His face was wet. He wiped it on his sleeve. How could any of this end well?
“The Bates brothers may still be free. Please . . . don’t let there be any more bombs. You’re the only one who can control this.”
Cars parked near him, and people got out and walked into the store. Life was going on as if everything were normal, even though dozens of funerals were happening in Atlanta this week. It seemed wrong, somehow. Didn’t these people know that evil lurked near here? That there were people building bombs?
He pulled himself together and got back onto the highway. He followed the signs to Gainesville, even though he didn’t know what he would do when he got there.
Taylor kept her distance behind Dustin, following him off the Gainesville exit ramp. When he pulled into a Walmart parking lot but didn’t get out of his car, she parked some distance away, watching him, her hand inside her purse, clutching her gun. Did he know she was following him? Should she act now?
It wasn’t a good place to confront him. She couldn’t do it with security cameras everywhere and people coming and going. She was relieved when he pulled back into traffic the same way he had been going.
She followed him again. Maybe he hadn’t seen her, after all.
Her ears were still ringing, and her head was beginning to hurt. She had bandages on both legs and her arm now, and new rashes had popped up, itching her to distraction. Her hands trembled and her thoughts raced.
Could she do this? If he went to a place that wasn’t so monitored, could she really get out of her car and shoot him?
He had murdered Desiree and Mara and Ed Loran and dozens of others. He deserved this. It could be the only way she could live with herself.
51
Dustin’s GPS took him to Samuel Bates’s apartment complex. He’d half expected a pocked parking lot and appliances rusting on the grass, but instead it was a well-landscaped area with expensive cars parked outside. He found Bates’s apartment on the second floor of the K building. He parked across the parking lot from Bates’s door, waiting for someone to come out. He’d decided the best he could do was take a picture of Bates and of the tag on the white van or any other vehicle that might be his.
He looked around the parking lot for the van he had seen in the security video. There it was, sitting in one of the spaces in front of Bates’s apartment. Dustin got out of the car and snapped a picture on his phone of the tag and the van.
As he slid back into his car, he saw a gray sedan pull into the lot. The woman driving wore a baseball cap and sunglasses. He watched her pull into a parking space. She didn’t get out. Was she just going to sit there, like him?
A sudden shudder went down his back as he realized she was watching him. Was she with the media? Had she followed him from Atlanta? Or worse, was she a cop, assigned to tail him? Of course—and now they’d documented his visit here. What would they think about his reason for coming?
His phone rang. It was Jamie. He picked it up. “Hey.”
“I have some updates,” she said. “They’re still searching the storage units.”
“Still? What’s taking so long? The stuff is right there.”
“You said there were a lot of boxes and equipment. My guess is that they’re going through all of it.”
Dustin checked Samuel Bates’s door again. “I went by my office, and they’ve put new locks on the door.”
“That’s probably good news. But Travis still hasn’t been arrested.”
He struggled with the conflicting feelings that irritated him. At least Travis still had that time with Crystal. But did that mean the police weren’t buying his story? Had they decided the detonator caps and the diagram were Dustin’s?
“What do you think? Are they going to arrest him?”
“If I were them,” she said, “I would have people up there watching him. Plain-clothed detectives in the waiting rooms and other hospital rooms, hanging out in the hallway. He’s not going anywhere. But I’m not them, and I can’t exactly explain why they’re moving so slowly on all this.”
He wished he could go to the hospital and check it out, but after his fight with Travis last night, how could he?
“You okay?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“Have you managed to sleep any?”
He didn’t want to tell her he wasn’t even home, that he had gone to Gainesville to see if the police had done anything about the Bates brothers. She would go nuclear if she knew he was sitting outside the bomber’s apartment. “Maybe a little.”
“Good. I’ll call you back if I find out anything else.”
He hung up and checked the woman’s car again. She was still sitting there. He thought of walking over to her and telling her that the guy she really wanted was right up there, in that apartment, and that this was his van.
He started his car again and looked up at the apartment one more time. Just then, the door opened, and Samuel Bates walked out. There were two other guys with him.
Dustin set his phone on video, and as the men came down the stairs, he zoomed in and taped them. They didn’t look his way before getting into the van. Dustin had to leave now. If he stayed, they would know he was watching them. He pulled out of the parking lot and checked his rearview mirror. The woman wasn’t following him.
He turned onto the busy street and into the parking lot of a convenience store, then did a tight U-turn and watched the Bates van pull out of the apartment complex.
He followed them when they turned the other direction. They drove through town to a building that looked like a converted car repair garage. An old, faded sign said “Bates Plumbing.” The three got out and went inside. Samuel was limping slightly, just as he had been on the security video.
Was this where they’d made the bombs?
He took pictures of the building, the signs, and the other two cars parked there, making sure he got their tag numbers.
As he turned to head home, he looked for the gray sedan. The woman didn’t seem to be following him.
Maybe he was just paranoid. She could have been there waiting for a friend, or sitting in her car talking on the phone before going into her apartment. Maybe his imagination had gotten the best of him.
