Footsteps from the living room. Cory's voice carrying: "Everything alright?"
"Fine." Janet called back, voice artificially bright. She grabbed Izzy's wrist with surprising strength. "Please. He's all I have."
The raw desperation in her eyes made Izzy's chest tight. This wasn't guilt—this was a wife trying to protect a husband she feared was falling apart.
They returned to find Cory and Tom in awkward silence. Tom seemed oblivious to his wife's red-rimmed eyes, still maintaining his food poisoning story with dogged determination.
"I never left the house Friday," he insisted when Cory pressed about the airfield. "Why would I go to Tonopah? In my condition?"
Janet set down a coffee tray with shaking hands, hovering near Tom like she could shield him with her presence. Her pockets bulged with hidden pencils.
"Well, thank you for your time," Cory said finally, rising. "Sorry to intrude on your Sunday."
"Of course." Tom stood too, hand extended. The mechanical pencil in his pocket caught the light. "Anything to help clear this up."
Outside, snow had started falling again, heavy flakes that would cover their tracks within the hour. They sat in Cory's SUV for a moment, processing.
"Janet was destroying evidence," Izzy said quietly. "The moment you mentioned the pencil at the scene, she panicked. Grabbed every mechanical pencil she could find."
"She knows something." Cory started the engine. "Or suspects something."
"She's terrified." Izzy thought about Janet's desperate eyes, the way she'd clutched those pencils. "Like she thinks Tom might have done something but can't bear to believe it."
"Or knows he did something but loves him too much to let him burn for it."
They drove in thoughtful silence, snow falling heavier now. The Morrison house disappeared behind them, but Izzy couldn't shake the image of Janet on her knees, gathering pencils like she could gather up the pieces of her breaking world.
"Tom's showing signs of dissociation," she said finally. "The confusion, the memory gaps. I've seen it in operators after trauma."
"You think he's being framed?"
"I think..." Izzy watched the snow blur past. "Whether he’s our shooter or not, I think someone's using a broken man as a weapon."
The question was: who was pulling Tom Morrison's strings?
And how far would Janet go to protect him?
37
Monday morning began in a blur.
Cory stared at Izzy’s phone, reading Zara's text for the third time. After everything they'd risked—committing a federal crime, placing that tracker—SBN had done nothing more exciting than attend legitimate business meetings.
"She met with hospital board members, two insurance executives, and her yoga instructor. That's it." Izzy read aloud from her own phone, frustration bleeding through every word. "We risked federal prison for her weekly schedule."
"At least we know she's probably not involved directly," Cory offered, though the words felt hollow. They'd eliminated one suspect but were no closer to answers.
The Knight Tactical operations room felt smaller with both of them pacing opposite patterns across the floor. Three steps, turn, three steps back. Like caged animals sensing a storm.
When the exterior door alarm chimed, they both froze.
"Expecting anyone?" he asked.
Izzy checked the security monitor, her shoulders tensing. "FBI. Four agents."
Through the screen, Cory recognized Debartolo and Preston in their identical dark suits, plus two agents he didn't know.They moved with the purposeful stride of men who knew exactly what they wanted.
"They can't know about the tracker," Izzy said, but uncertainty crept into her voice.
