Читать книгу The Last Widow - Karin Slaughter, Karin Slaughter - Страница 11

Sunday, August 4, 1:33 p.m.

Faith Mitchell checked her watch as she pretended to study the diagram of the Russell Federal Building on the giant video monitor at the front of the classroom. The tedious asshole from the Marshals Service was running through the prison transport plan, which the previous asshole from the Marshals Service had run through an hour ago.

She looked around the room. Faith wasn’t the only person having a hard time concentrating. The thirty people assembled from various branches of law enforcement were all wilting behind their desks. The city, in its wisdom, turned off the air conditioning in all government buildings over the weekends. In August. With windows that didn’t open so that no one could jump out just for the pleasure of the wind in their face as they plummeted to their death.

Faith looked down at her briefing book. A drop of sweat rolled off the tip of her nose and smeared the words. She had already read through the book in its entirety. Twice. The asshole marshal was the fifth speaker in the last three hours. Faith wanted to pay attention. She really did. But if she heard another person call Martin Elias Novak a high-value prisoner, she was going to start screaming.

Her eyes rolled to the clock on the wall above the video monitor.

1:34 p.m.

Faith could’ve sworn the second hand was ticking backward.

“So, the chase car will go here.” The marshal pointed to the rectangle at the end of the dotted line that was helpfully labeled chase car. “I want to remind you again that Martin Novak is an extremely high-value prisoner.”

Faith tried not to snort. Even Amanda’s composure was starting to slip. She was still sitting ramrod straight in her chair, seemingly alert, but Faith knew for a fact that she could sleep with her eyes open. Faith’s mother was the same way. Both of them had come up in the Atlanta Police Department together. Both were extremely adaptable, like dinosaurs who’d evolved into using tools and forwarding memes that had stopped being memes two months ago.

Faith opened her laptop. Eight tabs were open in her browser, every one of them offering advice on how to make your life more efficient. Faith clicked them all closed. She was a single mother with a two-year-old at home and a twenty-year-old in college. Efficiency was not an attainable goal. Sleep wasn’t an attainable goal. Eating an uninterrupted meal. Using the bathroom with the door closed. Reading a book without having to show the pictures to all the stuffed animals in the room. Breathing deeply. Walking in a straight line.

Thinking.

Faith desperately wanted her brain back, the pre-pregnancy brain that knew how to be a fully functioning adult. Had it been like this with her son? Faith was only fifteen years old when she’d given birth to Jeremy. She hadn’t really been paying attention to what was happening to her mind so much as mourning the loss of Jeremy’s father, whose parents had shipped him off to live with relatives up north so that a baby wouldn’t ruin his bright future.

With her daughter Emma, Faith was aware of the not-so-subtle changes in her mental abilities. That she could multi-task, but she could barely single-task. That the feelings of anxiety and hypervigilance that came with being a cop were amplified to the nth degree. That she never really slept because her ears were always awake. That the sound of Emma crying could make her hands shake and her lips tremble and that sometimes Emma’s nightlight would catch the tender strands of her delicate eyelashes and Faith’s heart would be filled with so much love that she ended up sobbing alone in the hallway.

Sara had explained the science behind these mood changes. During the stages of pregnancy and breastfeeding and childhood, a woman’s brain was flooded with hormones that altered the gray matter in the regions involved in social processes, heightening the mother’s empathy and bonding them closely to their child.

Which was a damn good thing, because if another human being treated you the way a toddler did—threw food in your face, questioned your every move, unraveled all of the aluminum foil off the roll, yelled at the silverware, made you clean shit off their ass, peed in your bed, peed in your car, peed on you while you were cleaning up their pee, demanded that you repeat everything at least sixteen times and then screeched at you for talking too much—then you would probably kill them.

“Let’s discuss the tactical quadrangle we’ve created on the west-bound streets,” the marshal said.

Faith let her eyes take a really slow blink. She needed something outside of work and Emma. Her mother euphemistically called it a work/life balance, but it was really just Evelyn’s polite way of saying that Faith needed to get laid.

Which Faith was not opposed to.

The problem was finding a man. Faith wasn’t going to date a cop, because all you had to do was date one cop and every cop would think he could screw you. Tinder was a no-go. The guys who didn’t look married looked like they should be chained to a bench outside of a courtroom. She’d tried Match.com but not one of the losers that she was even remotely attracted to could pass a background check. Which said more about the type of men Faith was attracted to than internet dating sites.

