During their bantering exchange, Emory had vacillated between disbelief and fury. Now she confronted them. “You’re friends?”
Hayes said, “Not even close.”
Jack’s reply was, “Quasi friends.”
“How long have you known each other?”
Jack said, “I recruited him straight out of the army.”
“For?”
“My SWAT team.”
She looked at Hayes with wonderment. “You’re with the FBI?”
“Was.”
“You’re the unnamed SWAT officer who made the impossible shot and killed the Westboro gunman? You’re the legend?”
Hayes didn’t respond.
“Answer me!”
He shouted back, “I will when you ask a question that I feel is worthy of an answer.”
The sound that broke the resultant silence was Connell slapping his naked knees. “We’ve got a lot to talk about. Hand me my pants.”
Hayes looked behind him where Connell’s clothes were piled in a chair, along with his pistol and shoulder holster. “You should keep your weapon within reach, Agent Connell.”
“Lesson learned. God knows who’s likely to show up and assault me.”
Hayes tossed the trousers toward the bed. Connell caught them and shook them out. “Excuse me, Dr. Charbonneau.” He stood up and stepped into his pants. As he did them up, he said, “Oh, before I forget.”
He took a cell phone from one of the trouser pockets and handed it to her. “Yours. We found it in the bedroom last night after you ran off. I asked if I could keep it, monitor calls you received. Guess there’s no need to now.”
“Thank you.”
“FYI, the battery has run completely out. It needs charging.” He finished dressing, including his shoulder holster, and worked his feet into a pair of loafers. “Emory, what Bannock said about your husband, is it valid?”
“Why don’t you ask me?” Hayes said.
“Because I’m asking her.”
“I believe it’s true,” she said.
“Based on a hunch or evidence?”
“In all the confusion…” She bent down and retrieved the brown paper sack containing the rock, which she’d dropped on the floor during the tussle. She handed the sack to Connell. After opening it and looking inside, he turned to Hayes. “Her hair and blood?”
He nodded. “Found at the scene, along with a designer logo off Jeff’s ski jacket.” Jack mulled over that information for several seconds, then said, “Before we get down to business, I could use some strong, black coffee and hot food, and, since I’m the only one here not currently being sought by local law enforcement, I volunteer to go for them.”
He gave them time to argue or offer an alternative. When neither did, he put on his overcoat and gloves and scooped the keys to his rental car off the dresser. “Back soon.”
He pulled the door closed behind himself, but even the momentary blast of cold air didn’t dissipate the tension in the room. Neither she nor Hayes spoke. He walked over to the bed, pulled the bedspread up over the mussed sheets, then sat down approximately where Connell had been. Only then did he look at her.
“How did you get in here so fast?”
His head went back a notch. “Of all the burning questions you must have, that’s the one you asked?”
Without even trying to mitigate her anger, she said, “I’m pacing myself.”
“I drove around to the other side of the building, ran like hell, and came through the bathroom window.”
“Why not just accompany me to the door? He would have been just as surprised.”
“I had to make sure of you.”
“Of me?”
“I had to be certain that you would do what was right and uphold the law.”
She gave a harsh laugh. “Do you realize how ludicrous that statement sounds coming from you?”
“It’s my choice to bend the law when expedient. But I didn’t want to be responsible for your breaking it.”
“You made me into a burglar.”
“That was an exception. Even you drew the distinction between the episode with the Floyds and lying to a federal agent in order to let a fugitive escape justice.”
“So everything you said this morning was to see in what direction my moral compass was aimed?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, I’m happy I passed.”
“I know you mean that sarcastically, Doc, but I’m happy you passed, too.”
“You put me through hell for nothing.”
“Not exactly for nothing, but I’m sorry I had to be so hard on you.”
“Not hard, horrid.”
“I had to push your buttons, or the ruse wouldn’t have worked.”
“I could happily kill you right now.”
“I have that effect on people.”
He’d met her charges with calm acceptance, which only made her angrier. “You never planned to drop me off and hightail it?”
“Do you think I’d trust your safety, your life, to Knight, Grange, or even to Jack? Hell. No.”
“You must trust Connell to some extent or you wouldn’t be here. Weren’t you afraid he would arrest you on sight?”
“Arrest me? His pursuit is personal, not official. In his book, my only crime was bailing.”
“What?”
“I vanished. Disappeared.”
“You didn’t commit a terrible crime?”
