At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  Nick waved off the sentimentality and turned away.

  Jake looked at Carolyn for a long, long moment. They’d shared everything. Good times and bad. It couldn’t end like this. They’d always been together. That’s how any of this was able to work. How could he watch Travis be sent off to a hospital somewhere while Carolyn was shipped off to prison? He didn’t think he could make a go of it alone. What would happen if he failed? He realized in a rush of emotion that he’d never see either of them again. Never hear his wife’s throaty laugh; never rumple his son’s hair. He pulled Carolyn close, overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness. There’d always been options; there’d always been plans. Now there was nothing. Now he was alone. He couldn’t…

  “Jake, we’ve got to go,” Nick said.

  Carolyn pushed Jake away and reached up to wipe the tears from his face, ignoring her own. “He’s right,” she said. “You’ve got to go. I’ve got to be with Travis.”

  Jake shook his head. “Together forever, remember?” he pleaded softly.

  “Family first,” she corrected, straightening her husband’s hair with her fingers. “This is the only way.”

  He wanted to argue. He tried to argue, but the words just weren’t there. He allowed Nick to pull gently on his arm, and as they stepped away, Carolyn’s face collapsed. She pivoted quickly and headed toward the ambulance, where Bob and Barbara were lifting Travis through the back doors.

  “I love you!” Jake shouted after her, his voice thick and raspy.

  He couldn’t tell if she’d heard him over the rumble of the ambulance’s motor.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Irene walked briskly through the throngs of reporters that had gathered outside Little Rock’s Adult Detention Center, ignoring their shouted questions, concentrating instead on the ones she planned on asking herself. Paul had gone on to the hospital to stay with the boy, in case his condition improved enough to answer some questions, while George Sparks stuck with her. Once inside the jail, they were joined by Tom Flaherty, superintendent of the ADC, who greeted them warmly and seemed to be good friends with Sparks.

  “How long have you had her?” Irene asked, keeping the pace moving down the hallway.

  “About an hour,” Flaherty answered. “Long enough to get her in-processed. Any word on the other one?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. He’ll turn up, though. He’s lost too much just to disappear.” Maybe if she said it confidently enough, it would come true. Frankel wasn’t nearly as pleased as she’d thought he’d be that fifty percent of the team was in custody. “No one’s talked to her yet, right?” she pressed.

  “Nope. Not beyond the standard in-processing crap, anyway. You know, name, rank, and serial number.”

  “Has she lawyered up?” This from Sparks.

  “Not that I know of,” Flaherty said with a shrug. “In fact, I’m not sure she even answered the name, rank, and serial number questions. I’m told she’s pretty dejected.”

  Irene chuckled at that. “Yeah, well, her day’s about to get a lot worse.”

  The three-person parade stopped at the edge of the security area, while Irene and George deposited their weapons in the shoebox-size lockers built for the purpose. Then they signed in, and Flaherty led the way to an interrogation room. Fairly modern as jail facilities went, the ADC was still a jail, and such places always left Irene feeling depressed. To her, there was a sense of hopelessness about incarcerated criminals that couldn’t be dispelled by lofty claims of “rehabilitation.”

  “I’d like to talk to her alone, if that’s okay,” Irene said, stopping the procession at the door. “You know, womanto-woman. I think she might open up more.”

  Flaherty couldn’t have cared less, and while Sparks seemed disappointed, he didn’t object. They’d be able to watch everything on the television monitors, anyway. His acquiescence came in the form of a shrug.

  “Thanks, George.” She turned to Flaherty. “Okay, then, let’s go.”

  The jailer slipped a key into the interrogation room door, then pulled it open.

  Irene paused while the door closed behind her, then stepped forward to sit at a conference table, directly across from the woman she recognized from pictures as Carolyn Donovan.

  Frankly, Irene was surprised. As fugitives went, this one looked especially small; especially whipped. Ultimate Criminals-people who committed Ultimate Crimes-often failed to look the part, and this was certainly another example. Usually, though, behind the beaten look spawned by captivity, there burned an air of defiance; the spark of something despicable.

