Thirteen

Deborah Sawyer spoke for a very long time, the red second hand of the cheap clock on the wall counting off the minutes. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty . She had to pause on more than one occasion to collect herself and daintily blow her nose in one of the tissues from the box that Ghost handed her. When she was finished, he dropped the whole box in the trash, tied off the bag, and slung it over his shoulder to take with them. Mike had already agreed to come in behind them with a rag and a bottle of Lysol and get rid of prints and DNA, but, given the way things were going, the wildly improbable turns it had all taken, Ghost wondered if they’d need a DNA sample of their own at some point, even if just to cause a little misdirection.

Though she qualified it with plenty of lies and pleas of innocence, the gist of her involvement with Abacus was this: the fourth child of an old money family, her siblings had all worked their way up to the executive boards of various corporations; her oldest brother was a congressman. She’d aimed for the FBI, always intended to become a director, to oversee the dispensation of justice from a bright corner office. But she had to start at the bottom, with the “riff-raff,” as she put it, and it turned out she had a sensitive stomach, and lacked the attention to detail needed in her chosen profession. Her father made some phone calls; an old friend of his opened doors for her…in exchange for her cooperation in some sensitive personal and professional matters. As the head of Forensics, she would disappear evidence when he asked, and in turn, she would have her lauded career, as well as invites to all the most exclusive social gatherings on the east coast.

She claimed never to have willingly participated in any of the sex-trafficking, but her husband, it turned out, had been fraternity brothers with Jack Waverly, so Ghost doubted that was true.

The laptop proved a treasure trove.

“Do you have anything else at home?” Fox wanted to know. “The only way this works – the only way we can protect you – is if you give us everything .”

Wrung-out and defeated, she agreed, and let them drive her to her five-bed, four-bath colonial mini-mansion on the outskirts of DC. She even offered up the code for the garage door so her neighbors wouldn’t have to see her in the company of DOJ officers and start the rumor mill going.

The interior of the house was decorated in an over-the-top, expensive play at wealth-flaunting, from the ridiculous statues on plinths, to the elaborate oil portrait of Sawyer and her husband over the mantel.

She moved around collecting flash drives from hiding spots, until she’d amassed a small pile of them on the marble kitchen island.

“This is everything?” Fox asked.

“Yes.” She exhaled, and seemed to deflate several inches. Then glanced up at him expectantly. “Do I have your word that this won’t blow back on me?”

“Yes,” Fox said. “You have my word.”

She started crying and spluttering again when Fox produced the rope they’d brought. When Ghost pulled a gun on her. When Fox snapped on a pair of gloves and tucked the Home Depot receipt into her wallet as evidence.

The second floor featured a long, railed gallery that overlooked the foyer. Ghost was afraid one of the wooden rail spindles would snap when her weight hit the bottom of the rope and it snatched taut. But it held.

Ghost had never witnessed a hanging; it took longer for her to stop twitching than he’d anticipated.

“What about the husband?” Ghost asked, as they were gathering the flash drives and wiping down the counters. “He’s an even worse piece of shit.”

“Yeah, but the news is going to be crawling all over this place after he finds the body. The media circus is going to put the rest of the people on our list on their toes. Fear makes people sloppy.”

“I lack your patience,” Ghost said, pointedly, and Fox smirked.

“You’re the one who wanted to fake his own death and go undercover. Settle down, boss man.”

Fox, still wearing gloves, booted up the desktop in the den, found the app connected to the video doorbell, and deleted the day’s footage. Then they left, and used the code to put the garage door down behind them.

They were a half-mile from the house, evening coming on dusky orange, when Ghost’s phone rang.

His nerves lit up immediately. Walsh, Mags, Ava, Colin, and Alex were the only ones outside of this car who knew he wasn’t dead, but only Walsh knew where he actually was. Whoever was on the other end of the line, he knew this wasn’t a social call.

Walsh’s name flashed on the screen before he answered. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Walsh’s voice was a little slow, not slurred, but fuzzy at the edges, like he’d been drinking. “Had any word from New Orleans?”

Ghost frowned, and put him on speakerphone; Fox was driving, now, and he set the phone down on the console between them. “No. Have you?”

“No, but I wondered if you’d heard that’s where your wife and daughter are.”

It took Ghost a beat to register what he’d said, and that was only after Fox shot a fast glance at him, brows raised.

“ What ?”

“Yeah.” There was the unmistakeable sound of ice cubes shifting in a glass. “I’m gonna have a stroke if I have to keep anybody else’s fucking secret. My wife wasn’t even going to tell me she helped cover it up until I asked her point blank. Fucking unbelievable.”

Ghost’s heart squeezed and lurched and he pressed a hand to his chest, wondering if this phone call was going to be the thing that really, finally killed him, and then his fake death wouldn’t be a lie at all, and Fox could tote his body back to Knoxville, so that Mags and Ava could be at his funeral…when they got the fuck home from New Orleans .

“Jesus Christ,” Fox said, low and even and not even shocked.

Ghost finally managed to take a breath, and some of the urgent pressure in his chest lessened a fraction. “Walsh,” he said, shockingly level, “you’re drunk.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t change the fact that Maggie and Ava are in New Orleans. Apparently, Tenny, Reese, Colin, and Alex are with them. I can only assume they’ll reach out to Mercy if they haven’t already.” He sighed. “I’m just telling you. Do what you want with the intel, but I’m not keeping another damn thing to myself.”

The line went dead.