At this rate, the only way she was going to get laid was to crawl up a chicken’s ass and wait.

“So,” the marshal clapped his hands together once, loudly. Too loudly. “Let’s review Martin Elias Novak’s résumé. Sixty-one-year-old widower with one daughter, Gwendolyn. Wife died in childbirth. Novak served in the Army as an explosives expert. Not too expert—in ’96, he blew off two fingers on his left hand. He was discharged, then took some odd jobs working security. In 2002, he was in Iraq with a private mercenary force. By 2004, we clocked him joining up with some fellow vets on a citizens border patrol in Arizona.”

The marshal steepled together his fingers and slowly bowed his head. “Arizona was the last time we saw him. That was 2004. Novak went off the grid. No credit card activity. Closed his accounts. Canceled his utilities. Walked out on his lease. His pension and disability checks were returned as undeliverable. Novak was a ghost until 2016, when he popped up on our radar at a new job: robbing banks.”

Faith noticed that he’d skipped over a big piece of the puzzle, the same way every single speaker had skipped over the glaring detail in all of the previous meetings.

Novak was an anti-government nut. Not just a guy who didn’t want to pay taxes or be told what to do. Hell, no red-blooded American wanted those things. His time with the so-called citizens border patrol put him at a whole other level of dissent. For six months, Novak had kept company with a group of men who thought they understood the Constitution better than anybody else. Worse, they were willing to take up arms and do something about it.

Which meant that thanks to all of those bank robberies, someone, somewhere, had half a million bucks to aid the cause.

And no one in this room seemed to give a shit about it.

“All right.” The marshal clapped his hands together again. Someone in the front row jumped at the sound. “Let’s bring up Special Agent Aiden Van Zandt from the FBI to talk about the reason Novak is such a high-value prisoner.”

Faith felt her eyes roll back in her head again.

“Thank you, Marshal.” Agent Van Zandt looked more like a Humperdinck than a Westley. Faith didn’t trust men who wore glasses. At least he didn’t clap or offer a long preamble. Instead, Van Zandt turned toward the monitor, offering, “Let’s go to the video. Novak is the first man through the door. You can see the two fingers of his left hand are missing.”

The video started to play. Faith leaned forward in her seat. Finally, something new. She had read all of the police reports but hadn’t seen any footage.

The screen showed the inside of a bank, full color.

Friday, March 24, 2017. 4:03 p.m.

Four tellers at the windows. At least a dozen customers standing in line. There would’ve been a steady stream all day. People cashing their checks before the weekend. No security glass or bars at the teller counter. A suburban branch. This was the Wells Fargo outside of Macon, where Novak’s team had taken their last stand.

On the screen, things moved quickly. Faith almost missed Novak coming through the doors, though he was dressed in full tactical gear, all black, a ski mask covering his face. He held his AR-15 at his right side. A backpack was slung over his left shoulder. The pinky and ring finger were missing from his left hand.

The security guard entered the frame from Novak’s right. Pete Guthrie, divorced father of two. The man was reaching toward his holster, but the AR swung up and Pete Guthrie was dead.

Someone in the classroom groaned, like they’d just watched a movie, not the end of a man’s life.

The rest of Novak’s team swarmed into the bank, quickly taking up position. Six guys, all dressed in the same black gear. All waving around AR-15s, which were as ubiquitous in Georgia as peaches. There was no sound with the video, but Faith could see open mouths as the customers screamed. Another person was shot, a seventy-two-year-old grandmother of six named Edatha Quintrell who, going by the witness statements, had not moved fast enough getting down on the ground.

“Military,” someone needlessly said.

Needlessly, because these guys were clearly a tactical unit. Less than ten seconds through the door and they were already opening the teller drawers, tossing the hidden dye packs aside and shoving the money into white canvas bags.

Van Zandt said, “We scoured four previous months of footage trying to find someone casing the bank, but nothing stuck out.” He pointed to Novak. “Look at the stopwatch in his hand. The closest precinct is twelve minutes away. The closest patrol is eight minutes out. He knows how much time they have down to the second. Everything was planned.”

