scraggly white beard and was wearing a brown leather vest over a faded denim shirt. He had a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap pushed back on his head.
“Dodgers need a new manager and a pitching staff,” she said. “They haven’t had shit since Lasorda left.” She looked over her shoulder at the table. “Would one of you please translate that for me? There’s a hundred in it for you if you do.”
Bobby looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “You’re crazy.”
“Yep,” Faith said. “Do it.”
Bobby shrugged and spoke rapidly in Spanish to the old man, who looked surprised and then spoke back.
“Señor Vargas says girls shouldn’t talk like that,” Bobby said. “And he says you don’t know baseball. Girls don’t know baseball.”
Faith smiled. “Tell Señor Vargas that the Dodgers haven’t had a real pitcher since Orel Hershiser. See what he thinks of that.”
Vargas’s eyes grew wide at the mention of the name Hershiser, and he looked at Bobby for the rest. After the translation, Bobby said, “He’s testing you. You really don’t want to get into this with him, lady. He wants you to tell him Hershiser’s record in 1988.”
Faith shook her head. “Ask me something hard. Twenty-three and eight. But the postseason was what was amazing. Two complete games in the World Series, one shutout, ERA for the series of one. Uno. One point zero zero. Same series where Kirk Gibson hit that famous home run against the A’s, coming off the bench when he was injured. That was real baseball.” She shrugged. “I was ten years old. That was the first year I watched the whole World Series on TV. I’m a Cubs fan, so I always have to cheer for someone else in October. I watched that series with my brother. He was so wrapped up in it that he actually cried when Gibson hit that home run. I’ll never forget it.”
Bobby translated. Vargas looked at Faith while listening. He never dropped his eyes. When Bobby finished, he took off the Dodgers cap and placed it carefully on the bar. He spoke a few words, slowly, then nodded at Bobby.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Bobby said. “Señor Vargas says your brother went for a walk.”
“Which way?”
“South, toward the border.”
Faith nodded to the old man. “Gracias, Señor Vargas.” She turned to go.
“Señorita,” the old man said in his throaty voice.
Faith turned back to him.
“Ryne Sandberg,” Vargas said, articulating each syllable very carefully. He gave Faith a thumbs-up sign.
“He was great, all right,” Faith said.
She pulled a hundred out of her pocket and handed it to Bobby as she passed. “Thanks,” she said.
“No problem,” Bobby said, watching her as she went out.
Faith walked south from the cantina, through the sharp S-curve in the road, looking at the adobe houses, keeping her eyes open. Three or four brown-skinned children ran across the road and back. One little girl, her hair in a long braid, sat in a hardscrabble front yard, spinning a car’s hubcap around and around.
She walked past the sign that pointed to Mexico. The port of entry lay before her, brick and steel and glass in the midst of this sand and adobe. Now most of Sasabe was behind her. The country to her right was wide open, the United States blending into Mexico somewhere out there in the desert.
She heard Sean’s voice behind her and to the right. “Sorry about taking your car. It was an emergency, and it was all I had.”
Faith stopped and turned very slowly. He was standing in a spot she had just passed, thirty or forty steps off the roadway. She blinked. She’d heard that the desert could play visual tricks on a person.
“Just like that, out of thin air,” Faith said. “You were always good at tricks.”
Sean was wearing dirty, rumpled khaki pants and a white T-shirt. He hadn’t shaved. His eyes were shot through with red. He was holding a gun loosely in one hand, as if he weren’t quite sure what to do with it.
“You planning on shooting me?” Faith said.
Sean looked at the gun. He let it drop to the ground.
“There,” he said. “Happy now? Above all, you should be happy.”
“Sean-”
Sean took a few steps toward her. A car went by on the road next to them, the first one Faith had seen between the cantina and the port of entry.
“Why are you here?” Sean said. “This is one of the stupidest things you’ve ever done, Faith, coming all the way down here.”
“Is it? Why? Tell me why you think so.”
Sean put his hands in the pockets of the dirty khakis. “What are you, my fucking therapist now? Wanting to know how I feel? Sorry, I’m not buying it, sister.”
He walked abreast of her, glanced at her once, and kept walking past. She began to move with him, matching his long strides. Faith imagined how they must look-these two tall people with red hair, striding along in this land where everything seemed to be sand-colored.
“Did you kill her, Sean?”
Sean didn’t break stride. “I guess it doesn’t matter now whether I did or didn’t. Even you believe I did.”
“It does matter. That’s why I asked the question.”
Sean said nothing.
“You were crazy over that girl. You were obsessed. She drew you in, fed your obsession, fed your weakness. Then at some point she rejected you, didn’t she?” A thought came to her. “She called you, didn’t she? That night, the night I took her back to her apartment. After I’d gone home with Scott, Daryn called you. What happened?”
“Rejection,” Sean said. “Just like you rejected her, wouldn’t protect her. Is that what you mean?”
Faith flinched but said nothing.
“Good to see you’ve still got some of that good old Irish Catholic guilt in you,” Sean said. “Of course, you didn’t think you had to protect her from me, did you?”
“What did she say when she called? What did she tell you?”
“Jesus, you just don’t give up. Probably why you’re so good in Department Fucking Thirty. You get your teeth into someone and shake them around until they cough up whatever you want. Yeah, she called. Said she wanted me, needed me. There was some sex talk. Like you said, she played to my weakness.”
“And you went to her.”
Sean nodded. “She was a crazy woman. I’ve never seen anyone make love like that. Though I guess you really couldn’t call what we were doing making love. It was fucking, pure and simple. I was so drunk I couldn’t keep it up, but she kept at it until I came. Then, a few seconds after she rolled off me, she started slapping me and hitting me and screaming at me to get out.”
Faith watched him. To her great surprise, a tear rolled down her brother’s cheek, unchecked.
“I mean,” Sean said, “I’m not stupid enough to think we were in love or anything like that. It was too raw, too…I don’t know what the word is, maybe primal? But I thought we had a connection. That’s why I tried to see her during that week you had her in the safe house. I just wanted to feel that connection. There at the end, I didn’t understand it. It’s like…it’s like she knew she was going to die and wanted me to be blamed for it. Someone somewhere will match up the semen sample from inside her with my DNA, and they’ll be after me.” He looked sidelong at his sister. “Just like you are.”
“They’re already after you, Sean.” Faith stopped walking. They were so close to the port of entry building that they could hear the air-conditioning unit humming. Mexico was only a few feet away. “They found your Jeep. There was blood in it. They’re betting it’s Daryn’s and are probably running the tests right now. They found your gun. They’ll be doing ballistics.”
Sean sighed. “And your boyfriend will come after me with a vengeance.”
Faith felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. “No,” she said slowly. “He won’t.”
“Oh, they gave some other Bureau hack the case, then.”
“No, Sean. Scott is dead.”
Sean whipped his head around.
“Scott was murdered yesterday, shot in the head while he worked on his case notes at his condo.” Faith blinked at him. She felt her own tears welling.
“Oh Jesus,” Sean said. “And you think I did that, too.”
Faith reached out and grabbed his shoulder, spinning his entire body around. “What the hell is the matter with you? Can you think for just one minute about something other than yourself? Are you even capable anymore of considering anything except how it affects you? Jesus Christ, Sean.” Faith’s voice rose steadily. “I loved him! I loved him, and he was decent and honest and smart and funny, and he was shot in the head!”
Faith’s composure cracked, and the floodgates opened. The tears began to stream down her face.
“I found him!” she shouted at her brother. “I found his body, and I had to leave him. Because of all this, I had to leave him right there, like his body was so much garbage, just to be cleaned up later. He showed me respect and kindness, and, goddammit, love! He showed me love, like no one else ever did. And there he was, lying dead on the floor, and I left him there!”
A door opened at the port of entry building, and a burly Hispanic man in a khaki uniform came out. His holster was unbuttoned, his hand on the butt of his weapon.
