by Marcus Sakey
She laid out the technical details, but the shorthand was that from an investigative standpoint, the murder of Emily Watkins had been meaningless. In the Wikipedia page that would one day exist, the future entry chronicling this crisis, Emily’s name would appear in a table between Luis Orlando and whoever came tomorrow. Her name would not be bolded, would not have a side note saying that this was where the sniper made a mistake, where law enforcement found the clue that let them end this madness.
It’s a bad habit, Claire thought, thinking of the present in terms of future Wikipedia. Especially while talking to the director of the FBI.
Mikkelson said, “What’s this I hear about an agent running down the street?”
Claire grimaced. “Special Agent William Brody spotted muzzle flashes during the second attack, and pursued.”
“A hot shot?”
“A good agent with impulse control issues. He also saved the life of the EMT.”
“Alright. How’s morale?”
“It’s . . . everyone is feeling it.”
“If you need more resources, just ask.”
“It’s not that.” She blew a breath. “The sniper is different from anything I’ve ever seen. It’s almost like . . .”
“Yes?”
“Never mind. Just thinking out loud.”
“Claire, there’s a reason I promoted you. Tell me what’s on your mind.”
“Well, it’s like he’s being guided. He seems to know exactly what not to do. Exactly where our blind spots are. Like he’s working with someone, maybe even someone in law enforcement.”
“Hmm.” The director paused. “Okay. Check it out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Claire. We—the FBI, the city of Chicago, the nation—we need this to end. You have my full faith and confidence. But get it done.”
“Yes, sir.”
After they hung up, Claire stood, put her palms on her sacrum, bent backward. Didn’t get a pop, but it still felt good.
She wanted to sit down and get back to work. To push her way through this on sheer will and effort, as she’d done at Georgetown, at Quantico, in every posting since. But there was nothing to do. Sitting at her desk wouldn’t change that.
11:21 p.m.
She picked up the phone, dialed. “This is Claire McCoy. I’m heading out. Call my cell with anything.”
“Yes, ma’am. Have a good evening.”
There was a cold inch of coffee in her mug, and she drank it. Her eyes felt like they’d been dipped in sand. She closed her computer, tucked it in her bag.
Get it done, she thought. Yeah.
The streets were abandoned. The YES, WE’RE OPEN signs in bar windows had a whiff of desperation. A CPD squad car turned from a light and pulled in behind her. Claire could see a cop typing her license plate into the system and flashed the spinners to save them all time. The officer nodded and threw a half salute.
Longevity in law enforcement demanded compartmentalization. It was an intense job with demanding hours and high stakes, but still a job. You had to be able to work a case for months or even years, to stare at brutalized victims and burned bodies, and still be able to go home and have a life.
At least, that’s what everyone told her.
At her building, she parked in the deck, walked to the elevator, and slumped against the wall. When they caught this guy she was going to sleep for a week and get every spa service known to woman. Soft chimes marked each floor, and for a second she might have drifted off, because it didn’t seem like there had been nearly enough to reach the twenty-first.
Claire unlocked the door to her apartment, switched on the lights, dropped her bag. She wandered to the kitchen, opened the fridge, discovered leftover Thai. That was a happiness. Squeeze on half a bottle of Sriracha, eat it straight from the container, maybe take a shower, maybe not, then go to bed and get a full seven hours—
“Hey.”
The voice came from behind her. Claire dropped the noodles and spun, hand flying to her hip, the Glock coming out smooth as she aimed—
At Will Brody, who sat in the chair by the window, a couple of empty beer bottles on the table beside. “Whoa,” he said, putting up his hands.
“Jesus Christ. What the hell, Brody?” She lowered her sidearm. “What are you doing sitting in my apartment in the dark?”
He snapped on a light, then stood up. “Waiting for you.” He stepped forward, his eyes intense.
“I’ve had a long day.”
