Nora stepped inside, stood in the doorway staring at Renee on the floor with Devin before she looked at Frank. Her eyes searched his, then flicked to the guns on the counter.
“They’re empty,” he said, and he pushed off the counter and walked into the living room. Renee turned at the sound of his approach, a protective motion, covering Devin with her body.
“Get him up,” Frank said, “and get out of here.”
“All right.”
“The keys to the van are inside it, I think. You’ve got to get him out there, though. I’m not helping. If I touch him again, I’m going to kill him.”
She just nodded.
Frank turned and walked outside, leaving the empty guns on the counter. Nora followed him, and a few minutes later Renee appeared, with Devin on his feet but leaning heavily against her. Frank and Nora stood together beside the cabin and watched as she got the van door open and got him inside.
“You’re letting them go,” Nora said.
He shook his head. “They aren’t going far. He’s got to get to a hospital. Anybody can see that.”
She didn’t answer. Renee slammed the van door shut and walked toward the driver’s door. She paused for a moment in front of the van and looked back at them.
“Thank you,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
There was a beat of silence, and then Frank said, “You know what he does. You know what he is. So how the hell do you love him so clean?”
“Hon,” she said, “whoever said anything about it being clean?”
Frank looked away from her, out at the lake. He didn’t turn when the doors opened, didn’t turn when the engine started, didn’t turn when they drove up the gravel drive.
When the sound of the van had faded and they were alone, Nora said, “Is there a phone inside?”
“No.”
“Mine’s ruined. The water.”
“Yeah. Mine, too.”
“Where can we go to call the police?”
He waved toward the drive, and then they turned and started up it together, not speaking, stepping over puddles and through the mud. They were halfway to the main road when they heard the hum of an engine and the crunch of tires and Nora said, “Are they coming back?”
They weren’t coming back. It was a car, not a van, and when it slid to a stop and the door opened and Grady Morgan stood up and stared at them, all Frank could say was “You’re too late, Grady. Too late.”
Grady looked over his shoulder and then back at Frank. “Who was that? Who was in that van?”
“Devin Matteson and his wife,” Frank said.
“I can’t let them drive away from here.”
“Sure you can,” Frank said. “You never saw them. Didn’t know who it was. Didn’t ask me about it just now.”
Grady looked at Frank for a long time and said, “I’ve lied about him before. I guess I can do it again. Now what the hell happened out here?”
38
__________
Six hours later, Frank and Nora long departed in police custody, Ezra Ballard evacuated to some hospital, first by boat and then by helicopter, Grady stood alone at the shore and stared out into the dark lake where several bodies waited to be found.
Atkins was dead. Another agent, one who’d been trying to do the job right, was dead, and Grady would see that blood on his hands for the rest of his days, understood that it was the end of his career long before anyone back in Chicago would.
Too late. That was the first thing Frank Temple’s son had said to him. Grady had been too late.
Frank had no idea, either. He had no idea.
Seven years of watching that kid, keeping tabs on him, and it had never been about protecting Frank from anything. It had always been about protecting Grady, about covering his own ass. He’d never had the courage to approach the kid and tell him the truth and apologize, and now they were bringing body after body out of this damn lake, one of them a dead agent, a colleague.
Too late. Yes, Frank, I was too late.
Grady Morgan and the Seven-Year Lie. He could have gotten the nerve just a year ago, six years too late and still it would have been in time for this. If he’d tracked Frank down then and told him the truth, how much blood would have been spilled? Not as much, that was for sure. There would have been some, Devin Matteson’s gunmen would have seen to that, but not as many people would have died, certainly not Atkins. If Frank had known Devin wasn’t responsible for his father’s demise, he never would have headed north, never would have seen Vaughn Duncan or had anything to do with it. Those two from Miami would have made their way north quietly, killed Duncan and taken Renee home to see her husband.
It was a sick world, Grady thought, when you could stand on the shore of a beautiful lake like this and long for one murder. One murder that would have saved the others. Everybody with their damn score to settle, and Frank in the midst of it with one that didn’t need settling.
He was done with the Bureau. Wouldn’t have to be—all of this was indirect involvement, he was close to retirement, and the Bureau loved to handle such things quietly and in-house—but he knew he’d resign now. Should have seven years ago, but it wasn’t too late to do it now, and he felt he owed Atkins that much. Atkins wouldn’t have wanted a guy like Grady left in his Bureau.
The truth would start with Frank, though. The hell with the people in Chicago who would hear it next; Frank was the one that mattered.
He didn’t see him again until the next morning, and while there were still cops moving around the lake—and still divers looking for Atkins—they were alone in the cabin, sitting with their backs to the window that looked out on the lake and its grisly activity.
Ezra Ballard was alive and recovering from a single gunshot that had blown through his ribs and wreaked some internal havoc but left him to see another day, and that’s what Frank wanted to talk about at first.
“He’ll make it,” Frank said after he finished filling Grady in on all the medical details Grady had already heard.
“Yes.”
“One of the few, though. One of the few, and you don’t need to tell me how much of that is my responsibility, Grady. I understand it.”
“That’s not the way anyone else is telling it,” Grady said. “You see the papers? You’re on the front page.”
“So was my dad.”
“They’re saying different things about you, though.”
Frank didn’t respond to that.
“You let Devin go,” Grady said. “Had him and let him go, there at the end. I saw the reports.”
A nod.
“It was the right thing to do,” Grady said, and his voice was so rigid, grandfatherly, none of the relief coming through in it. And it was relief, because a day earlier when the kid stood in this room with a gun in his hand he had somehow done the right thing, despite all the energy Grady had invested into priming him for the wrong thing.
“Anybody heard about him?” Frank said. “Has he turned up somewhere?”
Grady shook his head.
“I was sure that he would,” Frank said. “Sure of it. He’ll need a hospital. I’d be surprised if he didn’t, at least. Nobody’s blaming me for letting him walk, though. Wasn’t my job, they keep saying.”
“It was the right thing to do,” Grady said again. “And I need to explain that to you.”
“I get it, Grady.”
“No, Frank. No, you do not.”
Frank tilted his head and squinted against the sunlight, and Grady finally opened his mouth and let the truth out.
“I was seventeen years old,” Frank said when he was done. It was the first thing he’d said in a long time, Grady doing all the talking, speaking too fast, trying to rush out as much as he could before Frank went nuts, blew up.