trigger. The back of her head was gone, blood and brain tissue sprayed on what was left of the wall behind her. The barrel of the gun was still in her mouth.
“Oh God,” Faith muttered. She lowered her head to her hands and wept.
She cried not just for the destruction of this young girl, but for the destruction-in a very different way-of her own brother, of her own family. She wept for the way Daryn McDermott had been used. She’d been a willing vehicle, and it all came down to an elaborate and spectacular suicide for her, but she’d still been used. And she wept for the hole ripped in her own existence by Scott Hendler’s murder. Faith cried and cried and cried, becoming oblivious to the external pain, blinded by the pain inside.
“They were cowards,” Smith’s voice said.
He stepped out of the small closet that had been beside the stairs. The stairs were gone, but the closet enclosure still stood. He’d found the only other safe place in the house. His left arm hung bloodied and limp by his side. His shirt was ripped, a collection of rags. There was blood on his face.
Faith could barely find her voice. “What?” she said.
“Britt and your brother,” Smith said, and his voice sounded very far away, as if he were at the bottom of a well. “The stupid girl, she couldn’t figure out which one of us to trust, so ultimately she trusted no one, not even herself. A lesson of the streets, I would presume.”
“Sean,” Faith croaked.
“He turned out to be a coward as well. He turned and ran. He pushed you into the basement, then took a giant leap out the back door. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to see what happened to him from there. I suspect he’s buried under a few tons of this house, don’t you?”
“You…
Smith bent over and picked up a brick in his good hand. He started toward Faith.
“Name calling doesn’t suit you, Officer Kelly,” he said. “It is down to you, and it is down to me now. The way it should be. Can’t run, can you?”
Smith took a few more steps. Faith pushed herself away from Britt, but there was nowhere to go. Britt’s body and the front wall blocked her on one side and behind, debris on the other. Smith was directly in front of her.
Faith couldn’t make herself speak. She began digging at the pile of rubble beside her.
“Think you can tunnel through it in the next five seconds?” Smith taunted. “No, no, no. Never happen.”
He knelt beside Faith’s legs and dropped his voice to a whisper. “As long as I’m alive, you’ll never have peace, Officer Kelly. I’ve done everything I could to you in this round of the game. Nothing about your life is what it was. And now I’ll simply disappear. I’ll gather up a few personal belongings and I’ll just go away. I already have my identities in place. You know that, don’t you? Your friend Yorkton won’t find me. No one will find me, because I don’t exist. I’m John Brown’s Body, remember?”
Faith remembered his DOJ code name, the moniker that had been given to Smith before they unearthed his real identity last year. She nodded, still scrabbling with the debris.
“I win,” Smith whispered, raised the brick over his head, and brought it down on Faith’s left foot.
Faith screamed in unimaginable agony as the pain rocketed through her. She saw him raise the brick again, saw it coming down toward her right foot.
Mercifully, Faith passed out.
39
FAITH DIDN’T REMEMBER THE ARRIVAL OF THE Logan County Fire and Rescue squad, nor did she remember talking to the sheriff’s deputy about the young woman with the back of her head blown off in the ruins of the house. She didn’t recall the MedEvac helicopter, or her arrival at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center trauma facility. Incongruous with everything else, she vaguely recalled music, something light and feathery. A flute, perhaps.
When she awoke, she was in a hospital room, and the lights were very bright. She saw IV lines, and both her feet were propped up. She turned her head and saw her friend Alex Bridge sitting beside her bed.
Alex was thirty-one, half Comanche, with the high cheekbones and deep dark eyes common to Native Americans. Her hair was short, dark, and straight, though she’d highlighted it with red and blond streaks. She wore jeans and sandals and a Kerrville Folk Festival T-shirt and held a wooden flute in her hands. Faith could see the tattoo on her upper arm, a crown of thorns intertwined with roses and crosses.
Faith stared at her, as if she weren’t quite sure Alex was real. She put out a hand.
Alex clasped her hand, putting her flute aside. “Hey, Faith Siobhan. Man, you Irish redheads are tough.”