“Me too, ma’am.” Brody squared up in front of her, uncomfortably close. She held her ground. He reached out, touched her shoulder. Her adrenaline was still up, and she could smell his aftershave and a whiff of soap. His eyes never left hers as he slid his fingers down, barely touching her, skimming the outside curve of her breast, down her side, tracing the lines of her stomach, then her hips. “So I decided to go home.”
“This is my apartment.”
“This is your apartment,” Brody agreed. He stepped closer still, so she could feel the warmth of him, see the gold flecks in his eyes. One hand slipped around her back, the other cupping her neck, tangling in her hair. “And this is home.”
The kiss started soft, but his hand drifted lower and pulled her pelvis against him. She could feel the muscles of his chest, the heat of him, and she holstered her gun and put her arms around his head, gripping handfuls of hair, the kiss turning bruising, the rough skin of his face scraping at her lips and chin. When he moaned she could feel it against her whole body, and she tugged harder on his hair until the moan became a gasp. His right hand pushed her skirt up to bunch around her waist and with his left he fumbled to undo his belt, metal clinking, the buckle cold and hard, and then he pushed his pants down and jerked her panties aside and hoisted her into the air to press against the hardness of him.
She gasped, the sensation too strong, too sudden, too sharp, but in the best possible way, her body responding even as she pulled away. He held her tighter, not letting her retreat as he stumbled to the wall, the pants around his legs giving him a convict’s stumble, her holster clip coming free and the Glock falling to the floor with a thump, and she laughed, giddy with the moment. The wall was cool against her shoulders as he pressed against her and she was ready, Jesus, what was it about him that she could be ready so fast and of course now he decided to tease, sliding against her, between her. She arched her pelvis to capture him, but he wouldn’t let her, the friction delicious but not enough. Claire took a hand from his hair and gripped his left nipple and pinched like she was popping Bubble Wrap, so hard his knees wobbled. He pulled her off the wall just far enough to slam her back into it, the picture frames shaking, and eased into her, as gentle there as he’d been rough with the rest, short strokes taking him into her an inch, and then two, holding there until she clawed at his back and jammed herself down the length of him and they both shuddered.
The nearest picture vibrated and bounced against the wall. Not long after it finally fell, he gripped her hard, thrust deep enough to hurt, and exploded inside her.
She blew her bangs out of her eyes and looked at him and said, “I win.”
“You win.” Without withdrawing he slid a hand between them, thumb finding her clit and rubbing delicate swirls that made her lean in and bite his shoulder, the taste of cotton in her mouth as wave after wave shook her, took her, wrung her out.
When she finally stopped shaking, they were both panting and slick with sweat. Her skirt twisted halfway around. Gun on the floor, handcuffs jamming into the small of her back. The picture, a landscape she’d bought at a DC art festival, was half-obscured by a jagged lightning bolt of shattered glass. It was ridiculous, and she started laughing. Will buried his face in her neck and laughed with her.
When they could breathe again, she said, “That was some serious Nicholas Sparks crap, your line about this being home.”
“Hey, it worked.” He leaned back, lifted her off him, both of them shivering at the separation. “You hungry?”
She pulled a beer from the fridge, then changed into a robe and returned to the kitchen. The leftover Thai was all over the cabinets. While she cleaned it up, he banged around in her kitchen, putting a pan on the stove and staring into the fridge.
“You have no food.”
“You say that every night.”
“Because you have no food.” He took out a container of eggs, a sad lemon, half an onion in a Ziploc bag. He was shirtless now, the tiny silver cross his mom had given him nestled in his chest hair.
She said, “So what the hell were you thinking?”
“Huh?”
“Charging down the street like that. Cops on scene said that you didn’t even use cover. Just ran your big dumb head off. You know you were running toward a sniper, right?”
He laughed. “Yeah, that occurred to me too.”
“The city’s going crazy already, the last thing we need is footage of a dead FBI agent. I had the director asking me about it. Seriously, Will, what were you thinking?”
“Honestly?” Brody leaned the knife on its point and sighed. “I was thinking, ‘That’s him, right there, the guy who just killed an innocent woman, and he’s right there.’” He shrugged and resumed chopping onions. “Maybe it wasn’t smart, but I couldn’t not.”
