And then Grace saw it. In the game, clutched in the hand of murder victim fifteen, and in real life, around Mitch’s neck all those years ago in college. Always under his shirt or sweater so no one else would see it.
‘The idiot lost it when he was killing that woman FBI agent, which wasn’t a problem until you put the damn necklace in that damn game and then put it on the goddamned Internet. And when the Atlanta cops see that they’re going to remember it’s just like the one they have in the evidence locker. Then guess what happens? They’ll come up here and start asking questions, how you came up with that idea, and you’ll tell them, gee, I gave Mitch a necklace just like that back when we were in college in Atlanta, and that would be it, end of story, because Libbie Herold cut him. His blood was all over the scene. And now with all the DNA testing . . .’
Grace was barely listening. Mind, body, spirit – they were all numb. The rage she’d been counting on, the hatred that had filled her up and made her strong, had drained away in a flood of hopelessness.
It had all been for nothing. Silly, really, when she thought about it. All that security to protect herself from a killer who’d been beside her every step of the way. All that sharp-eyed paranoia, suspicion of every strange face, when she’d been too blind, too stupid to see the truth behind one of the faces she thought she knew best.
The Sig was growing heavier, and the muscles in her outstretched arm were starting to cramp. Why was she holding it there anyway? She would never have a chance to use it.
Suddenly there were terrible noises from downstairs. Something big crashing, metal against metal, again and again.
Diane’s eyes flickered. ‘Oh dear. The cavalry is getting serious. I guess we’d better finish up here. What the hell are you doing?’
Grace blinked, a little confused.
‘With your neck, damnit! What are you doing with your neck?’
She felt it then, between her fingers. Even as her gun hand had sagged toward the floor, her other one had crept to the chain she’d tucked inside her T-shirt, pulling out the cross that Jackson had given her. It hadn’t been a conscious gesture. You didn’t live through a life like Grace’s and retain a belief in talismans, religious or otherwise. But when she touched the cross she saw the young boy’s solemn brown eyes looking up at her, imploring her to wear it. He believed. Maybe that was why she had reached for it; to connect with the fragment of trust that life hadn’t beaten out of him yet.
Grace, do you trust me? . . . as if she owed him that, because he had trusted her first.
What a precious thing trust was; a fragile thing. That was what Jackson had really given her. Jackson and Harley and Annie and Roadrunner and Charlie, and even Magozzi, who shouldn’t have trusted her at all, but did . . .
‘It’s nothing. Just a cross. See?’
Diane took a quick step backward, and for the first time in what seemed like hours, Grace took a breath without the .45 pressed against her chest.
Diane was staring at the cross, transfixed, as it swung back and forth in Grace’s hand, catching the light from the loft windows, sparkling. ‘I had one of those,’ she whispered, touching her own throat, feeling a phantom. ‘Mother Superior gave it to me, but . . . I think I threw it away.’
She was lost in a memory Grace couldn’t begin to imagine, distracted for just a split second by whatever she was seeing behind those staring eyes. And in that second Grace felt the heat of an adrenaline surge that started to raise her gun hand, saw the stairwell door open slowly, slowly; saw a woman in a brown uniform soaked in blood crawling on her belly, a gun shaking in both hands, then the muzzle sagging, clattering to the wooden floor as she lost her tenuous grip . . .
In the next second Diane’s eyes blinked, jerked to the woman on the floor, and faster than Grace could follow, Diane angled the .45 toward the door at the same time the Sig was rising, and then the loft seemed to explode in a volley of deafening gunfire.
Diane was flung sideways and went down very fast, her head hitting the floor hard with a sound that would feed nightmares forever. There was blood, a lot of blood, flowing from so many wounds in Diane’s head and body that Grace couldn’t make sense of it at all.
She looked down at the Sig Sauer in her hand, confused. She’d fired once? Twice? Certainly no more than that, there hadn’t been time, and besides, the gun had been rising, barely above floor level, and she could see where the bullets had ripped and shattered the polished maple.
He rose slowly from his crouch behind Annie’s desk so he wouldn’t startle her, gun pointed down, but still clenched tightly in both hands.
‘Magozzi,’ Grace whispered, and then again, ‘Magozzi.’
It was only his name. He’d heard it all his life, but hearing it right now from Grace MacBride made his heart hurt. ‘And Halloran,’ he said, looking toward the stairwell door.
Grace followed his eyes and saw a big man in a brown uniform bent over the bleeding woman, pressing his hand against the wound in her throat, crying like a child.
Grace heard a lot of yelling from the stairwell, up through the elevator. What seemed like a thousand voices calling unintelligible words, and her heart picked out three voices from all the rest, booming out her name.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ she whispered mindlessly, even as she was dropping her gun, running to help the injured woman, oblivious to the tears streaming down her face. She was thinking of Annie and Harley and Roadrunner, alive, by God, alive; of Jackson and Magozzi, the man called Halloran and the woman bleeding beneath his hand – all the people who had saved her at last.
Gino and Magozzi stood on the curb outside the warehouse, watching the ambulance speed away toward Hennepin County General. There were three police escorts, lights and sirens going full blast: two MPD units in front, and Bonar behind in the Wisconsin cruiser. Halloran had insisted on riding with Sharon. The med techs had been foolish enough to tell him they were sorry, but he couldn’t ride in the ambulance, and Halloran hadn’t said a thing. He’d just pulled out his gun and pointed it at them, and the techs had changed their minds in a hurry.
‘Techs said it doesn’t look good,’ Gino said.
‘I heard.’
‘How many cops do you know would have dragged themselves up all those stairs with a wound like that?’
‘I’d like to think most of them would.’
Gino shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It was really something.’
Magozzi nodded. ‘They were both something. Halloran jumped through that door and damn near emptied his clip before I could get off a second round.’
Gino sighed. ‘I might have to rethink my position on Wisconsin cops. What was the deal with MacBride anyway? Why was she chasing the gurney like that?’
Magozzi closed his eyes, remembering Grace running alongside the gurney as they wheeled it through the garage, jerking the crucifix off her neck, frantically wrapping the chain around Sharon’s wrist.
Is she Catholic? one of the techs had asked her.
I don’t know. Don’t let them take that off her.
‘She was doing what she could, Gino.’
‘Huh.’ Gino turned and looked at Grace, Harley, Roadrunner, and Annie, huddled in a circle by the door with the shell-shocked expression of war victims. ‘Wonder if she’s gonna go loopy after this.’
Magozzi looked over his shoulder at Grace. She was almost buried under the arms of her friends, but she raised her eyes to his almost immediately, as if he’d spoken her name. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
48