Based on the position of the body and the blood patterns on the carpet it certainly appeared that Corey had killed himself.
I spent the rest of the evening studying the files, taking notes, deciding what aspects of the enigmatic suicide warranted further investigation. In the end, I decided that in the morning I would begin by taking a more careful look at the same thing Margaret had mentioned: the medication Corey was taking, specifically, the type, dosage, and potential side effects.
Tessa stared at her phone.
At Aiden’s number.
All she had to do was hit “reply.”
But what was she supposed to tell him?
Nothing.
Nothing yet.
But she needed to see him.
She needed to…
It would’ve been a lot easier if he’d been the one to offer to text her.
She flipped the phone over and plunked it facedown on her desk.
Everything that was going on this week seemed to press in on her, tightening around her, causing this suffocating pressure on her heart. It made it hard to think.
Lien-hua was recovering, so that was one bit of good news. But Basque was on the loose, apparently somewhere nearby. Plus, all the questions she’d talked about with Brineesha concerning unanswered prayer, and with Patrick about, well, poisoned beliefs, and now her own personal issues with Aiden and trying to come up with a speech and the nerve to speak in front of a thousand people — all of it was overwhelming.
A graduation speech?
They’re always about how to have a successful life.
What did she know about being a success?
Well, basically, nothing.
But she was an expert at the opposite.
Just tell people not to be like you and you’ll be all set.
She jammed in her earbuds and disappeared into the lyrics of Boomerang Puppy’s song “Eclipse.” It was pretty hard to make out the words, but if you could, they were actually not that bad, and she knew them by heart:
A dark ache clutched at me
tearing apart the tower of hope that
looked so shiny, so permanent, so true.
Tremors run deep
beneath the confidence that
I’d hoped would carry me through
the night.
A nice encouraging sentiment there to really lift her spirits.
She retrieved her pack of cigarettes from where she kept them hidden in her closet and fished her lighter out of her purse.
Stared at it for a long time.
Man, she hated, hated, hated that she’d gotten into this. Cancer, whatever, she knew all that, of course, she did, but still…
And the worst part of the whole deaclass="underline" whenever she smoked she felt like she was letting Patrick down.
Still, it did something for her, helped calm her in some weird way and she understood why people got hooked on it.
But at least she wasn’t cutting anymore. At least there was that.
She told herself the mantra of all addicts: that she could always quit tomorrow.
She slipped outside and went to the small hedgerow on the edge of their property where she usually went to smoke. Crickets chirped at her from the dark folds of the night. Somewhere, a dog barked.
Lighting up, she closed her eyes and took a long drag.
She wanted the cigarette to comfort her, wanted the cool, damp night to wrap around her and just help her to relax, but it didn’t take long at all for her to realize that none of it was helping.
Praying? Yeah, well, she wasn’t even sure she believed in that.
Over the last couple months she’d been reading her Bible a little — which was one of the reasons she’d brought up the whole church thing with Patrick — and now she remembered the opening lines of Ecclesiastes: “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’”
More encouragement for her.
Maybe she could give a speech on that.
Yeah, that would totally fly.
Right now, she just needed a way to sort out the questions and see if any answers lay beneath, as the lyrics of “Eclipse” referred to it, the confidence that she’d hoped would carry her through the night.
38
From his hotel balcony Valkyrie stared out across the nighttime DC skyline, with the Washington Monument rising into prominence against the dark sky. The city’s building height restrictions made the skyline not nearly as magnificent as New York City’s, but still, with all the symbols of freedom, it was just as memorable.
At one time, Valkyries were worshipped as goddesses in Norse mythology. They were the ones who chose who would live and who would die on the battlefields. Eventually, the stories morphed, as myths do, and Valkyries became known as seductive spirits who lived in Valhalla and served fallen battle heroes.
No, he did not think of himself as a deity or as some type of alluring or servile spirit. However, since the day he’d emerged, he had thought of himself as the one who had the duty to determine who would live and who would enter eternity.
Tomorrow evening Keith and Vanessa would be arriving from India. They didn’t yet know that he was in the States, but they would find out. He had a meeting planned with them before the drugs entered the country’s secure supply chain.
Well, the supply chain that was supposed to be secure.
So now, DC.
The Washington Monument rising regally into the night.
Here was the center of democracy in the world, the beacon of freedom, the convergence of all that he had fought against while he was still working for the GRU. The Cold War was long over, but Russia’s network of spies, and his homeland’s interest in the politics and policies of Washington, had remained the same.
However, over this last year his heart had turned against Mother Russia. Her concerns were no longer his. In fact, these days he had no master directing his life. None, that is, except his past, which, in a way, dictated everything, shaped who he was and how he had become the determiner of life and death.
His past, his choices, had transformed him.
The day last May when his wife, Tatiana, died.
No, not died. Was murdered.
Before he’d ever identified himself as Valkyrie, he’d been known by his given name, Alexei Chekov, and had been in the business of cleaning up messes no one else wanted to dirty their hands with. Sometimes that involved taking the life of another person, a job he had never enjoyed, but one that he did, out of duty to his homeland, when called upon to act.
And he did his job well.
But then something happened that changed things forever.
Last May he’d argued with Tatiana, told her words he would always regret, words that would always ring like a terrible death knell through his mind, the sharp, most painful lie of alclass="underline" telling her that he did not love her and never wanted to see her again.
Then, later that same day, he found her body, with a single bullet hole in her forehead staring at him like a dark, unblinking third eye.
She’d only just been killed and the blood wasn’t done seeping from the back of her head across the sheets of the bed.
He’d searched for her murderer, vowing to punish him.
But he never had the chance, because she hadn’t been killed by another assassin, as he’d first thought.
He had blocked out the truth. It took him a long time to come to terms with what had actually happened, but last winter an FBI agent named Patrick Bowers had confronted him and made him realize the truth: that day when Alexei was with Tatiana, in a moment of terrible loss of self-control, he had done the unthinkable — he had killed the woman he loved.
Bowers had apprehended him, but, under the supervision of a law enforcement officer who was not nearly as astute as Bowers, Valkyrie had escaped. Still, Bowers was the one who’d deduced what Alexei had done to Tatiana, and nothing had been the same since.