FAITH HADN’T SLEPT, OTHER THAN DOZING FOR AN hour here and there, since the call came.
An early riser, even when she spent the night with Hendler, she’d walked into the condo’s kitchen and started coffee. She knew Hendler would probably stay in bed for another hour and a half or so, and Faith rather enjoyed the quiet time before the day began. She would probably wait until she got home to take her run. She had her own route, and it helped to organize her life by sticking to it.
She was sitting at Hendler’s kitchen table, wearing only the long T-shirt, drinking her coffee, lost in thoughts of Sean and Daryn McDermott and what she could possibly do to straighten out her brother, when Hendler appeared in the doorway.
One look at his face told her something was wrong.
“What is it?”
“Rob Cain called. They found the girl.”
“He said that last night,” Faith said. “Doesn’t he-” She broke off, staring at Hendler’s normally placid face.
“No, I mean they found her this morning. We’d better get dressed.”
By the time they’d reached the memorial, the crime scene unit was already there. So was Cain. So were other FBI agents. So was a swarm of the media.
When Faith had first seen the body hanging in the tree, she’d remembered Daryn, back at the safe house. At first there had been hysteria-
And then, when Hendler had finally taken her home, both Sean and her car were gone. She tried calling Sean’s cell every two hours, then every hour, with no answer. Not even voice mail.
She rented a car, a Ford Focus hatchback, and shuttled back and forth between her office and the house. She talked to Yorkton once.
“Even the most brilliant surgeon loses a patient now and then,” he’d told her, then proceeded to ask questions about departmental security.
She’d snapped at him that it should be fine, and quickly hung up.
No one understood, and she could talk to no one.
She’d found no evidence to support any of Daryn McDermott’s claims.
There had been no solid footing on which to build a Department Thirty case with Daryn. There was no independent confirmation that the Coalition for Social Justice was planning anything. Franklin Sanborn was a nobody. There was no evidence to suggest he even existed, much less that he would come after Daryn.
So she held it all in. Hendler knew her brother was gone, but he knew nothing else. He didn’t know how deep Sean’s involvement with “Katherine Hall” ran. He knew only that “Kat” had been a potential Department Thirty case, but had been rejected. That was as far as Faith could go. Even for a fellow Department of Justice agent-and her lover, she mused-she could go no further. Yorkton had cautioned her more than once about her involvement with Hendler, and she’d assured him she could manage it, could keep all the balls in the air.
And now it was crashing down around her, and there was no one in the world she could talk to about it.
Since the body was found on the grounds of a federal reservation, the investigation of the murder fell to the FBI. Rob Cain had worked the missing persons case of Katherine Hall, though, so he and Hendler were working closely together. They’d jointly assured the media that local and federal turf battles would not get in the way of solving this bizarre case.
As the sun rose on the second day after Katherine Hall’s body was found, Faith finished her run. The run gave her no pleasure-her body was exhausted, and she hadn’t eaten much the last two days. When she rounded the bend and entered her block, she saw Hendler’s Toyota and an Oklahoma City police cruiser sitting in front of her house.
Hendler was waiting on her porch. Rob Cain got out of the passenger side of the patrol car, said a few words to the uniformed officer behind the wheel, and the car drove away. Then he turned to watch Faith as she jogged up to the door.
“How far do you run?” Cain asked her.
Faith shrugged. “It varies. Some days three miles, some days five or six.”
“Ever do any real long-distance running?”
“I’ve done marathons.” She saw no need to give the man details.
“So have I,” Cain said. “Back before the kids came along.”
Faith nodded. She unlocked the door and held it open. Hendler didn’t look at her as he went in.
“Coffee?” Faith said. “Scott? Detective Cain?”
Hendler shook his head, still not looking at her.
“Cream and sugar, please,” Cain said. “And call me Rob. We’re all professionals here, right? I think we can dispense with the titles.”
They all looked at each other. Cain glanced around the room, taking in the clutter. “What happened here?” he said, waving a hand toward her bookshelf.
Faith looked over her shoulder, saw where he was pointing. She still hadn’t picked up the dropped book or the shattered whiskey bottle.