52
Taylor had been completely focused on Dustin as she sat in the parking lot at the apartment complex. She had considered walking to his car and shooting him through the window, but something had told her to wait until he got out of the car. He never did.
When he’d pulled out, she had started her car to follow him, but the three men who’d just come out of an upstairs apartment caught her eye. She had seen two of them before.
That feeling she’d had after the bombing flooded her again, drenching her in sweat, her heart racing to keep up with her thoughts. She couldn’t catch her breath and felt dizzy and confused.
Where had she seen them before?
As they pulled out of the parking lot, she stayed where she was and tried to think. Something to do with that day.
Then it came to her. She dug through her purse, ignoring the gun, and pulled out her phone. There had been a dozen calls from her sister, but she ignored them and went to her photos, her hands trembling.
She flipped through the pictures she had taken after her escape from Trudeau Hall and found the video she’d taken from her car’s dashboard as she’d waited for her friends that night.
She slid the bar through it, making the images move in jerky fast-forward motion, until she found the one she was looking for.
There! She turned the video on and watched as two guys dressed in Ed Loran T-shirts jogged up the sidewalk and got into the car in front of her.
Was Dustin Webb connected with them? When she looked up again, their van was out of sight, and so was Webb’s car. She had lost them.
It was them, she thought. Those men. They had something to do with the bombing, too. From the depths of her soul, she knew it.
With new purpose, she headed back to Atlanta, trying to lay out th
e logical steps she’d need to take to make sure they were all caught.
53
In Crystal’s room, Travis stroked his rubber-gloved fingers along her cheek and looked into the hazy-sick glaze of her eyes, searching for the woman who had once exuded such vibrant life.
“Tired,” she whispered. “Need to rest.”
A tear rolled down his cheek, and he smeared it away. “Okay, love. Go ahead and rest.”
“Love you . . . Don’t be angry.”
He almost didn’t hear the endearment, her whisper was delivered on such a thin wisp of breath, but when he realized what she’d said, an alarm went off in his heart. “Why would I be angry?”
“Tired,” she whispered again. “So tired.” Her eyes closed as she drifted into a shallow sleep, and he held his breath, trying not to suck in the sob lingering in his throat. Was she telling him that she was too tired to fight? Was that why he would be angry? Because she was ready to let go?
He bowed his head as tears stung his raw eyes, and he fought the urge to shake her and force her to wake up. Sleep was a powerful drug, one that she needed right now. But death was even more powerful, and like a narcotic that promised peace and numbness, it was calling to her.
Its voice was stronger than his.
But after death, what would happen? He’d avoided that question his whole life, even when Dustin would bring it up. He didn’t believe in God, so why would he believe in an afterlife?
But now that question hung above him like the certainty that death was coming for her.
What if there was a God? What if her death was only a temporary state, and he could see her again one day, and his children could see their mom?
Wanting it didn’t make it true. But the arbitrary nature of his beliefs, all based on his belief in the accidental soup that made humans into beings that could cure diseases and travel off the planet, seemed less and less likely now without some greater force to guide them. His truth seemed wobbly, even though he’d used it to justify what he’d done to Dustin. How could it stand when people were dead and so many families were going through what he was feeling with Crystal?
He didn’t like those truths. But not liking them didn’t make them untrue.
Knowing that she would be asleep for a while and that he was too weak to keep his emotions quietly contained, he stood and started out of the room, discarding his sterile clothing with vicious rips and wads once he was past the walls that were supposed to protect Crystal from contamination.
He looked up and saw Wendy standing in the hallway, watching him with sad eyes. “She’s just sleeping,” he said. “You can go on in.”
She reached up, hugged him, and pressed a motherly kiss on his cheek. That prompted more tears. Wendy wiped them off his face.
“You go take a break. Get something to eat.”
Travis nodded. He wasn’t hungry, and he didn’t want to venture far from this floor, which felt like a sanctuary. That was another wobbly truth. It wasn’t a sanctuary. If Dustin had gone to the police about Travis’s part in the bombing, they wouldn’t care if he was in the cafeteria or in the cancer center. It was just a matter of time.
54
Dustin’s room in the Airbnb grew darker as the sun set, but he didn’t turn on the light. Instead, he sat motionless in the chair in his room, staring pensively at the video he’d taken years earlier as it played on his computer screen.
Crystal Grey ran across the television screen, sweaty and wearing a T-shirt and jogging shorts. “Get that camera off of me, Dustin Webb. I don’t want to have to kill you.”
Dustin fast-forwarded to the next scene with Crystal. He smiled as her nine-month-pregnant belly—so big it made his own stomach hurt—dominated the screen.
Travis was on his knees in front of the camera, which was balanced on the tripod, and Dustin chuckled lightly as he watched himself step into the picture. Mischievously, Travis lifted Crystal’s maternity shirt, exposing her bare stomach.
