by Carly Bishop
Standing at the elevator surrounded by deputies of the United States Marshal Service, exhausted by the weeks of waiting, the endless protection, the lack of any real privacy, the hopelessness of it all, Eden almost gave in to hysteria and laughed.
Wire fraud.
Two years at most.
That’s all her sacrifice was worth. The brutal irony choked her. Her chest tightened with a fear she hadn’t felt so fiercely since she was five years old and had been taken in by Social Services for the first time.
The verse was different, but the refrain was the same. Eden Kelley had no home.
The elevator came to a stop on a restricted-access floor of the Federal Building. Flanked by the deputies, she walked at her own pace, trying perversely to gain the tiniest sense that she was in control of her life. A maze of hallways led to the garage, where a car with darkened, bulletproof windows waited to transport her to Logan International Airport. Eden began to smell the automobile exhaust wafting in from the garage.
A small cluster of four men and one woman entered the unadorned hallway slightly ahead of Eden’s protective entourage. The woman was taller than Eden’s fire-five height, with short dark hair and a three-quarter-length navy suede coat that nearly matched her own forest green one.
Eden thought the group composed a decoy team until the woman gazed adoringly up at the knockout, drop-dead gorgeous guy dressed in torn jeans and a black leather trench coat. “We’re pregnant! Can you believe it, Chris? Baby finally makes three.”
“Little loaf in the oven, eh, Tierney?” teased one of the other suit-clad men.
“Lead in the pencil after all!” gibed another
“You’re gonna name the kid after me, right?” a third one demanded.
“Right, Dilts,” the gorgeous expectant dad returned, his deep voice vibrant with a Boston accent. “I been waiting since second grade to grow up and name my firstborn after you.”
The five of them laughed as if this joke were the natural evolution of lifelong friends. Eden felt a wave of jealousy, a pang of longing, of not belonging so intense it stole her breath. She blinked and forced her gaze off them, and focused straight ahead.
The first man, Dilts, shoved through the heavy metal door with his shoulder, and the laughing fivesome poured into the garage. The deputy leading Eden’s protective detail caught and held open the door after them, and in that instant, the deadly cocking sounds of a shotgun splintered the laughter.
One of the deputies roared, “It’s a damned ambush!” and in the next second, a man swung wildly around from behind a concrete pillar, his head covered in a ski mask, the deadly shotgun aimed from his side. He looked no farther away than the woman ahead of Eden, and he brought the shotgun to bear on her chest.
His eyes seemed on fire.
Raw panic rose in Eden and she screamed, “You! No! No! God, no!” but the weapon erupted. Blinding bursts of light spewed out. The deafening blasts echoed and magnified and obliterated her scream.
Time seemed to warp, to stop. The woman who belonged crumpled silently back into the arms of her husband. The men surrounding her and the men surrounding Eden had already drawn sidearms and sprang into action. Someone shoved her to the ground. The men fanned out, shouting orders, covering one another, all of them firing. Eden saw the hit man duck and feint and run. He never made it to cover. He fell hard and facedown to the concrete floor in a terrible hail of gunfire.
One of the deputies held Eden down by the collar of her coat. She tried to scramble up, to shrug out of her coat, to go to the other woman. To stop her awful bleeding.
A part of Eden’s mind urged her to break and run instead. The gunman was playing a dirty trick. The instinct nearly overwhelmed her. She knew he must only be pretending to be dead. Any second, he would curl up and around and take aim and this time not kill an innocent bystander, but her.
She didn’t care. She couldn’t face a lifetime of this kind of evil lurking behind every closed door. She almost hoped he’d come back to life and riddle her body with bullets. Amid the terrible chaos, she heard the woman’s husband desperately commanding someone, anyone, to get an ambulance.
Eden began to hyperventilate as she writhed in the deputy’s grasp. “Let me go,” she begged, crying. “If I don’t help her, she’ll die! Let me go!”
He snatched her back.
“Stay down, damn it!” the deputy snarled. “It’s already too late. Now breathe! There’s nothing you can do. Breathe!”