He took a few steps toward them, then Sean turned to face him.
“Irish?” the man said. “Sean Kelly?”
“Hey, Mike,” Sean said.
“What are you doing down here? I heard you were-”
“It’s a long story, Mike. Sorry to disturb the peace. This is just a little family matter. This is my sister.”
The guard looked uncomfortable. “Hey, Irish, I need to ask you back off from the port, okay? Do I need to make a phone call here?”
“No, no, I don’t think so.”
Mike nodded. “You’ll be safer back up toward town, Sean.”
“Right. Thanks, Mike.”
Sean backed a few steps away from the border. Faith followed after a moment. The guard went inside. Faith noticed his hand had never left the butt of his gun.
“Jesus, Faith,” Sean said softly. “I didn’t-”
“And yes, to answer your question,” Faith said, “I thought you’d done it. I thought you killed Daryn out of some kind of booze-induced sexual obsession with her, and I thought you killed Scott because he was getting close to you in the investigation.”
Sean lowered his voice to a whisper. “How can you think that of me? I mean, this is me, Faith. Anyone else, yeah. They’d look at the evidence and figure it was pretty conclusive. My car, the blood, the gun, the semen. But how could you think that?”
“What have you given me to disprove it? Huh? You’ve lost your job, you’re desperate, out here searching for some senator’s daughter. You’re drunk all the time, you don’t listen to anything I say. You’re sick, Sean, and when people are sick they’re not the same people anymore. You’re not the brother I grew up with.”
Sean scuffed the sand at his feet. He was silent for a long moment, then he said, “I didn’t kill her, Faith. God as my witness, I didn’t kill Daryn and I didn’t kill Scott.”
“I know you didn’t kill Scott. Your friend AJ verified that you were here when Scott was murdered.”
Sean nodded. “But you don’t believe me about Daryn.”
“I don’t know what to believe.” She looked him in the eye. “But I know this: you’ve been manipulated, very carefully and very skillfully manipulated into the position you’re in. I think Daryn was too, though there are some things about her I still don’t understand.”
“What do you mean, I was manipulated?”
“Franklin Sanborn.”
“But I thought you couldn’t find any evidence that he even existed. Hadn’t you decided that Daryn and I made him up?”
Faith shrugged. “For a while, I was leaning in that direction. I couldn’t find him. No one could. He was a ghost.”
Sean looked off into the distance. “That night, the night Daryn was killed. Sanborn followed me after I left her apartment, after we’d…he followed me. He found me passed out in the parking lot of a truck stop. He told me if I hurried, I might catch the real killer. It’s like he was taunting me, daring me to go.”
“I know who he is,” Faith said. “I figured it out when I found that book you pulled out of my shelf at home.”
Sean looked at her, the question on his face.
“The Secret Six by Edward Renehan. It’s about the Civil War.”
“Oh, I remember that. I remember thinking, ‘Since when is my sister into reading about the Civil War?’ ”
“I’m not. That book was sent to me.”
Sean nodded briskly. “There was an inscription, something about ‘until we meet again.’ I thought it was strange, but I was wasted so I didn’t think anything else about it after that.”
“Franklin Sanborn,” Faith said. “I know now that he’s real, all right. Not by that name, of course. He has more identities than I want to think about, and I’d thought he was gone for good. You see, when I knew him, his name was Isaac Smith.”
THEY WALKED A FEW STEPS TOWARD SASABE. Sean stopped at the first yard they came to. It was fenced with barbed wire, and a few chickens wandered through it. “Isaac Smith,” he said. “That name doesn’t mean anything to me.”
Faith sighed. “Do you remember last year, when the chief justice of the Supreme Court resigned?”
“Yeah. Cole, wasn’t it? Something about a family crisis. It surprised everyone, because he was relatively young, as Supreme Court justices go.”
“Right. Well, there was no family crisis.”
Sean leaned on a fence post. “Are you trying to tell me Department Thirty was somehow involved in the resignation of a Supreme Court justice?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. This man, this Isaac Smith, was in the middle of it. We think his real name was Mikhail Gerenko.”
“Russian?”
“Ukrainian. His father was a Soviet physicist who defected when Mikhail was a boy. They came to this country, but by then the Cold War was essentially over. The boy, Mikhail, wound up bitter and angry. He happened on a new and lucrative line of work that let him vent his own anger and make money at the same time.”
“What?”
“His clients would hire him to destroy a person’s life. Instead of simply assassinating them with a quick bullet to the head, he would ruin them. Take their lives and twist them around, destroy the things and the people they cared about until their own lives were completely devastated. For example, there was one government lawyer that he was hired to ruin. The man was by all accounts honest in his job, faithful to his wife, good to his children. Who knows what the agenda was that brought him down? But Gerenko, or Smith as he was known by then, seduced the man, made him question his own sexuality, carried on a torrid homosexual affair for six months, then dropped him. He’d convinced the lawyer that he was really gay and should leave his family. The lawyer did, left behind his wife and kids. Then Smith disappeared to leave him twisting in the wind. The lawyer wound up jumping off a bridge and drowning himself in Chesapeake Bay.”
Sean whistled. “Nice guy. So how did he get from Gerenko to Smith?”
“Somewhere along the way, Gerenko became obsessed with the American Civil War, and particularly with John Brown.”
“Whoa, what? John Brown? You mean like Harper’s Ferry? That John Brown?”
“That’s the one. Isaac Smith was an alias Brown used when he was preparing for the raid on Harper’s Ferry.”
“So Gerenko adopted the same alias that Brown did.”
Faith nodded. “Yes. But after everything that happened last year, Smith was offered protection by Department Thirty.”
“What? You protected this guy?”
“No. I didn’t protect him. Actually, I wanted to kill him, and almost did. But I was overruled-my boss thought he’d be a ‘nice catch’ for the department. And so he disappeared into Thirty. A few weeks after the last time I saw him, that book came in the mail.”
Sean thought for a long moment, gazing off toward Mexico, avoiding his sister’s eyes. “Sounds to me like there’s more than one obsession running through this. This Smith was obsessed with you, Faith.”
Faith blanched. She’d never quite thought of it in that way. She knew Isaac Smith hated her. Because of the way Faith had done her job, he’d had to stop practicing his “trade,” and even though he’d been given yet another new identity and relocated far away from her-she didn’t know where-she knew he would carry an anger at her for interrupting his business. Faith thought he was the classic sociopath, the one who believed the rules didn’t apply to him.
“You’re right,” Faith said quietly.
“But I still don’t understand how you decided he was Sanborn, and what he has to do with all this. Who’s his client, and who is he supposed to be ruining? Daryn, her father, you, me, your friend Scott? What’s it all about?”
Faith rubbed her scar. She felt suddenly exhausted. Grief, rage, pain…they were working their toll on her.
And that’s what he wants, she realized.
It started to become sickeningly clear. Even when she’d seen the book, had figured out why she knew the name of Franklin Sanborn, she still hadn’t understood why. She’d still been naïve enough to think that Smith might send her a book from wherever he was now, might write a cryptic notation in it, but that he wouldn’t-couldn’t-do anything else.
Isaac Smith-Franklin Sanborn-was his own client.
And Faith was the target.
He’d wanted to make her his ultimate conquest, to see her life tumbling out of control, destroying the people around her. He’d done his homework-that was Smith’s trademark, after all, the painstaking research and detail he put into his “jobs”-and found her brother, and knew of his weakness. He would have learned of her relationship with Hendler, and he already had an idea of how difficult it was for Faith to commit to a relationship, how far she’d come with Scott.
All of this, every bit of it, had been accomplished under the nose of Department Thirty and Director Yorkton. Somehow Smith had found a willing vehicle in Daryn McDermott, though she had no doubt that Daryn had been manipulated as well.
“I should have killed him,” Faith said, not realizing she’d spoken aloud.
“Oh?” Sean said.
