by Lori Ryan
“He was scary crazy,” said the other agent. “Fanatical about being prepared to take down the government if they infringed on his rights. I don’t remember a daughter, though,” he said turning to Eve.
“She wasn’t with the group anymore. His wife was dead. The daughter had left the group to marry a man the others considered an outsider. But, there’s no denying that’s Rebecca James.” She pointed to the tablet and pushed it toward him. He lifted it and blew up the image, shaking his head with a whistle as he passed the tablet around to the others.
Cal took the tablet and read the notes. The photo was from three years prior to Evans’s arrest and identified the woman as Rebecca Evans. “She was twenty when this photo was taken, but yeah, that sure looks like her. So, she wasn’t around when you guys raided the place?”
“No,” Eve said. “The General didn’t even talk about her and the group considered her gone. She wasn’t on our radar.”
Eve looked over Cal’s shoulder at the image on the screen. The picture showed the General standing on the front porch of a large house, surrounded by his followers. And, apparently, his daughter. Every member of the group held a weapon of some sort. But the daughter’s weapon was the biggest, by far. She held it casually in one hand, as though it grew from her hand, an extension rather than a separate thing. A sniper rifle. The kind that could easily make the shots that had plagued their city for weeks.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Scout’s stomach twisted and she thought she might vomit again. The cop had moved at the last minute. He wasn’t supposed to be hit. She’d been aiming for the burglar holding a gun on the gas station attendant; a poor teen with acne on his face and terror in his eyes. The cop had moved into her shot when it was too late for her to stop what was happening. She’d pulled up but the bullet had already left her weapon.
Or maybe she was wrong. Maybe she’d been off her game. Seeing the fright in that boy’s eyes had forced her right back to thoughts of her own son. Of the fear Christopher must have suffered in the moments before his own death. That Lansing guy had reported that Christopher had been shot after Bryan. She had asked Detectives Reynolds and Cafferty and they had said they couldn’t know for sure, but she could tell they weren’t being completely up front with her.
She couldn’t imagine how those few seconds had felt for Christopher. To have to see what happened to Bryan and know death was coming for him.
Seeing the man holding the teenager with a gun to his head had messed with her. She’d blinked and Christopher was in front of her. Another blink and he was gone again, but had that been enough for her to screw up the shot? Maybe the cop hadn’t moved the way she thought he had.
The news hadn’t given any details yet. Only that a cop had been shot and was in critical condition.
“General,” she whispered. “Where are you?”
The General had stopped appearing to her. There was no one there to give her answers any more.
Sorrow ran through her as the newscaster added details. “We’re now being told the officer killed is Officer Danny Burke. Officer Burke is a recent graduate of the academy and he has a young child. That’s all the information we have at this time, but we will update as we have more information.”
How had everything gone so wrong? How had she gotten so far away from who she was and what she’d wanted to accomplish?
A small voice in the back of her head taunted her. She hadn’t gotten away from who she was. She was moving back to what her father had taught her. Back to the weapon, the killer, he’d designed her to be.
“I need to find out what they know,” she said aloud. She ran her hands over the steering wheel and thought about going into the police station. It would be a gamble, but she could go to the station and see what they knew.
It was almost funny that she was able to walk in and out of the station at will. Her father had taught her years before that police stations were largely unprotected.
Sure, many of them had doors or bulletproof glass and you had to be buzzed into the back, but some didn’t even have that. And most didn’t have a metal detector or any way to know if the people they were buzzing back carried a weapon. From the time she could lift a weapon, the General had groomed her to be his soldier. She remembered how funny the General thought their lack of protection was. “One day,” he would say to her, “we’re going to take advantage of that. They think you’ll hit at the courthouses, the federal buildings. They don’t expect you to walk into a precinct.”
It wasn’t until she was older that she realized those statements proved he had planned to sacrifice her. There was no way he thought she could walk into a police precinct, shoot a bunch of cops, and walk back out. She was a tool, a weapon to him, and nothing more. When Bryan had found her, had taken her away from the General, she’d stopped all communication with the militia group she’d been raised in.
She’d been twenty when she met Bryan James during a trip off the militia compound. She could still remember how handsome he’d been. Those dark eyes, and his gentle way. He’d been so intelligent, too. He talked to her like she mattered, like she had something to offer other than her ability to fire a weapon.
The General had been furious when he’d found out about their affair. But Bryan hadn’t backed down. He stood up to the General and came to take Scout away. That was the day she’d stopped being Scout and had gone back to her given name. Rebecca Evans. That day, Rebecca had held off the General with a gun and walked out with Bryan, never returning to the group. Never returning to her family. She and Bryan had made a family of their own, and she’d always been amazed he’d still wanted her after all that. That he could witness her having to hold her family off with a gun and still want her. Still love her.