She would never breathe easily again. The horror of that crushed orchid blossom filled her mind, gnawed at her awareness. The other woman had been blown away, and every instinct fired at Eden to run. She recognized the gunman from Web’s office, but what could she tell these lawmen that they wouldn’t already know? That the shooter was a crony of his?
The narrow hallway filled with more men armed with more guns. The shouting intensified. Eden felt unutterably cold and sick at heart and numbed and guilty. Another woman was shot dead with bullets meant for her.
The crushed orchid blossom... Oh, God.
The deputies finally dragged her up and poked her into the bulletproof car. The last thing she saw was the drop-dead gorgeous expectant dad, holding the dead woman tight to his chest, his head bowed low.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Such a brutal loss would forever deaden a man’s heart. “So sorry.” Emotion scalded her. Tears spilled down her cheeks, but they had dried by the time the deputies put her on the west-bound jet.
“Flying into the sunset,” she murmured. “And she lived happily ever after.” The deputies just looked at her, not knowing whether to smile or look tactfully away. Not knowing how to respond at all to the black humor that kept her from going quietly insane.
She couldn’t get warm. After a while, two of the men accompanying her began to question her about the attack. She told them everything she could. She told them she knew the shooter was an associate of Winston Broussard’s. That she’d seen both of them together, naming the time and place that she remembered exactly. She described the shooter’s eyes. She agreed, numbly, fearfully, to be recalled when the case came to trial.
She dozed off and on. Each time she jerked awake, the image of the murderer’s eyes, like flaming amber, filled her mind. The jet finally landed. The deputies and local FBI agents scouted the area and convinced themselves the destination was secure, and then, still numb, still cold, Eden disembarked.
It was colder here in Wyoming than in Boston. Her breath froze in the thin air. The jagged, snow-covered Tetons ruled the landscape. The deputies helped her into yet another car, but the drive was short, ending at the icecrusted wooden steps of a mountain cabin veranda.
Seven hours after the gunman had murdered another woman in her stead, Eden Kelley became Lisa Hollister. She was helped to undress by a hardy, wrinkled old woman named Judith. The ritual felt familiar—kindly strangers taking an abandoned child into their homes. The old woman crooned softly and brushed Lisa Hollister’s short, out-of-a-bottle sable brown hair one hundred brisk strokes.
Judith put her to bed beneath a well-worn handmade quilt, blew out the tallow candle and sat with Lisa Hollister through the night in a softly creaking rocking chair.
But by touch, to keep the shame and horror at bay, Eden counted stitches and squares in the dark and multiplied stitches by squares in her head until she knew there were 26,800 separate stitches in the quilt, give or take fifty.
WINSTON ELIJAH BROUSSARD didn’t spend even two years in the country-club federal penitentiary where he’d been consigned. He served seventeen months and four days. His release was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the cause of Deputy Marshal Christian X Tierney’s sacrificing whatever thin veneer of civilization he had managed to retain. His fellow deputies used to joke with him, changing Tierney into Tyranny. He didn’t think they’d see the humor much longer.
Catherine lay dead and buried in a windy cemetery on Chestnut Hill with her unborn child still in her body. Chris though
t sometimes, when he indulged a black rage and had to get totally drunk on Jack Daniel’s to kill the pain in his heart, that he should have just lam down beside her in the frozen earth and been done with it.
No one in any law enforcement agency ever kidded themselves for long that justice prevailed more often than it was perverted, but Chris had a personal stake in dealing real justice now.
God’s own justice. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Catherine was dead.
The day was overcast and windy, typical of Boston in May. The cold wind blowing off the Atlantic sliced through even his battle-scarred leather trench coat. Chris shoved through the doors of the Federal Building, flashed his badge and ID at the guards standing by to sweep their hand-held electronic metal detectors over anyone who set off the alarm system.
