Page 48 of Go First
“What about your guards?”Kate asked, sharper than she intended.
Silence.Then his tone iced over.“Are you accusing my staff of complicity, Agent Valentine?Because if so, I’ll be filing a formal complaint.”
Kate winced.“That’s not what I meant—”
“I hand-pick the men and women who work at this facility,” he thundered, a different man to the one who’d called her.“From the guards to the guy who mows the grass and the girl who orders the ink for the goddam printer.And there is not one of them that I wouldn’t trust with my life.My baby grandson’s goddam life.”
“Governor—"
But the line had already gone dead.
She lowered the phone, the dial tone humming in her ear.She could have phrased that better, sure.But the Governor’s defensiveness told its own story.
And what an overstatement.He’d trust ‘the girl who orders the ink’ with his baby grandson’s goddam life?
One thing her training and experience had taught her, one type of personnotto trust.An exaggerator.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
The Portland field office was louder than a train station at rush hour.Phones trilled in bursts like startled birds; printers coughed and whirred; a television in the far corner squawked about Russia’s latest yar-boo to the West.Kate had never seen so many strangers in Bureau-blue suits—sleek, foreign-cut jackets, knot-perfect ties—clustering up and down the main corridor, even on the landing halfway up the stairs.
A plastic sign taped to the wall announcedNorth Atlantic Counter-Intelligence Symposium, Conference Room B.Every few minutes a pair of harried interns ferried carafes of coffee through the bullpen like battlefield medics.
She edged her way past a trio of men—Korean, judging by their rapid-fire vowels and rolling rs—who stood blinking at the directory map.One of them mimed a desperate question about toilets.Kate pointed to the right without breaking stride, and they beamed gratitude, or perhaps relief, before shuffling off.
Her own desk was half-buried beneath case folders, crime-scene photos and a laptop that hummed like it, too, might be close to breaking down.Winters passed behind her for what seemed like the third time in as many minutes, carrying nothing, saying nothing.Each time the heels on her court shoes clacked like a metronome of judgment.
Kate tried to lose herself in the evidence.
She’d printed up her image of the note from Sister Dorothy’s hand, and it lay in a transparent sleeve on top of the pile, its double message already branded into her mind:
Is anyone among you suffering?Let him pray.Is any cheerful?Let him sing praise.Is any among you sick?Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.
—James 5:13–15.
Why had that verse been left there?It seemed to suggest that Sister Dorothy’s kind of healing—with oil and incantations and faith —was divinely-approved-of, at least in the eyes of Christianity.But if that was the case, why had the person who left that verse cut her tongue out and killed her?
And beneath the Bible verse she couldn’t grasp the point of, was a shorter, seemingly more personal note.In a cramped, almost childish hand, it simply said:two years, two months.
She had already burned through every obvious avenue.
Birthdays, death anniversaries, prison sentences, Whitfield’s timeline, Harper’s timeline, Sister Dorothy’s.Addresses, past and present, social security numbers, zip codes, telephone numbers, grid references, bank account details.Nothing.Not the known victims of Whitfield, not among the ranks of Elijah Cox’s known acolytes, no spark of relevance to her own life, or Marcus’s.
She had fed the phrase through three different cipher programs, run it backwards, converted it into Hebrew letters, assigned each one a numerical value and fed the numbers through a program that made a noise like a pig munching apples as it hunted down patterns and symmetries and veiled meanings.The noise was the only thing it yielded.Noise and no answers.
Two years, two months.
Winters strode past again.This time she slowed—just half a beat—then kept going, her silence heavier than any reprimand.She wanted to know what leads they had, what the next steps would look like.But right now, there was nothing to report.
And there was something ridiculous in Winters’s behavior right now. On one level, it was benign, just part of her process, her way of dealing with the pressure she was undoubtedly under. But at the same time, it was deeply unhelpful.Hovering and circling weren’t going to produce results.Kate wasn’t going to have a ‘Eureka!’moment with the boss breathing down her neck. Now, as always, in every investigation, there was only one thing to do.Patiently, calmly and doggedly, follow up every angle that had presented itself.Eventually, something would shift, fall into place, step into the light.Eventually.You couldn’t will it into being.
Kate’s chest tightened.The bullpen’s din seemed to rise around her, a living pressure.The TV rattled off something about Russian gunboats in the English Channel, a paper-cup tower collapsed in the kitchenette, someone’s phone erupted in a burst of synthetic K-pop.
She stared at the Bible verse again, trying to feel what the killer might have felt when he chose it.The prayer of faith will save the sick man… and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.
Was that a promise?Or a threat?
Meanwhile, the second line—two years, two months—just sat there like a locked door.