No, she thought. She couldn’t take a chance on going to the station again. What she needed to do was to start over. She’d done that in life before.
She needed to get out of New Haven, out of Connecticut, and find a way to atone for what she’d done. Then she could begin again. The only trouble was, she didn’t know if atonement was even possible anymore. And she didn’t know if she had it in her to start over again. There’d been so much heartache. So much sorrow. She was tired now. The kind of bone tired that stemmed from emotional battle.
Chapter Thirty-Four
This time, SWAT was called in. Eve stood with Cal while they watched teams stack at the front door to the James home. She knew others were at the back door of the house. It was a small home, but the property surrounding it was larger than most of the lots around it. The house had the look of being closed-up tight against intruding eyes, curtains and blinds drawn, no car in the driveway. It made Eve wonder how much of Rebecca Evans’s upbringing as an off-the-grid militia member remained with her.
Cal leaned in, speaking low in her ear. “If we were up there, I’d let you go first.”
She turned and gave him a look, unable to hold back the snort of disbelief. He’d likely jockey for position again. “I’m sure—”
She wasn’t able to finish the statement. The sound of an explosion came from the backyard and she saw the SWAT team at the front of the house fall back to the perimeter. Voices came through on the radio and she and Cal stood together, weapons drawn, watching the house. The next few minutes held the heavy weight of tension as they waited to hear what had happened at the back of the house and called in the explosives team to help clear the yard and home.
It wasn’t until twenty minutes later that they were able to enter the home. No officers had been injured in the explosion. In fact, it looked as though it was designed to provide a warning more than injure anyone triggering it. It had wounded a fair amount of pride. No one had seen the small vials of chemicals that had mixed together when the back gate was opened. The brake fluid and pool chemicals mixed together had ignited and triggered the black powder that caused the large amount of smoke billowing from the yard.
They’d received word from the agent they’d asked to interview one of t
he former militia members who was still alive and in prison. Rebecca Evans had left the militia years before her father was arrested. Apparently, she’d met her husband and, after a standoff with her father, the two had left together and she’d never come back. Her name had been taboo with her father after that. He’d seen it as the ultimate betrayal by the person who should have been his best soldier.
“No sign of her anywhere.” The SWAT Captain reported in as forensics teams entered the living room, where Cal, Eve, and Captain Ayala stood.
Detectives Reynolds and Cafferty joined them.
“Weapons?” Cal asked the two men. He had been speaking primarily in grunts and one word utterances. Eve felt much the same way.
“Not the kind your sniper might have used. A small handgun in the drawer next to the bed in the spare bedroom. Looks like she’s been sleeping in there. There’s some ammunition in the drawer as well. Nothing else in the house that we’ve found so far.” Cafferty shook his head. “Could she be on the run?”
“I don’t see how she would know we were coming,” Eve said. “I get that she got some of her information when she was in the precinct meeting with you guys. She could have heard things, known you were preparing to move a witness to the FBI, heard the name of the mugger who shot her husband and son. I get that. But she wasn’t anywhere near the station today when we figured out it was her. How would she know to run?”
“She shot an officer. That could have sent her into flight mode. So far, she’s been a vigilante, which means she sees herself as one of us, in a way. It might have screwed with her to have hit one of the good guys.” Reynolds offered.
“Search everything.” Cal was still tight-jawed, but at least he’d said more than two words. “We need to figure out where she’d run to.”
Eve pulled her phone out of her pocket. “I’m going to put in a call and see if we can get some agents watching the remaining members of her dad’s group. Maybe she’d head home if she thinks we’ve ID’d her as our shooter.”
Eve made the call then headed through the house with the others. They covered it top to bottom. It had clearly once been a happy home of a family. There was a small study where Professor James appeared to have done some of his work. The wall in there held degrees and awards, but also photos of the family smiling on vacations and pictures of Christopher at various times in his life.
The kitchen wall held a plaque that read Come, Gather, Give Thanks and another over the breakfast nook that read Table for Three.
In the basement, there was a bumper pool table and television with video game console on one side and a crafting area on the other side. Stacks of fabric and glue guns rested on a table. An abandoned scrapbooking project included pages showing Christopher James’s latest swim meet wins. It was a life interrupted.
They left hours later, with no news of any sightings on their be-on-the-lookout for Rebecca James. They’d found nothing hinting at someplace she might go if she were on the run.
Cal drove as Eve manned the phone. She turned to him when she hung up from her latest call. “Nothing on her bank accounts or credit cards. No money withdrawn or purchases since our last shooting that might tell us where she is.”
Cal swore.
Eve looked down at her phone, lips pressed together as she ran through all they knew in her head. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Pull over.”
“What?” Cal asked, but he did as she directed and pulled to the side of the road. They were only a few blocks from the James home.
“Go back, but park down the street.”
He didn’t question. Just nodded and turned the car around.