He looked like hell, but he was clean. He was always clean, though he hadn’t shaved in days and didn’t intend to. He didn’t much resemble the clean-cut, Irish-Slavic eager-beaver deputy in the photo ID. His eyes were still hazel, his hair black, height six-one, weight one eighty-five. But his hair was way out of regs. His eyes were bloodshot all the time. And the unshaven whiskers made the angles of his face a little savage. Still, the guards recognized him and let him pass.
He got on the elevator, off on the restricted floor that housed the United States Marshal Service, Boston, and glanced up at the surveillance cameras. He pushed through another set of doors on an electronic lock, then passed rows of cubicles, finally letting himself unannounced into Chief Deputy Paul Maroncek’s office. He stood, waiting.
Maroncek looked up from a bulky report. He leaned back in his blue leather chair, tossing his ballpoint atop the file folder. He nodded at the chair opposite him.
Chris sat.
“A job well done, Tierney,” Maroncek said at last, gesturing to the report. “The attorney general is ecstatic. Seven captures in what? A year and a half?”
“Seventeen months.”
It was true. Chris had reinvented himself. He’d become a merciless, dangerous son of a bitch. He needed some outlet for the rage, some way to burn off the violence in his soul. Even after he took to a mean vintage Harley, tracked down and captured seven of the most dangerous fugitives on the Eastern Seaboard, even after he traced Winston Broussard’s activities and haunted his former bases of operation and consumed everything there was to know about the man whose assassin had killed the wrong woman, even then, Chris was left constantly spoiling for a fight.
He’d found more than one. The last brawl had left him laid up in a hospital in Whitewater, New Hampshire, where he suffered through five days and nights quaking like a man with malaria, only his shaking came from withdrawal.
When his mind cleared, the nightmares returned. The same disorienting, wildly disjointed images of Catherine’s murder, like holographic images projected at an agonizingly slow pace of one per second.
Three weeks ago, Chris had cornered a domestic terrorist in one of the most bloody, bullet-ridden captures he’d ever executed. That night, his nightmares finally broke through to his consciousness and he knew. Eden Kelley, the intended victim of the bullets that killed Catherine, had been screaming beneath the echoing blast of the shotgun. You! No! No! God, no!
Eden had recognized the shooter.
He planned, then, to pervert the witness protection system he still believed in. He would dig out Eden Kelley’s new identity and location so he could bring her back. She was the key. The only person on the face of God’s green earth who could link Broussard to Catherine’s assassin.
In the past few days, after poring over official investigation notes, Chris knew the FBI had already pursued that avenue. Eden Kelley had recognized the shooter and could even cite the day and time she had seen him together with Broussard because it was the night David Tafoya had taken her into protective custody. But guilt by association hadn’t translated into a viable prosecution tactic since the Salem witch trials. Lacking any other link to Broussard, the FBI couldn’t even bring him before a grand jury for indictment.
Eden Kelley’s testimony would only further endanger her life. No charges were brought. No grand jury was ever called. Broussard was off scot-free.
He had not even served a full two years on the wirefraud charges, but Catherine was dead for all time and Eden Kelley would live a fugitive’s existence, in fear for her life, forever. Chris could no longer stand by and let it be. He wanted real justice. And for that, Broussard must die.
Maroncek wasn’t stupid. He knew the seventeen months in which Chris had turned in those captures was also the length of sentence Broussard had served.
“Suppose you heard,” Maroncek said, shoving his half glasses up onto his head. Narrow-faced, he had a full head of silver hair and penetrating, squinty blue eyes.
“Yeah. Broussard was released.” Chris slumped. “Too frigging bad I had to hear it on the Channel 5 news.”
Maroncek shrugged. “You weren’t in yesterday. Or the day before yesterday, or the day before that.”
Chris sighed sharply and shook his head. Maroncek knew Chris hadn’t been in because he’d been on a roundthe-clock stakeout trying to nab a heavily armed, cocainefreaked fugitive. “This office knew, Paul. Everyone on that stakeout knew a week ago.” Word had gotten around to everyone but him.
Maroncek pinched the bridge of his nose. “This office has a few higher mandates than keeping you informed. And frankly, it’s of some concern to me that you refuse to let this thing with Broussard go.”