“On a beach at Galveston, a year ago, I had the chance and the justification. He’d already shot at civilians, and with everything else he’d done, if I’d been a little quicker, none of this would have happened. You, Daryn, Scott…it was all an elaborate plan to get at me, somehow. There are still holes in it, but he was after me all this time.”
Sean was silent for a long time. “You still didn’t tell me about the name Sanborn, about how you figured it out.”
“The first time I heard the name, I knew I recognized it, but I didn’t know from where. After I saw the book on the floor, I picked it up and looked at it, read the dust jacket. The use of that name was a message to me. Smith wanted to me to figure it out, to know who was doing this. Franklin Sanborn was one of the ‘Secret Six,’ this small group of Northern abolitionists who funded and supported John Brown in the revolt he wanted to start. The real Sanborn was an educator, a professor. He was even a friend of Emerson and Thoreau.”
“A professor,” Sean said. “He used that cover with the Coalition, too.”
“More of Smith’s sense of irony.” Faith kicked the ground with the toe of her boot. “Son of a bitch! He wanted me to know it was him. He wanted me to see what he was doing to me, that even though he was exiled and relocated, he could get to me. He must have been planning this almost from the moment he went under with the department. Son of a bitch!”
Sean moved away from the fence post and looked down at his sister. His eyes had changed. Ever since he’d arrived at her house two weeks ago, Faith had seen little but an alcoholic haze, a dullness, in her brother. Now his blue-green eyes flashed anger.
His voice, when he finally spoke again, was tightly controlled. “So this was all about you?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“Think about something, Faith. Just a few minutes ago you accused me of not being able to think of anything except about how it affected me. Turn that around. Why would someone go to these lengths to get to you? Are you that important, Faith?”
Faith stared at him, unable to speak. The words had been swept out of her, as if a desert wind had blown them off toward the distant mountains.
“Are you that big a deal now, just because you’re working for Department Thirty? Because you can play around with people’s lives and create new people, just because you think it’s in the ‘national interest,’ are you that important? Huh? You’ve been trying to prove something your entire life. Did you prove it? Did you finally prove you were a big deal? Do you think you’d finally get Joe Kelly’s approval?”
“Stop it, Sean.”
“Except…oh, wait a minute, you can’t tell anyone you work for Thirty, so no, Dad can’t approve, can he? So maybe all this is in your own mind, Faith. Maybe I’m a boozer, but maybe you’re just fucking delusional!”
“Sean, you have to understand. Smith-Sanborn-is a master manipulator. He can-”
“Make people commit murder and not even know why they’re doing it? Come on, think, Faith! Think about how idiotic that is!”
“This is what he wants. This is part of what Smith was trying to do. He’s destroying us. He wants me to pay-”
“Oh, bullshit!” Sean shouted. “Spare me your goddamn conspiracy theories! You’ve lived with that Department Thirty crap for so long that now you’re believing it yourself, that it’s in your own life. Somehow you’ve figured that your own brother is a cold-blooded killer.” Sean tapped his chest with his fist. “I didn’t kill Daryn, obsession or not. I don’t care what the fucking evidence says, and I don’t care what you say. Not anymore.”
Faith’s cell phone rang.
“Better get that,” Sean said, the bitterness thick in his voice. “You know how important you are.”
The phone rang again.
Sean turned and walked down the hill, toward the border.
“Sean!” Faith shouted.
Sean kept walking, closer and closer to the port of entry.
Faith took a step, willing her mind to clear. I can’t think, I can’t think…
Only a handful of people had the number of the Kimberly Diamond cell phone. Finally, she pulled the phone out of her fanny pack and looked at the caller ID. She didn’t recognize the number right away, but it was area code 405. Oklahoma.
Sean drew closer to the border. He was leaving her, leaving everything, walking away.
She knew he would have been defenseless in the face of Isaac Smith’s machinations and Daryn McDermott’s seductive powers. She’d tried to tell him she understood. Had she actually said the words? Suddenly Faith couldn’t remember, and suddenly it seemed very important.
She flipped open the phone, watching her brother grow smaller. “Yes?”
“Faith? It’s Rob Cain.”
“Yes, Rob?”
“Scott was found dead in his condo last night.” A long pause. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
Faith said nothing.
“Your message,” Cain said. “I didn’t understand it, until-”
“What do you have?”
“Where are you, Faith?”
Faith was silent for a long moment, then said again, “What do you have?”
“The autopsy results from Daryn McDermott. Now I know why it took so long to get the report. They had to be one hundred percent certain of what they were looking at.”
“Yes?”
She listened to him for two minutes, to his crisp, professional explanation. When he finished, her hands were shaking as she put the phone away. The last pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
Ahead of her, Sean stepped across the border and into Mexico.
“No!” she shouted. “Sean!”
Faith broke into a run. As she ran down the hill, she realized she was still carrying a gun in her fanny pack, and she knew that if she carried it into Mexico, she might never see the U.S. again. She had nothing identifying her as an employee of the Department of Justice, nothing to justify carrying a firearm across the border.
Without breaking stride, she unsnapped the fanny pack and flung it to the side of the road.
“Sean, wait!”
Sean was a few steps beyond the border now. On the Mexico side, the road wasn’t paved but loose gravel. He was heading up a small hill toward a building that presumably served as the Mexican mirror of the port of entry.
He turned back to look at her. “Go back, Faith! You don’t have any jurisdiction over here!”
Faith ran. The door to the building on the American side opened. The guard named Mike stepped out. On the other side of the road, from the booth on the northbound side, a female officer was watching her.
“Hey!” Mike shouted.
“Go back!” Sean said.
American citizens didn’t have to show any kind of documentation to enter Mexico. They didn’t have to stop, didn’t have to answer questions, could simply walk or drive across the border and enter the other country. Faith pounded down the pavement, cursing the stiff boots and wishing she had her Reeboks instead.
A few more steps and she would be there.
“Hold it!” Mike shouted. “I want to talk to you! Hey, woman! Stop!”
Ten more steps. Sean had stopped and was staring at her in disbelief, as if he couldn’t believe his sister was crazy enough to follow him into a foreign country.
Five steps.
She heard Mike unsnapping his holster again.
You can’t shoot me, Faith thought absurdly. I work for Department Thirty.
Then she realized: Sean was right. This job has changed me into something I don’t even recognize.
She stepped into Mexico, felt the ground change from blacktop to gravel.
“Are you out of your mind?” Sean said.
Behind them, Faith heard Mike talking on the phone.
“You’re going to get us both arrested or killed,” Sean said. He was twenty steps away from her.
“You have to come back with me,” Faith said.
“No, I don’t.” Her brother turned away. “Go back, Faith. You and I don’t know each other anyway. Tell Mom and Dad something, I don’t care what.”
“Listen to me, Sean-”
“No, I won’t listen to you!” Sean kept walking, right in the middle of the road. No traffic came or went.
At the top of the hill, two Mexican men appeared at the edge of the small white building.
Faith kept running at full speed and tackled her brother around the waist. She squeezed his stomach and felt the air go out of him.
“Shit!” he cried, and rolled over, kicking at her.
Faith held on, sliding down his body, even when his foot connected with her face. Thankfully he was wearing soft-soled shoes.
“Let go! Goddammit, Faith, you’re insane! Let go of me!”
“No,” Faith breathed. They rolled over. She tasted gravel.
Sean scissored both legs back and forth, finally shaking loose of her grip. He stumbled, but managed to get to his feet. The two Mexican border guards began to hurry toward them.
Faith doubled over. “You have to come back with me.”
“To hell with you, Faith, and everything you stand for.”
Faith absorbed the words like a slap, shaking her head violently.
“I know what happened, Sean,” she said, and surprised herself by how steady her voice had become. “That call…I know what happened.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I know you didn’t murder Daryn McDermott.”
The Mexican guards were closing. “No te muevas!” one of them shouted. Don’t move!
