He approaches, then stops and stands in front of me, blocks my view of the city, shadows me like a tree.
“You,” he says.
“Have a seat.” He does not comply. I stare at him for a few seconds before my words cripple him: “She’s gone. I killed her.”
I feel a dizziness at having confessed to something that, if the rest of my plan goes awry, might have me executed—but I can’t unring the bell: I reach over and hand him Melody’s bloodstained sundress, the result of her being tossed among garbage cans in the alley barely a mile from where we are at this moment.
Sean reaches for the dress and sits at the same time.
“I don’t believe you,” he says.
“She was trying to get information from me, wanted me to give her all sorts of details about my family. I tried to reason with her.” I lower my voice as a couple passes. “She just wouldn’t listen. It got… out of control. I just lost it.”
Sean looks at the dress, spots the biggest bloodstain, avoids touching it. “I don’t believe you,” he repeats weakly. What he really means: I can’t believe it.
“You keep DNA samples on all your witnesses?”
He sniffs hard, then mumbles, “Of course.”
“It’s gonna match. This is real.” I take a deep breath, can barely speak the lie because it could’ve so closely been the truth had I not spirited Melody away. “She’s spread all over the East River. She’s gone.”
To the dress, he says, “You’re full of it. You don’t have it in you, Bovaro.” Then to me: “Anyone else in your family, but not you.”
“Why do you think I’m here talking to you? I can’t live with this. You think I’m confessing for entertainment?”
Sean studies the stain again, slowly turns the dress and sees another red blotch. He swallows and looks away, focuses on the drunk. I read his demeanor as nothing other than his own perceived failure, a witness lost because he couldn’t contain the danger, couldn’t sell the dream.
I swallow, almost gag on my request: “I want to talk to Justice. I have information they’ll want, but one thing in particular they’ll need.” Sean does not seem moved. “I’ll confess to killing Melody, no reneging.” Fake sigh. “I have to live with what I did. I’ll also give up all the details on how the McCartneys were killed. I was there, and I’ll tell them exactly what happened. But most of all, I’ll supply you with information that will give Justice headlines for a year straight. I’m not exaggerating.” And then, another ring of the bell: “But I want to go into Witness Protection. I want to start over.”
Sean turns back and looks me in the eye; it takes so much strength to return his stare, to convince him that my actions are genuine. Though I quickly realize that the way he’s looking at me might have something to do with my poor choice of words: Start over. My guess is the utmost concern of any witness entering the program is being kept safe, not getting a new identity, the mere means for achieving the safety. He stands up, gently places the dress over his shoulder, waves for me to get to my feet. His repugnance for me has carved a sneer into his sullen face; I recognize when an adversary can barely contain himself.
“Let’s go,” he says. I slowly stand, feel a little vertigo at the realization that I’ve not only surrendered Melody, but I’m about to surrender myself, that whoever I become, Jonathan Bovaro will soon disappear forever.
Sean glares at me, for the first time comes across as something more than an unqualified marshal. “I hope your family kills you,” he says, “I really do. I hope you don’t make it another twenty-four hours.”
He turns slightly and waves his hand for me to walk next to him. As we get to the edge of the hill, one of the streetlights catches the metallic edge of the handcuffs clipped to the side of his jeans, partially tucked into a back pocket. The fact that he’s not using them is a bad sign.
We descend the staircase together, not a word between us. When we arrive at the bottom of the hill, he escorts me to my vehicle, doesn’t have to ask which is mine.
“Last shot,” he says, staring off and away. “Get what you need.”
I look at the Audi like I’m leaving a dear friend at the airport. I open the trunk, grab my bag, then slam it shut. As we’re halfway to Covington Street, en route to his black government SUV, I say, “Wait!”
I run back to the passenger side of my car, open the glove compartment and pull out the CD case, and take with me the entire library of discs that served as the soundtrack to my finding and protecting Melody, the discs purchased when I followed her through Best Buy, the discs that will allow Melody to speak to me forever.
Sean stays close, watches as I take the case and jam it into the pocket of my overnight bag. I gaze around the perimeter of where we’re standing, where his vehicle is parked, tucked in an angled spot across from the American Visionary Art Museum. Turns out Sean kept his promise: He came alone. No one is around to help him. No one is around to watch him open the back door of his Explorer for me, and no one is around to see him check up and down Covington before he slams my head into the doorframe of the SUV, twice. There is no backup, no other marshals, no one else who took an oath to protect and serve as he punches me three times in the face. No one to see that I let him do it, that I merely curl up in a ball and allow his fists to hammer me. No one to notice that I never ask him to stop.
FOUR
Sean shoves me into the men’s room on the sixth floor of the Garmatz Federal Courthouse, pushes me so hard I go sliding across the floor and bang my head into the pipe under one of the sinks. Just as the door closes, he says, “Clean yourself up.”
