by Susan Sey
“Sit tight and put both hands on the wheel,” Patrick said. “Nice and high.”
Oz frowned but complied. “Why?”
“Because the cops are about to arrest you, and they get nervous if they can’t see your hands.”
His face went white, and he suddenly looked exactly like the kid he was. “Wait, what now?”
Patrick only tapped one ear with his finger and cocked his head. Sirens wailed in the distance, getting louder and closer. The helicopter buzzed by again, lower this time.
“Fuck that.” Oz tried to jerk out of the seat, but he was still belted in. He started fumbling with the clasp as the sirens approached. “I have five thousand in fake hundreds in my wallet.”
“I know,” Patrick said. “I was looking forward to watching you pass them, too.”
The first cop car screeched around the bend in the road behind them and Patrick shrugged. “Well, here we go.”
Oz laid his head against the steering wheel. “Shit.”
“Yeah.”
LIZ’S STOMACH was sour, her eyes burning with fatigue as she slipped out of Interview Room Two, leaving Goose to referee while Oz’s parents berated each other with discouraging gusto. It was no more than she’d expected. She doubted they’d voluntarily been in the same room since finalizing their divorce. Which probably hadn’t been a bad parenting decision, judging from their current behavior. They’d turned on each other like rabid dogs the minute Liz had informed them of their son’s extracurricular activities.
She slipped into the observation room and her heart stuttered to a halt when she spotted Patrick there, lounged elegantly over the gimpy folding chair that faced the one-way glass. A small white bandage stood out in stark relief against the tanned column of his throat, and her knees went watery at the reminder of how very close he’d come to dying today. She recovered her stride just before he turned those glacial eyes her way.
“You caught the show?” she asked as she fed the Coke machine a few quarters. She belted back the sugar and caffeine with the exhausted desperation of an addict.
“Yeah,” Patrick said. “Nice touch, turning them on each other like that when their son needs their full attention. They teach you that in cop school?”
The fog enveloping her brain surrendered to the caffeine just in time for her to catch the thread of disgust in his voice. She shrugged and pressed the cold can first to one eye, then the other. It was too late to change his opinion of her. Truth be told, she didn’t even want to. What would be the point? So he’d think well of her from his separate future across the country? It was enough that he was alive to have a future of any sort.
She’d just have to pray that her tenuous grip on all the pieces of her heart held long enough for her to arrest Villanueva and get Patrick out of town.
She watched Goose exit the interview room through the one-way glass. The Bradys barely noticed.
“God.” Goose shuddered as she slipped into the observation room. “That poor kid.”
“Yeah,” Liz said. “Have either of them asked to see him yet?”
“Nope. Too busy divvying up the blame.”
Liz shook her head, her heart somehow finding room for another ache at the memory of being seventeen herself and searching desperately for a life that made sense of her gifts. With the kind of moral guidance these two had provided, it was a wonder Oz—Donald, she corrected herself—hadn’t decided to go into arson. “The kid must have been conceived in a moment of wild optimism.”
“Or an alcoholic stupor.”
“Yeah, that’s probably more the case.” They stood in silence for another few moments while Liz finished her Coke and tossed the can into the recycling bin. Patrick watched the Bradys fling accusations at each other with increasing vitriol through the one-way glass.
“Listen,” Liz said, drawing Goose toward the far wall and lowering her voice. “I know this is technically a Secret Service collar and I don’t want to step on your toes, but can I make a suggestion?”
At Goose’s nod, she said, “Recommend counseling, reparations and community service in lieu of a formal charge. I know he could be tried as an adult, but—”
“Yeah, I was thinking that myself.” Goose smiled, but it was a little crumpled around the edges. “He’s well old enough. It won’t be an easy sell with the DA.”
“I’ll do whatever I can to help out.”
“I’ll set up a meeting with the DA and invite the whole family. That ought to go a long way toward generating some sympathy for the kid.” Goose glanced at the bickering couple on the other side of the glass and sighed. “Let those two wear themselves out a few minutes more, then cut them loose. I’m going to make some phone calls, see what I can do.”