Sean went still. “How-”
“This wasn’t a murder,” Faith said. “Daryn McDermott committed suicide.”
THE MEXICAN GUARDS SEARCHED THEM AND, FINDING no contraband, escorted them back to the port of entry, requesting that they leave Mexico for “creating a public disturbance.”
They declared their American citizenship at the border and were admitted back to United States soil. Mike met them as soon as they’d made their declaration and walked them into the building. Sean did most of the talking, assuring Mike it truly was nothing but a family squabble. Never mind that it had spilled over into another country and created an incident at the border.
“Irish, you don’t want to be doing stuff like this,” Mike said. “I believe you’re in enough trouble already.”
Sean assured him they were leaving the border now, and they did. They walked back to the cantina, looking at Faith’s Miata and the huge Suburban next to it.
“You drove that?” Sean said. “You have changed.”
They followed each other back to Tucson, to the airport, where Faith turned in the Suburban to the rental agency and they left the Miata in the long-term parking area.
They caught a Southwest flight, traveling as Kimberly Diamond and Michael Sullivan, and settled in. Sean peppered Faith with questions, but she’d gone to the place where nothing and no one could reach her.
“Trust me,” she said.
She dozed off and on for the entire flight, and Sean drank three beers in rapid succession. He thought she was deeply asleep, but Faith heard him order the beer from the flight attendant. She decided against saying anything about it. They’d said enough to each other.
She thought back to what Rob Cain had told her. It all made a sort of sense now. A convoluted sense, to be sure, but now she knew where the pieces fit together.
And she knew that for all the lives that had been shattered, for all the people who had been destroyed, for the families who had been devastated, it had all been about two people: Isaac Smith and Faith Kelly.
Faith felt her rage, and this time, she wasn’t sure she could control it. What frightened her more was the fact that she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
They landed in Oklahoma City in the late afternoon. After only one day in the desert, the air of the plains seemed thick and humid to Faith. The sky seemed to be split: over the airport in south Oklahoma City, it was a dazzling blue with few clouds. To the north, it was gray and overcast with storm clouds building.
“Where are we going?” Sean asked as Faith rented another SUV.
“You told me he said the Coalition was going to regroup at Mulhall,” Faith said.
“But didn’t you already check there? You said the house was empty except for some homeless guy.”
“But now I wonder,” Faith said. “I think that homeless guy may have been one of Smith’s people, one of your Coalition people. I think that somehow Smith hurriedly cleaned out the house so it would look like no one had been there, and left one person there to let him know when I came looking. He would have known I would investigate the house eventually, and he was ready. He was waiting for me.”
Sean shook his head. “Now you sound like you’re talking to yourself.”
“Maybe I am.”
“That doesn’t make sense, though. He would have known that if you didn’t find anything to back up Daryn’s and my story about the Coalition’s plans after Oklahoma, that you’d reject Daryn from Department Thirty. What was the point of having her request protection, just to be rejected?”
“Oh, it makes perfect sense,” Faith said, but offered no more.
With the rush-hour traffic headed north out of the city, it took them nearly an hour to reach the exit for Guthrie. Sean showed Faith the route he had taken when he drove Daryn and Britt there the first time, passing over the Cimarron River and Skeleton Creek into Mulhall.
By the time they passed through the town and found the turn at the north end, the sky was almost black and the wind had begun whistling from the northwest. A few fat drops of rain smacked the windshield. Faith stopped at the foot of the rutted driveway and reached across Sean into the glove compartment. She took out the fanny pack, the same one she’d retrieved from where she’d dropped it near the border in Sasabe. She unzipped it and checked the load in her Glock. There was no safety on this model. It was ready to fire.
Faith didn’t try to hide their approach at all. She didn’t leave the SUV down the driveway from the farmhouse. She drove right up to the clearing and parked next to the dark luxury sedan there.
“Bastard,” she said, looking at the car.
With Sean beside her, she moved up the steps. She remembered which one creaked, and stepped especially hard on it. She wanted him to hear her. She wanted him to know she was here, and that the game was over.
She hauled open the screen door, the one that had flapped in the wind and startled her the first time she came here.
Nothing would startle her this time.
Faith twisted the doorknob and stepped into the house.
The man sat in an old bentwood rocking chair with a wicker seat. He was rocking back and forth, a book in his hands.
“Bravo,” Isaac Smith said. “It actually took you less time than I thought it would. I suspect it was difficult to convince your brother to come back with you. I wasn’t betting you’d be able to do that part. I should never underestimate you, should I?”
He looked the same as he always had: a few years older than Faith, completely unassuming, of medium height and build, dressed in a way that would let him blend into the wallpaper. But then, that was the idea. The focus was never to be on Smith himself, but on what he could do.
“Sanborn,” Sean said.
“Agent Kelly,” Smith said. “Or Mr. Sullivan, if you prefer. Please, let’s avoid confusion. Your sister knows me best as Isaac Smith. Let’s stick with that, shall we?”
“Why?” Sean said. “For Christ’s sake, why? Why all this?”
“Your sister knows,” Smith said.
Faith slowly drew her gun from behind her back, placing it where Smith could see it. “Like I told you in Arizona, Sean, it was all about Smith and me. Everything that happened, happened so he could do to me what he did to so many others. I deprived him of being able to play his games with others, so he decided he’d play them with me.” She shook her head. “Didn’t you read the fine print when Yorkton promised you a new life under Department Thirty?”
“Indeed I did. There was all kinds of legalistic nonsense about adhering to the letter and spirit of the law, not breaking the law or conspiring with others to break the law, et cetera, ad nauseum. I remember it well.”
“But it didn’t apply to you.”
Smith shrugged. “This was personal.” He smiled, and Faith wanted to take the gun and smash his face in.
“You see, Sean,” Faith said, “this man had just pulled off something major, something amazing. He reached back more than a century to an obscure frontier massacre and used it to bring down a Supreme Court justice. He destroyed God only knows how many people along the way. My friend Alex Bridge was very nearly one of them. But I stopped him.”
“No, you didn’t,” Smith said. “The justice still fell, didn’t he?”
“And so did you. I should have killed you on those rocks in Galveston Bay, but my boss had other ideas. So you got a new identity and spilled what you knew about your previous jobs. Where did they send you, by the way? Who are you now?”
“Do you think that matters?” Smith said. “You have no idea how many identities I can create for myself. My ‘relocation’ has been a minor inconvenience. The only loose thread has been you, and now you’ve been tied up nicely.”
“Indiana, was that it?” Faith said, ignoring the jab.
“Evansville. Lovely country, right along the Ohio River. I’m a software trainer named David Corcoran. I’ve had the flexibility to travel, which was very important in bringing my plans together.”
Thunder cracked outside. Faith heard rain blowing against the windows of the old house.
“So it’s true,” Sean said. He’d begun to circle around to the side of Smith’s rocking chair. “You really did all of this to get revenge on my sister.”
“Revenge? Oh, don’t be simpleminded. Revenge is so banal. No, this was a lesson to be taught.”
Sean shook his head. “You prick. What did you do to Daryn? How did you get her tied up in this scheme?”
“That was quite easy, actually,” Smith said. “I simply had to be patient and keep my eyes open. Her agenda was no secret. She’d been very public about it. She wanted to get at her father and score her own political points. She offered herself to The Cause.” He spoke the last two words in a grand, mocking tone. He glanced at Faith. “But you know that now, don’t you?”
“Faith?” Sean said.
Faith looked at her brother. “Remember what I said, that Daryn had committed suicide? Maybe someone else pulled the trigger, maybe someone else put the rope around her neck and lifted her into that tree, but it was suicide, all right.”
“I don’t understand,” Sean said.
“Daryn was dying,” Faith said.
Smith smiled.
“At first I couldn’t explain it,” Faith said. “I simply thought she was dangerous, maybe sociopathic. Her behavior was so erratic-intellectual and articulate one minute, vulgar and profane the next. Plus the headaches. She had those terrible headaches, and they got worse and worse as time went on. That should have been a giveaway, but then, I wasn’t looking for it.”