“We found her car in the garage so she’s not driving that. She hasn’t purchased anything on her credit cards or been to the ATM. She hasn’t booked a flight out of town.”
“Train or bus. She could have paid cash. There wouldn’t be a record we could track.”
“She might have.” Eve nodded. “But that explosion was meant to warn her, not to harm anyone coming on the property. She might well already be out of the city. But we have enough people out there hunting her down. It won’t hurt us to sit tight here and see what happens.”
Cal looked at her for a long minute, before turning off the car. “Do we stay with the car or go on foot?”
“Foot. She knows we would have eyes watching for her car. No way she takes it. If anything, she’ll hike out of here and steal a car. She’s stolen them before. Clearly she has the skill.”
Cal picked up his phone and sent a text as he spoke. “We’ll head to that little rise on the north side of the yard. There was enough coverage in the trees there for us to blend in, but see the front and backyard. I’m having Cafferty and Reynolds come back. When they get here, we can move to a better spot and let them cover one side.”
“Works for me.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
The hardest part of waiting out the police wasn’t the waiting. It wasn’t sitting in the cramped hidden room in the basement. It wasn’t the heat in the tight area or the potential for claustrophobia. It was the memories.
Memories of being taught to do this very thing by her father had assailed her. When she’d failed any training exercise, his response would never be predictable. There were times he’d go with guilt, sometimes not speaking to her for days. Other times, he might lash out at someone else for her failure, punishing her friends. The better times were when he’d just hit her and be done with it. Broken bones could heal, she’d discovered. The other stuff cut much deeper.
The key to sitting still for so long was to focus on breathing. In for four breaths, hold for four, out for four. Rebecca waited until long after the last of the noises had sounded in the house. She slid the door open and crawled out into the air vent. She’d been smart when she set up the room. She hadn’t taken a chance that anyone would discover a hidden door in a wall or bookshelf. No, she’d hidden the door inside of the air vent itself. Even if they removed the cover to the return vents and looked inside, no one would see the door. It was too far into the vent itself.
Of course, the setup had meant she only had about two feet by one and a half feet to hide in. That was all right. She belly-crawled slowly toward the return vent, then lay still again, listening for any signs of an officer left behind to monitor the house.
Nothing.
Rebecca used her nails to pull at the back side of the latch holding the return vent in place, wiggling until the top latch gave. The bottom latch gave more easily, and she slid from the space.
Her breathing sounded loud in her ears, but she knew it wasn’t. She maintained the slow, even breaths that would keep her from gulping loud breaths of air.
She reached back in and pulled her R93 and a backpack out behind her. Sitting on the couch that Christopher had spent so many hours on with his video games, she opened the backpack and stared at the contents. Fingering the R93, she removed the Lapua rounds from the backpack and carried both back to the air vent, pushing them inside before closing it up again. When she got far enough away, she’d find a way to let the police know they were there so they could be safely removed and destroyed. Someday, the bank would foreclose on the house and sell it. She couldn’t have a child discover the deadly weapon and injure themselves with it.
Her days with the weapon were over.
She pulled a small .22 caliber handgun out of the backpack, checked the magazine and the safety, then slipped it into the pocket of her sweatshirt. The backpack went over her shoulders and she made her way carefully through the house, checking as she went to be sure there wasn’t anyone waiting.
The house was silent. It had been since Christopher and Bryan had been taken from her. The slash of pain hit her through the heart once again at the thought that her boys were gone. Not for the first time, she thought that maybe it would have been better if she’d been with them when the mugger had struck. They could have all gone together.
She wasn’t a religious person, and yet, the thing keeping her
alive in this hellish life was the fear that if she took her own life, they somehow wouldn’t end up together. She’d be made to continue to haunt this world forever seeking a way back to them. It seemed silly, but at the same time, it wasn’t something she could bring herself to test.
She allowed herself a moment and one last, long, deep breath to look around the living room of their home. She didn’t see the torn pillows and books that lay slung from their shelves on the floor. She didn’t see the evidence of the police assault on the home she’d shared with her son and husband. She saw what it was. The place where she and Bryan had raised their baby. She saw Christopher learning to crawl. She saw herself running to greet Bryan when he came home, eager to show him that Christopher was walking. She saw chubby arms around Bryan’s neck and scraped knees and triumphant grins. She saw Christopher running through the house, stopping only long enough for a Bye, Mom! before running out to his friend’s car. She saw Christopher trying on his cap and gown for graduation. A graduation he hadn’t made it to.
Tears flowed freely as she watched the memories and allowed herself a last goodbye.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“There,” Cal whispered, barely audible as he raised his hand and pointed. A shadowy figure in dark clothing moved along the edge of the house.
Eve nodded. God this woman had really been trained. It was evident in how she moved now, and Eve had to wonder how no one had seen it before.