I right myself by holding on to the sink. The thing shimmies and shakes, feels like I might rip it right out of the wall as I use it to pull myself up. When I finally see myself in the mirror, the damage doesn’t look as bad as it feels. Sean apparently learned as I did that the best way to bruise someone is behind areas covered by clothing: the blows to my body. I have a large lump across my forehead from where he rammed it into the door of the Explorer, blood crusted around both nostrils, and three cuts along my left cheek from his punches to my face. But the real soreness resides in my chest and sides from where he rained down blow after blow until a tour bus turned the corner near Covington and startled him out of his rage.
I turn on the faucet and let the water run over my hair and face, into my mouth. I spit out a pinkish pool of fluid, wipe myself dry with a handful of paper towels, gently dab some of the dried blood from my skin. I rub my rib cage where the pain is most intense, wince as my fingers brush my left side, wonder if I have a cracked rib.
I walk out to the hall and Sean is standing with his back against the wall, staring at his cell phone. The building is quiet and empty at ten-thirty on this Sunday evening.
Sean ignores me, takes another minute to finish whatever it is he’s doing, then suddenly snaps his cell shut and looks up. “C’mon,” he says, and starts to walk down the hallway.
“Can I get something to drink?”
“Shut up. You’re not in Witness Protection yet. If you think I’m gonna wait on you, you’re out of your mind. You want a drink? Go stick your head in the toilet.”
We make our way to the end of the hall and he opens the last door before the stairwell, flips on a light to display a conference room that could seat fourteen people around one long rectangular table. He flips another switch and the blinds drop across all seven windows and the lights of Baltimore’s skyline slowly disappear. At the farthest end of the room is a one-way mirror wide enough to house an entire Hollywood film crew behind it.
I take a few steps toward the table, rest my hand on the back of one of the plush leather chairs. Sean walks to a computer in the corner of the room, spends a minute typing something, then disappears through the door leading to whatever is on the other side of the one-way mirror. For a marshal, he seems awfully comfortable around the facility and its components. I’m not really sure what I expect of him, but it’s not this: a man with the keys to the kingdom
, able to run the show.
I sit down in the chair at the end of the table and sink into the seat. I rest my damp head against the back of the chair, and just as I close my eyes for a few seconds, Sean reappears through the first door again. As he walks my way, he chucks a bottled water in my lap.
“This room will be full by daybreak,” he says, then sits down several seats away from me. “People coming from all over—New York, DC, Baltimore, of course. You better have something really interesting to say.” He stares at me like he might lunge toward me, give me one more round.
“It’s gonna be bigger and better than anything they could imagine.”
He wipes his face. “This is your big moment, Bovaro. Enjoy it. People are going to care about you, really love you, all the way through getting you deposed. Then you’ll return to being nothing. Same loser, different name.”
I sit up a little, want to help him understand that his annoyance has more to do with the fact that he’ll be ushered out when the real dealmaking and information transfer begins. Instead, I rest back again and say, “You don’t like us much, do you?”
“You who?”
“Criminals who flip on their own.”
Without any hesitation: “Hate you. Really takes all my strength to provide even the thinnest protection. The few witnesses in this program that are innocent—people like Melody and her parents—I love ’em. They’re braver than anyone you know, possess a willingness to sacrifice and a commitment to doing the right thing that you’ll never understand.”
I wish I could correct him, want him to know he and I might have more in common than he thinks. I spent twenty years of my life committed to successfully protecting Melody—something he failed at after only a few days.
I stare back, spill my thoughts. “You know you’re a terrible marshal.”
He narrows his eyes and grins slightly, then drops his eyes, spins his wedding band around his finger.
“When you phoned me,” he says, “you asked if I lost something. I didn’t lose anything.” He looks back up at me. “She walked away.”
Melody’s fast confession in the kitchen of my father’s house floods my mind. I so easily recall the panic on her face as she offered up the scattered details of those loose hours lost from the spa.
I slide down in my chair. “You guys offered her a deal to turn on me,” I say. Everything she said, all genuine. I hate that I let even the slightest doubt cross my mind, feel a deepening of sadness at losing her forever, knowing her love for me was so real that she gave up having the best of everything the government could offer in order to remain with me.
Sean nods a little. “They were going to give her the ultimate incentive.” He goes back to spinning his wedding band. “Any town, any job, any money.”
I stiffen. That precise definition of her deal wasn’t just Gravina’s general description of what’d been offered to Melody; those were his exact words: any town, any job, any money. I process the information over and over, my eyes dim and mouth open like I’m about to sneeze, except something far more jarring is brewing. I lean forward, put my elbows on the table, intertwine my fingers and start cracking knuckles, need to find a way to call Peter and tell him the name he needs to take very seriously, give him the proper direction to vent his impending indignation.
