Page 28

Her quick sweep of the library exterior hadn’t magically made the phantom that was Michael Brooks appear.

There were still two plainclothes officers keeping an eye out, one male and one female, both young enough to still believe in the system.

Inside, Ella and Sarah Webb were sitting side by side, thick as thieves.

Ripley hated the small, petty tug of jealousy that it created.

She was too old for that playground crap.

But there it was anyway, gnawing at her like a rat on drywall.

Maybe coffee would help. Or coffee with whiskey, if this hipster place was willing to Irish things up a bit.

Ripley pushed open the glass door and a startlingly-cheerful bell jingled overhead. The place was deserted inside. A sign by the register listed coffee varieties from countries Ripley couldn’t locate on a map without squinting.

Then a sudden thought pinballed through her mind.

Maybe Ripley could put her preconceived notions behind her and bring coffees back for both Ella and Webb.

A peace offering. The author had given them intel on the White Whalers without hesitation; the kind of intel that would have taken Ella and Ripley all day to dredge up.

Webb had volunteered to be bait in a stakeout, and unlike most civilians who inserted themselves into investigations, she hadn’t once mentioned payments or movie rights.

Ripley found herself almost regretting her earlier hostility, but not quite.

Okay, the woman wrote about dead people for a living, a job Ripley fundamentally distrusted, but that wasn’t an automatic character indictment.

Frank himself had been obsessed with Jennifer Marlowe for nearly fifty years. Obsession recognized obsession.

The counter stood empty. Ripley tapped her knuckles on the wood. ‘Hello? Anyone in?’

A door swung open behind the counter, and a man emerged from what looked like a storage area.

Early thirties, average height, dark hair that fell across his forehead.

Wire-rimmed glasses perched on a nose that was just slightly too large for his face, which threw the bland symmetry slightly off-kilter. The man wiped his hands on a dishtowel.

‘Sorry, but we closed at four.’

Ripley glanced at the door, then back to the barista. ‘Then why was the door open?’

‘Yeah, I’m just waiting on a delivery at five.’ He tucked the rag into his apron pocket and leaned against the counter.

The explanation sat there. Simple enough.

Ripley almost leaned forward and utilized her older woman charm to get three coffees anyway.

Maybe she could throw him a tip or – God forbid – flirt with him.

Judging by the romance books she’d been reading back in the library, the older-woman-younger-man dynamic was all the rage.

But something stopped her. The way he leaned was too casual, like he was an actor playing the part of relaxed barista. How he kept looking to the door, then the espresso machine, then his apron. Anywhere but directly at her face for more than a second?

Nerves? Social ineptitude?

Hiding something?

Ripley let her gaze linger. She didn’t speak. She just looked. Decades of reading rooms, reading faces, reading the subtle tells of deception screamed louder than the quiet hiss of the coffee machine.

Images of a familiar face flashed in her mind’s eye. One she’d seen for the first time two hours ago.

On a printout given to her by the library manager.

Ripley felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. She kept her eyes locked on the man while fishing it out one-handed, thumb swiping across the screen to reveal a text from Ella:

Brooks just emailed the group. He has to be here.

Two jigsaw pieces suddenly connected. The emails sent to the White Whale email group had been traced back to the library’s IP address. Ripley was no tech expert, but she knew that IP addresses were determined by routers, and ergo Wi-Fi connections.

And this coffee shop didn’t have Wi-Fi.

Ripley’s blood ran cold.

Because the man who had gouged out Frank Sullivan’s eyes stood three feet away from her, separated only by a thin countertop.

‘Everything okay?’ Brooks asked with a tremor to his voice. ‘Maybe I could… knock up something for you real quick?’

Her mentor. Her friend. Dead because of this – barista?

‘Michael Brooks?’

He suddenly drained of color. Michael Brooks – or whatever his name was – suddenly stood up ramrod straight. Guilt had its own body language, and Brooks had instantly become fluent in it.

‘Excuse me?’

‘You heard me. Are you Michael Brooks?’

‘No. I’m not.’

Ripley instinctively reached for her non-existent gun, then the same with her badge. She was merely a consultant here. If she wanted Michael Brooks in chains, he either had to come quietly – or she’d have to get her hands dirty.

His right foot slid backward half an inch.

His fingers splayed against the countertop, calculating trajectories and measuring angles and timing her reaction speed against his own.

Ripley had seen this exact moment play out in every location in every state.

The exact moment the pretending stops and the running begins.

‘I’m with the FBI. We’re investigating two homicides, and we-’

And there it was. Michael Brooks pushed off the counter and became a blur that disappeared into the back of the coffee shop. For a split-second, Ripley fantasized about baptizing him in boiling hot water, but such daydreams ate up precious microseconds.

‘Stop!’ she screamed, but it was a futile gesture.

The storeroom door slapped against the wall as Brooks disappeared through it, and then Ripley was over the counter and on his trail.

A milk machine and a tip jar were casualties of her journey from front-of-house to the back, and she found herself in a storeroom decked with sacks of coffee beans.

Up ahead, Brooks was fumbling with a metal door – the back exit.

Ripley fought against her mounting heart rate. It felt like years ago the last time she’d done this. She had to remind herself that she’d chased down a thousand punks in her time, and this was just one-thousand-and-one.

Thump. The bar on the inside of the door sprang free.

