“I figured you’d lead us straight to Stenopolis.”
“But instead I led you to this guy. He matches Mount’s description. Don’t you think?” she said, nodding toward the leather-clad freak.
“We’ll see,” he said, noncommittal. “Anyway, I’d go so far as to say things are looking a little better for Stenopolis, except that he’s a fugitive on the run considered armed and dangerous.” He sighed. “It’s always a bad idea to run.”
She shook her head at him. He’d made all his assumptions already; he’d have to wrestle his ego a little before he came to terms with the fact that she’d been right all along. But she could tell he was the kind of man who’d put the truth first and she respected him for it.
Dylan came through the door then, looking afraid and a little angry. He walked over to her, eyes scanning the room, then resting on the big man in cuffs. She’d split off from Dylan after he brought her back to the precinct to get her car, saying she wanted to get home and rest. Really, she hadn’t wanted to drag Dylan into the gray area of entering Matt’s house and looking for clues as to where he might have gone. It could be bad for his career, considering he was already on temporary suspension. And, maybe most of all, she’d just wanted some distance from him.
“I thought you were going home,” he said to her.
“I thought you were going home,” she said, looking at him. She fought the urge to wrap her arms around him until she could stop shaking.
“I was. I heard the call on my scanner and turned around.”
He put a hand to her face and she winced at the pain. “You’re gonna need stitches on that,” he said as the two uniforms moved past them with the prisoner.
“Not before I talk to that guy.”
“I’ll be talking to him, Detective,” said Bloom. “I don’t need to remind you that this is not your case.”
“The hell it isn’t,” she said, pushing past Bloom. “I would have been the one to put the cuffs on him if your boys hadn’t come in. I would have had him for breaking and entering, assaulting an officer.” He put a gentle but firm hand on her arm.
“I don’t want to have to arrest you for obstructing an investigation,” he said quietly. “Which I could do, considering we both know why you came here.”
She looked him up and down. He was half the size of her most recent assailant, but there was something tougher about him.
“If you’d listened to me in the first place, we wouldn’t even be here. It never would have gone this far,” she said, looking down at his arm and then turning her eyes on him.
He gave her a black look and she let out a sigh, looked at the ground.
“Let me come with you, at least,” she said when he didn’t answer her.
He nodded grudgingly and released her arm. “Paramedics are outside. Let them patch you up first. Meet me at HQ.”
What is happening?” yelled Lydia.
“They moved in. They’re taking the compound.”
Dax’s sentence was punctuated by the sharp report of semiautomatic gunfire. In the distance she heard voices but they sounded faint and far away, yelling, as they stepped from the building they’d been in into the humid night. There was another sound, too, also faint and far away to Lydia’s damaged ears: the crackle of flames. The thick, hazy air seemed to hold an orange glow and smelled strongly of burning wood. She felt like she was breathing in the color gray. She held a hand over her mouth.
“Who’s moving in? The Feds? I thought they couldn’t come in here,” she said as they followed Dax at a run into the cover of a glade of trees.
She was feeling disoriented and her heart was still chugging. But something was bugging her, nudging at her consciousness. She could see the look on Jeffrey’s face, too. Blank but eyes slightly narrowed, trained on Dax.
How did Dax know where they were? Was it her imagination or did he seem to know where they were going?
“About a half an acre west of here, there’s a wall that we can get over and get out of here,” said Dax.
“No,” she said. “We’re not leaving without Lily.”
He looked at her. “Do you understand what’s happening here?” he asked her. There was something cold in his tone she’d never heard before. She didn’t like it.
“No, I don’t, Dax. Why don’t you tell me?” she said, turning to him, moving in closer.
She felt Jeffrey’s hand on her arm. “We should do this later,” he said. “We have to get out of here.”
“We have to find Lily,” said Lydia.
“Look at the reality here,” said Dax. “The place is burning. Every building in this compound is on fire. FBI and ATF are all over the place.”
The sky exploded with light and the chopping blades of a helicopter. Lydia felt her hair whip around her, and she covered her eyes, squinting against the brightness of the spotlight that shone through the trees directly on them.
“Drop your weapons and get down on the ground.” It sounded like the voice of God coming down from the sky. But it was really just someone in full body armor with the big letters ATF printed on his chest. Still, Lydia figured it behooved them to listen. He had a gun trained on them-a very big scary-looking gun much like the one Dax was carrying. A moment later, four other men in body armor emerged from the trees around them, their faces obscured behind the Plexiglas masks of their helmets.
Jeffrey and Lydia exchanged looks and did what they were told.
What? I can’t hear you?” Lydia yelled. She wasn’t trying to be obnoxious; she really couldn’t hear very well. Maybe she was trying to be a little obnoxious, but given what the FBI was trying to pull she figured they deserved it.
The young agent who was questioning her looked annoyed. They sat together in the back of a van that was mercifully air-conditioned, just the two of them, on two metal chairs he had provided. She didn’t know where Dax and Jeff were; she imagined they were in two other vans somewhere close by. The agent had given her an ice pack when she’d complained of a pain in her ribs and then he’d started questioning her. She wasn’t worried until he started acting like he didn’t know Agent Grimm.
“Did he show you any identification?” the kid yelled at her. He was a kid, maybe not even twenty-five. He had the fleshy, earnest face of the very young and wore the look that milk-fed people have before they’ve experienced the rest of the world, before they’ve realized that 95 percent of people are living in poverty and chaos, that hatred reigns and justice is in short supply. But maybe Lydia was just feeling bitter.
“Yes,” she said more quietly. “He showed us his shield and identification.” He’d flashed it, actually. She hadn’t inspected it closely, mainly because they had guns that she recognized as Glocks, pretty standard law-enforcement equipment.
“You got a close look at it?”
She shrugged. “Close enough.”
“Close enough?”
“Close enough to be convinced. He was out of shape and wore a bad suit. He had a crappy attitude and a kind of annoying self-righteousness to him that just screamed FBI.”
Agent Gary Hunt ignored her comment, to his credit, and scribbled something in a black notebook.
The doors to the van were closed but through the rear windows she could see that the fire at the New Day Farms still raged; she could smell burning wood and hear the hiss of the chemical spray firefighters were using to quell the blaze. They were a safe distance from the scene now, but the occasional shout and bursts of gunfire carried through the air. The New Day compound was a war zone, another Waco in progress, and they were a part of that. Maybe the biggest part, since the Feds were using them as their reason for invading the compound. And for all Lydia knew, Lily Samuels was somewhere inside. Failure sat in her stomach like a piece of lead. Lydia still felt herself start to shiver slightly from a cold that seemed to come from deep inside her center and spread out through her veins to the rest of her body.