They hadn’t planned on one of the customers being an off-duty police officer. Rasheed Dougall, a twenty-nine-year-old patrolman, had stopped by the bank on his way to the gym. He was wearing red basketball shorts and a black T-shirt. Faith’s eyes had automatically found him in the bottom right corner. Belly flat to the ground. Hands not over his head, but at his side near his gym bag. She knew what was going to happen next. Rasheed pulled a Springfield micro pistol out of the bag and shot the guy closest to him in the belly.

Two taps, the way they were trained.

Rasheed rolled over and caught a second guy in the head. He was aiming for the third when a bullet from Novak blew off the bottom half of his face.

Novak seemed unfazed by the sudden carnage. He coldly looked at the stopwatch. His mouth moved. According to the statements, he was telling his men—

Let’s go, boys, clean it up.

Four guys moved forward, two teams each shouldering one of their fallen accomplices as they dragged them toward the door.

Novak scooped up the white canvas bags of cash. Then he made his custom move: He reached into his backpack. He held up a pipe bomb over his head, making sure everyone saw it. The bomb wasn’t meant to blow the vault. He was going to set it off once the car was out of range. But before he left, he was going to chain the doors shut so that no one could leave.

As violent criminal acts go, it was a solid plan. Small towns didn’t have enough first responders to handle more than one disaster at a time. An explosion at the bank, casualties falling out of broken windows and doors, was the biggest disaster the locals would ever see.

On the screen, Novak slapped the bomb to the wall. Faith knew that it was held there by an adhesive sold at any home improvement store. Galvanized pipe. Nails. Thumb tacks. Wire. All of the components were untraceable or so common that they might as well be.

Novak turned toward the door. He started pulling the chain and lock out of his backpack. Then he unexpectedly collapsed face down on the ground.

Blood spread out from his body like a snow angel.

Some of the men in the classroom cheered.

A woman rushed into the frame. Dona Roberts. Her Colt 1911 was pointing at Novak’s head. Her foot was on the man’s tailbone to make sure he stayed down. She was a retired Navy cargo plane pilot who’d just happened to be at the bank to open an account for her daughter.

Damn if she wasn’t wearing a strapless sundress and sandals.

The image paused.

Van Zandt said, “Novak took two in the back. Lost a kidney and his spleen, but your tax dollars patched him up. The phone to detonate the bomb was inside his backpack. According to our people, the first bad guy who was shot in the stomach could’ve survived with quick medical intervention. The bad guy with a hole in his head obviously died at the scene. No bodies were found dumped in a twenty-mile radius. No hospitals reported gunshot victims fitting the description. We have no idea who these accomplices are. Novak didn’t crack under questioning.”

He didn’t crack because he wasn’t the average bank robber. Most of those idiots got arrested before they could count their money. The FBI had basically been invented to stop people from robbing banks. Their solve rate was north of 75 percent. It was a stupid crime with a high chance of failure and a mandatory twenty-five-year sentence, and that was just for walking up to a teller and passing a note saying you would like to rob the bank, please. Waving a gun, making threats, shooting people—that was the rest of your life in Big Boy prison, assuming you didn’t get a needle in your arm.

“So …” The marshal was back. He clapped together his hands. He was a real hand-clapper, this guy. “Let’s talk about what happened in the video.”

Faith checked her Apple Watch for messages, praying for a family emergency that would pull her out of this never-ending nightmare.

No luck.

She groaned at the time.

1:37 p.m.

She pulled up her texts. Will had no idea how lucky he was to be skipping this stupid meeting. She sent him a clown with a water gun to its head. Then a knife. Then a hammer. She was going to send him an avocado because they both despised avocados, but her finger slipped on the tiny screen and she accidentally sent him a yam.

“Let’s look at this next chart.” The marshal had pulled up another image, this one a flow chart detailing all the various agencies involved in the transport. Atlanta Police. Fulton County Police. Fulton County Sheriff’s office. US Marshals Service. The FBI. The ATF. The who-the-fuck-cares because Faith had two hours of folding laundry ahead of her, six if her precious daughter insisted on helping.

She checked to see if Will had texted back. He hadn’t. He was probably working on his car or doing push-ups or whatever else he did on the days he managed to get out of hideously long meetings.

He was probably still in bed with Sara.

Faith stared out the window. She let out a long sigh.