“But,” Sean adds, “once you’d brainwashed her into thinking you cared about her, and by the fact that she’d truly grown weary from being in this program her whole life, she apparently wanted nothing to do with it any longer. Wouldn’t even listen to what they had to say.” He leans forward, points a finger. “And the result of her decision was her own murder.”
“If only she’d had a marshal capable of protecting her.”
Sean leaps out of his seat like he’s going to grab me by my shirt and toss me out the sixth-floor window, but he merely reaches in his back pocket. I assume he’s grabbing the cuffs, throwing a tantrum by suddenly going by the book and locking me down to the table. Instead he pulls out what looks like a wallet and chucks it against my chest.
It bounces onto the table and falls open backward, displays a gold badge and identification bearing his picture and name—for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“I’m with the Organized Crime Unit. Have been for most of my career.” I leave the badge on the table, try to assess his angle, the second time today I’ve been forced to reevaluate everything I thought I understood—though this assessment requires far less analysis. And as I quickly comprehend what has happened, how things have been so badly manipulated, I don’t even realize I’ve left my seat.
“Wait a minute,” I say. “Melody was set up.” Sean slowly reaches over and takes back his identification, slides it in the pocket opposite the cuffs. “You used her.”
“It was an experiment,” he says. “And it failed.”
Sean sits down, points to my chair, and I do the same. He explains how he was a member of a small group of pioneers within Justice (those who carried disdain for the group termed them rebels)—a hybrid of its divisions and offices, but mostly comprised of FBI agents—who proposed breaking the rules, and some laws, to infiltrate three principal areas: child pornography, drug trafficking, and organized crime. He tells me how he started working to bring down child pornographers and pedophiles, how it made him sick enough that he had to move on, generated an anger and rage in him that he redirected toward the Mafia. He studied and learned everything he could about the Italian organizations, memorized every chart and every member of every family operating up and down the East Coast.
A year earlier, the group conjured the idea of manipulating a single witness in WITSEC—the United States Federal Witness Protection Program—into unwittingly becoming a lure, as bait to draw the Mafia closer, to catch them acting on a federally protected witness, with the notion that it would create a frenzy of one member folding on the other. The small group viewed the countless bad guys turned witnesses as a bucket of juicy worms to hang from their giant fishing pole. And all they needed was one worm. The idea was to take a single witness who’d been a member of one of the families, someone they callously viewed as expendable from both sides, and set the mousetrap.
Except.
Except they could never find the right witness at the right time, waited years for the perfect scenario to present itself. And during these years, two things occurred simultaneously: an increasing angst at nailing the largest families in New York, and annual federal budgets where funds were increasingly redirected from organized crime to terrorism. They became desperate—I argue it was an issue of job security, but Sean explains it was truly about bringing justice—and they decided they were going to pull in a prizewinner without getting a fishing permit.
And then: little Melody. The woman with whom I fell in love grew bored of her surroundings at the absolute wrong time. The nadir. When Melody called in to the Marshals Service and the FBI was notified, the handler she’d dealt with most of her life explained—lied—that he was going to retire and a younger, more able marshal was going to take her case.
In walked Sean Douglas, a strapping and powerful man who, while fully capable of protecting her, played the part of the aloof buffoon, the only marshal in the history of the service who didn’t fit the part, who didn’t possess the power to take your life with a punch to your face, the red umbrella in the sea of black ones. The toddler.
“When you found her in Cape Charles,” he says, “you think we didn’t know you were there?” I feel like I could throw up. When I don’t answer, he adds, “I mean, c’mon, I kept making excuses while driving down Route 13 to let you catch up.”
“No way. I saw the marshal with your caravan who ran into the convenience store on the Delmarva. That guy was the real deal.”
“Indeed, he was. Had no clue I was undercover.”
I clench my fist so hard my nails dig into my palm. “I hope one day you have to be protected by the guys you duped.”
He ignores me, continues, “When you were so clev
erly sneaking into her room in Cape Charles, I sat on the beach on my cell phone talking to agents parked a hundred yards out, who were giving me each and every detail of what you were doing.”
I take a deep breath, attempt to suppress the desire to make my first kill. I utilize my last strand of self-control as this realization washes over me: “But… you let me enter her room. I could’ve killed her right on the spot.”
He takes a deep breath and lets it out in measured pulses. “It shouldn’t have been Melody. I was against that.”
“Oh, you were against that.”
“It was a poorly estimated risk. But we did what we had to do.”
“And to get to my family, you would have let me kill her?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you knew it could happen.”
“Not with you. Part of estimating the risk was knowing that you, of any member of any crew in the five boroughs, had virtually no capacity to kill. You were the ultimate actor for the part, Johnny. Like I said, this was the perfect scenario, and it was handed to us.”
I wave him away with the back of my hand. “But you knew it could happen.”
The Exceptions Page 34
