A week later
THE NEWS CONFERENCE WAS IMPRESSIVE.
Senator Edward McDermott stood once again on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and once again choked back tears as he talked about his daughter.
“Because she felt she couldn’t talk to me,” McDermott said, “she hid from me the fact that she’d been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. I didn’t know until after…” McDermott coughed. He sniffed into the microphone. “…after the autopsy on her was completed. After I learned this, I was put in touch with Dr. Byron Barth at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, one of the world’s leading neurologists. He told me…he said that with this disease, as it progressed, Daryn would have exhibited erratic behavior, and she could have experienced delusions, even hallucinations.”
McDermott stood silently for a moment, his head down, before going on. “After I spoke to you last, I started looking for this Department Thirty that Daryn mentioned in the letter she wrote me the night she…”
McDermott’s entire body shook, and he stepped aside. His wife was nowhere to be seen, but an aide, a slim young Latino in a dark suit, stepped forward to the microphone.
“The senator conducted an investigation, and we could find no evidence that Department Thirty exists. There are no budget appropriations for such an agency, no government facilities, nothing to indicate it ever existed. It was evidently a fantasy created by Daryn’s illness. Still, she reached out to her father before she died, and that’s given Daryn’s father and stepmother great comfort. The senator regrets any difficulty created by his earlier statements, but would like to remind the nation that he did not know of his daughter’s illness, or the nature of it.”
Faith tuned out the rest. She was at home, her injured feet in casts and propped on the couch. She had both crutches and a walker, but she refused to use the walker. The crutches were much more difficult to manage, but infinitely preferable.
She’d left the hospital after only two days, electing to recuperate at home. Alex looked in on her, as did her friend Nina Reeves, and various acquaintances from the Marshals Service. She had one regret-they’d buried Scott Hendler while she was still in the hospital. Scott’s mother had paid her an emotional visit the day after she came home, and the two women had cried together, holding hands in Faith’s living room.
At first, Faith had slept all the time. The images didn’t pursue her into sleep, which was deep and dreamless. But gradually, she reached the other extreme, where she couldn’t sleep at all.
Smith was right about one thing-nothing about her life was the same, and it never would be again.
Her cell phone rang. “Faith Kelly,” she said into it.
“Did you still think I did it?” Sean said.
Faith sat up straight. There had been no word from him all this time. His body hadn’t been found in Mulhall, and there had been no sign of him anywhere.
Faith’s heart pounded. “What?” was all she could think of to say. There was static on the phone line.
“Before Britt admitted it,” Sean said. “You still thought I shot Daryn, didn’t you? It was suicide, but you believe I pulled the trigger.”
Faith was silent a moment. “I don’t know, Sean.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Where are you?”
“Gone. Don’t look for me, at least not for a while. Here’s a clue, three places I won’t be: Arizona, Oklahoma, or Chicago. I leave behind all I know, and see what I can figure out. You know that’s hard for me.”
“I know. Are you sober?”
“Right now, this minute? Mostly. I feel like shit, though. I may drink later today, or I may not. I’m not sure. Sometimes you take it a day at a time, sometimes an hour at a time…and sometimes, sister, you take it one breath at a time.”
They were both quiet for a long moment. “You saved my life,” Faith said.
Sean let out a rush of breath. “Yeah, Daryn said the same thing to me.”
The phone clicked.
The first thing Sean had said came back to her. He’d wanted to know what she thought of him, if she’d still thought he was a killer. “Oh God,” Faith said, bowed her head, and wept.
Two days later
Yorkton visited her on the first day she was back in her office.
She’d tidied up some paperwork, talked to Hal Simon, and received his assurances that Leon Bankston/Benjamin Williams was adjusting well. Simon had seemed very distant.
Yorkton knocked twice on the door, then walked into the office. They looked at each other for a moment. “Something’s different in here,” the director of Department Thirty said.
“The fish,” Faith said. “I haven’t put it back up yet.”
“Are you going to?”
Faith shrugged. “Want to go for a walk?”
“Is that a joke?”
Faith pointed at the crutches. “I’m getting better with these things.”
Neither of them asked where they were going. They walked across the street to the memorial, to the Survivor Tree. Daryn McDermott’s blood had been cleaned from the flagstone walkway.
Faith hobbled on the crutches to the curving wall that looked out over the reflecting pool and the 168 empty chairs.
“A lot has happened,” Yorkton said, joining her at the wall.
“Yes.”
“Had you heard about John Brown’s Body? I guess I can tell you the details now. He’d been relocated to Evansville, Indiana, and was living as a software trainer there. A few days ago, a nineteen-year-old boy walked up to him as he unlocked the door to his apartment and shot him dead, point-blank. Emptied six shots into him.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Yorkton was watching her closely. “The intriguing aspect is that the young man’s name was Miles Hayden. His father was one of our friend John Brown’s Body’s ‘targets,’ five years ago. George Hayden was the D.C. lawyer who threw himself into Chesapeake Bay after a six-month affair with our man.”
“What an irony.”
“It is that. How do you suppose that young man knew what his name was, where to find him?”
Faith turned slowly toward him. “There must have been a leak somewhere.”
“There must have been.”
“Hypothetically, if Smith had broken the law while under departmental protection, he would have disqualified himself from the program.”
Yorkton nodded. “Quite true. But hypothetically, that determination would be made by his case officer and, ultimately, by me. I’ve spoken to his case officer, and Vaughan knew nothing.”
“How interesting,” Faith said.
“Yes, it is,” Yorkton said.
They were quiet for a while. It was mid-June now, a week away from summer, and the Oklahoma days had become long and hot. Within a few minutes Faith was sweating.
“You got to McDermott,” she said.
“It didn’t take much convincing. And the irony is that it was true. The young woman’s disease would have caused delusions and hallucinations. It’s interesting, isn’t it? The way the truth can be made to serve a lie, and vice versa.”
“So it goes. And the media even left my house. Were you behind that too?”
Yorkton smiled. “Not at all. There are eighty-nine women named Faith Kelly in the state of Oklahoma. Twenty-one are here in Oklahoma City. They spent time in front of each of their homes.”
Faith reached into her pocket and handed Yorkton a folded sheet of paper.
“What’s this?”
“My resignation.”
“I trust that’s a joke.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Yorkton tapped the folded paper against his pursed lips. “I believe we went through this last year. One doesn’t just ‘quit’ Department Thirty. I understand you’ve been through quite an ordeal, and-”
“No, you don’t understand. I quit. That’s it, the long and the short of it. I’m not going to do this anymore.”
“Look, Officer Kelly-”
“I’m not ‘Officer’ anymore. That’s effective immediately, right now.”
“You’re not listening. You can’t just quit.”
“Yes, I can. You can send your goons to follow me if you want to, if they can keep up with me. But I’ve had enough. I watched almost everything I care about be destroyed in the last few weeks.”
“But Smith is gone.” Yorkton was beginning to sound desperate. “That should give you some closure.”
“Goddammit, it’s not about closure!” Faith shouted. Tourists below them on the Memorial turned to look. Faith backed away from the wall a few steps, hobbling on the crutches. “I’m simply not going to do it anymore, and that’s that.”
They were both quiet for a long time. “No one has ever walked away from the department,” Yorkton finally said. “Never.”
“First time for everything,” Faith said. It was getting harder and harder to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
“We will watch you. You know that, don’t you?”
Faith shrugged.
“I think you’re about to be a very lonely young woman, Faith,” Yorkton said.
“I already am,” Faith said.
Yorkton tried one more time. “You can not just quit Department Thirty.”
“Watch me,” Faith said, turned the crutches around, and hobbled away.