The Last Widow

“Let’s look at this next chart.” The marshal had pulled up another image, this one a flow chart detailing all the various agencies involved in the transport. Atlanta Police. Fulton County Police. Fulton County Sheriff’s office. US Marshals Service. The FBI. The ATF. The who-the-fuck-cares because Faith had two hours of folding laundry ahead of her, six if her precious daughter insisted on helping.

She checked to see if Will had texted back. He hadn’t. He was probably working on his car or doing push-ups or whatever else he did on the days he managed to get out of hideously long meetings.

He was probably still in bed with Sara.

Faith stared out the window. She let out a long sigh.

Will was a missed opportunity. She could see that now. Faith hadn’t been particularly attracted to him when they’d first met, but Sara had Pygmalioned his ass. She’d dragged him to a real hair salon instead of the weird guy in the morgue who traded haircuts for sandwiches. She had talked him into getting his suits tailored so he’d gone from looking like the sale rack at a Big and Tall Warehouse to the mannequin in the window of a Hugo Boss store. He was standing up straighter, more confident. Less awkward.

Then there was his sweet side.

He marked his calendar with a star on the days Sara got her hair done so he would remember to compliment her. He was constantly finding ways to say her name. He listened to her, respected her, thought she was smarter than he was, which was true, because she was a doctor, but what man admitted that? He was constantly regaling Faith with the ancient wisdoms that Sara had passed on to him:

Did you know that men can use lotion for dry skin, too?

Did you know that you’re supposed to eat the lettuce and tomato on a hamburger?

Did you know that frozen orange juice has a lot of sugar?

Faith was diabetic. Of course she knew about sugar. The question was, how did Will not know? And wasn’t it commonly understood that eating the lettuce and tomato meant you could order the fries? She knew Will had been raised feral, but Faith had lived with two teenage boys, first her older brother and then her son. She hadn’t been able to leave a bottle of Jergens unmolested on the bathroom counter until she was in her thirties.

How the hell did Will not know about lotion?

“Thank you, Marshal.” Major Maggie Grant had taken the floor.

Faith sat up in her seat, trying to look like a good student. Maggie was her spirit animal, a woman who had worked her way up the Atlanta Police Department food chain from crossing guard to Commander of Special Operations without turning into a testicle-gnarling bitch.

Maggie said, “I’ll briefly run down the SWAT Bible on transport from the APD perspective. We’re all following the Active Shooter Doctrine. No negotiation. Just pop and drop. From a tactical standpoint, we’ll maintain a hollow square around the pris—the high-value prisoner—at all times.”

Only Faith and Amanda laughed. There were exactly three women in the room. The rest were men who had probably not let a woman speak uninterrupted for this long since elementary school.

“Ma’am?” a hand shot up. So much for uninterrupted. “Concerning emergency egress for the prisoner—”

Faith looked at the clock.

1:44 p.m.

She opened Notes on her laptop and tried to trim down the grocery list she’d dictated to Siri this morning: Eggs, bread, juice, peanut butter, diapers, no, Emma, no, for fuck sakes, Emma don’t, oh Christ please stop, candy.

Technology had finally caught up with her bad parenting.

Had she always been like this? By the time Jeremy was in the first grade, Faith was twenty-two years old and working out of a squad car. Her parenting skills fell somewhere between Charlotte’s Web and Lord of the Flies. Jeremy still teased her about the note she’d once left in his lunch box: The bread is stale. This is what happens when you don’t close the bag.

She had vowed to be a better mother to Emma, but what did that mean, exactly?

Not creating a Mount Vesuvius of unfolded laundry on the living room couch? Not letting carpet fuzz build up in the vacuum so that it smelled like burned rubber every time she turned it on? Not realizing until exactly three-twelve this morning that the reason the toy box smelled like rotten fruit roll-ups was because Emma had been hiding all of her fruit roll-ups in the bottom?

Toddlers were such fucking assholes.

“I’m Deputy Director Amanda Wagner with the GBI.”

Faith jerked back to attention. She had gone into a fugue state from the heat and boredom. She said a silent prayer thanking Jesus, because Amanda was the last speaker.

