Why didn’t I kill that bitch next to the cop?
Why did he hesitate? Was it because he was distracted? Was it because she wasn’t a cop? Was it because she pleaded?
All he could do now was torment himself for his mistake.
I should’ve put a bullet in her head.
13
Pelham, Westchester County, New York 4:17 a.m.
Morrow watched time tick down in the glowing green numbers of the clock on his nightstand in his home.
Three hours of sleep.
He deactivated his alarm before it was set to go off and in the darkness, he felt his wife’s warmth against him, heard her soft breathing. Part of him yearned to stay here and hold her. Instead, he stared at the ceiling while self-reproach coiled around him for not telling Elizabeth what he was facing.
I can’t. Not yet. Not after losing her mother and not with this case.
But you vowed to love, honor, respect her in sickness and in health.
I also have a sworn duty to see that justice is done for these four men.
I need to clear the case before I can tell her.
What if I don’t clear it?
The notion of failure evaporated as scenes of the four notifications he’d made late yesterday swept over him again.
In Brooklyn, the first guard’s wife had refused to let Morrow and the others into her home in Flatbush. A curtain had fluttered, someone had seen them coming to her door. Morrow shot glances at her priest, the FBI grief counselor and the armored car company exec, who kept adjusting his glasses. Through the door the wife said she’d heard news of a heist on the radio. “I know Phil was working up in Ramapo.” She knew it but had refused to accept it: “It’s a goddamn lie! It’s not true!” She screamed through the door until Morrow noticed it was not locked, opened it and caught her in his arms just as she let go.
The second guard also lived in Brooklyn, in Bensonhurst, where he had recently separated from his wife. She was a bank teller in Gravesend. They took her into her manager’s office to break the news. She went numb. Froze, except Morrow observed how she kept twisting her wedding rings.
The third guard was to be married in a few weeks. His fiancée shook her head, repeating “No! No! No!” then collapsed against the doorway of her apartment in the Bronx. They called an ambulance and two neighbors.
The last notification was some sixty miles north on 1-95 in Connecticut. The agent in charge of the FBI’s New Haven Division met Morrow and two other agents at the Bridgeport resident office on Lafayette Boulevard. From there they went in separate cars to a tree-lined street where Special Agent Gregory Scott Dutton had lived in a split-level with his wife, Jennifer.
Others had joined them. Jennifer’s father, who was a retired Hartford detective. They also called her priest. Jennifer’s face contorted as if it had broken, when they’d confirmed her worst fear. “I kept calling Greg’s phone, and calling and calling.” One hand covered her face. The other covered her stomach as if to shield her baby from the nightmare that had befallen them.
In the shower, Morrow welcomed the hot needles of spray.
He would clear these four deaths.
Then he would clear his own with Elizabeth and Hailey.
By 4:45 a.m. he was dressed and ready to leave, when he peeked inside his daughter’s bedroom. Hailey was a fourteen-year-old vegetarian, intent on becoming an environmental lawyer. Her walls had posters of rock bands he’d never heard of. She had a new poster he liked that said, Give Earth A Hug Today. She was pretty as hell, with her mother’s eyes.
He could lose himself in their eyes.
Morrow was not afraid of dying. What he dreaded was the idea of never seeing them again. Yet, since Art Stein called, Morrow realized that a small part of him hoped that maybe, just maybe, the diagnosis was wrong.
It is an indestructible pillar of human nature to hope until the end.
He saw it in the victims straining from broken windows in the towers, waving shirts, jackets, flags of desperation, signaling hope to be rescued from the inevitable.
Then some of them jumped.
Morrow felt hands on his waist from behind.
Elizabeth, wrapped in her robe, turned him to her and kissed his cheek. She was warm and smelled so good to him.
“This is a terrible case, Frank,” she said. “You were tossing and turning.”
“I know.”
“Let me fix you something before you go in.”
“I’ll take a bagel and some fruit to eat on the way. How’s she doing?”
“She’s got a new boyfriend. Jerrod.”
“Do we like him?”
“Too soon to tell.”
“Have they…?”
“She tells me she believes in abstinence.”
“Do you believe her?”
“We have to trust her.”
“Want me to polygraph her?”
“Seriously, is there something we need to talk about?”
“What do you mean?”
She pulled him away from Hailey’s door.
“You’ve been acting like you’ve got something on your mind, and the weight thing.”
“Just work, Beth. I’ve got a lot on my plate.”
For an intense moment she read his face for any evidence of deception before shifting to another subject.
“I am so sorry about those guards, the agent. Did you know him?”
“No, he worked in Bridgeport. His wife is pregnant with their first.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “I think that’s about the worst news a wife could ever hear.”
Morrow hated himself for not being able to tell her about his condition.
Not now. Just not now.
14
New York City
Morrow got behind the wheel of his bureau car, an old Taurus, but before he started the engine, his phone hummed.
He’d received a flurry of reports, including an updated version of the WPA story he’d seen last night. It quoted “unnamed sources,” stating that an FBI agent was among the victims, that he was shot while going for his weapon and investigators had an eyewitness to his “execution.”
Morrow cursed under his breath.
Unnamed sources.
This kind of crap was dangerous. Leaks kept the suspects informed. Morrow’s phone vibrated again with a new message that seized his full attention.
It was from the director of the FBI.
“Agent Morrow. I want you to keep me personally updated on the progress of the Ramapo investigation.”
Morrow took in a deep breath then let it out slowly.
It was 4:58 a.m. when he started the car and rolled from his modest colonial home in Pelham, working his way westbound on the Cross County Parkway. He made good time to the merge with the Saw Mill River Parkway until it continued south as the Henry Hudson Parkway in upper Manhattan. Then it was on to the West Side Highway and downtown.
Traffic was good at this hour.
He found a calming, classical music station and as New Jersey and New York streamed by him in the incipient light, he thought of what he was facing.
Lead agent for one of the FBI’s biggest cases.
Death at age forty-two.
Morrow was not bitter, angry or fearful. He was grateful for what he’d had, for Elizabeth, for Hailey, for his parents. It had been a good life, growing up in Laurel, Maryland. His father was a Maryland state trooper. His mother was a dental hygienist. They were God-fearing, devoted parents.