Chris could no longer keep his anger leashed. “Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass that you’re concerned. Frankly, I resent the hell out of your concern. It’s insulting. I don’t need a keeper.”
Wearily, Maroncek let his chair spring upright. “What possible difference does it make that Broussard was released ? Are you planning to take him out? Avenge Catherine’s death? You think you’re going to feel better then, like a real man? It doesn’t work that way, my friend.”
Chris met Maroncek’s hard stare straight on and kept quiet. The silence lasted for over a minute.
Maroncek finally gave a heavy sigh. Chris knew his superior might worry about it all day long, but he wouldn’t for a minute believe Chris capable of tracking Broussard down to blow him away.
Maroncek was wrong.
“Look,” the chief deputy said at last, trying to make up for having insulted Chris’s integrity, “the Feebs have got their shorts in a knot over this thing. Tafoya thinks Broussard has a fix on the Kelley woman’s location.”
Chris straightened. “Why?”
Maroncek shook his head. “Beats the hell out of me.”
“We’re supposed to take it on faith that her cover has been blown?” Chris demanded. He didn’t believe in taking things at face value, and faith required a kind of spiritual conviction he no longer indulged in at all. “Is Tafoya suggesting Witness Protection leaked her location?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Maroncek grimaced. The U.S. Marshal Service was inevitably going to be blamed when a relocated witness’s cover was blown. He began toying with a pen. “The Feebs aren’t talking,” he went on. “Tafoya is playing this hand close to the chest. The most obvious conclusion is that Eden Kelley saw someone she knew, panicked over the chance that she’d been spotted and called Tafoya. Sheila Jacques’s name came up, but Tafoya refuses to confirm or deny.”
Chris shook his head.
“Do you know who the Jacques woman is?” Maroncek asked.
“I’ve heard the name.” Chris knew Paul’s question was carefully phrased. Bait in a fishing expedition. He wanted to know exactly how well-informed Chris was. How obsessed. But he also knew it would be deadly to deny knowing anything about the woman. “An old friend of Eden Kelley’s.”
Maroncek nodded. “Apparently, her closest friend. The closest thing she had to any family.”
Chris knew that, as well, and more, but he didn’t think Paul expected a comment. “I don’t buy it, Paul. Even if Eden Ke
lley knew she’d been seen, she has to know better than to call Tafoya. She has an assigned contact in Witness Protection—”
“I agree. She was instructed in procedure, Chris,” Maroncek interrupted. “But—again, neither confirming nor denying that she called him—Tafoya maintains that if Eden Kelley’s witness protection identity has been compromised, then someone inside this office has either screwed up and leaked the information, or—”
“Deliberately sold her down the river.”
Maroncek sighed heavily and tossed the pen down. “Exactly.”
“So Tafoya can make the case that he’s the only one she can trust.”
“Again, exactly.”
Chris didn’t think Paul was done. “What’s the bottom line?”
“Tafoya wants her relocated and he wants it done by his people.”
“Bypassing Witness Protection altogether?” Chris asked incredulously.
“Yes.”
“He’ll never get the A.G. to approve that.”
Maroncek gave a bitter smile. “The attorney general, bless her little pointed head, has already given Tafoya the nod. She’s convinced that the Kelley woman has a right to be spooked by a blown protection—if that’s happened— and to decide whom she’ll trust.”
Chris swore. “I don’t believe it.” He swung out of his seat and dumped his coat in the chair. He couldn’t believe this sheer reckless disregard of the Marshal Service and a program that had safely relocated an overwhelming majority of its charges.
The truth was, though, that Chris admired the Feebs’ ploy. If Eden Kelley were his witness—and if he were in Tafoya’s shoes, already humiliated by a case that had publicly crumbled and left a witness marked to die—Chris would have done the same thing and to hell with the bureaucracy. The witness’s life was paramount.
So, yeah. He understood Tafoya’s reasoning—even admired the end result. A man who could think made a far better cop than a by-the-book drone. Tafoya was thinking.