She leaned on the desk in the front of the room and waited for everyone’s undivided attention. “We’ve had six months to prepare for this transfer. Any failures to secure the prisoner are down to human error. You people in this room are the humans who could make that error. Put your hand down.”

The guy in the front put his hand down.

Amanda looked at her watch. “It’s five past two. We’ve got the room until three. Take a ten-minute break, then come back and review your books. No papers are allowed to leave the room. No files on your laptops. If you have any questions, submit them in writing to your immediate supervisor.” Amanda smiled at Faith, the only agent in the room that she was in charge of supervising. “Thank you, gentlemen.”

The door opened. Faith could see the hallway. She weighed the consequences of pretending to go to the bathroom and slipping out the back door.

“Faith.” Amanda was walking toward her. Trapping her. “Wait up a minute.”

Faith closed her laptop. “Are we going to talk about why no one is mentioning the fact that our high-value prisoner thinks he’s going to overthrow the deep state like Katniss from The Hunger Games?”

Amanda’s brow furrowed. “I thought Katniss was the hero?”

“I have a problem with women in authority.”

Amanda shook her head. “Look, Will needs his ego massaged.”

Faith was momentarily without a response. The request was surprising on two levels. First, Will bristled at any kind of handholding and second, Amanda lived to crush egos.

Amanda said, “He’s smarting over not being picked for this task force.”

“Picked?” Faith had lost half a dozen Sundays to this tedium. “I thought this was a punishment for—” She wasn’t stupid enough to make a list. “For punishing me.”

Amanda kept shaking her head. “Faith, these men in the room—they’re going to be in charge of everything one day. You need them to get used to your being part of the conversation. You know—network.”

“Network?” Faith tried not to say the word as an explicative. Her motto had always been Why go big when I can go home?

Amanda said, “These are your prime earning years. Have you thought about the fact that you’ll be eligible for Medicare by the time Emma’s in college?”

Faith felt a stabbing pain in her chest.

“You can’t stay in the field forever.”

“And Will can?” Faith was perplexed. Amanda was like a mother to Will. If you were worried that your mother was going to run you down with her car. “Where is this coming from? Will’s your favorite. Why are you holding him back?”

Instead of answering, Amanda flipped through the briefing book, pages and pages of single-spaced text.

Faith didn’t need an explanation. “He’s dyslexic. He’s not illiterate. He’s better with numbers than I am. He can read a briefing book. It just takes a little longer.”

“How do you know he’s dyslexic?”

“Because—” Faith didn’t know how she knew. “Because I work with him. I pay attention. I’m a detective.”

“But he’s never told you. And he’ll never tell anyone. Therefore, we can’t offer him accommodations. Therefore, he’ll never move up the food chain.”

“Christ,” Faith muttered. Just like that, she was closing down Will’s future.

“Mandy.” Maggie Grant walked into the room. She had a bottle of cold water for each of them. “Why on earth are you both still in here? It’s cooler in the hallway.”

Faith angrily twisted the cap off the bottle. She couldn’t believe this Will bullshit. It wasn’t Amanda’s job to decide what he was capable of doing or not doing.

“How’s your mother?” Maggie asked Faith.

“Good.” Faith gathered up her stuff. She had to get out of here before she said something stupid.

“And Emma?”

“Very easy. No complaints.” Faith stood from the chair. Her sweaty shirt peeled off her skin like a lemon rind. “I should—”

“Send them both my love.” Maggie turned to Amanda, “How’s your boy doing?”

She meant Will. All of Amanda’s friends referred to him as her boy. The term reminded Faith of the first time you meet Michonne in the Walking Dead.

Amanda said, “He’s getting by.”

“I bet.” Maggie told Faith, “You should’ve locked that down before Sara entered the picture.”

Amanda guffawed. “She’s not sweet enough for him.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Faith held up her hands to stop her own decapitation. “Sorry. I was up at three in the morning dragging a toy box into the front yard. The sky was awake, so I was awake.”

Faith was saved bastardizing more lines from Frozen by a ringing cell phone.

Maggie said, “That’s me.” She walked over to the windows and answered the call.

Then Amanda’s phone started to ring.

More rings echoed in the hallway. It sounded like every phone in the building was going off.