“Thanks,” Liz said. Goose patted Patrick’s shoulder on her way out and he reached up to touch the back of her hand, flashing her the sweetest smile Liz had ever seen. She closed her eyes against a punishing wave of jealousy and hurt. She’d never seen such honest and uncomplicated affection in his face and it was a revelation. Had she really thought he wasn’t capable of that sort of emotion? Why had it never occurred to her that he just wasn’t interested in bestowing any of it on her? God, she was screwed up.
“So what’s on tap for our young friend now, Liz?” Patrick’s voice was smooth and urbane as always, but she could still hear the thin sliver of disgust in it.
She forced her face into a cool mask. “It’s out of my hands. He’s in the system now.”
“The system, huh?” Patrick turned those piercingly blue eyes on her. “You think the system will do any better by him than it did by you?”
Her heart stopped, swelled painfully against her ribs, then shrank down into a hard, black nugget. He knew. He knew who she was. What she’d been. She should have known he’d find out sooner or later. She’d said too much last night, and he’d opted for sooner.
“The system saved my life,” she said carefully.
“No, Liz. Your grandmother saved your life when she pulled you out of it.” He regarded her with hard eyes. “Mrs. Lacey Brynn Chambers. Socialite, heiress and the unlikely savior of one damaged little girl the system couldn’t have cared less about.”
She stared at him blindly. “What are you talking about?” she asked, even though she knew it was pointless to pretend she didn’t know.
“I’m talking about before, Liz. Before you were rescued. Before your granny plucked you out of your precious system. Before you had your trust fund, your education, your fresh start. Before you became super-agent Liz Brynn.”
Liz shook her head in silent plea, but Patrick went on.
“Come on, Liz, this is history we’re talking about. You were the most famous face in America for a while there. You were on the cover of Time, Newsweek, People, The New York Times, The Washington Post.”
“How did you find this out?” Liz asked, hating the tremble in her voice. “Nobody’s ever made this connection before. My grandmother made sure of it.”
He smiled at her. “A parting gift from Villanueva, who asked me to tell you the FBI database isn’t quite as well secured as it could be.” His smile died. “It is, however, extremely thorough. I was shocked to see how much the two of us have in common.”
“Were you?”
He inclined his head and studied her with unfriendly eyes. “Tell me, Liz, from one child of crime to another, how does the daughter of the country’s most famous criminal grow into a woman who’d throw the book at a neglected child?”
Chapter 23
“IT WASN’T easy.” She smiled faintly, or tried to. It might not have worked. She couldn’t tell from his face. She couldn’t tell anything from his face. “Getting from there to here. I could have just wallowed in my victimhood for the rest of my life, I suppose. Being a victim is pretty damned seductive. Just ask my father. He built an empire around it.”
“Your father was no victim.”
“Did I say he was?” Liz rolled her eyes. “Please. Pay attention here, Patrick. I’
m not going to go over this more than once. My father was a cult leader. He capitalized on other people’s victimhood. He gathered up all the broken, sad, disenfranchised people he could find and recast them as martyrs. Victims. God’s chosen ones, enduring the slings and arrows of the secular world in exchange for eternal glory.” She shrugged, the past shrinking in on her like an ill-fitting jacket. “If life is going to suck, it’s so much more satisfying to think it sucks for a reason, you know? They spoon-fed it to us with our mother’s milk. We were different. Special. We were The Chosen, handpicked by God to live by the sacred law as He revealed it. Funny thing, though. God only ever talked to my father. Which might explain, if you were the skeptical sort, why God was so concerned with his flock’s sexual practices. But hey, it made sense, right? God wanted his prophets to have lots of wives so they could have lots of children. Strength in numbers, you see?”
Patrick didn’t say anything, only continued regarding her with those still, unreadable eyes. Liz rolled her shoulders and plowed on.
