I pop open a panel under the steering wheel of Wade’s truck and place the tracker inside.
“Okay,” I tell Brannicks. “Now I’ll know where you are. I’ll know if you do what I tell you. If the tracker isn’t found in that truck when it sinks, everyone on the street will know you gave up your boss.”
He stares at me like I really am crazy. Like I’m worse than any criminal he’s ever dealt with before. Because I tell him all of this without a trace of emotion.
That will come later. After I’ve returned to my car. And opened the door. And climbed inside. And finished what I started.
ChapterThirty-Six
The first thing I do is leave an envelope on the windshield of Rowan’s car. Inside is the account information for the tracker I left in Wade’s blue truck. Tomorrow, they’ll find the truck in the river. They’ll match the VIN number and know it’s his, even though he changed the plates. They’ll send divers to look for his body. The beginning of the end to the case of the 404.
The second thing I do is go home. It’s late, and the house is empty.
I sit on the floor in my daughters’ room, one small lamp turned on. I place the two phones on the floor. Mine and the burner Brett Emory used to torment me. I force myself to use his real name now, even inside my head, from this moment forward.
I feel no relief that this is over. The torment has stopped, but something else is just beginning.
Staring at the two phones, I lay out my thoughts like cards in a game of solitaire. One at a time, in a neat row, and then down into columns. Each one put in a place where I can see it. Make sense of it. Organize it in a way that I can live with. A narrative of what has happened to me and Clay Lucas and now Brett Emory.
I examine first the cards about Brett. I consider Dr. Landyn’s analysis, and that gives me a context for what I learned when I watched him pull the trigger of my gun with his eyes closed, finally evolving into a man who could kill another man bound and gagged, whimpering on the floor.
Billy Brannicks was not a threat. Not in that moment. There was still a chance for him to change. To make a better life. It was not the same as the moment I pulled a trigger and killed Clay Lucas. This is not a lie I tell myself so I can find peace. It is the truth. Though peace, I fear, will remain elusive.
Next is the card with Vera Pratt and her unborn son in that dressing room. Then the coworker Brett assaulted in the elevator. After that, Laurel Hayes. I don’t know the details yet, but he did something to her. Enough to make her confide in Clay Lucas. Enough to make Clay find a gun and hunt him down in Nichols that day. And now she’s disappeared.
Finally, what he did to me on that back road and every day since. He was not going to stop.
I stare at these cards and repeat this over and over:He was not going tostop.
I think about justice and whether it has been served. Whether it is ever served. Billy Brannicks led Clay to a stash of guns—whether they were his or not didn’t matter. He would never pay for that crime, but he’d given me a name—the dealer who calls himself Diesel—and with that name, maybe there would be a different kind of justice. Brannicks would have to stay gone to avoid retaliation. And we might stop another Clay Lucas from killing or being killed.
I stare at the cards, my thoughts, carefully laid out. More rush in, and I fight to keep up with them. I close my eyes, and they play like a silent movie.
Rowan walking down that street, Brett strolling behind him with a baseball bat. My girls on the playground, and Mitch kissing me goodbye at our front door. The shadow in my bedroom that I see through the steam in my shower. Brett pulling the trigger of my gun, aimed squarely at Billy Brannicks. Clay Lucas, his head turned, those eyes looking into mine as I pull the same trigger. And, finally, Brett’s eyes as I fired the rifle into his gut and felt him fall into me.
What unsettles me now are the loose ends after every crime. Every loss. Every trauma that uproots the moral compass inside every one of us. Uproots it and then leaves it to roam freely until we can find it again. Reshape it. Make it square with our new reality. The things we feel and the things we know about ourselves that are new and disturbing. What unsettles me is what remains inside when a loved one is found, dead or alive, when it is learned that a child is never coming home, when the gunman is killed and the shooting has stopped, and we are still breathing.
What remains inside of us is uncertain. Unknown. Unfamiliar. Unruly.
What remains inside of me now I haven’t even begun to investigate. I find refuge in one single moment. The hesitation as I held that rifle to Brett Emory’s chest. The missed beat before my finger pulled the trigger.
If this is all there is, all that remains, I pray it will be enough.
ChapterThirty-Seven
the kill room
The investigation into the shelter killing is just five days old when I first hear of it from Aaron. They have moved quickly.
He calls me into his office, not because of the remains that have been found, but because he can’t find Elise. If anyone would know where she’s gone, it would be me. Her partner.
“She’s not answering her cell. She’s not with her family in Florida. I sent a unit to her house and no one answered,” he tells me.
I think carefully about how to respond. She’s not ready to come back.
Aaron continues, “We tracked her phone to the house. There’s been no activity since she called you. What exactly did she say when you told her the 404 was dead?”
I shrug. “Something about a retreat.”
