The remainder of the deadly strain of the corn fungus, the cuitlacoche, had been removed from the underground storage chamber, and a thorough search of the reservation land had turned up no additional hidden reserves. Jones had told Caitlin those reserves would be “dispatched appropriately”—his phrase, spoken with a smirk. As far as the water responsible for turning the corn fungus into a deadly toxin, seismic specialists were in the process of devising a strategy to seal the underground reserves as much as five miles down, render them inaccessible to the likes of both Daniel Cross and Cray Rawls. The opening to the cave with the still pond, found by Daniel Cross, had been sealed, and serious thought was being given to temporarily evacuating the entire population of the reservation.
New evidence, meanwhile, had mysteriously surfaced in cases involving Cray Rawls and his consortium of energy companies, leading a number of investigations to be reopened. That would ensure that the bulk of his time over the ensuing years would be spent in court or fretting over the eventual loss of the empire he’d built with his inheritance from the couple who had been roasted to death as payment for adopting him.
And he wasn’t alone.
*
Jones had let Caitlin see Daniel Cross alone before he was placed in total isolation, save for his lawyers. She sat on the other side of a thick glass partition inside ADX Florence, the ultra–maximum security prison in Fremont County, Colorado, where Cross was being held, while two armed guards fixed manacles onto his arms and legs.
“I guess you remember me,” he said, voice weak and almost shy.
“Yes, Daniel. I do.”
“I don’t suppose I should thank you for coming.”
“Actually, I wanted to apologize.”
His gaze narrowed, as if trying to gauge her intentions. “It wasn’t your fault. You’re not to blame.”
“Yes, I am,” Caitlin told him. “I’m to blame for not letting you do some time in juvie. Maybe if you’d spent the rest of your teen years there, we wouldn’t be looking at each other right now. So, yes, I’m to blame for thinking a second chance would steer you clear of trouble.”
“I’ll bet you wish you could take it back,” he said, looking identical in that moment to the fourteen-year-old boy, handcuffed to an interrogation table in an Austin jail, whom she’d met ten years before. Only this time, Caitlin felt no sympathy.
“I guess I do,” she told Daniel Cross. “I needed to come here just to see how I got things so wrong. And looking at you through this glass makes me think of somebody else, somebody a little younger than you, who believes he can save anybody too. Now I realize I should be listening to the same advice I gave him—that some people aren’t worth the bother; the key is the ability to tell which is which.”
Cross’s expression grew cold and flat. “Know what? I wish I had built that bomb. I wish I had blown up that school and killed all the assholes. Tell me the world wouldn’t have been a better place with all of them in hell.”
Caitlin rose, having had enough. “Only if you got there first, Daniel.”
*
“I can’t tell you exactly what evil is,” she continued, meeting Dylan’s gaze down in the front row, “only that I know it when I see it, just like you need to do. Because evil is at its best when it’s hiding among us, in places we least expect, in the hearts of people we expected better from. If I had one piece of advice to give you today, it would probably be to never disappoint anyone, least of all yourself. I think one of the things that sets evil people apart is that, while they hate a whole bunch of folks, mostly they hate themselves.
“I’m looking out over you today and I want to believe none of you will become like that, except the truth is I really can’t say for sure—nobody can. What I can say for sure today is that fate is yours to control, and nobody else’s. So I want you to remember this moment, remember this day. Keep it frozen in your mind so you never lose track of the way you feel right now. Because the day you stop feeling that way is the day you may find yourself becoming somebody you don’t want to be.”
Caitlin had stopped checking her notes, was veering entirely from her intended remarks. Her mind waxed whimsically, applying the lessons she’d learned in her own life, with no way to gauge whether she was striking a chord with the graduating seniors of the Village School at all.
As her speech neared its close, Caitlin thought she caught a fleeting glimpse of her father and grandfather standing along the back of the seated graduates, where shadows and light merged. But today Earl and Jim Strong had been joined by William Ray and Steeldust Jack, their shadowy silhouettes lost to the wind before Caitlin could wave their way. She knew she didn’t have to, because they’d been there with her yesterday and would be there again tomorrow. Texas Rangers for life and beyond.
“I hope you all learn lots of times what it feels like to win. And I hope, just as much, you learn how to lose,” Caitlin said, letting her gaze wander over the crowd, where a soaring red-tailed hawk dipped and darted about, having reclaimed the sky. “’Cause nobody wins all the time, but the thing is, that doesn’t stop us from trying.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE