The Exceptions

FOUR


Sean shoves me into the men’s room on the sixth floor of the Garmatz Federal Courthouse, pushes me so hard I go sliding across the floor and bang my head into the pipe under one of the sinks. Just as the door closes, he says, “Clean yourself up.”

I right myself by holding on to the sink. The thing shimmies and shakes, feels like I might rip it right out of the wall as I use it to pull myself up. When I finally see myself in the mirror, the damage doesn’t look as bad as it feels. Sean apparently learned as I did that the best way to bruise someone is behind areas covered by clothing: the blows to my body. I have a large lump across my forehead from where he rammed it into the door of the Explorer, blood crusted around both nostrils, and three cuts along my left cheek from his punches to my face. But the real soreness resides in my chest and sides from where he rained down blow after blow until a tour bus turned the corner near Covington and startled him out of his rage.

I turn on the faucet and let the water run over my hair and face, into my mouth. I spit out a pinkish pool of fluid, wipe myself dry with a handful of paper towels, gently dab some of the dried blood from my skin. I rub my rib cage where the pain is most intense, wince as my fingers brush my left side, wonder if I have a cracked rib.

I walk out to the hall and Sean is standing with his back against the wall, staring at his cell phone. The building is quiet and empty at ten-thirty on this Sunday evening.

Sean ignores me, takes another minute to finish whatever it is he’s doing, then suddenly snaps his cell shut and looks up. “C’mon,” he says, and starts to walk down the hallway.

“Can I get something to drink?”

“Shut up. You’re not in Witness Protection yet. If you think I’m gonna wait on you, you’re out of your mind. You want a drink? Go stick your head in the toilet.”

We make our way to the end of the hall and he opens the last door before the stairwell, flips on a light to display a conference room that could seat fourteen people around one long rectangular table. He flips another switch and the blinds drop across all seven windows and the lights of Baltimore’s skyline slowly disappear. At the farthest end of the room is a one-way mirror wide enough to house an entire Hollywood film crew behind it.

I take a few steps toward the table, rest my hand on the back of one of the plush leather chairs. Sean walks to a computer in the corner of the room, spends a minute typing something, then disappears through the door leading to whatever is on the other side of the one-way mirror. For a marshal, he seems awfully comfortable around the facility and its components. I’m not really sure what I expect of him, but it’s not this: a man with the keys to the kingdom, able to run the show.

I sit down in the chair at the end of the table and sink into the seat. I rest my damp head against the back of the chair, and just as I close my eyes for a few seconds, Sean reappears through the first door again. As he walks my way, he chucks a bottled water in my lap.

“This room will be full by daybreak,” he says, then sits down several seats away from me. “People coming from all over—New York, DC, Baltimore, of course. You better have something really interesting to say.” He stares at me like he might lunge toward me, give me one more round.

“It’s gonna be bigger and better than anything they could imagine.”

He wipes his face. “This is your big moment, Bovaro. Enjoy it. People are going to care about you, really love you, all the way through getting you deposed. Then you’ll return to being nothing. Same loser, different name.”

I sit up a little, want to help him understand that his annoyance has more to do with the fact that he’ll be ushered out when the real dealmaking and information transfer begins. Instead, I rest back again and say, “You don’t like us much, do you?”

“You who?”

“Criminals who flip on their own.”

Without any hesitation: “Hate you. Really takes all my strength to provide even the thinnest protection. The few witnesses in this program that are innocent—people like Melody and her parents—I love ’em. They’re braver than anyone you know, possess a willingness to sacrifice and a commitment to doing the right thing that you’ll never understand.”

I wish I could correct him, want him to know he and I might have more in common than he thinks. I spent twenty years of my life committed to successfully protecting Melody—something he failed at after only a few days.

I stare back, spill my thoughts. “You know you’re a terrible marshal.”

He narrows his eyes and grins slightly, then drops his eyes, spins his wedding band around his finger.

