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Fifty-Four

The Regency, Baltimore, Maryland

Sunday, October 27th, 10:30 PM Eastern Standard Time

By the time ten thirty came around, we’d been through so much preparation, it almost felt like it should be later than it was. Then again, that might be the jet lag talking. Either way, time was up.

Paige and I were seated at a table to the left of Frank’s, under the guise of a date, and Jack and Kelly were on the other side. Other agents were positioned throughout the Regency.

An agent from Quantico was tending bar, and two others were posing as servers. Out front, undercover agents were keeping civilians from entering the bar as discreetly as possible.

At ten thirty-five, the front door opened, and Michelle Evans walked in. I found myself holding my breath. She was right there, and I just wanted to move in, but Jack wanted to see if we could get a confession from her through Frank. The more evidence, the better, when it came to getting convictions.

Michelle wandered through the restaurant, and I was careful to watch but not appear as if I was. She was just as I’d expected from pictures I’d seen of her: pretty, trim, blonde, but there was certainly something off about how slowly she was walking and how she was diligently checking out her surroundings. Something she’d probably learned from being a Marine. Her gaze swept over everyone, but I had no doubt she was cataloging us all, trying to assess us.

But if I did say so myself, we were all looking the parts we were playing. Paige’s hair was backcombed and frizzy, and she was wearing jeans and a matching jacket. Her gray T-shirt had a hole in it with some band’s name scrawled across the front, tour dates on the back. I was done up much the same, but I had a knock-off leather coat, which I had hanging on the back of my chair. Both of us had pints of beer in front of us, along with two empties. We hadn’t been drinking on the job, of course, but it was made to look like we had enjoyed some beer already and that the staff was slow to clear the tables, which would fit with the feel of the place. It could definitely benefit from a thorough cleaning. My Dr. Martens stuck to the tile floor. Even the tabletops were tacky—that took me right back to the Lucky Pub.

Michelle spotted Frank and sat across from him. She didn’t take off the thigh-length trench coat she wore, but she undid it. She didn’t say a word.

“Michelle, you made it,” Frank said. We could hear him through earpieces, as we had the music playing at a loud volume that was regular for the joint and he was recording the conversation, which we could hear live. “You did it? The prosecutor, that was you, Shelly?”

“Yes.” Michelle was smiling; it traveled in her single-word response.

Frank held out a hand for Michelle’s, and slowly she raised hers and extended it across the table. “I’m so proud of you,” he said.

“Thank you.” Michelle was quiet, shy, tentative like a little girl talking to her father.

“You took care of all of it. You cleared your mother’s name.”

Michelle stiffened and withdrew her arm. “Mother never needed her name cleared.” Heat coated her tone, and it made the skin tighten on the back of my neck. I glanced quickly at Jack, starting to get a bad feeling.

Frank didn’t seem fazed. “What did you do with the rifle?”

“Just what you told me to do. It’s at the bottom of the Patapsco River.”

“And the leftover ammunition?”

“With it.” Michelle shifted her position, slowly, and her demeanor was calm.

“You did a good thing, Shelly, killing those men.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“You did. Now we can be a family again, Shelly. A family,” Frank cooed, using her pet name so much that it made me cringe.

Michelle flashed a brief, insincere smile that disappeared faster than it formed. She shuffled her feet in slow, precise movements and looked my direction. I laughed and took a sip of beer as if Paige and I were having an engaging conversation, but my mind was on the fact something was off about her.

Images of the interstate map found in Michelle’s apartment flashed in my mind. The asterisks noted at each stop she intended to make along the way. The ones marking her targets. We had thought at one point that Frank was a target, but we’d become distracted by the fact he was an accomplice. Her friend Karen told us Michelle had forgiven her father, but what if she hadn’t? We’d pegged Michelle for the patsy, but maybe she wasn’t as naive as we thought.

“We need to abort now,” I said for the benefit of the comm, trying not to jump up and put an end to it myself.

“We let it play out a bit longer,” came Jack’s reply.

“What do you mean you’re not sure, Shelly?” Frank said. “I love—”

Michelle reached inside her coat, and I bolted to my feet.

I was too slow. She’d pulled a gun and squeezed the trigger.

Blood was draining from Frank’s forehead as his head hit the table.

She put the gun on the table in front of her and laughed when she saw us and raised her hands in the air. “Thank you. Thank you,” she repeated with a wide smile.

I glanced at Paige. Guess there’s a first for everything.

Paige collected the gun—not a Glock G19—but a Sig Sauer P938, an easy acquisition off the street.

Jack cuffed Michelle and started to read her the Miranda rights. “You have the right to—”

“He used me!” she snarled and spit on Frank’s lifeless body. “He turned his back on my mother. On me. That man doesn’t know love. I shouldn’t even exist.”

Jack hauled her to her feet and finished off the Miranda rights.

Michelle then said, “Prison will be a better place for me. At least my mother will know peace now. She was an angel on earth, and now she watches over me.” She blew a kiss toward the ceiling, then started to sob, her body racking fiercely under the pressure of years of emotional turmoil finally giving birth.