“What are you saying?” Sean demanded.
“Daryn had a glioblastoma multiforme lodged on her frontal lobe.”
“A brain tumor,” Smith added. “Completely inoperable. She would have been dead in another three months.” He spread his hands apart. “So she offered herself for The Cause, to be used in whatever way would serve her agenda the best. She rather liked the idea of being a martyr, instead of dying at twenty-four from some useless cancer. This way, she would die for something ‘greater than herself.’ Or so she believed.”
“I don’t believe you,” Sean said. “Daryn was willing to let herself be killed so you could get to Faith?”
“Well, of course, Daryn didn’t know my true motivations. As far as she knew, I was Franklin Sanborn, professor of communication, and shared her agenda for social and political change. But yes, Agent Kelly, she put her life in my hands. She was about to lose it anyway, and she was already growing weaker. You saw that, didn’t you?”
Sean appeared to agonize. He clenched his fists at his sides. “After the bomb, down on Main Street after the car crashed into the wall, you had the gun on Daryn. You said something about a moment of pain, then no more pain at all, and something about how she’d probably enjoy that. I didn’t know what you meant.”
Smith smiled. “Observant, much like your sister. It must be a family trait.”
Thunder cracked again. Faith saw a cloud-to-cloud lightning flash through the side window. The clouds seemed lower, a solid wall of them across the dark sky.
“But I still don’t understand,” Sean said. “She knew then that you were going to kill her? You’d already set this up. Why go through all of that?”
“From the moment you met Tobias Owens in Sasabe, everything was an illusion, Sean. Nothing you saw or heard or felt or did was real. Any interaction you saw between Daryn and myself was for your benefit, to continue the illusion. Tobias Owens wasn’t even real. He, of course, was not Senator McDermott’s counsel. He was an ambulance chaser from Phoenix who had no scruples and wanted a fast buck. See where it got him.”
“He’s right,” Faith said. “None of it was real. He used Daryn and you to get to me, to devastate me in every way imaginable. I had to watch my own brother falling apart, and it twisted me to the point that I suspected him of murder. Sean, she very carefully drew you in. You thought you were getting close to her so you could convince her to go home. But she knew who you were all the time. That was the whole point. She even got you to participate in her Coalition.”
“But why me?” Sean said. “You couldn’t know that I was going to screw up at work and be so desperate that I’d go along with Owens.”
“Oh, no,” Smith said. “You did that all by yourself. I’d identified you long ago as your sister’s biggest weakness. I saw what you were doing to yourself and knew it was only a matter of time until something happened that pushed you over the edge. I just had to hope that Daryn lived long enough to do her part.”
“How could you know?”
Smith looked at Sean as if he were a child who didn’t comprehend the day’s math lesson. “I watched you, of course. Just as I did your parents, at various times. Family ties can almost always be used against a person. You’re the living proof of it.”
Faith stared at Smith in disbelief. “You believed Sean was my biggest weakness?”
“Of course. And in exploiting his weakness, I exploited yours at the same time. It was a simple and beautiful plan, and it worked beyond my wildest expectations.”
Sean put his hands to his head, as if it were about to burst. “All of this…the attacks on the banks. That whole business with Daryn being angry at you for wanting to use explosives…that was staged? I mean, you slapped her. You-”
“It was good theater,” Smith said, crossing his legs at the ankle. “Remember, everything was staged. The two men who broke into Daryn’s apartment while you were there with her? The ones who ran you off the road? The incidents were created to form a bond between the two of you, to put you on the run, to put you in a position to come here, to be dependent on each other.”
Faith brought the gun up in her hand. She pointed at Smith with it, coming closer to the rocking chair. “All of it was designed to make Sean-and eventually, me-believe that Daryn McDermott was part of this radical group, but that it had become too radical for her and she wanted out. You’d chosen Sean very carefully, exploited his alcohol weakness, made sure he and Daryn got to be mutually dependent on each other. Then you even went so far as to stage a real attack-one that actually killed innocent people. You thought nothing of killing a two-year-old child in order to dress the stage. Then, after Sean brought me into it and asked for Department Thirty to protect Daryn, you yanked the rug out from under it.”
“Erase all evidence,” Smith said, sweeping a hand around the room. “Then you would have to cut Daryn loose. Tell her she was rejected. Send her back out into the world, where she was afraid of Franklin Sanborn.”
Understanding gradually crept onto Sean’s face. “And then kill her. Faith and Department Thirty would get the blame.”
“Senator McDermott did a fine job reading his daughter’s impassioned letter on national television,” Smith said. “There she was, at the eleventh hour, trying to be reconciled to her father, only hours before her death. Now Department Thirty has been taken to the public, and so has its renowned Officer Kelly. McDermott can rant and rave about a federal government department out of control, a department that could have protected his darling daughter from terrorists, but chose not to. And look what happened to her! Your department will be dismantled. There will be Congressional hearings, and you’ll be the star witness. How’s our mutual friend, Director Conway, handling all this, by the way?”
Faith had to think for a moment, that Conway equaled Yorkton. “He can take care of himself, and the department,” she said. “You might be surprised.”
“It’ll take a lot for you and the department to overcome this,” Smith said. “But it won’t matter to me. I’ll be gone. I already have my next identities in place. No more David Corcoran of Evansville, Indiana. I hate to leave Franklin Sanborn behind, though. I wondered when you would make that connection.”
Faith felt a chill. She had never before felt that she could simply raise her weapon and destroy another human being. The man she had killed two years ago had been purely self-defense. He’d shot at her, and at others, and she’d simply shot back. This was different. Smith was, as far as she could tell, unarmed. She recalled that he usually preferred to stay away from weapons himself, leaving actual violence to his “subcontractors.” It would be easy to simply erase him from the face of the earth.
She raised the gun. She took aim at a spot on his chest.
Smith acted as if he didn’t have a gun aimed at him from less than five feet away. “But all of this, for all its beauty, wasn’t the coup de grace. You watched your brother’s destruction, saw a girl that you could have protected be killed, and saw the famous Department Thirty veil of secrecy peeled away on national television. Were you writhing in pain by then, Officer Kelly? I know how tough you can be, or think you can be, so I added an afterthought. It had taken you so long to develop the affair with Special Agent Hendler. It’s very hard for you to commit, isn’t it? You were never sure, and still he patiently waited for you. He was patient to the end, wasn’t he? Waiting for you to show up at his condominium. If you’d come a little sooner, you might have saved him. Don’t you think so?”
Faith began to circle the chair. It was the only furniture in the room, the only thing to break up the emptiness. “I will kill you right now,” she said. “This isn’t about Department Thirty or Daryn or anything else. It’s only about you and about me. And you finally pushed too far. When you killed Scott, made him get on his knees and shot him, that was it. You’ve taken everything I have, and I’m going to return the favor.”
Faith heard a low rumbling from outside, growing louder.
“Was he on his knees?” Smith said, following Faith with his eyes. “What a clever touch. Go ahead, shoot me. Send me straight to hell, not that I believe in such a thing. It won’t change the fact that your life is gone. You have nowhere to go, nothing to do. Everything you’ve worked for is in ruins. Everything. Killing me won’t bring any of it back. It just seals your own fate. So go ahead.”
“Wait a minute,” Sean said, his voice rising above the storm. “You didn’t know he was on his knees? You didn’t shoot Hendler? What about Daryn?”
“Oh, no,” Smith said. “I didn’t assist Daryn in her exit from this life. I avoid bloodshed if at all possible.”
“Then if you didn’t do it,” Sean said, “who did?”
“I did.”
Faith and Sean turned at the voice. Britt slowly descended the stairs into the living room.
THE TALL GIRL WITH THE STRINGY HAIR AND THE muscular build came down one step at a time, walking very slowly, cradling a sawed-off shotgun in her arms.