  With Carolyn Donovan, there was only sadness. She sat slumped in the padded metal chair, her right arm limp by her side, held immobile by the handcuff on her wrist. Pale and drawn, she seemed lost in the oversize blue scrub suit worn by all inmates. This woman looked more like a mother than a criminal; more housewife than murderer.

  No wonder she’s been able to stay free for so long.

  “Hello, Carolyn,” Irene said cheerily as she approached the table. “I’m Special Agent Irene Rivers with the FBI. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to finally make your acquaintance.” She helped herself to a seat and folded her hands on the table. “As you might guess, we’ve got two or three thousand questions to ask you.” She meant the comment to be lighthearted but feared it sounded cruel.

  Carolyn didn’t respond at all.

  “Now, Carolyn, there are a couple of ways we can go about this,” Irene went on. “You can sit there sullenly and silently, and in general make it all worse for yourself, or you can-”

  “How is my son?” Carolyn asked abruptly.

  The question caught Irene off guard. She paused for a moment, wishing incongruously that she’d checked on his condition before she entered. “I don’t know,” she said honestly enough. “But I have an agent down there who’ll be in touch with any developments.”

  “They could have let me stay with my little boy,” Carolyn moaned. She seemed dazed by her grief; drugged maybe.

  Irene shook her head. “Actually, no they couldn’t,” she corrected. “We’ve been trying to catch you for long enough, thank you very much. The last thing-”

  “They didn’t even let me say good-bye to him. They just swooped in with their helicopter and sent him off. I never even got to kiss him good-bye.” Her eyes were focused on a spot on the table somewhere between them.

  “You should have thought of that before you got him involved,” Irene said, drawing a look that actually hurt.

  “You people have no idea what you’ve done to us,” Carolyn snarled. “You think you have answers. You think you have evidence, but all you have is stupidity and hatred. We’ve done nothing wrong. We’ve never done anything wrong, but you people want to hurt us, anyway.”

  Irene felt oddly defensive. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. “I just-”

  “You want to hurt my son,” Carolyn interrupted. “Because by hurting my son, you can hurt me and my husband. That’s what this is all about. Justice stopped mattering fourteen years ago. All that matters to you people is revenge.”

  Irene regarded the other woman for a long moment, searching her eyes for the scam; for the hidden agenda. The best criminals were consummate con men, and if you gave them half a chance, they’d work their way under your skin and fester like a bedsore. In all the years she’d been in the business of interviewing bad guys, she’d found precious few who owned up to their crimes. They all were innocent. Which made her speculate endlessly on the human capacity for self-delusion.

  Evidence spoke for itself. As an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Irene bore the obligation to collect and analyze that evidence and to arrest people deemed by the United States Attorney to be violators of federal law. Guilt and innocence were the far loftier domain of jurors and jurists. She couldn’t afford the luxury of feeling sorry for the people she arrested. As pitiful and grief-stricken as Carolyn Donovan appeared, Irene told herself it was irrelevant.

  “You
sound like you’re ready to make a statement,” she said, breaking the silence.

  Carolyn raised her eyes and locked onto the other woman. At length, she nodded. “Okay,” she said. She leaned forward, resting the weight of her torso as best she could on her single mobile forearm. “Okay, Agent Rivers, I’ll give you a statement. Why don’t we start with Newark, Arkansas, back in 1983.”

  “That works for me,” Irene agreed. She nodded to the camera to her right, in the corner near the ceiling, as if to remind George Sparks that a one-on-one interrogation had been her idea.

  Carolyn told the story her own way, at her own pace, refusing to be drawn onto the occasional side routes presented from time to time by Irene’s questions. She spoke for nearly a half hour, with barely a break, starting with that first day amid the smoke and the fire and the bodies and ending with Travis’s injury that afternoon. She carefully avoided any specifics on their aliases over the years and mentioned nothing of anyone’s participation outside of their little nuclear family.

