The Last Widow: The latest new 2019 crime thriller from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author

by Karin Slaughter

  “We’ve built something here,” Dash said. “Our community is young, but we’re driven. There will be some sacrifices, some casualties, but the Message is more important than any one man. You’ll see that when you meet the rest of the group. I want you to sit with my family. Get to know us. You’ll understand what we’re fighting for.”

  Will doubted Dash was going to sacrifice himself. Megalomaniacs talked a big game, but they always came out without a scratch. The highest casualties would be all the brothers who thought running around in black tactical gear made them ready for war.

  Will said, “Lot of young guys here.”

  “They are indeed. That’s why we need tough, battle-hardened soldiers to train them up. Maybe you could be one of those soldiers, Major Wolfe.”

  Will gave a noncommittal shrug. They were heading into the woods. He noticed two older guys with rifles. There was a platform built into one of the trees. A gray-haired man was leaning on the railing. His AR-15 was slung over his shoulder.

  The Sig Sauer could take out one of them before Will was shot down. If they were using the same FMJs from the staging area, the bullet would run through Will’s chest like water and go straight into Dobie’s head.

  “This way, Major.” Dash led Will toward a cleared trail. Dobie was tagging behind them like a puppy. The B and C Team straggled a few yards behind.

  “I think you’ll like it here.” Dash walked beside Will, though the trail was narrow. “Gerald tells me you’re a friend of Beau’s.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not—” Will feigned injecting a needle into his arm. “That’s not my thing.”

  “What is your thing, brother?”

  Will shrugged. He couldn’t make this easy.

  Dash said, “Quarter of a million dollars is a lot of money.”

  Will could feel Dash studying his face. “It is.”

  “What are you going to do with it, Major Wolfe?”

  The question wasn’t as simple as Dash had made it sound. Will took his time thinking through an answer. Now wasn’t the time for Jack Wolfe to go into some racist tirade or rail against the government for failing him. “I guess I’ll go somewhere like this. Just me and nobody else.”

  “You wouldn’t take a woman with you?”

  He shook his head. He glanced at Dobie, who was listening intently. “I don’t like complicated.”

  Dash nodded, but Will couldn’t tell if he’d given the right answer. It didn’t matter. There was no taking it back. They’d reached a clearing. Small cabins were tucked into the tree line. Women were cooking over open fires, filling up bowls and plates. Eight in all. Three old guys on platforms in the trees. Three more on the ground. Twelve younger women at the picnic tables putting down silverware and plates. Children were running around, spinning in circles, screaming, laughing. There were too many for Will to count.

  “You like kids?” Dash asked.

  Will felt like his breath was trapped in his chest. If there were kids here, then Sara might be close by. But there were so many of them. Will couldn’t start shooting if there were children. Some of them were barely old enough to walk.

  “Major Wolfe?”

  Will realized that he was staring at the girls. And then he realized that a man like Dash wouldn’t find that creepy. “They’re pretty. The little blonde ones.”

  Dash chuckled. “My girls love their Daddy.”

  Will swallowed down his disgust. “How many are yours?”

  Dash looked Will in the eye and said, “Every single one of them belongs to me.”

  He meant it as a warning. Will forced his fingers not to curl up into fists. He turned around slowly, looking at Dobie. The kid had stuck a piece of grass in his mouth. He swatted away a fly.

  Will asked Dash, “He got anybody coaching him up?”

  Dash smiled, as if he finally understood Major Wolfe. “You can have him if you want him.”

  Will nodded. “Sure.”

  Dobie grabbed at the fly, trying to catch it in his hand.

  Dash called to him, “Dobie, brother, keep an eye on Major Wolfe for me.” He patted Will on the shoulder. “I’ll find you after the celebration, my friend. That’s when the real work starts.”

  Will nodded. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets as Dash walked toward the children. They ran toward him, yelling Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!

  Will spit out the bile that had filled his mouth. Dash wasn’t really training these toy soldiers. He didn’t have a plan other than to murder a hell of a lot of people. If Will had to guess, he would say that the only brother who had practiced making it out of that building alive was the racist pedophile who was leading them into it. This was a suicide mission, plain and simple.

