said. “You’ve got to go. I’ve got to be with Travis.”

Jake shook his head. “Together forever, remember?” he pleaded softly.

“Family first,” she corrected, straightening her husband’s hair with her fingers. “This is the only way.”

He wanted to argue. He tried to argue, but the words just weren’t there. He allowed Nick to pull gently on his arm, and as they stepped away, Carolyn’s face collapsed. She pivoted quickly and headed toward the ambulance, where Bob and Barbara were lifting Travis through the back doors.

“I love you!” Jake shouted after her, his voice thick and raspy.

He couldn’t tell if she’d heard him over the rumble of the ambulance’s motor.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Irene walked briskly through the throngs of reporters that had gathered outside Little Rock’s Adult Detention Center, ignoring their shouted questions, concentrating instead on the ones she planned on asking herself. Paul had gone on to the hospital to stay with the boy, in case his condition improved enough to answer some questions, while George Sparks stuck with her. Once inside the jail, they were joined by Tom Flaherty, superintendent of the ADC, who greeted them warmly and seemed to be good friends with Sparks.

“How long have you had her?” Irene asked, keeping the pace moving down the hallway.

“About an hour,” Flaherty answered. “Long enough to get her in-processed. Any word on the other one?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. He’ll turn up, though. He’s lost too much just to disappear.” Maybe if she said it confidently enough, it would come true. Frankel wasn’t nearly as pleased as she’d thought he’d be that fifty percent of the team was in custody. “No one’s talked to her yet, right?” she pressed.

“Nope. Not beyond the standard in-processing crap, anyway. You know, name, rank, and serial number.”

“Has she lawyered up?” This from Sparks.

“Not that I know of,” Flaherty said with a shrug. “In fact, I’m not sure she even answered the name, rank, and serial number questions. I’m told she’s pretty dejected.”

Irene chuckled at that. “Yeah, well, her day’s about to get a lot worse.”

The three-person parade stopped at the edge of the security area, while Irene and George deposited their weapons in the shoebox-size lockers built for the purpose. Then they signed in, and Flaherty led the way to an interrogation room. Fairly modern as jail facilities went, the ADC was still a jail, and such places always left Irene feeling depressed. To her, there was a sense of hopelessness about incarcerated criminals that couldn’t be dispelled by lofty claims of “rehabilitation.”

“I’d like to talk to her alone, if that’s okay,” Irene said, stopping the procession at the door. “You know, womanto-woman. I think she might open up more.”

Flaherty couldn’t have cared less, and while Sparks seemed disappointed, he didn’t object. They’d be able to watch everything on the television monitors, anyway. His acquiescence came in the form of a shrug.

“Thanks, George.” She turned to Flaherty. “Okay, then, let’s go.”

The jailer slipped a key into the interrogation room door, then pulled it open.

Irene paused while the door closed behind her, then stepped forward to sit at a conference table, directly across from the woman she recognized from pictures as Carolyn Donovan.

Frankly, Irene was surprised. As fugitives went, this one looked especially small; especially whipped. Ultimate Criminals-people who committed Ultimate Crimes-often failed to look the part, and this was certainly another example. Usually, though, behind the beaten look spawned by captivity, there burned an air of defiance; the spark of something despicable.

With Carolyn Donovan, there was only sadness. She sat slumped in the padded metal chair, her right arm limp by her side, held immobile by the handcuff on her wrist. Pale and drawn, she seemed lost in the oversize blue scrub suit worn by all inmates. This woman looked more like a mother than a criminal; more housewife than murderer.

No wonder she’s been able to stay free for so long.

“Hello, Carolyn,” Irene said cheerily as she approached the table. “I’m Special Agent Irene Rivers with the FBI. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to finally make your acquaintance.” She helped herself to a seat and folded her hands on the table. “As you might guess, we’ve got two or three thousand questions to ask you.” She meant the comment to be lighthearted but feared it sounded cruel.

Carolyn didn’t respond at all.

“Now, Carolyn, there are a couple of ways we can go about this,” Irene went on. “You can sit there sullenly and silently, and in general make it all worse for yourself, or you can-”

“How is my son?” Carolyn asked abruptly.

The question caught Irene off guard. She paused for a moment, wishing incongruously that she’d checked on his condition before she entered. “I don’t know,” she said honestly enough. “But I have an agent down there who’ll be in touch with any developments.”

“They could have let me stay with my little boy,” Carolyn moaned. She seemed dazed by her grief; drugged maybe.

Irene shook her head. “Actually, no they couldn’t,” she corrected. “We’ve been trying to catch you for long enough, thank you very much. The last thing-”

“They didn’t even let me say good-bye to him. They just swooped in with their helicopter and sent him off. I never even got to kiss him good-bye.” Her eyes were focused on a spot on the table somewhere between them.

“You should have thought of that before you got him involved,” Irene said, drawing a look that actually hurt.

“You people have no idea what you’ve done to us,” Carolyn snarled. “You think you have answers. You think you have evidence, but all you have is stupidity and hatred. We’ve done nothing wrong. We’ve never done anything wrong, but you people want to hurt us, anyway.”

Irene felt oddly defensive. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. “I just-”

“You want to hurt my son,” Carolyn interrupted. “Because by hurting my son, you can hurt me and my husband. That’s what this is all about. Justice stopped mattering fourteen years ago. All that matters to you people is revenge.”

Irene regarded the other woman for a long moment, searching her eyes for the scam; for the hidden agenda. The best criminals were consummate con men, and if you gave them half a chance, they’d work their way under your skin and fester like a bedsore. In all the years she’d been in the business of interviewing bad guys, she’d found precious few who owned up to their crimes. They all were innocent. Which made her speculate endlessly on the human capacity for self-delusion.

Evidence spoke for itself. As an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Irene bore the obligation to collect and analyze that evidence and to arrest people deemed by the United States Attorney to be violators of federal law. Guilt and innocence were the far loftier domain of jurors and jurists. She couldn’t afford the luxury of feeling sorry for the people she arrested. As pitiful and grief-stricken as Carolyn Donovan appeared, Irene told herself it was irrelevant.

“You sound like you’re ready to make a statement,” she said, breaking the silence.

Carolyn raised her eyes and locked onto the other woman. At length, she nodded. “Okay,” she said. She leaned forward, resting the weight of her torso as best she could on her single mobile forearm. “Okay, Agent Rivers, I’ll give you a statement. Why don’t we start with Newark, Arkansas, back in 1983.”

“That works for me,” Irene agreed. She nodded to the camera to her right, in the corner near the ceiling, as if to remind George Sparks that a one-on-one interrogation had been her idea.

Carolyn told the story her own way, at her own pace, refusing to be drawn onto the occasional side routes presented from time to time by Irene’s questions. She spoke for nearly a half hour, with barely a break, starting with that first day amid the smoke and the fire and the bodies and ending with Travis’s injury that afternoon. She carefully avoided any specifics on their aliases over the years and mentioned nothing of anyone’s participation outside of their little nuclear family.

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