Will was a missed opportunity. She could see that now. Faith hadn’t been particularly attracted to him when they’d first met, but Sara had Pygmalioned his ass. She’d dragged him to a real hair salon instead of the weird guy in the morgue who traded haircuts for sandwiches. She had talked him into getting his suits tailored so he’d gone from looking like the sale rack at a Big and Tall Warehouse to the mannequin in the window of a Hugo Boss store. He was standing up straighter, more confident. Less awkward.

Then there was his sweet side.

He marked his calendar with a star on the days Sara got her hair done so he would remember to compliment her. He was constantly finding ways to say her name. He listened to her, respected her, thought she was smarter than he was, which was true, because she was a doctor, but what man admitted that? He was constantly regaling Faith with the ancient wisdoms that Sara had passed on to him:

Did you know that men can use lotion for dry skin, too?

Did you know that you’re supposed to eat the lettuce and tomato on a hamburger?

Did you know that frozen orange juice has a lot of sugar?

Faith was diabetic. Of course she knew about sugar. The question was, how did Will not know? And wasn’t it commonly understood that eating the lettuce and tomato meant you could order the fries? She knew Will had been raised feral, but Faith had lived with two teenage boys, first her older brother and then her son. She hadn’t been able to leave a bottle of Jergens unmolested on the bathroom counter until she was in her thirties.

How the hell did Will not know about lotion?

“Thank you, Marshal.” Major Maggie Grant had taken the floor.

Faith sat up in her seat, trying to look like a good student. Maggie was her spirit animal, a woman who had worked her way up the Atlanta Police Department food chain from crossing guard to Commander of Special Operations without turning into a testicle-gnarling bitch.

Maggie said, “I’ll briefly run down the SWAT Bible on transport from the APD perspective. We’re all following the Active Shooter Doctrine. No negotiation. Just pop and drop. From a tactical standpoint, we’ll maintain a hollow square around the pris—the high-value prisoner—at all times.”

Only Faith and Amanda laughed. There were exactly three women in the room. The rest were men who had probably not let a woman speak uninterrupted for this long since elementary school.

“Ma’am?” a hand shot up. So much for uninterrupted. “Concerning emergency egress for the prisoner—”

Faith looked at the clock.

1:44 p.m.

She opened Notes on her laptop and tried to trim down the grocery list she’d dictated to Siri this morning: Eggs, bread, juice, peanut butter, diapers, no, Emma, no, for fuck sakes, Emma don’t, oh Christ please stop, candy.

Technology had finally caught up with her bad parenting.

Had she always been like this? By the time Jeremy was in the first grade, Faith was twenty-two years old and working out of a squad car. Her parenting skills fell somewhere between Charlotte’s Web and Lord of the Flies. Jeremy still teased her about the note she’d once left in his lunch box: The bread is stale. This is what happens when you don’t close the bag.

She had vowed to be a better mother to Emma, but what did that mean, exactly?

Not creating a Mount Vesuvius of unfolded laundry on the living room couch? Not letting carpet fuzz build up in the vacuum so that it smelled like burned rubber every time she turned it on? Not realizing until exactly three-twelve this morning that the reason the toy box smelled like rotten fruit roll-ups was because Emma had been hiding all of her fruit roll-ups in the bottom?

Toddlers were such fucking assholes.

“I’m Deputy Director Amanda Wagner with the GBI.”

Faith jerked back to attention. She had gone into a fugue state from the heat and boredom. She said a silent prayer thanking Jesus, because Amanda was the last speaker.

She leaned on the desk in the front of the room and waited for everyone’s undivided attention. “We’ve had six months to prepare for this transfer. Any failures to secure the prisoner are down to human error. You people in this room are the humans who could make that error. Put your hand down.”

The guy in the front put his hand down.

Amanda looked at her watch. “It’s five past two. We’ve got the room until three. Take a ten-minute break, then come back and review your books. No papers are allowed to leave the room. No files on your laptops. If you have any questions, submit them in writing to your immediate supervisor.” Amanda smiled at Faith, the only agent in the room that she was in charge of supervising. “Thank you, gentlemen.”

The door opened. Faith could see the hallway. She weighed the consequences of pretending to go to the bathroom and slipping out the back door.

“Faith.” Amanda was walking toward her. Trapping her. “Wait up a minute.”

Faith closed her laptop. “Are we going to talk about why no one is mentioning the fact that our high-value prisoner thinks he’s going to overthrow the deep state like Katniss from The Hunger Games?”