  He thought about the GPS tracker. He was running out of time to find Sara. Will would give himself fifteen more minutes. More than that, and he wouldn’t be the kind of man that Sara would want to come back to.

  “Didja see those bullets, man?” Dobie hovered at Will’s elbow. “They sprayed them with pork brine in case we hit any Muslims.”

  Will couldn’t think of a more asinine idea. Salt corroded metal. Guns were made of metal. These people sure liked jamming their weapons.

  Dobie asked, “Did Dash say anything, bro? Did he tell you what we’re gonna do? Nobody knows. He’s always talking about the Message, and we’ve been training, but—”

  “Shut up.” Will let his eyes travel across the clearing. He’d counted forty men so far, forty-one if he included Dobie. The eight cooking women were older, but the twelve women at the tables were all in their early twenties. Even in the weird wedding dresses, Will could tell they were attractive. That explained what kept Dobie and his Three Amigos here.

  “Come on, bro,” Dobie begged. “We’re a team now. Tell me what Dash said.”

  Will saw a long, low building across the clearing. There was a sink and shower stall by the steps. The windows were covered in white paper.

  Will watched the door open. “Go find us some Gatorade.”

  Dobie said, “Dash told me to keep an eye on you.”

  A woman came outside. Tall, willowy. White dress. White scarf around her head.

  Dobie started to speak, but Will palmed his face and shoved him backward onto the ground.

  The woman sat down on the stairs. She was putting on her shoes.

  Will held his breath.

  Dobie whined, “Fuck, man. What’d you do that for?”

  The woman looked up at the sky. Her pale skin was already burned from the sun.

  Will couldn’t remember how to exhale. His lungs started to fold in.

  “Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

  The woman wiped her face with the hem of her dress. She pulled off her scarf. Her long, auburn hair fell around her shoulders.

  Sara.

  17

  Tuesday, August 6, 5:32 p.m.

  Sara folded her impromptu scarf into a neat square. She had wrapped one of the cloth napkins around her head in hopes that it would keep her hair from curling up as it dried. She wanted to press her face into the material and cry—about Michelle and Tommy and every other appalling thing she had witnessed—but she lacked the will to summon any emotion but hopelessness.

  None of the children were improving. Joy could not stay awake. Three more adults had showed up at the bunkhouse reporting nausea, fatigue and breathing issues. Benjamin was in a stupor. Lance’s dysentery had resolved, but he was slurring his words and complaining of double vision. The varied symptoms could point to anything from a tick-borne illness to Guillain-Barré to glaucoma to mass psychosis.

  Nothing Sara had tried was working. The medications had to be bad. The various antibiotics and prophylactics were either mislabeled, placebos, or poison.

  Poison.

  Was Gwen some kind of Dark Angel?

  In the course of her medical career, Sara had heard plenty of talk about hastening the death of a terminally ill patient. Wanting to end a person’s suffering was a natural desire. Sara h
ad never seen anyone act on the impulse, no matter how dire the situation. The children in the bunkhouse were ill, but there were treatments, medications, that could help them rally. Two days ago, Sara had assumed that Adriel would be protected by her mother. Now, Sara knew that Gwen was not above murder if the calculus was in her or Dash’s favor. The woman shared her bed with a mass murderer. She parented her children by fear and intimidation. God only knew what else she was capable of.

  Sara looked around the clearing. Women were rushing back and forth, making preparations for the party, staying well out of Gwen’s way in case they invited her rage. Tonight’s celebration was all about gearing up to deliver the Message. If Dash got his way, everything would change tomorrow. Sara was supposed to be his Witness. She shuddered to think what that would entail. He had predicted more deaths than could be counted. She was yards away from the greenhouse, but getting inside would not stop what was going to happen. It would only burden Sara with the horrific knowledge of what was to come.

  She had never felt so alone on this god-forsaken mountain.