“I’d rather not have my gut exposed for posterity, thank you,” she told her husband, pulling her shirt back down.
But Travis had a plan. “Just let me draw a little face on it.”
“That’s my skin, you lunatic.”
“They’re nontoxic, washable markers. I checked.”
She finally gave in and let her husband sketch two eyes, two enormous ears, a nose over her navel, and a huge, buck-toothed mouth on her belly.
Dustin heard himself laughing, and Crystal’s laughter turned into uncontrollable hysterics, until tears ran down her face. “If I go into labor with this on my stomach, someone is going to die.”
He was glad he’d gotten that on camera.
It was the last time they’d been together before their lives had changed, when Miles and Mason had come into the world.
The tape progressed to the scene of the two tiny babies just hours after their birth, and Crystal lying in her hospital gown, completely exhausted but euphoric with pride over the perfection of those two little boys.
“Uncle Dustin, you realize you’re looking at the first set of co-presidents in the United States.”
On tape, Dustin leaned over and shook one of their tiny fists. “Nice to meet you, Mr. President.”
Funny how things changed. What was to become of those babies now, with their mother dying and their father facing a prison sentence? Though it was completely irrational, he felt responsible.
He heard the front door open and close, then a knock on his bedroom door. Carrying the computer with him, he went to answer it.
Jamie stood there, her face sober and her eyes direct. “I left Avery with Mom in case something happens tonight.”
“Like what?”
“Like another interview? More questioning?”
Dude scratched on the back door, and Dustin set the computer on the coffee table and went to let him in. The dog bounded to greet Jamie ferociously, then went to his water bowl. Dustin’s computer was still playing his home movies. He paused it, but Jamie said, “Don’t. I want to see.”
He clicked Play again. Jamie sat down on the edge of the couch and studied the face of his bright, happy friend on the screen, heard her quick wit and her even quicker laugh. “Is that Crystal?” she asked.
Dustin nodded. “Yeah, that’s her.”
“She’s beautiful.”
It was after the babies had come home, and Crystal was bemoaning the fact that she looked her worst.
“I don’t think you’ve ever looked more beautiful.” Travis pulled the camera back and showed the two little babies in her arms.
“She looks so healthy there. So strong.”
“She is strong,” Dustin said. “She’s fought for a long time. She was never going to surrender to this easily.” He looked at Jamie. “Have they arrested Travis yet?”
She sighed. “No. They still have to convince the DA and judge of probable cause, investigate more, and make sure they have a solid case.”
“If they don’t think there’s probable cause, then that means they don’t believe me. They still think I’m the culprit.”
“Don’t think that,” she said. “It’s not that simple.”
He looked back at the video on his screen. “At least Crystal doesn’t have to know yet.”
“Yeah. Maybe it’s a God thing. Not for Travis, but for her.”
The reminder that God was still watching over Crystal filled his heart with gratitude. The situation could change at any moment, but each minute counted. He hoped Crystal could pass into eternity without ever having to know what her husband had done.
55
Crystal’s death came so peacefully that Travis wasn’t aware of it until the nurse who’d been watching her monitor stepped into the room and met his eyes with silent, soul-deep sorrow.
Days ago, Crystal had made him and Wendy promise that they wouldn’t allow resuscitation if she died. “I don’t want to be dragged back once I cross that threshold,” she’d said.
Travis hadn’t been
able to stop his tears. “But, Crystal, we need you here. We don’t want to let you go.”
“Let me rest,” she whispered. “This has been so hard. But you’re in God’s hands, and so are the boys. I’ve had to give them up to him. Now it’s your turn to give me up to him.”
He had ultimately made the promise. Now he regretted it, and in truth, he hadn’t given her up yet. She was being ripped away from him. He’d had no real choice. But he hadn’t yet let go.
He looked up at the nurse, his eyes denying what his heart couldn’t accept. The nurse wiped a tear from her eye, and suddenly his heart absorbed the truth. She was gone.
“No,” he whispered, a sob catching in his throat. “I thought she was sleeping.”
“She was,” the nurse said. “She went quietly.” He looked up through his tears and saw Crystal’s mother standing outside the room, still pulling on a sterile gown, preparing to come in. But when Wendy saw Travis’s eyes through the glass, her face distorted into a miserable twist of despair. Letting the gown fall to the floor, she pushed into the room, her eyes focusing on the only child she had ever had. “God, please,” she whispered.
Travis went to her, his arms reaching out to receive comfort more than to give it. But Wendy had little to give. “So many things I meant to say,” she whispered. “I thought there was still time.”
They wept together, wordless pain in anguished groans. Wendy pulled away from him and went to the daughter she had outlived, kissed her, and wept on her chest. After a while, she straightened her daughter’s blankets, like a mother tucking her child in for the night.
When Wendy prayed, Travis just watched. “Thank you, Jesus,” Wendy whispered as she wept. “Oh, thank you.”
When it seemed she had stopped praying, he wiped his face. “How could you . . . thank him?”
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