“I know how to use this,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t. You.” She gestured at Faith. “Drop it or I’ll blow a great big hole in you.”
Faith backed away from Smith. “Who are you?”
Britt looked at Sean. “You know who I am.”
“You were Daryn’s friend,” Sean said.
“What else?” Britt prodded.
“You loved her.”
Britt nodded as if satisfied. “You never did, that’s for sure. After you came along, she wanted you all the time and she didn’t want me so much anymore. She said it would be that way for a while. I thought it was all for The Cause.”
Faith still hadn’t dropped the Glock. “You…you loved Daryn McDermott?”
“I said drop it,” Britt said. “You think I’m nothing but a stupid whore? Well, I’m not. I’m worth more than any of you. Daryn showed me that I could be more. Now drop the gun!”
Faith bent over and gently put the pistol on the floor.
“You knew,” Sean said. “You knew about the tumor.”
Britt nodded. “She already had it when she came to Oklahoma City the first time. The doctors had just told her a couple of weeks before she left on her tour. She told me she’d be coming back, that she’d come back for me, that she had a plan. She told me about Sanborn.” She glanced at Sean. “She told me about you, too, that you’d be coming, and what to tell you when you got there.”
“When I found you at the motel,” Sean said, “you already knew. It was all part of the plan, for you to tell me about Daryn becoming an escort named Kat Hall, and how to find her. Even then-” He looked ill.
“As I told you,” Smith said, “everything from the moment you met Owens was part of the illusion. Go ahead, Britt. Tell the rest.”
“Daryn asked me…when the time came…if I would do it for her. She wanted me to.”
Sean’s hands were shaking badly. “I just remembered something. You told me you wanted to take her pain away. Out there on the deck, the first day we were here.”
Britt reached the foot of the stairs. “I did. I took away all her pain. She told me everything she wanted me to do. She told me to listen to Sanborn after she was gone, that listening to him would be just like listening to her.”
“So that day downtown,” Sean said, “you took my Jeep so you could implicate me in Daryn’s murder. I’d left my gun here in the house. You took it, you used it to kill Daryn, and left it along with her bloodstains in the Jeep.”
Britt nodded. “Uh-huh. She called me that night, after she’d done you one last time, so your come would be inside her. She wrote her dad a letter, all about The Cause. Then she called me. I took away her pain.”
“But why put her in the tree?” Sean said.
“That was to make people pay attention. And they did, didn’t they?”
“You put her there yourself?”
Britt nodded with a perverse pride. “Sanborn had already timed the security guard, to see how long he took on his rounds. I had twenty-five minutes. I’d already taken Daryn’s pain. She’d kissed me and thanked me before I did it. But I think she was scared too, at the very end. It was one thing to come up with an idea, and another to actually know someone was going to shoot you. But I told her I loved her before I pulled the trigger. I think that helped her. I think she was at peace.”
“The tree,” Sanborn prompted, as if he were bored.
“Right,” Britt said. “I’m strong, and Daryn was a tiny little thing. I put the rope around her neck while we were still in the car, put her over my shoulder, and carried her to the tree. It was the middle of the night-there was no one around, just the guard, and he was on the other side. I lifted Daryn up, let her feet dangle, and wrapped the other end of the rope around the tree. Then I just drove away. I even had seven minutes to spare. I took the Jeep and parked it at Southeast High School. That’s not far from where I work. I knew someone would find it there. Then I walked up the street to the Oasis, back to my regular room.”
Smith clapped his hands together. “You’ve done well, Britt. And we haven’t even discussed Special Agent Hendler.”
“Oh, he was easy. Just like you told me, I followed him from the place where I left the Jeep, all the way to his place. I waited a few minutes, then knocked on his door. I told him I was a friend of Daryn’s, and I knew things. He let me in. I guess he didn’t expect me to have a gun, since I’m a girl. People never think I can do things, but I always surprise them. He had me come into his little office room. Before I even went in the door, I pointed my gun at him, told him to get on his knees. He didn’t want to, but I told him that if he didn’t, we were going to kill his girlfriend next.” She looked at Smith. “I came up with that part myself. And then I just shot him. I knew Daryn wanted me to. He was with the FBI…he was part of the ruling class.”
Faith closed her eyes. Scott Hendler had died on his knees, because he thought that in doing so he might be able to save her. He could have gone for his own gun, could have disarmed Britt, but he was thinking of her. In his last seconds, he was thinking of Faith.
“Very good, Britt,” Smith said. “Now let’s finish this.” He turned to Sean.
The storm roared outside. Somewhere very far away, Faith thought she heard a siren. The rumbling outside increased. It sounded like a freight train, amplified many times over.
“Remember how he betrayed Daryn?” Smith said to Britt. He nodded toward Sean. “He never cared about The Cause, never cared about Daryn or about you. He was in it for money. He came to take Daryn back to her father.”
Britt swung the nose of the shotgun toward Sean.
“No!” Faith screamed.
Sean took a step toward the foot of the stairs, where Britt stood. His voice became eerily calm. “If you’re going to shoot anyone, Britt, shoot him. He’s a user. You heard everything he said. He only did all this to get even with my sister.”
The nose of the shotgun drooped a couple of inches.
“That’s right,” Sean said. “Do you think he cared about your Cause? He was selfish, the whole time. It was all about him and my sister. It was never about you or Daryn or me or any of the other Coalition people. He probably hired them, gave them money to play parts here, just like actors.”
Smith smiled and slowly stood from the chair. “Very perceptive. But Daryn trusted me, Britt.” He spoke very slowly, very deliberately. “And that means you should trust me. You remember what she said, don’t you? Listen to me as if you were listening to her. Shoot him, Britt.”
“He’s just another man who used you,” Sean said. “Just like all your customers, Britt. All he’s done was use you, from the beginning. I cared about Daryn. Maybe I didn’t understand her, but I cared. I wanted to be with her…by the end, that was all that mattered to me, being with her.”
Panic and confusion painted Britt’s face. The shotgun drooped further. “I don’t-”
“Shoot him and be done with it!” Smith shouted, showing the first signs of impatience.
Faith had been moving slowly during the exchange between the other three, inching with her feet toward the Glock on the floor. Outside, the storm had built to a scream.
She went into a dive, her arms outstretched. She got her hands around the pistol.
“Shoot him!” Sean said.
“Britt!” Smith shouted. “Remember what Daryn said!”
Britt screamed, an agonized wail. Faith froze, her eyes locked onto the window. A grayish white funnel-shaped cloud had descended from the sky and was churning up the ground, on a collision course with the house.
Tornado.
The scourge of Oklahoma in spring, they were intense storms with winds stronger than any hurricane, and they struck with much less warning. The cloud looked almost like it was dancing, its tail swaying back and forth. A tree in its path suddenly disappeared. Debris swirled around it and inside it.
“Sean!” Faith screamed.
They all turned. For an instant, Faith saw something cross Smith’s face that she never expected to see-uncertainty, fear.
Thunder, a lightning flash outside, and the interior lights went out.
There was a scream from the stairs-Britt.
The tornado danced across the plains. A window blew out.
“Is there a basement? A cellar?” Faith yelled at Sean.
“The kitchen!” her brother shouted back.
Each moved in the dark toward where the other had been standing. Faith and Sean found each other, and they clasped hands, just like when they were children and something scared them both. And just like then, Sean led the way, pulling Faith toward the kitchen.
More windows exploded. “Here!” Sean shouted, but couldn’t say more because of the deafening din of the storm.
He kicked open a wooden door in the kitchen. It led into blackness. An earthy smell drifted up to them.
Faith glanced up at the kitchen window. The funnel filled her line of vision. She screamed wordlessly.