  Sara made herself stand up. She walked down the stairs, across the grassy clearing. She lost count of the new faces, the young ladies setting the tables, the little boys who had joined Dash’s brood of little girls. The armed men were still on guard. The hum of the generator had died down a few hours ago. She kept hearing loud pops from over the hill. She assumed the preponderance of gunfire meant that Dash had stepped up the drills.

  Sara’s brain had given up on song lyrics and replaced them with a mantra:

  Black box, the greenhouse, the Message, tomorrow.

  She was rethinking her biological agent theory. Sara had been too focused on the infectious disease part of Michelle’s job title. The CDCs Clinical Chemistry Branch serves as the world reference laboratory for certain infectious disease. Their National Biomonitoring Program measures levels of exposure to toxins such as anthrax, botulinum, pertussis and aflatoxins. In order to translate that data into practical treatments, Michelle would have to have a deep understanding of chemistry.

  Sara had minored in chemistry as part of her pre-med. She knew that thermite was made from aluminum and ferric oxide. Naphthenic and palmitic acids combined to make napalm. Phosphate rock heated in the presence of carbon and silica creates white phosphorous, a waxy solid so volatile that it has to be stored underwater to keep it from self-igniting.

  Any one of these substances could be synthesized in a commercial lab. Or a greenhouse with a commercial lab inside. With proper handling, you could insert an incendiary munition into anything from a hand grenade to a missile to a black box. The resulting explosion would be catastrophic, especially in a heavily populated area. Phosphorous could burn a hole through skin and organs. Pouring water on thermite created a steam explosion, spraying hot fragments in every direction. Napalm could cause an array of maladies, from subdermal burns to death by asphyxiation.

  If Dash was planning to detonate the black box inside a building like the Structure, hundreds if not thousands of people could be murdered.

  “How is she?” Gwen’s raw hands were in her apron. She was standing beside a table with several ice-cream churners. She had been cranking them by hand. “Adriel? Is she any better?”

  Sara shrugged and shook her head, conveying her exact feelings. “Why? You’re not going to do anything to help her.”

  Gwen started cranking one of the churns. Chunks of rock salt hit the table. The scent of fresh vanilla was in the air. All that Sara could think was that cyanide had a similar odor when it was processed through the body.

  “Good evening, ladies.” Dash was grinning as he struggled to walk. A child was wrapped around each leg. Esther and Grace were giggling like monkeys.

  He asked Sara, “Everything good, Dr. Earnshaw?”

  Sara nodded. She had not spoken to him since she’d told him to fuck off. She supposed that, like most psychopaths, he couldn’t handle confrontation.

  He asked, “Tell me, how are your patients doing?”

  She tried, “I’m not pleased with their progress. Are you sure the medications are—”

  Grace gave a squeak. Her mother had filled two small paper cups with ice cream.

  Gwen said, “Share with your sisters.”

  The girls ran off, squealing with delight.

  Dash said, “I’m not a medical expert, Dr. Earnshaw, but am I correct that little children often get sick for no reason at all?”

  Sara was annoyed by every part of the question. “As a medical expert, I can tell you that the symptoms are not sequela to a measles infection.”

  “Hm.” He made a show of thinking while she enjoyed the fact that he had no idea what sequela meant.

  Gwen said, “You should probably say something before we begin.”

  Dash smiled at his wife. He asked Sara, “If you don’t mind, Dr. Earnshaw, I’d like it if you walked with me.”

  He didn’t lead her toward the picnic area. Instead he indicated the direction back toward her cabin prison. If he thought confining her was a punishment, he was wrong.

  Dash said, “It’s a lovely evening. I think we’re getting a break in this heat.”

  Sara did not respond. The gun in his holster looked different. She recognized the blue slide that retrofitted the gun for Simunition.

  Dash said, “I’m sorry to have to bring this up, Doctor, but it appears that you’ve upset my wife.”

  Sara chewed her lip. He had never admonished her before.

  He said, “I really can’t have discord in the Camp. Especially not tonight. What we’re doing tomorrow is too important.”

  Sara turned around to look at him.

  She could tell he had no intention of backing down. One side of his smile was higher than the other. This wasn’t the mask slipping. This was a joyful anticipation of cruelty.

