The doctors gave David something for the pain, then took X-rays. A miracle shot, the doctor called it. The bullet had fractured when it passed through the side of the van, and only a chunk of it had hit his hand, where it went straight through soft tissue, missing the bones and damaging only a little muscle. They stitched him up and gave him an antibiotic and sent him on his way.
Brooke waited for him in the lobby. He’d told her the truth, albeit only part of it. That there was a larger drug operation going on, and he’d somewhat stumbled into it, and the crew running the operation tried their damnedest to kill him.
He wished so badly to tell her the rest of it. About the infection and people ingesting these crystals and his desperate, dashed hope that this would end the killings. She more than anyone deserved the truth. Brooke was smarter than he was. She didn’t take any shit, but she also didn’t have that inexplicable male craving for authority—a tendency even David had to fight off, though often enough it overtook him. She was a hell of a cop, and one day she’d be a hell of a sheriff. As it was, she was stuck going out on the job every day playing against a stacked deck.
“You okay, boss?” she asked as she drove him to his apartment.
He’d been staring out, watching dusk fall across the giant.
“Yeah. I don’t know. Shit, no. No, I’m not,” he answered. “I’ve had a couple of bullets come my way before, but nothing like today. There’s no good reason I’m still alive other than dumb luck. And you know, I never killed anyone before today. A cow, once. Never a person.”
He looked down at his right hand, which hadn’t stopped trembling.
“And now four men are dead.”
“They wanted to kill you, boss. You did what you had to do.”
“I suppose. I . . . I didn’t hesitate at all.”
He was seeing it again. The soldiers bleeding out as bullets tore through them. The one in the truck, his head smashed on the steering wheel. Chambers, stumbling under the car, his body mangled.
“What does that make me, Brooke? That I would do that and not feel a thing?”
She glanced over, then back to the road ahead.
“It makes you a survivor, boss. That’s all. A survivor.”
Not long after he got to his apartment, there was a knock at the door. Sunny stood there, her face filled with concern. They lay together on the bed, not talking, just holding each other. Priest had told Sunny what happened, and she’d demanded to go and see David.
He went to the window and peered through the blinds. Outside, a couple of dark, unmarked cars sat in front of the apartment. They were watching over him. Conover. Priest. Whoever. He could relax, if only for one night.
She held his heavily bandaged hand and caressed it. His fingertips were bruised and mostly numb. He could barely feel her touch.
“You’re a fucking moron, you know,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
“You can’t do that. Going off on your own.”
“I know.”
She looked into his eyes, unblinking and insistent.
“You can’t get yourself killed.”
“I’m not trying,” he argued back, though without much force.
“No. But you aren’t trying to stay alive, either. And . . . You can’t do that, okay? I need you.”
“Okay,” he said, and he pulled her more tightly to him.
Later, he lay in bed and waited for sleep that refused to come. The shootout played through his mind on a loop. The crash. The burst of violence. Adrenaline charging through him, his heart slamming against the inside of his chest. Stop, he told himself, it’s over. You survived. Let it go.
Finally, his mind relented, and he stared at the empty expanse of the ceiling. He had survived. But the other part of it was wrong. It wasn’t over. Somewhere in the night, a killer watched and waited, readying to strike again.
In the morning, they went back to Site One. Passing through security, David scrutinized the faces of the soldiers. Were all of Chambers’s friends dead? Or were some still out there, hidden in plain sight? He hurried along, eager to reach the isolation of Building Seventeen.
Sunny joined him in his office, where he went straight to the far wall and crossed out Chambers’s name.
“One more dead end,” he said.
They stood back and surveyed the wall, the names and photos and maps. Seven victims, and the only thing that seemed to tie any together—the drugs—had been a mirage. The cases were like bones, with no connective tissue to form them into a body. No tendons or veins or nerves.
“You’re looking for connections,” Sunny said.
David sat, his body still exhausted from the day before.
“I figure there has to be a motive. It doesn’t feel random, like a spree killer. And the messages he’s sent to Charlotte show that he’s thinking through what he’s doing. He’s messing with her. Messing with me.”
David hadn’t told Sunny about Erickson’s lighter showing up on his doorstep. He knew how hard his death had been on her already and didn’t want to hurt her anew.
She studied the wall.
“So, there’s one reason for all the deaths. One motive,” she said, thinking out loud. “And if you find the motive, you find the killer.”
“That’s the idea,” he said. “But now there’s nothing left connecting any of them.”
“It’s sort of the same as my work,” Sunny said. “I know something is connecting all the crystals that make up the giant, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it is.”
She pointed to the line between Kapoor, the realtor, and Jason.
“What’s that?”
“Kapoor was buying and selling properties. Jason had sign-off power on real estate deals. So they at least were connected. I don’t know. Maybe some land deal went wrong, and some outsider went after Jason and Kapoor? But that still doesn’t connect to any others.”
Even as he said it, the idea felt limp, unsupported by anything he’d seen and uncovered. But it was also as good of a theory as he had.
“And you’re assuming it’s an outsider,” Sunny said. “What if it’s not?”
“It has to be. The killer is infected by the spire, right? That means it’s someone with access. And I’m the only local with a clearance.”
Sunny shook her head.
“Not necessarily. Remember when Gulliver fell? Little pieces of the giant and spire fractured off in the atmosphere and rained down all over the county.”
David pictured it in his mind. Gulliver looming overhead, glowing. The sky dark. Flaming debris racing through the sky, toward the ground.
“I thought the army came in and found everything,” he said.
“They picked up as much as they found, but what if they missed something? We have no idea if some local randomly came across a piece of it.”
“No,” David said, cutting her off, his defenses raised. “It isn’t one of us.”
“You can’t know for certain. That’s all I was trying to say.”
“It isn’t,” he said, more curtly than he wanted.
They sat in silence, and then after a while Sunny stood, put her hand on his shoulder, and whispered in his ear that she was going to her office to work. Then he was alone. Just him and the faces of the dead staring back at him from the wall.
It couldn’t be a local. She was wrong.
He stared at the line connecting Kapoor and Jason. Maybe.
He’d already spent hours scanning through Jason’s financial records, looking for anything strange. He sorted through the pile of folders on the table, found what he was looking for, and started reading again: Jason’s bank statement, a vast scroll of everywhere he’d spent money, everything he’d bought.
David’s eyes glazed over amid the tedium of life it reflected. Groceries. Bar tabs. Fuel. Clothing for the twins. A few withdrawals from an ATM that he already had looked up and knew was the one sitting inside the entrance of the strip club. A purchase from a flower shop. Was it for Missy, his wife, or was it for Jason’s mistress?
If asked, David would’ve said he knew everything there was to know about Jason. Yet he was reminded all over again that there was a whole side of his life that Jason had kept hidden. They’d spent all their lives together, he and Jason. Been the best man at each other’s weddings. Maybe they hadn’t been as inseparable as when they were children, but they still saw each other almost every day at the courthouse. Still got together for every big championship boxing match.
David stopped mid page. Then he flipped backward. One page. Another. Another. Scanning over each line item as he went, searching. No. It wasn’t there.
He tossed the sheets aside and picked up another stack, statements from a different account. Again, he flipped one page after another, searching for something—an expense—that had to be there. Except, it wasn’t.
David thought back to when he’d requested the records. His uncle Dale had stared at him across his desk. What had he said? I’ll prepare them myself.
David stood and rushed out. It was time for a family visit.