  Of all the points she made, however, she emphasized one over all the others: that Travis had never known a thing; that he was purely a passive participant.

  Her story was the most outlandish thing Irene had ever heard. “You do know that we found the note you left at the crime scene?” she asked.

  “We never wrote a note,” Carolyn responded easily. “Just as we never hurt anybody. If you have a note, then somebody planted it there.”

  Irene laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. “That’s it? That’s your story? You want people to believe that someone planned all of this? That someone went to all that effort merely to frame Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary Citizen for some wild murder cover-up? Come on, Carolyn, you can do better than that.”

  The prisoner stared some more, her eyes burning holes through her captor on the strength of hatred alone. “Why bother to ask questions if you’re so convinced you already know the answers?”

  Irene had heard this same question posed by dozens of prisoners in the past. “Because I’d like to hear you say it, Carolyn. I’d like you to give me some indication I should trust you. That you’re going to be cooperative.”

  Now it was Carolyn’s turn to laugh. “Trust? Cooperation? You’ve got to be kidding. You people have made our lives a living hell for the past fourteen years!” Her voice raised in pitch and volume, and she tried to stand, but the chair that restrained her arm was bolted securely to the floor. “How dare you talk to me about trust! If you people had done your jobs at the very beginning, none of this would have happened! My boy… he wouldn’t be-” Her voice stopped working.

  The interview was approaching the moment Irene had been waiting for: the point at which the prisoner’s emotions swamped the protective walls she’d built around the truth. As she’d been trained, Irene slipped easily into the mother confessor mode: “We did our job, Carolyn,” she said softly, soothingly. “We went in the direction that the preponderance of evidence took us. Please understand that there are no hard feelings here. You did your job, too. You ran, just as anyone who feared punishment would run.”

  “We ran because we had no choice!” Carolyn wailed. “We knew-” All at once, she realized what Irene was up to. She understood the game, and she brought her emotions under control. She remembered now what Lanny Skiles had told them so long ago, when he was indoctrinating them in the rules of the street. The police saw people as pawns, as things to be manipulated. They’d lie, they’d seduce, they’d do whatever it took to get you to string incriminating words together in a sentence. Once transcribed, those words would serve as a confession, devoid of any emotion, and carefully edited for the greatest possible damage.

  Suddenly, she felt horribly, horribly tired. She couldn’t remember all she’d said thus far, but she knew it was too much. Anger, fear, and hatred were all-too-natural emotions, and she could afford none of them. This game was for keeps, and it was time to change strategies.

  She froze there for a moment, straining against her tether as she took a deep breath, held it for a couple of seconds, then let it go. Control flooded back. Breaking eye contact just long enough to soften her expression, she lowered herself back into her chair. “What time is it?” she asked.

  Irene eyed her curiously, having trouble disguising her disappointment in losing the moment. “You have someplace important to go, do you?”

  Carolyn rolled her eyes and chuckled. “You people really are bullies, aren’t you?” The chuckle turned to a laugh. “This is one big power trip for you!” The laugh got louder, and even more genuine. Tears came to her eyes, and she wiped them away with her free hand.

  “Okay, Agent Rivers,” she snickered through her lingering smile. “If it makes you feel big, you just hide the time from me, okay? You’re in control, by God, and I must say you wear it well.”

  Irene’s jaw set as Carolyn derided her, and she found herself suddenly self-conscious of the people on the other side of the camera. Withholding the time was probably a petty move, but she certainly couldn’t cave in now.

  “Anyway,” Carolyn concluded, “it’s getting late, and I’m getting tired. Just let me ask you one question.”

  “If you must.” Like there was a choice.

  “You’re not going to let yourself even consider the possibility of a conspiracy. You’ve made that plainly obvious, and in so doing, you’ve answered your own question about why we ran. Now, I’d like to ask you this: Why would we return to Newark, Arkansas, if not to collect the evidence I spoke of? You know from firsthand experience that we’re adept at staying underground. Why didn’t we stay there? Why did we expose ourselves?”