Faith checked her watch. She’d silenced the notifications before the meeting, but she turned them on again now. An alert had come in at 2:08 p.m. through the First Responder Notification System:

EXPLOSIONS AT EMORY UNIVERSITY. MASS CASUALTIES. THREE MALE WHITE SUSPECTS FLED IN SILVER CHEV MALIBU LP# XPR 932. HOSTAGE TAKEN. CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

For a moment, Faith lacked the ability to comprehend the information. She felt a nervous sickness rattle her body, the same sensation she got when she saw an alert for a school shooting or a terrorist attack. And then she thought about the fact that Novak’s team liked explosions. But a university wasn’t their M.O. and Novak’s safe house was well outside the city.

“Send all available agents,” Amanda barked into her phone. “I need details. Descriptions. A casualty estimate. Have SOU coordinate with ATF on securing the campus. Let me know the second the governor calls out the National Guard.”

“Amanda.” Maggie’s voice was tightly controlled. This was her city, her responsibility. “My bird will meet us on the roof.”

“Let’s go.” Amanda motioned for Faith to come.

Faith grabbed her bag, the nervous sickness turning into a lump of concrete inside of her stomach as her mind started to process what had happened. An explosion at the university. A hostage taken. Mass casualties. Armed and dangerous.

They were all running by the time they reached the stairs. Maggie led them up, but the other officers from the meeting were pounding their way down in a furious rush because that’s what cops did when something bad happened. They ran toward the bad thing.

“I’m giving the authorization …” Maggie yelled into her phone as she sprinted past the next landing, “… 9-7-2-2-4-alpha-delta. 10-39 every available. I want all birds in the air. Tell the commander I’m five minutes out.”

“One of the bombers was wounded.” Amanda was finally getting information. She glanced back at Faith as she climbed. Shock flashed across her face. “The hostage is Michelle Spivey.”

Maggie muttered a curse, grabbing the railing to pull herself up the next flight. She listened into her phone a moment, then reported, “I’ve got two wounded, nothing about Spivey.” She was breathing hard, but she didn’t stop. “One perp was hit in the leg. Second in the shoulder. The driver was dressed in an Emory security uniform.”

Faith felt the sweat on her body turn cold as she listened to the words echoing down the stairwell.

“A nurse recognized Spivey.” Amanda was off the phone. She shouted to be heard over their footsteps scuffing the concrete treads. “There’s conflicting information but—”

Maggie stopped on another landing. She held up her hand for quiet. “Okay, we’ve got an eye-witness from Dekalb PD saying that two bombs went off in the parking structure across from the hospital. The second detonation was timed to take out the first responders. We’ve got at least fifteen people trapped inside. Ten casualties on the ground.”

Faith tasted bile in her mouth. She looked down at the ground. There were cigarette butts where someone had been smoking. She thought of her dress uniform hanging in the closet, the number of funerals she would be attending in the coming weeks, the number of times she would have to stoically stand at attention while families fell apart.

“There’s more.” Maggie started up the stairs again. Her footsteps were not as brisk. “Two security guards found murdered in the basement. Two Dekalb PD killed when the bombers made their escape. One more is in surgery. Fulton County sheriff’s deputy. Doesn’t look good for her.”

Faith resumed the climb at a slower pace, feeling gut-punched by the news. She let herself think of her children. Her own mother who had done this job. She knew what it was like to wait for news, to not know whether your parent was dead or alive or hurting and all you could do was sit in front of the television and try to convince yourself that this wasn’t the time they wouldn’t come home.

Amanda stopped for a moment. She put her hand on Faith’s shoulder. “Ev knows you’re with me.”

Faith made her legs keep moving, kept climbing up the stairs because that was all that she could do. It was all any of them could do.

Her mother was watching Emma. Jeremy was at a video game tournament with his friends. They all knew Faith was downtown at the meeting because she had complained loudly about it to anyone who would listen.

Two security guards murdered.

Two cops murdered.

A deputy who probably wouldn’t wake up from surgery.

All of those patients in the hospital. Sick people—sick children, because there wasn’t just one hospital at Emory, there was Egleston Children’s Hospital a block down the street. How many times had Faith driven Emma to the emergency room in the middle of the night? The nurses were so kind. Every doctor so patient. There were parking structures scattered around the building. An explosion could easily send one collapsing onto the hospital.