It crashed open and Brooks escaped into the open.

Ripley charged through and emerged into a wide alleyway that stretched out in either direction.

It seemed to run behind all of the buildings on the street.

The perimeter wall was about ten feet high with razor wire along the top, but Brooks was aiming directly for it.

‘FBI!’ Ripley tried again, and this time Brooks did glance back. Panic was written on his face, and the picture confirmed that Brooks was indeed guilty of something. Innocent men didn’t run, and they certainly didn’t run straight at barbed wire unless they were driven by pure desperation.

Brooks’ hands found the top of the wall and he became airborne. Ripley closed in, close enough to grab one flailing leg, but a dirty boot to the forehead knocked her back. Her vision became a blur, and through the haze she saw Brooks ascend.

Okay. So that was how he wanted to play this.

Time to get dirty.

Typical alleyway detritus lay at Ripley’s feet. Boxes and trash bags and shipping pallets. Ripley reached down amongst the garbage. Frank once told her that anything was a weapon if you were reckless enough.

She heaved a loose piece of wood off one of the pallets. Solid, jagged, still with rusty nails protruding from the underside. Twenty years ago, she would have scaled that wall without issue. Today, with knees that sounded like maracas every time she climbed stairs, she needed to improvise.

‘Hey, brOOKS!’

The perp made the mistake of looking back.

She cocked her weapon back and channeled every ounce of rage she had into her swing.

Somewhere in the rational corner of her mind, a voice whispered that attacking a suspect with improvised weaponry wasn’t procedure.

Wasn’t legal. Wasn’t who she was supposed to be.

But Frank’s mutilated face floated before her, and procedure became a distant concept.

The wood connected with Brooks’ spine with a wet thunk that reverberated up her arms. The nails tore through his shirt and into flesh like they were hungry for it.

Two entry points in his lower back dripped with blood; two rusty promises of infection if the bastard survived long enough to worry about tetanus.

Brooks howled the cries of a dying animal, fell back off the wall and tumbled directly into Ripley.

His surprisingly weighty carcass briefly disoriented her, but Ripley managed to position herself for another swing.

Her momentum carried her forward, off-balance, vulnerable, but Brooks was already five steps away, then ten, fleeing down the alley toward the street.

His gait was uneven, one hand pressed against the small of his back where the nails had found purchase. But he was moving, escaping, and Ripley’s body was reminding her with increasing volume that retirement had been a biological necessity, not just a career choice.

‘STOP!’ she bellowed. ‘FBI!’

The alley captured her voice and threw it back at her. Brooks didn’t even look back.

God dammit. She was going to lose him. He was going to hit the streets, find a car and disappear. They might find his real name from his job at the coffee shop, but a name was no good without a body to attach it to.

Then suddenly, the sound of a gunshot.

No. Not a gunshot, but something close to it. The distinct sound of metal crashing into a brick wall.

Brooks heard it too. His stride faltered for half a second as he swiveled his head toward the noise.

Ripley now realized they’d edged towards the back of the library, and the building’s fire exit door had burst open. A figure rushed out – and not the one Ripley expected.

Sarah Webb moved like a bullet into Brooks’ path. Brooks tried to swerve, slip past her, but Webb showed no signs of slowing down. As he lunged by, she pivoted sharply and threw a clean, crisp right hook. No wind-up, no hesitation. Just knuckles connecting solidly with the side of Brooks’s jaw.

The perp’s head snapped sideways. He staggered but didn’t fall, and the momentum of his escape carried him a few more stuttering steps.

His glasses, already precarious, went skittering across the dirty floor.

He reeled like a drunk, momentarily stunned, eyes unfocused.

Sarah yelped and immediately grabbed her right hand, shaking it vigorously as if she’d just punched concrete.

Pain, or maybe just the shock of actually hitting someone, registered on her face.

But that brief, beautiful moment of stunned disorientation was all Ripley needed.

She closed in the last few yards, then planted her feet and delivered a right hook that contained thirty years of rage.

At perps who’d walked on technicalities, at victims who’d never seen justice, at Frank Sullivan whose vacant eye sockets now held stones.

Brooks folded inward as if he’d suddenly lost all skeletal integrity.

Ripley reached down, grabbed a fistful of his shirt and twisted it. She pressed her forearm against his trachea with the right amount of pressure – enough to restrict, not eliminate, oxygen flow. The Bureau manual specifically prohibited this maneuver. Ripley had long since returned her copy.

‘Why did you kill Frank?’ she screamed.

The emergency exit banged open again. Ella burst through with her service weapon drawn. ‘Mia, step back. We need him conscious.’

Ripley obliged her partner. She dropped the bloody and bruised Michael Brooks back onto the ground. As much as she wanted to cave his skull in, a concussed suspect didn’t make for a good interrogation. Ella moved in, rolled Brooks over and slapped the cuffs on his wrist.

Sarah was standing off to the side, flexing her wrist.

‘Webb, you okay?’ Ripley asked.

‘Think I broke a nail. Maybe my wrist too.’

The adrenaline that had propelled her through the alley began its inevitable retreat. It left behind the wreckage of a fifty-something body that had temporarily forgotten its limitations.

And this return to state had awarded Ripley a sudden clarity.

Maybe Sarah Webb wasn’t so bad after all.