She caught a glimpse of her brother, half-turned away from her. Then his hand was ripped from hers and she felt herself falling through the doorway. Her foot caught on something. She felt bones snapping, as her foot tried to go a different direction from the rest of her body. After a moment of blinding pain, she was falling again. Then, over the roar of the storm, she heard the boom of the shotgun. She thought she heard Sean’s voice one last time, and then everything was dark and silent.
FAITH AWOKE SLOWLY, TO THE SMELL OF WET earth all around her. She was lying on her left side, and that entire side of her body was damp. One arm was curled under her. Her hair felt matted. There was no sound whatsoever. She remembered how loud the tornado had been, and the quiet now seemed unnatural, unreal.
She didn’t move, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Gradually, objects took shape in the darkness. The kitchen door that Sean had pushed her through seemed to have led down to an unfinished, dirt-floored basement. She saw lumber, paint buckets, cans of food. Surely she must be dreaming-she was in a muddy basement surrounded by cans of green beans and chicken soup.
She sat up. Directly ahead of her was the staircase, except it wasn’t a staircase. She began to see that it was a folding wooden ladder. That explained how she’d snagged her foot between the steps-there was an open space between each rung.
Bracing herself with her hands on the muddy floor, she got to her feet. Millions of shards of red-hot broken glass stabbed both her feet. She screamed wordlessly and collapsed again.
She sat on the floor, breathing hard, until the pain receded a bit.
Okay, so one foot is broken. I remember that. And the other one-who knows? But I can’t stay down here. I have to find Sean. And what about Smith and the girl, Britt?
She rolled onto hands and knees, trying to keep her weight away from her feet. She grew dizzy and nauseous and collapsed again.
There was a small shaft of light entering the basement from the doorway above. Faith very carefully maneuvered her body so that both feet, still wearing the gray boots Hendler had given her, were in the light. The right one was at an odd angle to the rest of her leg-she’d felt it snap on the way down. The left foot was at yet another angle still. She hadn’t felt it break-she must have landed on it and her body’s weight twisted it.
Okay, so both feet are broken. Still can’t stay down here.
She rolled over again, fighting the tide of nausea. She stayed still until it abated, then crawled a couple of steps, using only her arms and upper body, essentially dragging the lower half of her body behind her.
The pain lanced her again, and tears formed. She struggled against the pain and dragged herself a little farther. More pain, more reflexive tears. She was breathing hard, and she made herself do some breathing exercises, the ones Alex had taught her. In sixty seconds her breath was under control, her mind focused and centered.
She dragged herself to the ladder-the one that had broken one of her feet, she reminded herself. She leaned an arm against it, resting from her trek across the muddy basement floor. Mud caked her arms up to the elbows, and the front of her tank top had the mud completely ground into it.
Now came the hard part-climbing. She’d known people who were rock climbers, who knew all about how to use their upper bodies to pull themselves up. Faith’s fitness had always been attuned to the lower half of her body. She took a moment to reflect that she had rarely found her running useful in real life. Fat lot of good all those miles and marathons did her now, with two useless feet dangling at the ends of her legs.
Move your ass, Faith. Get yourself out of this hole. Your brother might need you.
She reached two rungs above her head, wrapped her arms around the wooden ladder, and pulled. Her feet screamed in pain. Faith bit her lip.
One rung at a time.
Her body moved a few inches.
Next rung.
A few inches more.
And so it went. She had no idea how long it took her, rung after excruciating rung of the ladder
By the time she reached the top, there was very little light. Her arms exhausted and aching, she put on one last burst of strength and pulled herself over the top.
She’d heard of the capricious nature of tornadoes, but had never lived through a major one herself. There were famous stories of a tornado making its way down a street, destroying one side completely, flattening everything in its path, while the other side of the street was completely intact, nothing out of place; or about how some tornadoes “skipped” houses, plowing through a neighborhood destroying every other house, leaving the ones in between alone.
What she saw was a microcosm of the stories she’d heard. The kitchen of the old farmhouse was nothing but rubble-two floors worth of rubble. The kitchen sink was upended a few feet away from the opening that led to the basement where she’d been. A toilet wasn’t far away, sitting upright but not connected to anything.
There was no wall. The southern wall was simply gone, whisked off the house’s foundation. Bricks and lumber were everywhere, housing fixtures no longer recognizable. Faith looked to the left, back toward the living room where she and Sean had found Isaac Smith.
The east wall-the front of the house-was still there and completely intact, standing as if in silent protest against the storm that dared to threaten this place. The north wall, at Faith’s back, was standing, but with giant gaping holes. Now that the storm had passed, there was a bit of natural light in the early evening, a tiny bit of sunlight peeking into the ruined house. Faith could see Isaac Smith’s rocking chair, sitting upright without a scratch on it, right where it had been.
She cleared her throat. “Sean?” she called. “Sean, are you here?”
Now that she was out of the hole, Faith began to hear sounds. A bit of wind, dripping water, and strangely, birds singing.
Something made a noise to her left, in the direction of the living room. Faith dragged herself a few feet, but it was even slower going than coming out of the hole, as she had to clear a trail through the debris, using her hands the way a swimmer parts the water ahead. Periodically one of her feet would glance off something-a brick, a piece of lumber-and pain would shoot from her toes all the way up to her neck, stopping her in her tracks.
Still she dragged herself forward. She heard the noise again.
Someone else was alive in here.
Faith blinked against pain and rage, trying to remember the last seconds before she and Sean had clasped hands and he had directed her toward the basement. Britt had been standing on the stairs, aiming the shotgun. Smith was urging her to shoot Sean, Sean had told her to shoot Smith instead, and Faith had dived across the floor for her Glock. Britt had looked confused, doubtful, panicked, as if things weren’t as black and white as she’d imagined them to be.
The lights had gone out. They’d found each other and Sean had taken her to the basement door, then practically pushed her through it. He’d turned away from her. She fell. The shotgun roared. The tornado slammed into the house.
Britt had shot someone.
Faith’s heart began to hammer. “Please, God,” she whispered. “Please, please, please.”
There was the sound again, someone moving.
Faith dragged herself past the rocking chair, in the direction of the stairs, or at least where the stairs had been. The second floor had collapsed on that side of the house, tons of rubble on the floor. But again, it was surreal in that there were places where Faith could see the actual floor, areas where there was no rubble at all.
Where the stairway should have been, she saw a pair of bare feet sticking out from under some debris. She made her way toward them, her heart still triple-timing.
Dammit, why can’t I go any faster?
Who did Britt shoot? Faith thought as she moved, the thoughts torturing her.
“Please,” she said again, her voice a rasp.
She froze when she saw the bright red nail polish on the feet.
She pulled herself next to the body and managed to raise herself into a sitting position. Her arms felt nearly as useless as her feet now, from dragging her dead weight all the way through the ruined house.
The lower half of Britt’s body was buried in rubble, only her feet visible. Her torso and arms were intact. One hand was still wrapped around the shotgun, her red-nailed hand curled around the trigger. The back of her head was gone, blood and brain tissue sprayed on what was left of the wall behind her. The barrel of the gun was still in her mouth.
“Oh God,” Faith muttered. She lowered her head to her hands and wept.
She cried not just for the destruction of this young girl, but for the destruction-in a very different way-of her own brother, of her own family. She wept for the way Daryn McDermott had been used. She’d been a willing vehicle, and it all came down to an elaborate and spectacular suicide for her, but she’d still been used. And she wept for the hole ripped in her own existence by Scott Hendler’s murder. Faith cried and cried and cried, becoming oblivious to the external pain, blinded by the pain inside.
“They were cowards,” Smith’s voice said.
He stepped out of the small closet that had been beside the stairs. The stairs were gone, but the closet enclosure still stood. He’d found the only other safe place in the house. His left arm hung bloodied and limp by his side. His shirt was ripped, a collection of rags. There was blood on his face.
Faith could barely find her voice. “What?” she said.