A few months ago, if someone had told Claire that just after taking a leadership position, she would start sleeping with another agent—one who reported to her—she would have told them to adjust their meds. No chance, zero, that she would make such a stupid mistake. The Bureau was more progressive than a lot of law enforcement, but only about 20 percent of agents were women, and that percentage plummeted with rank. Female agents couldn’t afford impropriety. Especially if they had her ambition.
Then she’d met Will, and he’d given her that smile. It was hard to say why it made her feel the way it did. He was good-looking, but it wasn’t like he sported a shock-and-awe George Clooney grin. It wasn’t even an aesthetic thing, really. It was more like a sense of recognition. Like they were old friends pretending to meet for the first time in order to pull everybody else’s leg.
And since then, despite the fact that it was a terrible idea wrapped in terrible timing, they’d been doing this. Retreating to her apartment every night and pulling the world closed behind them. When it came to routine, schedule, and rest, girl meeting boy had been akin to trailer park meeting tornado. And yet she knew what he meant about home. They had become each other’s calm.
Of course, there were reasons why cross-rank relationships were a bad idea. Claire couldn’t say for sure that she’d be reacting the same way to another agent right now. Was she annoyed because he’d broken protocol, or because she cared about him?
And then there’s the other question—would you want to be with a man who’d played it safe while a killer escaped?
Tricky. Claire decided she was too tired to deal with it now. “You’re a moron.”
“See, that just calls your taste into question.” Brody looked up and winked. “Find anything on the scene?”
She shook her head. “Nothing useful.”
“So we’re still waiting.”
“No. We’re investigating every credible theory, running down tip line—”
“Yeah.”
“You know the frustrating part?” Claire gestured with her beer. “Eventually we’re going to catch this guy, and he’s going to turn out to be a loser who watched Batman too many times and got turned on by the wrong character.”
“You blame Heath Ledger?”
“Hell no. I wouldn’t be an agent if it weren’t for Jodie Foster.”
“A census taker once tried to test me,” Brody replied. “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.” The onions sizzled as he dropped them in butter, stirred them around. “Chips?”
“Pantry. I’m just saying there won’t be an explanation, and that bugs me.”
“Because you want everything to mean something.” Brody crushed handfuls of corn chips into the eggs. He had nice forearms, muscular, enough hair to mark him as a man without crossing over to gorilla. “I get it. You’re anal.”
“Ha-ha. I can’t help it if I think. One of us has to.”
“Ouch.”
“I’m not crazy, though, am I? Things have gotten weirder. More surreal. Kids walking into schools with automatic weapons. Assholes in costume opening fire in movie theaters. That guy in Michigan, the Uber driver, who picked up fares between killing strangers.” Claire leaned forward to prop her chin on her elbow. “I miss Ted Kaczynski.”
He laughed. “The Unabomber?”
“It must have been so good to catch him. Genius IQ, Harvard at sixteen, messed up by CIA mind-control experiments. Moves to the woods and mails bombs to engineers to provoke an anti-industrialist revolution. Nuts. But at least he had a goal. Whereas our bad guy is going to be like that Uber driver. No good reason. No reason at all.”
Putting the pan into the oven, Brody said, “White blood cells. That’s what I tell myself when everything starts to seem a little too crazy. We’re white blood cells. Something harmful gets into the body, we take it out. There doesn’t have to be a reason.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to cure the actual disease?”
“Sure.” He wiped his hands, leaned back against the stove. “Any idea how?”
A few minutes later Brody took the pan from the oven, having somehow turned random ingredients into a fluffy circle of deliciousness. He squeezed lemon over the top and set out the hot sauce, and they stood in the kitchen eating it by the slice like pizza until there was nothing left but grease stains.
“That,” she said, “was amazing.”
“When this is over, I’ll take you out for a proper meal. I know this steakhouse down by the river. We’ll drop a week’s salary on dry-aged beef and pinot noir.”