Faith coughed. She didn’t trust her voice.
“Don’t,” Alex said. “You’re going to be okay, but it may be a while before your next marathon.”
“Sean?” Faith managed to say.
“He wasn’t there. Your brother wasn’t there, Faith. They were digging all night. The rescuers dug through tons of debris, they scoured that house and the whole countryside. Your brother’s body wasn’t found. He may have made it out. While you were delirious, you kept asking for him…talking to him.”
Faith nodded. “He saved me. Pushed me down into the basement.”
Alex squeezed her hand. “They found a girl there, too. Her name was Brittany Ray. She was twenty-one.”
Faith closed her eyes. She nodded again.
Alex let go of her hand. Her voice changed. “You mentioned Smith, while you were delirious. Was it…”
Faith nodded a third time. Alex had been one of Smith’s victims last year. One of the personas he’d adopted for that “job” had been that of Alex’s husband. He’d fathered her child, then made her believe he’d been killed. Alex had later confronted him on the beach at Galveston, and Faith had never before or since seen the kind of courage Alex Bridge displayed then, facing down the evil that was Isaac Smith.
Alex lowered her voice. “I thought he was under protection.”
Faith held her breath. She remembered Smith-
And the bastard had walked away from Mulhall a free man.
“No,” Faith whispered.
Alex leaned forward.
A plan formed in Faith’s mind.
“I need a computer,” she said.
“What?”
“A computer with Internet access. Can you get a laptop?”
“Mine’s at home,” Alex said, confused.
Faith suddenly looked alarmed. “What time is it? How long have I been here?”
“Ten hours or so. It’s nearly seven in the morning.”
“Where’s Daniel?”
Alex smiled. Daniel was her one-year-old son. Faith had been there when he was born three months premature, and had carried him in her arms to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. “Don’t worry. He’s with my dad. He’s fine. But I had to get here. I guess in your delirium, you told them to call me.”
“Need that computer. I need it fast.”
“Why? They won’t let you use a laptop in here.”
Faith lay back against the pillow. Her hair felt gritty. “Yes, they will. Smith isn’t going to win.”
Alex looked at her quizzically, but stood up. “Give me half an hour.”
Faith was instantly asleep as soon as Alex left the room, and woke when she returned.
Alex plugged in the laptop while Faith adjusted herself on the bed. A nurse came in, looked at the clock, and said, “What’s all this?”
“Business,” Faith said, staring at her.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Kelly, but you can’t use that in here. It will interfere with-”
Faith had Alex hand her a pen, and she scribbled a phone number on an envelope Alex had had in her purse. She handed the envelope to the nurse.
“What’s this?” the nurse said.
“The phone number for a man named Yor-Conway. He’ll tell you I have permission to use this laptop right here, right now, for a few minutes.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t let you-”
“And if you don’t like him,” Faith continued, “he can put you in touch with the attorney general of the United States. And if that’s not good enough, you can speak to the president.”
The nurse stared at the envelope with Yorkton’s phone number. “I’ll need to speak to the nursing supervisor.”
“You do that.”
Alex shook her head as the nurse left. “You tough Irish redheads.”
“Just don’t cross us,” Faith said.
She logged onto the Internet, then using her high-level passwords, accessed the Department of Justice’s massive database. She did a search using “John Brown’s Body.”
“What are you looking for?” Alex asked.
“The file of the people Smith destroyed before last year. The people whose lives he ruined.”
“Why?”
“Do you have any more paper?”
Alex dug in her purse and handed another scrap of paper to her. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Faith felt suddenly alert, as if she’d been given a direct shot of adrenaline. “Smith broke the law again, so he’s not eligible to stay under our protection.”
“But won’t he just disappear, use another one of his aliases?”
Faith nodded. “That’s what he said he’d do. But if I know him like I think I do, he’ll go back to where he’s been living and pack up his books. Maybe nothing else, but he’ll want to keep all his history books, to take them with him into his next identity.”
“So? I still don’t get it. It’s not like you can tell the people he ruined what his new name is.”