  He said, “I had hoped that, given Michelle’s rapidly declining help, you would be able to take over her job as our Witness.”

  Sara looked away first, chiding herself for playing Russian Roulette. She was a hostage. He was a murderer. She had seen him shoot two men. She knew that he’d set off those bombs at Emory. He was planning something even more spectacularly awful. Confronting him, pushing him, was the quickest way to her death.

  Dash told her, “Gwen says I’ve given you too much freedom.”

  Sara watched him lift the gun from his holster. The blue slide stood out on the top of the frame. He had no idea that Sara knew the marking rounds were not lethal. He was enjoying the idea of toying with her.

  “You’re right.” She tried to talk him down. Dash’s gun wasn’t a threat, but there were three dozen men in the clearing who carried the real thing. “I’ve been frustrated because of the children. I shouldn’t have talked to Gwen that way. Or you.”

  “It’s not for my sake I’m doing this.” Dash didn’t point the weapon at her. Instead, he tested the weight in his hand. “Between you and I, it’s not often I meet my intellectual equal. Perhaps I’ve let myself enjoy parrying with you too much.”

  “I—”

  He pointed the gun at her belly. “Let’s finish this by the river.”

  “Wait.” Sara’s eyes desperately scanned over his shoulder, as if anyone would help. The girls were seated at the picnic table. They were surrounded by men dressed in black. Young faces, old. All clean-shaven but one.

  Tears flooded into Sara’s eyes. She gasped.

  “Dr. Earnshaw?”

  She covered her mouth with her hands.

  Will?

  Standing by the picnic table. Laughing with the girls.

  Was it really him?

  Dash said, “Doctor—”

  “I’m sorry!” Sara blurted out the words. “Please, I’m so sorry.” She clasped together her trembling hands, begging him. “Forgive me, please. I’m sorry. Please.” She couldn’t stop pleading. Had Will seen her? He wasn’t even looking this way. “I’ll be better. I promise. Please. Just let me—you said I’m your Witness.
Let me—I’ll tell them that you—that you are a community. A family.”

  Dash’s eyes narrowed. Her reaction had been too delayed.

  “Please.” Sara’s hands were shaking so hard that she couldn’t hold them together. Will had turned away from her. She saw his back, his broad shoulders. “Dash, please. I’m so sorry. Please don’t—don’t hurt me. Please. I don’t—I don’t want to be hurt. Please.”

  “What is this?” he demanded. “You think I’m going to rape you?”

  “No—” Sara was so desperate she almost screamed the word. “No, of course not. I was—”

  “I assured you that you would remain unmolested.”

  “I know you did, but—” A sob rolled out of her mouth. She looked at Will, begging him to turn around. “Please. I saw the gun and I thought—”

  “We adhere to the rules of the Geneva Convention.” Dash waved the gun around as he spoke. “I told you. We are not animals. We are soldiers.”

  “I know. I know. I just—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said—I’m upset about the children. They’re so sick. And Michelle—”

  Turn around-turn around-turn around …

  “Dr. Earnshaw, I’m a married man.”

  “I know.” Sara gave up trying to wipe her tears. “I’m sorry. I should know you better by now. I realize you would never—that you’re an honest man. You always keep your word.”

  “I do.”

  “Dash, I’m so sorry. I just—I saw the gun, and I panicked, because my—my husband was shot with a gun like that.” She had no idea where the lie had come from, but Dash seemed to like it.

  He said, “Shot by a filthy mongrel, no doubt.”

  “I’m scared of guns. They terrify me. And they’re all around. Everywhere. And I’m so scared. All of the time. I’m sorry I’m not—”

  Dash gave a dramatically drawn out sigh. He slowly returned the weapon to its holster. He tightened the Velcro strap to make a point. “It is my ardent wish, Dr. Earnshaw, that what we’re doing tomorrow will ensure that good white women such as yourself are no longer afraid.” His hand went to her shoulder. “Once the world is wiped clean of the mongrels and their enablers, we will be free of the kind of crime that took your husband away from you. Police officers will be safe on the streets again. Law and order will be restored. You will be the last widow of your kind.”