And then what? How many buildings had been destroyed during the aftershocks on 9/11?

Finally, Maggie pushed open the door at the top of the stairs. Sunlight sliced into Faith’s retinas, but her eyes were already filled with angry tears.

The second detonation was timed to take out the first responders.

She heard the distant chop of helicopter blades. The black UH-1 Huey was almost older than Faith. SWAT used it for fast roping and fire rescue. Men were already suited up in the back. Full tactical gear. AR-15s. More first responders. They would have to go room by room, structure by structure, and ensure there were no other bombs waiting for the signal to detonate.

The chopping got tighter as the aircraft drew closer.

Faith’s thoughts kept a silent cadence between the slicing rotors—

Two-guards-two-families.

Two-cops-two-families.

One-deputy-one-family.

“Mandy.” Maggie had to yell to be heard over the roar of the engines. There was something in her voice that made the air go taut, a knot being jerked into a string.

“It’s Will, Mandy. They hurt your boy.”

4

Sunday, August 4, 1:54 p.m.

Sara made a mental note of the Porsche driver’s estimated time of death as she checked the F-150 driver’s lacerated scalp.

“Gas main exploded. We got the hell outta there.” The truck passenger pointed toward the silver Chevy Malibu. “It’s them people there you should be worried about. Guy in the back seat ain’t lookin’ so good.”

Sara was glad to hear Will keeping pace as she jogged toward the Chevy. There was something not adding up about this car accident. The rear-end impact from the truck didn’t feel severe enough to break the driver’s neck. A mystery for the Atlanta medical examiner to figure out. Eventually. There was no telling how long it would take to clear out the gas main explosion. It was sheer luck that the construction site was empty.

Still—

Broken neck. No other signs of trauma. No lacerations. No contusions.

Weird.

The Malibu driver told Will, “My friend needs help.”

“She’s a doctor,” Merle said.

“Sir?” Sara knelt down to examine the unconscious man in the back seat of the Malibu. The passenger beside him watched her every move. Airway clear. Breathing normal. “Sir, are you okay?”

Sara heard names being tossed around behind her.

Dwight, Clinton, Vince, Merle.

“Dwight?” Sara tried. The back of the Malibu was dark, the windows tinted almost black. She pulled the unconscious man into the sunlight. His pupils were reactive. His vertebrae were aligned. His pulse was strong and steady. His skin felt sticky, but then it was August. Everyone’s skin felt sticky.

“I’m Hank,” the passenger beside him told Sara. “You’re a doctor?”

Sara nodded, but that was all she could give him. This idiot had knocked himself unconscious because he hadn’t bothered to put on a seat belt. The gas main explosion would have critical cases: burns, traumatic brain injuries, crush trauma, projectiles.

Hank opened the door and got out of the car.

Sara glanced up.

Then she stared.

Blood soaked the back of Hank’s leg.

He turned around, leaning his arms on the roof of the car. His shirt slid up. There was a gun tucked into the front of his pants. Sara heard him say, “Clinton, it’s nobody’s fault.”

Sara looked at her hands. The stickiness wasn’t from sweat. It was from blood. She brushed her palm along Dwight’s back. The familiar puckered hole in his left shoulder indicated the same type of injury she’d seen on the back of Hank’s leg.

A gunshot wound.

The Porsche driver’s broken neck. The short skid marks on the road. The blood trail leading to the truck. The names—would Will catch the fake names? Dwight Yoakam. Hank Williams. Merle Haggard. Vince Gill. Clint Black. They were all country music singers.

Sara took a deep breath and held in her panic.

She carefully searched the Malibu for a weapon.

Dwight’s holster was empty. Nothing on the floorboards. She looked between the front seats and almost gasped.

A woman had wedged herself into the footwell. Petite with short, platinum blonde hair. Arms wrapped tightly around her legs. She hadn’t moved or made a noise this entire time, but now she raised up her head and showed her face.

Sara’s heart shuddered to a stop.

Michelle Spivey.