“Sorry about the mess,” she said.
He looked back at her, knowing she’d evaded his question. In a minute she brought coffee into the dining room.
“What’s going on?” she asked, looking first at Hendler.
Hendler looked up at her with those soft eyes of his. They weren’t striking eyes, always looking vaguely tired. Hence the “Sleepy Scott” nickname. But they were open and they were faithful, and right now, they were troubled.
“Faith,” Hendler said, “Katherine Hall has just been identified as Daryn Anisa McDermott. She’s the only child of U.S. Senator Edward McDermott of Arizona.”
“Which explains, at least partially,” Cain said, “why her paper trail was so short.”
They all looked at each other for a long moment.
“Did you know about this?” Hendler finally asked.
Faith sipped her coffee, not really tasting it, weighing her options.
She pulled at her lower lip with her teeth. “Yes,” she said finally.
Cain leaned forward across the table. “What exactly do you for DOJ, Faith?”
“Special projects,” she said by rote.
“Uh-huh. And what exactly does that entail, and how is it connected to McDermott?”
Faith said nothing.
Cain shifted in his seat. “I’ve known Scott for three or four years now, and I trust him. He’s never tried to pull any jurisdictional nonsense on me, and has always bent over backwards to be helpful on the cases where we have a mutual interest.”
Hendler looked uncomfortable.
“But,” Cain said, “I’m beginning to get a feeling that some of the children in the federal sandbox don’t all like to play nice with others.”
“I suppose that’s true of any organization,” Faith said mildly.
“Did you spend some time with Daryn McDermott?” Cain asked.
“What difference does it make?”
“Did you kill Daryn McDermott?”
Hendler nearly came out of his chair. “What the hell was that all about? Holy shit, Rob, have you lost your mind?”
“We’re still waiting on the autopsy and ballistics,” Cain said. “The final reports should be in soon, maybe by this afternoon. But you know, that poor woman was killed twice. She was shot in the heart, and then someone tied that rope around her neck and lifted her into the tree, where they then tied the other end of the rope around a tree branch. That would need to be someone fairly tall, fairly strong, in good physical condition.”
“Rob, you’re out of line,” Hendler said.
“Am I?” He locked eyes with Faith. “Did you kill Daryn McDermott?”
“No,” Faith said without breaking eye contact.
“She was with me,” Hendler said. “From a little after nine o’clock that night, until you called me in the morning. She was never away from my side.”
Cain swiveled to look at Hendler. “So you’re closer than friends.”
No one spoke for a moment. Then Hendler said, “Yes, we are.”
Cain looked at Faith again.
“It’s not a secret,” Faith said. “We don’t broadcast it, but we don’t keep it a secret either. We don’t have any kind of formal professional relationship, so there are no protocol violations.”
“That’s good to know,” Cain said. “Okay, so you didn’t kill her. Let’s just assume that’s the truth. But I’m also assuming you know more about her than you’re telling.”
Faith hesitated, then nodded.
“Do you know who did kill her?”
Faith hesitated longer. “I’m not sure.”
“Tell me about Franklin Sanborn.”
“Haven’t we covered this?” Hendler said. “Sanborn’s a ghost.”
“So was Katherine Hall,” Cain said. “Kind of strange to be talking about a dead ghost, isn’t it? When I talked to her a few hours before her death, she said she was running from Sanborn, had had an abusive relationship with him, but that now he understood, now he wasn’t going to bother her anymore.”
Faith rubbed her cheek, touched her scar. “Franklin Sanborn’s not an abusive boyfriend. I can tell you that.”
Cain nodded. “When I first met you, that day at Barry’s, I thought you recognized the name. Our nice little lunch ended pretty quickly after his name came up. So if Sanborn’s not the abusive boyfriend, two questions come up.” He raised his index finger. “One: why did she say he was?” His middle finger went up beside the other one. “Two: who is he?”
Faith swallowed. Facts and feelings and shifting loyalties collided. Faith had declined to protect Daryn. Now Daryn was dead. Within a few hours after Faith cut her loose, the young woman was dead, shot and hanged from a tree.