Amanda’s brow furrowed. “I thought Katniss was the hero?”

“I have a problem with women in authority.”

Amanda shook her head. “Look, Will needs his ego massaged.”

Faith was momentarily without a response. The request was surprising on two levels. First, Will bristled at any kind of handholding and second, Amanda lived to crush egos.

Amanda said, “He’s smarting over not being picked for this task force.”

“Picked?” Faith had lost half a dozen Sundays to this tedium. “I thought this was a punishment for—” She wasn’t stupid enough to make a list. “For punishing me.”

Amanda kept shaking her head. “Faith, these men in the room—they’re going to be in charge of everything one day. You need them to get used to your being part of the conversation. You know—network.”

“Network?” Faith tried not to say the word as an explicative. Her motto had always been Why go big when I can go home?

Amanda said, “These are your prime earning years. Have you thought about the fact that you’ll be eligible for Medicare by the time Emma’s in college?”

Faith felt a stabbing pain in her chest.

“You can’t stay in the field forever.”

“And Will can?” Faith was perplexed. Amanda was like a mother to Will. If you were worried that your mother was going to run you down with her car. “Where is this coming from? Will’s your favorite. Why are you holding him back?”

Instead of answering, Amanda flipped through the briefing book, pages and pages of single-spaced text.

Faith didn’t need an explanation. “He’s dyslexic. He’s not illiterate. He’s better with numbers than I am. He can read a briefing book. It just takes a little longer.”

“How do you know he’s dyslexic?”

“Because—” Faith didn’t know how she knew. “Because I work with him. I pay attention. I’m a detective.”

“But he’s never told you. And he’ll never tell anyone. Therefore, we can’t offer him accommodations. Therefore, he’ll never move up the food chain.”

“Christ,” Faith muttered. Just like that, she was closing down Will’s future.

“Mandy.” Maggie Grant walked into the room. She had a bottle of cold water for each of them. “Why on earth are you both still in here? It’s cooler in the hallway.”

Faith angrily twisted the cap off the bottle. She couldn’t believe this Will bullshit. It wasn’t Amanda’s job to decide what he was capable of doing or not doing.

“How’s your mother?” Maggie asked Faith.

“Good.” Faith gathered up her stuff. She had to get out of here before she said something stupid.

“And Emma?”

“Very easy. No complaints.” Faith stood from the chair. Her sweaty shirt peeled off her skin like a lemon rind. “I should—”

“Send them both my love.” Maggie turned to Amanda, “How’s your boy doing?”

She meant Will. All of Amanda’s friends referred to him as her boy. The term reminded Faith of the first time you meet Michonne in the Walking Dead.

Amanda said, “He’s getting by.”

“I bet.” Maggie told Faith, “You should’ve locked that down before Sara entered the picture.”

Amanda guffawed. “She’s not sweet enough for him.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Faith held up her hands to stop her own decapitation. “Sorry. I was up at three in the morning dragging a toy box into the front yard. The sky was awake, so I was awake.”

Faith was saved bastardizing more lines from Frozen by a ringing cell phone.

Maggie said, “That’s me.” She walked over to the windows and answered the call.

Then Amanda’s phone started to ring.

More rings echoed in the hallway. It sounded like every phone in the building was going off.

Faith checked her watch. She’d silenced the notifications before the meeting, but she turned them on again now. An alert had come in at 2:08 p.m. through the First Responder Notification System:

EXPLOSIONS AT EMORY UNIVERSITY. MASS CASUALTIES. THREE MALE WHITE SUSPECTS FLED IN SILVER CHEV MALIBU LP# XPR 932. HOSTAGE TAKEN. CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

For a moment, Faith lacked the ability to comprehend the information. She felt a nervous sickness rattle her body, the same sensation she got when she saw an alert for a school shooting or a terrorist attack. And then she thought about the fact that Novak’s team liked explosions. But a university wasn’t their M.O. and Novak’s safe house was well outside the city.

“Send all available agents,” Amanda barked into her phone. “I need details. Descriptions. A casualty estimate. Have SOU coordinate with ATF on securing the campus. Let me know the second the governor calls out the National Guard.”

“Amanda.” Maggie’s voice was tightly controlled. This was her city, her responsibility. “My bird will meet us on the roof.”