The missing woman’s eyes were bloodshot with tears. Her cheeks were sunken. Her lips were chapped and bleeding. She spoke soundlessly, desperately—

Help.

Sara felt her own mouth open. She took a stuttered breath. She heard another word echoing in her head, the same word that came to every woman’s mind when they were surrounded by aggressive, damaged men—

Rape.

“Will.” Sara’s hands trembled as she fumbled in her pocket for the key fob. “I need you to get my medical bag out of the glove compartment of the car.”

Please. She silently begged. Get your gun and stop this.

Will grabbed the key. She felt the brush of his fingers. He didn’t look at her. Why wouldn’t he look at her?

Clinton said, “Give us a hand, big guy. Let’s go.”

“Wait.” Sara tried to slow them down. “He could have a neck injury or—”

“Ma’am, excuse me.” Merle’s beard was long but his hair was buzz-cut. He had to be police or military. All of them were. They stood the same way, moved the same way, followed orders the same way.

Not that it mattered. They had already gained the upper hand.

Will had clearly made the same calculation. He was looking at Sara now. She could feel his eyes on her. Sara could not look back at him because she knew that she would fall apart.

He said, “I’ll get your bag.”

Hank had limped around the car. He stood beside Sara—not too close, but close enough. Sara could feel the threat of him like a chemical burning her skin.

Will gripped the key fob in his fist as he walked toward the BMW. He was angry, which was good. Unlike most men, fury cleared Will’s mind. His muscles were tensed. She focused all of her strength, all of her hope, onto his broad shoulders.

“Vale.” Hank was speaking to Vince. He wasn’t using their code names anymore. The pretense was over. Either Sara or Will had given themselves away or Hank had figured out that the police sirens they were hearing in the distance would soon find their way down Bella’s street.

Hank lifted his chin, indicating Vale should follow the rest of the team to the car.

“Out,” Hank told Michelle, his voice low. He had a gun in his hand. It was small, but it was still a gun.

Michelle winced as she crawled over the center console. She held up her pants with one hand. The fly was unzipped. Blood dripped over her fist, ran down her legs.

Sara’s heart turned to glass.

Michelle’s bare feet slapped the asphalt. A bout of dizziness made her reach for the car to steady herself. She had open sores between the webbing of her toes. Needle tracks. They had drugged her. They had cut her. She was bleeding between her legs.

Rape.

“Don’t scream,” Hank said.

Before Sara could react, a blinding pain shot from her wrist to her arm and into her shoulder. She was forced onto her knees. The road bit into her skin. Hank twisted her arm again. Sara had her fingers laced behind her head by the time Will reached the BMW.

He leaned into the car.

He looked up.

His jaw tightened down so hard that she could see the outline of the bones.

Sara watched his eyes track—Hank pointing a gun at her head. Michelle holding up her bloody pants. Three armed men surrounding him. No way to save Sara even if he sacrificed himself in the process.

This final realization brought an expression to his face that Sara had never seen before:

Fear.

“You let—” Michelle’s voice was hoarse. She was talking to Hank. “You l-let him rape me.”

The words were a hammer to Sara’s heart.

“You c-can’t—” Michelle gulped. “You can’t pretend it’s n-not happening. I’m telling you now. You know what he—”

“All right!” Hank shouted over her. He told Will, “I need you to slowly get your head out of the car and put your hands up.”

Sara could only watch as Will complied. His eyes kept darting around. His brain was furiously working, trying to find a way out of this.

There was no way out.

They were going to kill Will. They were going to make Sara fix them and then they were going to tear her apart.

“You let him do it,” Michelle whispered. “You let him h-hurt me. You let him—”

“We need a doctor,” Hank shouted at Will. “No offense, brother. Wrong place, right time. Let’s go, lady. Get in the car.”

Sara had been expecting this moment, but she did not realize until now what her response would be.

“No.”

She didn’t move.

Her knees were part of the asphalt.

She was as sentient as a mountain.

Sara had been raped in college. Viciously, brutally, savagely raped. She had been robbed of her ability to have children. Had her sense of self, her sense of safety, forever stolen. The experience had altered her in ways that she still, almost twenty years later, was discovering. She had vowed that she would never let that happen to her ever again.