“When you phoned me,” he says, “you asked if I lost something. I didn’t lose anything.” He looks back up at me. “She walked away.”

Melody’s fast confession in the kitchen of my father’s house floods my mind. I so easily recall the panic on her face as she offered up the scattered details of those loose hours lost from the spa.

I slide down in my chair. “You guys offered her a deal to turn on me,” I say. Everything she said, all genuine. I hate that I let even the slightest doubt cross my mind, feel a deepening of sadness at losing her forever, knowing her love for me was so real that she gave up having the best of everything the government could offer in order to remain with me.

Sean nods a little. “They were going to give her the ultimate incentive.” He goes back to spinning his wedding band. “Any town, any job, any money.”

I stiffen. That precise definition of her deal wasn’t just Gravina’s general description of what’d been offered to Melody; those were his exact words: any town, any job, any money. I process the information over and over, my eyes dim and mouth open like I’m about to sneeze, except something far more jarring is brewing. I lean forward, put my elbows on the table, intertwine my fingers and start cracking knuckles, need to find a way to call Peter and tell him the name he needs to take very seriously, give him the proper direction to vent his impending indignation.

“But,” Sean adds, “once you’d brainwashed her into thinking you cared about her, and by the fact that she’d truly grown weary from being in this program her whole life, she apparently wanted nothing to do with it any longer. Wouldn’t even listen to what they had to say.” He leans forward, points a finger. “And the result of her decision was her own murder.”

“If only she’d had a marshal capable of protecting her.”

Sean leaps out of his seat like he’s going to grab me by my shirt and toss me out the sixth-floor window, but he merely reaches in his back pocket. I assume he’s grabbing the cuffs, throwing a tantrum by suddenly going by the book and locking me down to the table. Instead he pulls out what looks like a wallet and chucks it against my chest.

It bounces onto the table and falls open backward, displays a gold badge and identification bearing his picture and name—for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“I’m with the Organized Crime Unit. Have been for most of my career.” I leave the badge on the table, try to assess his angle, the second time today I’ve been forced to reevaluate everything I thought I understood—though this assessment requires far less analysis. And as I quickly comprehend what has happened, how things have been so badly manipulated, I don’t even realize I’ve left my seat.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “Melody was set up.” Sean slowly reaches over and takes back his identification, slides it in the pocket opposite the cuffs. “You used her.”

“It was an experiment,” he says. “And it failed.”



Sean sits down, points to my chair, and I do the same. He explains how he was a member of a small group of pioneers within Justice (those who carried disdain for the group termed them rebels)—a hybrid of its divisions and offices, but mostly comprised of FBI agents—who proposed breaking the rules, and some laws, to infiltrate three principal areas: child pornography, drug trafficking, and organized crime. He tells me how he started working to bring down child pornographers and pedophiles, how it made him sick enough that he had to move on, generated an anger and rage in him that he redirected toward the Mafia. He studied and learned everything he could about the Italian organizations, memorized every chart and every member of every family operating up and down the East Coast.

A year earlier, the group conjured the idea of manipulating a single witness in WITSEC—the United States Federal Witness Protection Program—into unwittingly becoming a lure, as bait to draw the Mafia closer, to catch them acting on a federally protected witness, with the notion that it would create a frenzy of one member folding on the other. The small group viewed the countless bad guys turned witnesses as a bucket of juicy worms to hang from their giant fishing pole. And all they needed was one worm. The idea was to take a single witness who’d been a member of one of the families, someone they callously viewed as expendable from both sides, and set the mousetrap.

Except.

Except they could never find the right witness at the right time, waited years for the perfect scenario to present itself. And during these years, two things occurred simultaneously: an increasing angst at nailing the largest families in New York, and annual federal budgets where funds were increasingly redirected from organized crime to terrorism. They became desperate—I argue it was an issue of job security, but Sean explains it was truly about bringing justice—and they decided they were going to pull in a prizewinner without getting a fishing permit.