“Let’s go.” Amanda motioned for Faith to come.

Faith grabbed her bag, the nervous sickness turning into a lump of concrete inside of her stomach as her mind started to process what had happened. An explosion at the university. A hostage taken. Mass casualties. Armed and dangerous.

They were all running by the time they reached the stairs. Maggie led them up, but the other officers from the meeting were pounding their way down in a furious rush because that’s what cops did when something bad happened. They ran toward the bad thing.

“I’m giving the authorization …” Maggie yelled into her phone as she sprinted past the next landing, “… 9-7-2-2-4-alpha-delta. 10-39 every available. I want all birds in the air. Tell the commander I’m five minutes out.”

“One of the bombers was wounded.” Amanda was finally getting information. She glanced back at Faith as she climbed. Shock flashed across her face. “The hostage is Michelle Spivey.”

Maggie muttered a curse, grabbing the railing to pull herself up the next flight. She listened into her phone a moment, then reported, “I’ve got two wounded, nothing about Spivey.” She was breathing hard, but she didn’t stop. “One perp was hit in the leg. Second in the shoulder. The driver was dressed in an Emory security uniform.”

Faith felt the sweat on her body turn cold as she listened to the words echoing down the stairwell.

“A nurse recognized Spivey.” Amanda was off the phone. She shouted to be heard over their footsteps scuffing the concrete treads. “There’s conflicting information but—”

Maggie stopped on another landing. She held up her hand for quiet. “Okay, we’ve got an eye-witness from Dekalb PD saying that two bombs went off in the parking structure across from the hospital. The second detonation was timed to take out the first responders. We’ve got at least fifteen people trapped inside. Ten casualties on the ground.”

Faith tasted bile in her mouth. She looked down at the ground. There were cigarette butts where someone had been smoking. She thought of her dress uniform hanging in the closet, the number of funerals she would be attending in the coming weeks, the number of times she would have to stoically stand at attention while families fell apart.

“There’s more.” Maggie started up the stairs again. Her footsteps were not as brisk. “Two security guards found murdered in the basement. Two Dekalb PD killed when the bombers made their escape. One more is in surgery. Fulton County sheriff’s deputy. Doesn’t look good for her.”

Faith resumed the climb at a slower pace, feeling gut-punched by the news. She let herself think of her children. Her own mother who had done this job. She knew what it was like to wait for news, to not know whether your parent was dead or alive or hurting and all you could do was sit in front of the television and try to convince yourself that this wasn’t the time they wouldn’t come home.

Amanda stopped for a moment. She put her hand on Faith’s shoulder. “Ev knows you’re with me.”

Faith made her legs keep moving, kept climbing up the stairs because that was all that she could do. It was all any of them could do.

Her mother was watching Emma. Jeremy was at a video game tournament with his friends. They all knew Faith was downtown at the meeting because she had complained loudly about it to anyone who would listen.

Two security guards murdered.

Two cops murdered.

A deputy who probably wouldn’t wake up from surgery.

All of those patients in the hospital. Sick people—sick children, because there wasn’t just one hospital at Emory, there was Egleston Children’s Hospital a block down the street. How many times had Faith driven Emma to the emergency room in the middle of the night? The nurses were so kind. Every doctor so patient. There were parking structures scattered around the building. An explosion could easily send one collapsing onto the hospital.

And then what? How many buildings had been destroyed during the aftershocks on 9/11?

Finally, Maggie pushed open the door at the top of the stairs. Sunlight sliced into Faith’s retinas, but her eyes were already filled with angry tears.

The second detonation was timed to take out the first responders.

She heard the distant chop of helicopter blades. The black UH-1 Huey was almost older than Faith. SWAT used it for fast roping and fire rescue. Men were already suited up in the back. Full tactical gear. AR-15s. More first responders. They would have to go room by room, structure by structure, and ensure there were no other bombs waiting for the signal to detonate.

The chopping got tighter as the aircraft drew closer.

Faith’s thoughts kept a silent cadence between the slicing rotors—

Two-guards-two-families.

Two-cops-two-families.

One-deputy-one-family.

“Mandy.” Maggie had to yell to be heard over the roar of the engines. There was something in her voice that made the air go taut, a knot being jerked into a string.

“It’s Will, Mandy. They hurt your boy.”