“Britt and your brother,” Smith said, and his voice sounded very far away, as if he were at the bottom of a well. “The stupid girl, she couldn’t figure out which one of us to trust, so ultimately she trusted no one, not even herself. A lesson of the streets, I would presume.”
“Sean,” Faith croaked.
“He turned out to be a coward as well. He turned and ran. He pushed you into the basement, then took a giant leap out the back door. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to see what happened to him from there. I suspect he’s buried under a few tons of this house, don’t you?”
“You…bastard.”
Smith bent over and picked up a brick in his good hand. He started toward Faith.
“Name calling doesn’t suit you, Officer Kelly,” he said. “It is down to you, and it is down to me now. The way it should be. Can’t run, can you?”
Smith took a few more steps. Faith pushed herself away from Britt, but there was nowhere to go. Britt’s body and the front wall blocked her on one side and behind, debris on the other. Smith was directly in front of her.
Faith couldn’t make herself speak. She began digging at the pile of rubble beside her.
“Think you can tunnel through it in the next five seconds?” Smith taunted. “No, no, no. Never happen.”
He knelt beside Faith’s legs and dropped his voice to a whisper. “As long as I’m alive, you’ll never have peace, Officer Kelly. I’ve done everything I could to you in this round of the game. Nothing about your life is what it was. And now I’ll simply disappear. I’ll gather up a few personal belongings and I’ll just go away. I already have my identities in place. You know that, don’t you? Your friend Yorkton won’t find me. No one will find me, because I don’t exist. I’m John Brown’s Body, remember?”
Faith remembered his DOJ code name, the moniker that had been given to Smith before they unearthed his real identity last year. She nodded, still scrabbling with the debris.
“I win,” Smith whispered, raised the brick over his head, and brought it down on Faith’s left foot.
Faith screamed in unimaginable agony as the pain rocketed through her. She saw him raise the brick again, saw it coming down toward her right foot.
Mercifully, Faith passed out.
FAITH DIDN’T REMEMBER THE ARRIVAL OF THE Logan County Fire and Rescue squad, nor did she remember talking to the sheriff’s deputy about the young woman with the back of her head blown off in the ruins of the house. She didn’t recall the MedEvac helicopter, or her arrival at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center trauma facility. Incongruous with everything else, she vaguely recalled music, something light and feathery. A flute, perhaps.
When she awoke, she was in a hospital room, and the lights were very bright. She saw IV lines, and both her feet were propped up. She turned her head and saw her friend Alex Bridge sitting beside her bed.
Alex was thirty-one, half Comanche, with the high cheekbones and deep dark eyes common to Native Americans. Her hair was short, dark, and straight, though she’d highlighted it with red and blond streaks. She wore jeans and sandals and a Kerrville Folk Festival T-shirt and held a wooden flute in her hands. Faith could see the tattoo on her upper arm, a crown of thorns intertwined with roses and crosses.
Faith stared at her, as if she weren’t quite sure Alex was real. She put out a hand.
Alex clasped her hand, putting her flute aside. “Hey, Faith Siobhan. Man, you Irish redheads are tough.”
Faith coughed. She didn’t trust her voice.
“Don’t,” Alex said. “You’re going to be okay, but it may be a while before your next marathon.”
“Sean?” Faith managed to say.
“He wasn’t there. Your brother wasn’t there, Faith. They were digging all night. The rescuers dug through tons of debris, they scoured that house and the whole countryside. Your brother’s body wasn’t found. He may have made it out. While you were delirious, you kept asking for him…talking to him.”
Faith nodded. “He saved me. Pushed me down into the basement.”
Alex squeezed her hand. “They found a girl there, too. Her name was Brittany Ray. She was twenty-one.”
Faith closed her eyes. She nodded again.
Alex let go of her hand. Her voice changed. “You mentioned Smith, while you were delirious. Was it…”
Faith nodded a third time. Alex had been one of Smith’s victims last year. One of the personas he’d adopted for that “job” had been that of Alex’s husband. He’d fathered her child, then made her believe he’d been killed. Alex had later confronted him on the beach at Galveston, and Faith had never before or since seen the kind of courage Alex Bridge displayed then, facing down the evil that was Isaac Smith.
Alex lowered her voice. “I thought he was under protection.”
Faith held her breath. She remembered Smith-I win.
And the bastard had walked away from Mulhall a free man.
“No,” Faith whispered.
Alex leaned forward.
A plan formed in Faith’s mind.
“I need a computer,” she said.
“What?”
“A computer with Internet access. Can you get a laptop?”
“Mine’s at home,” Alex said, confused.
Faith suddenly looked alarmed. “What time is it? How long have I been here?”
“Ten hours or so. It’s nearly seven in the morning.”
“Where’s Daniel?”
Alex smiled. Daniel was her one-year-old son. Faith had been there when he was born three months premature, and had carried him in her arms to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. “Don’t worry. He’s with my dad. He’s fine. But I had to get here. I guess in your delirium, you told them to call me.”
“Need that computer. I need it fast.”
“Why? They won’t let you use a laptop in here.”
Faith lay back against the pillow. Her hair felt gritty. “Yes, they will. Smith isn’t going to win.”
Alex looked at her quizzically, but stood up. “Give me half an hour.”
Faith was instantly asleep as soon as Alex left the room, and woke when she returned.
Alex plugged in the laptop while Faith adjusted herself on the bed. A nurse came in, looked at the clock, and said, “What’s all this?”
“Business,” Faith said, staring at her.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Kelly, but you can’t use that in here. It will interfere with-”
Faith had Alex hand her a pen, and she scribbled a phone number on an envelope Alex had had in her purse. She handed the envelope to the nurse.
“What’s this?” the nurse said.
“The phone number for a man named Yor-Conway. He’ll tell you I have permission to use this laptop right here, right now, for a few minutes.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t let you-”
“And if you don’t like him,” Faith continued, “he can put you in touch with the attorney general of the United States. And if that’s not good enough, you can speak to the president.”
The nurse stared at the envelope with Yorkton’s phone number. “I’ll need to speak to the nursing supervisor.”
“You do that.”
Alex shook her head as the nurse left. “You tough Irish redheads.”
“Just don’t cross us,” Faith said.
She logged onto the Internet, then using her high-level passwords, accessed the Department of Justice’s massive database. She did a search using “John Brown’s Body.”
“What are you looking for?” Alex asked.
“The file of the people Smith destroyed before last year. The people whose lives he ruined.”
“Why?”
“Do you have any more paper?”
Alex dug in her purse and handed another scrap of paper to her. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Faith felt suddenly alert, as if she’d been given a direct shot of adrenaline. “Smith broke the law again, so he’s not eligible to stay under our protection.”
“But won’t he just disappear, use another one of his aliases?”
Faith nodded. “That’s what he said he’d do. But if I know him like I think I do, he’ll go back to where he’s been living and pack up his books. Maybe nothing else, but he’ll want to keep all his history books, to take them with him into his next identity.”
“So? I still don’t get it. It’s not like you can tell the people he ruined what his new name is.”
Text began to scroll across the little screen of the laptop.
“Can you?” Alex said. “Faith?”
Faith began making notes, her impulse telling her to hurry, hurry.
“Faith?” Alex said. “You don’t have that information.”
“He’s so damned arrogant,” Faith said. “He told me his new name, his new occupation, and the city where he lives.”
Alex sat back. She waited a long moment, struggling with her own emotions.
“Faith,” she said, and the tone made Faith look at her. “If you tell those people, someone’s likely to kill him.”
Faith’s green eyes met Alex’s dark brown ones.
“You can’t,” Alex said.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t wished him dead a thousand times.”
“Yes, I have. That’s not the point. You can’t…you’re an officer. And this would…I mean, it’s not like it’s self-defense, like when you chased after him on the beach last year.”
Faith thought of Britt and Daryn and Scott…and Sean, dead or alive. She thought of Smith’s words: As long as I’m alive, you’ll never have peace, Officer Kelly.
“Yes, it is,” Faith said.