And then: little Melody. The woman with whom I fell in love grew bored of her surroundings at the absolute wrong time. The nadir. When Melody called in to the Marshals Service and the FBI was notified, the handler she’d dealt with most of her life explained—lied—that he was going to retire and a younger, more able marshal was going to take her case.

In walked Sean Douglas, a strapping and powerful man who, while fully capable of protecting her, played the part of the aloof buffoon, the only marshal in the history of the service who didn’t fit the part, who didn’t possess the power to take your life with a punch to your face, the red umbrella in the sea of black ones. The toddler.

“When you found her in Cape Charles,” he says, “you think we didn’t know you were there?” I feel like I could throw up. When I don’t answer, he adds, “I mean, c’mon, I kept making excuses while driving down Route 13 to let you catch up.”

“No way. I saw the marshal with your caravan who ran into the convenience store on the Delmarva. That guy was the real deal.”

“Indeed, he was. Had no clue I was undercover.”

I clench my fist so hard my nails dig into my palm. “I hope one day you have to be protected by the guys you duped.”

He ignores me, continues, “When you were so cleverly sneaking into her room in Cape Charles, I sat on the beach on my cell phone talking to agents parked a hundred yards out, who were giving me each and every detail of what you were doing.”

I take a deep breath, attempt to suppress the desire to make my first kill. I utilize my last strand of self-control as this realization washes over me: “But… you let me enter her room. I could’ve killed her right on the spot.”

He takes a deep breath and lets it out in measured pulses. “It shouldn’t have been Melody. I was against that.”

“Oh, you were against that.”

“It was a poorly estimated risk. But we did what we had to do.”

“And to get to my family, you would have let me kill her?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you knew it could happen.”

“Not with you. Part of estimating the risk was knowing that you, of any member of any crew in the five boroughs, had virtually no capacity to kill. You were the ultimate actor for the part, Johnny. Like I said, this was the perfect scenario, and it was handed to us.”

I wave him away with the back of my hand. “But you knew it could happen.”

He keeps his eyes on mine but licks his teeth like his mouth is getting dry. “We knew.” Now he looks away. “It should not have been Melody.” He bites the inside of his cheek, then adds, “I really liked her.” An entire minute passes before he completes whatever memory of her he’s recalling. “I mean, I really did.” He looks up at me again, repeats, “Shouldn’t have been Melody.”

I look at the clock and notice midnight is approaching, feel exhaustion setting in, taking over. “But it was. She was an innocent witness. Where’s all the love for innocent witnesses you spoke about earlier?”

He raises his voice as his justification becomes as fatigued as I am. “We can’t play by the same rules. You get to break the laws and we have to capture you while abiding by them. We’re both playing football here, but Justice isn’t allowed to have a passing game.”

As the hatred returns, I get the notion that what my family does is bad, but only notable because we’re higher up the scale, that we aren’t the bad guys; we’re the worse guys. This entire exchange with Sean brings the anguish back to my mind, has me recalling the very day I inadvertently made Arthur and Lydia and Melody McCartney vulnerable, how that cop manipulated a little boy to get what he needed, a scared kid who wanted to do the right thing to protect the girl with the blond curls and make sure she and her parents were safe, how the cop lied to me, said whatever he had to so he could gain my trust. So he could break my trust.

Maybe Sean is different—his anger and violence toward me at the notion I’d killed Melody certainly seemed genuine—but his remorse does not displace the risk he thrust upon her in the first place. I stare at him, see his pathetic look of regret covered by an opaque, synthetic smugness.

He bores me with a tale of his true incompetence, how they really did lose her in West Virginia—I never confess to where we were all that time—and how it became nothing more than a matter of “coming back to Baltimore to regroup and wait for further instructions from DC.”

I’m tired and hungry and in need of a rush of nicotine. I haven’t wanted to destroy someone this badly since Gregory Morrison. I take a drink of water, slowly twist the cap back on, and say, “I think it’d be in your best interest to put those cuffs on me.”