  Irene played her hand with a flawless poker face. It was a damned good question. One that just might be worth pursuing. But this was time for the good guys to be interviewing the bad, not the other way around. One of the most basic rules of any interrogation was for the interrogator to remain in control at all times, and that meant never answering a substantive question from a suspect. Instead, she countered with a fresh one of her own.

  “Your uncle, Harry Sinclair, is mixed up with this, too, isn’t he?”

  That one came out of nowhere and hit Carolyn like a slap. She tried to show no reaction.

  “Like I said,” she concluded, after dropping a beat, “I’m getting very tired. I think I’ll stop talking now.”

  But Irene was only just beginning. Or so she thought. After a half hour of needling, prodding, insulting, and shouting, and not getting so much as a moment of eye contact in response, Agent Rivers finally gave up, and told Flaherty to take Carolyn back to her cell.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Jake was shocked that Nick’s plan had worked so well. In all the confusion back at the Rescue Squad, his friend had transferred the orange body bag and the two money bags from the trunk of the Cadillac to the back of Bob and Barbara’s Toyota pickup truck, which was parked, keys inside, just off the back ramp. No one seemed to notice as they turned off the tiny access road and back onto the highway, passing within thirty feet of the ambulance as it sat there on the front ramp, swaying ever so slightly from the frantic efforts to save Travis’s life.

  They traveled in silence. Nick didn’t know what to say, and Jake, in a move to preserve some semblance of composure, simply allowed himself to become mesmerized by the yellow hash marks in the road. They flashed by endlessly, brilliant yellow dashes in the wash of the headlights, stretching forever, in a trajectory so straight that he wondered how a driver could stay awake.

  Nothing mattered anymore. With Travis dying and Carolyn off to prison, this business of revenge and of staying ahead of the police seemed tragically irrelevant. Their only chance for a life together now rested squarely on his shoulders, but he had grave doubts that he could handle the burden. Giving up, giving in, just seemed so much easier. A relief, even, from the pain that grew like a tumor in his heart.

  Why did I have to be so harsh with him?

  He felt exhausted, unable to remember the last time h
e’d been without fear. It undercut everything. Even the most joyous moments over the years had been dulled by a pervasive sense of dread that it would be their last moment to laugh together. Thankfully, it hadn’t been as bad the last year or two as it had been in the beginning. He’d finally gotten to the point where after a few months in one town, he’d achieve a certain sense of relief that they’d “made it” yet again, but then it would be time to move on, and he’d remember that their survival was only as secure as the first person who might recognize them.

  The worst time came back in 1990, when one of the reality-based television programs did a piece on the Donovans and their years-long flight from the law. Millions of people watched that show, just as they did every Saturday night, yet, apparently, no one made the connection. Still, the pressure was crippling: walking through the grocery store or helping customers when he knew in his heart that half of them were searching their minds for a clue as to where they’d seen him before.

  For Carolyn, the pressure had proved to be too much. That TV program, combined with the emptiness of anonymity and the demons from her childhood, had driven her to booze. He’d hated her for her weakness back then. How selfish, he’d thought, for her to try to drown out the miserable existence she’d helped him build, only to make it worse for the people she’d left behind to cover for her. Travis fared worst during those times, yet Jake knew without doubt that it was the sight of the boy’s suffering that had convinced her to dry out.

  He now realized and admired the courage it must have taken for her to shut down her only escape route. And he hated himself for never telling her.

  If only he could just turn the clock back a few days. If he’d argued with Travis for just a little longer that morning of the drug raid, then none of this would have happened. If he hadn’t taken a shortcut to avoid some of the traffic, or if he’d just stopped for a bite to eat, then the feds would have arrived before him, and he’d have driven on past the gathered knot of police cars. The randomness of life mocked him. After so many years of calculated planning and strategic moves, he sat now amid a giant clusterfuck, facing the prospect of never again seeing the two people who gave his life meaning.