“It’s a date.” Claire stacked the plates in the sink. Caught a yawn in her hand. She considered bringing up the thing they had tacitly agreed to leave unspoken. Decided against it.
Then was surprised to hear herself say, “When this is over, we’re going to have to talk.”
There was a pause. “Yeah?”
She looked over to where he leaned against the fridge. “Well. I mean. We can’t go on this way. There’s my career—both our careers—I’m just saying, if we want to make this work, we’ll need to figure out how.”
Brody nodded. It wasn’t agreement. More to indicate he’d heard. Confirmation of message received. He crossed his arms.
“I’m not proposing to you,” she said, feeling herself go hot. “I’m not asking for anything, I know it hasn’t been that long. I just mean we’ll have to talk.”
“Listen. Claire.” He looked away. “You know I care about you.”
It was like ice poured over her head. Claire stood with a dirty plate in one hand and the dish scrubber in the other and stared at him. He met her gaze, his expression impassive.
Until he burst out laughing.
Her fingers tingled. “I’m going to kill you.”
“You should see your face.” Still chuckling, he walked over, took the plate from her hand and set it down. “We don’t have to wait until it’s over. Are you kidding? I know it hasn’t been long. I know there’s a whole world to Claire McCoy I haven’t seen. I know it’s ridiculous to feel like I’ve been waiting for you to come along. And I don’t care. I have been waiting for you.” He shrugged. “We’ll figure it out. I’ll quit the Bureau and write traffic tickets if that’s what it takes to be with you.”
She realized her mouth was open, and closed it. There was a helium feeling in her chest, and her smile hurt. She took a breath, glanced at the clock. 1:29 a.m. “Well, shit.”
“What?”
Claire undid the sash, slipped the robe off her shoulders. “I was really looking forward to getting some sleep tonight.”
FIVE
Simon Tucks was two people.
Most of his life he had bee
n a sad, pointless little man. Stormy days. Long bleak black.
But something fearsome had grown inside him. Bloomed like cancer. His True Self. With each sacrifice, he grew closer to it. Like a baby ten pounds too heavy clawing free, ripping its mother apart in the hurry to be born.
The labor had begun a month ago.
That morning he’d awakened from a dream he could not remember and yet was sad to leave. Sunlight burned through his blinds. He thought of getting out of bed but did not get out of bed. Why? What for?
Everyone else seemed to know. Like there had been a meeting no one had told him about, where a secret was shared. Those who knew the secret did not wonder why they should get out of bed.
He had lain there hating the sunlight and thinking of the chef’s knife in the chopping block. The way the edge of it shone. Thinking of a warm bath and a fast, deep cut up the length of each forearm.
It was a game Simon had played all his life. Walking downtown, he imagined stepping out on the ledge of a skyscraper, pictured a clench and a leap and a howling plunge to nothing. At the hardware store, he fingered lengths of rope, thought about nooses.
The double handful of pills washed down with cold vodka.
The dive into the lake and eastward swim until his limbs failed.
The Toyota in the garage with windows down and engine idling.
It was just a game. A way to pass the time when he sat in his cubicle, when he rode the train home, when he ate cereal for dinner. But that particular morning, he realized he needed a gun.
He needed one now.
An hour later he passed beneath a sign welcoming him to Indiana, Crossroads of America. He drove without purpose or plan, and yet steered directly to a shithole town called Kokomo, where in a flat brown field a squat grey building hosted a gun show.
Simon had intended to buy a pistol. Something machined and heavy that would taste of metal as it clicked against his teeth. Yet for some reason, he allowed a long-haired man with a grizzled face to sell him an assault rifle. A Smith & Wesson M&P15 OR. Then he let a pretty blonde convince him to buy a Burris MTAC 1.5-6x42mm illuminated scope. She even mounted it for him, and he stared at her fingers moving fast and fluid, at the creamy skin of her neck, at the shadow of her cleavage revealed by her tank top—