He gave a brusque shake of his head.
“Then what have you been hiding from?”
“From being the legend who took out the Westboro mass murderer.”
Left speechless, she could only gape. When she was able to speak, her voice was thin. “You did your job.”
“True. But I didn’t see it as cause for celebration. I didn’t think it merited recognition. It was a good day for our team. We did spare lives, no doubt. I wanted it left at that.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“Not by anybody who knew me. Not by anybody, period. The media wanted my name, but thank God nobody on the team, including Jack, leaked it. I’ll always be grateful to them for that.”
“Remaining anonymous only made you more intriguing.”
“I guess,” he muttered. “I was the most sought-after interview, one TV station said. Some of the victims’ families wanted to meet me so they could personally thank me. I got it. I understood. Closure. An eye for an eye. All that. But I didn’t even read the letters they sent Jack to pass along to me.
“The buzz, for lack of a better word, lasted for months. Seemed like every frigging day it was in the news. A different aspect of the incident. I got sick of it and thought, hell, if it won’t go away, I will. So I tendered my resignation and took off. Rebecca, too. Jack’s been after both of us ever since.”
His explanation disarmed her. But considering the closeness they’d shared, physically and emotionally, she felt wounded by his not confiding all this to her sooner. “Why didn’t you tell me? Or was that a test, too?”
“Test?”
“To see if I would believe the worst about you and still go to bed with you?”
“No.” Then with more emphasis, “No.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
He pushed back his hair with both hands, and when they met at the nape of his neck, he held them there for a moment before lowering them. “I killed that kid, Emory. I put a bullet through his head and he died.”
“You did your duty,” she said with soft earnestness. “You did it in order to save lives.”
“Doesn’t make it any easier to accept. He wasn’t a criminal or a psychopath or a fanatic with a point to make. He was a victim, too.”
He got up and walked over to the window, where he twirled the wand on the blinds to open them. Looking out, he said, “His name was Eric Johnson. Jack referred to him as an angry, bitter young man, but he had just turned seventeen. Seventeen. He was working through summer vacation, about to start his senior year in high school. Most kids would be excited. Not Eric. He couldn’t bear the thought of school and more bullying.”
“He was bullied by his classmates?”
“By just about everybody.”
“His parents?”
“No.” He came around to face her, perching on the window sill. “Honestly, I don’t think so. He was their only child, and all indications were that they loved him. Maybe they should have sensed his increasing withdrawal and gotten counseling for him, and maybe they didn’t read the signs of his impending meltdown, but their negligence wasn’t malicious. Besides, by definition, the unthinkable never would have occurred to them, would it?
“They were shattered by what he did and shocked to learn that he had obtained his murder weapon without their knowledge. His dad had never owned a gun of any kind. Eric hadn’t grown up around them. He bought his murder weapon online and learned to use it in secret.
“The discovery came too late, when investigators from every branch of law enforcement turned the Johnsons’ lives and their house upside down looking for answers as to why he’d done what he did. Pundits aired their theories. But the reason was clear.”
“The bullying.”
“Yeah. Eric was an overweight, classic nerd. No people skills. No special talents or athleticism. In an effort to get him more involved, his dad encouraged him to attend a soccer camp one summer, and the following fall, he actually made the junior varsity team. In a journal, he described the cake his mom had decorated in the team colors to celebrate that achievement.”
Emory swallowed with difficulty.
“It didn’t turn out so well, though. He was slow and had no aptitude for the game.”
“Then why was he chosen for the team?”
“To be the coach’s whipping boy. If they lost, Coach gave the team hell, but he was especially hard on Eric.”
She murmured, “The soccer coach in Utah.”
“He’s not a coach anymore and never will be.”
“You saw to it.”
“I never laid a hand on him. All I did was hand him a length of pipe similar to the one he’d cracked across Eric’s kneecap.”
“With an implied threat.”
He didn’t respond to that. “More often Eric’s torment was psychological. He attended a parochial school. It was reported to the headmaster that he’d been caught masturbating in a restroom stall. During chapel the following morning, the headmaster used the incident to illustrate moral turpitude.”
Her heart sank with pity for the boy who’d been publically humiliated, and her expression must have revealed the sadness she felt for him. “This headmaster was a priest?”
“Yeah. A man of God,” he said with rancor. “When I caught up with him, he’d been reassigned to a school in Lexington.”
“I understand that he resigned under…duress.”