“Sometimes a brother or sister left us, and we mourned them as if they had died. Even though we saw them in town with their hair cut short and their legs and arms showing, we knew their souls were condemned to the fiery depths of an eternal burning hell. And we were more afraid of hell than of anything, except maybe my father. Because to us, he was God. He interpreted the scripture, he received the revelations. He blessed us, he baptized us, he banished us.”
She stopped, unable to go on.
“And he gave away little girls as wives to anybody who had the power to line his pockets or advance his ambitions,” Patrick said, a bubbling river of rage in his voice. “As if he hadn’t already stolen enough money from his congregations. Christ, Liz, you were a child. Your wedding dress was all ribbons and bows, like you’d been fucking gift wrapped for some sick old man.”
“I know,” Liz said, bile rising up in her throat. She’d never forget that day. Her wedding day. The scent of dust and blood, the foreign pop of gunfire interrupting the ceremony, the heat and noise and confusion. FBI agents in black flak jackets swarming through the makeshift church like locusts, trampling her flowers, staining her dress. “But it didn’t happen. Not to me.”
“That was an accident of timing,” Patrick said softly. “If the FBI had scheduled their raid one day later, that lucky photographer would have captured you as innocence shattered rather than innocence saved.”
“Is that what you think you saw?” She looked at him, startled. “Innocence saved? Is that what America found in that photo?”
“Hell, yes. It was a pretty powerful image, Liz. A young girl teetering on the edge of womanhood, young enough to burrow down into the arms of that agent and cry, woman enough to know what that virginal white dress she was wearing meant. You knew exactly what that agent was saving you from, Liz. It was written all over your face. That’s what America responded to.”
“I guess I never thought about it that way. I only knew what I saw when I looked at it.” She laughed softly, bitterly. “You see, I’d been taught that my only value to God was in fulfilling my sacred duty to marry as He directed,” she said. “By preventing my marriage, I thought those agents were sentencing me to hell.”
“What?”
“They stopped me from obeying God’s will for me. They made me sinful. Unclean.”
“Bullshit,” Patrick said roughly.
Liz shook her head. “When that agent picked me up, I clung to him because he was huge and scary and strong, and I thought maybe the devil wouldn’t come for me if I stayed in his arms. That famous picture wasn’t of a little girl weeping over a near miss with polygamy. It was a picture of a little girl weeping over the eternity she’d have to spend in hell. It took years to understand I’d been saved, not damned.”
She gave him a lopsided smile. “Saved, Patrick. By the system that you’re so fond of denigrating. If it hadn’t been for the system, I’d have lived in uneducated poverty with a dozen or so sister wives, pumping out as many babies as possible to pave my way to heaven. If it hadn’t been for the system, I’d never have understood that what I’d been taught was God’s will was nothing but the ruthless ambition of a sociopathic abuser and I doubt I’d have even survived.
“But that raid produced a photograph that put my face in front of every influential person in the country, including my grandmother. Not that she was instantly filled with grandmotherly love for a kid she’d never even met. Losing her daughter—my mother—to a cult had broken her heart too badly for that sort of nonsense. But whatever she lacked in love, she made up for in responsibility and duty. She gave me a home, a name, a top-notch education and the anonymity to live as normal a life as possible. She also gave me that ridiculously expensive bathrobe you like so much. And it’s all because of the system you hate.
“I’m not saying it’s perfect, because God knows it’s not. But it’s the only thing that stands between abusers and the people who are too vulnerable to protect themselves. I wouldn’t call Donald Brady abused, not by any stretch. But he’s still a child, a badly neglected child, who deserves everything the system can provide in terms of the guidance and discipline his parents failed to give him. He needs to pay for what he did. That’s right and just. But he shouldn’t pay with blood, nor with his future. I’ll do everything I can to see to that.”
Patrick stared at her for a long moment. “You really believe you can make that happen?”
She returned his gaze, unflinching. “I can’t promise anything. But I’ll exhaust every avenue open to me on his behalf.”
He shook his head slowly. “How can you still be this innocent after everything you’ve lived through? Everything you’ve seen? You charge that kid and he’s going to jail. And all he’s going to learn there is how to be a better criminal.”
“But letting him skip out on any formal consequences of his actions isn’t going to teach him how to be a better citizen, either,” Liz said. “He needs to face this. The system needs to work.”
“Christ.” Patrick raked both hands through his hair and turned from her, stalked to the one-way glass where the Bradys were now disregarding each other in icy silence. “You’re acting like God himself carved the U.S. legal system on stone tablets and handed it down from on high. I don’t think you really ever recovered from that extremist childhood of yours, Liz. You still can’t understand shades of gray. You just transferred all that blind faith from God to the FBI.”
Liz stared at him, stunned. She wanted to dismiss him, to scoff at the very idea, but something inside her vibrated like a struck bell. Could that be true? Had she somehow managed to devote herself just as rigidly to FBI policy and procedure as she had to her childhood religion?
Her phone buzzed at her hip, and she moved carefully so as not to shatter. She felt as fragile as spun glass all of a sudden.
“Liz Brynn,” she said into the phone.
Thirty seconds later, she slowly closed the phone.
“SAC Bernard wants us in his office,” she told Patrick. “Now.”
PATRICK FOLLOWED Liz’s rigid shoulders down the narrow aisle between cubicles and into SAC Bernard’s office. It was spotless, as usual. If the man actually worked in this space, he hid it well.
An invisible and efficient admin clicked the door shut behind them, and Patrick instinctively put himself next to Liz, who was standing at attention in front of Bernard’s massive desk. Regardless of any argument he had with her philosophy on crime and punishment, whatever she was going to face here was on him, too. No matter what he’d just said, no matter how true it turned out to be, he admired what she’d done with her life. Hell, he marveled at it.
But everybody had their limit. He’d be damned if he’d stand back and let Liz reach hers alone.
“Have a seat,” Bernard said with a nod at the stiff-backed chairs behind them.
Liz looked briefly startled, but she sat. Patrick followed suit. “Villanueva was in the car with you and Donald Brady for approximately eight minu
tes after he discarded the recording device,” Bernard said to Patrick. “This is your one opportunity to tell us what was arranged during that time.”
Liz frowned. “I’ve already interviewed Mr. O’Connor on this matter,” she said. “He stated that Villanueva neither made new demands nor indicated a time or place for further meetings. He simply reiterated his demand for payment.”
Bernard ignored Liz and kept those cold gray eyes trained on Patrick. “Information was exchanged,” he repeated. “Information Villanueva wanted to remain private, a desire with which you readily complied. I’m giving you a chance here, O’Connor. We’ve always dealt fairly with you. Give us what we’re after, and we can protect you. You haven’t done anything you can’t recover from so far, but you’re perilously close to the line.”
“What are you implying?” Patrick asked. He always liked to see his opponent’s cards, and sometimes all you had to do was ask, especially with the truly unimaginative.
“I want to know what you’re partnering with Villanueva on.” Bernard spoke without inflection. “I’m prepared to deal leniently with you if you can provide what we need to put him away.”
Patrick let his brows rise in lazy surprise. “I’ll admit the upstanding life hasn’t always been my cup of tea, but I don’t think I’ve backslid to a degree quite that significant. Surely you can’t imagine that this entire stalking business Villanueva’s been engaging in—the break-ins at Liz’s and my sister’s, the surprise left hook in a dance club basement, the armed carjacking—has all been a tricky ruse to throw you off the trail?” Patrick let a mocking smile curve his lips. “I write movies. I don’t live them. Criminals are simple people, SAC Bernard. You of all people should know that. Villanueva just wants the money.”
Bernard gazed at him for long, tense moments, those granite eyes of his suddenly sharp and weary. “Think about it,” he said finally. “You pursue your own ends any further, and I can’t sanction your activities as undercover work. You’ll be off the reservation.”
