The knob turned. The door swung inward.
Jo focused through the tiny strip between the door and the wall. Quinn. Bloodied. She stumbled across the threshold. Alice gripped the younger woman’s left arm. Holding her up or controlling her? Unknown, but Quinn stood between her and Alice.
“This’ll work,” Alice muttered. “You’ll have to sit in the gaming chair. I don’t know any other way to do this.”
Quinn staggered forward. A couple more steps and Jo would have the space to push Quinn out of the way and confront Alice.
She tensed, ready to spring.
Quinn’s head lolled toward Jo. Her eyes widened and she sidestepped, crashing into Alice. “She’s gotta gun!” Quinn slurred a warning.
The element of surprise evaporated.
Jo kicked the door and grabbed for Quinn, but Alice already held the injured woman and danced out of reach.
Jo trained her gun on Alice. “Drop the gun.”
Alice used Quinn as a shield, stooping slightly to make herself a smaller target, and pressed the barrel of a revolver against Quinn’s neck.
Blood caked the left half of Quinn’s face, and one eye was swollen shut. She swayed on her feet.
“Drop the gun,” Jo ordered again. Even this close, it would be a difficult shot. One Jo wouldn’t take while the barrel of the revolver kissed Quinn’s skin.
“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, will nothing go right tonight?” Alice laughed.
Jo swallowed. She’d expected a calculating woman. Controlled. This Alice was something altogether different. And Jo didn’t know how to appeal to her.
“Shmup,” Quinn said.
Shoot ’em up. Jo shook her head slightly. This wasn’t a game. If bullets started flying, no one would survive.
“My fight isn’t with you, Detective,” Alice said. Her voice was oddly singsong, but her gun hand shook. Not a good combination.
From a tactical standpoint, Jo was screwed. No cover. No concealment. No viable shot. “Put down the gun. We can work through this.”
Statistically, the most dangerous time in a hostage scenario occurred when the suspect first realized they were cornered. But Alice wasn’t cornered. Jo was. Alice had a clear shot. Jo didn’t.
“Please understand this wasn’t what I’d wanted,” Alice said, her voice steadier. “But I promise you’ll die a hero.” Her eyes pinged across the room. “It’ll look like a shootout, of course.” It was as if she was thinking out loud. “Sadly, you’ll succumb to your wounds, but not before mortally wounding the woman who single-handedly killed Tye Horton and Ronny Buck.”
“It’s too late for that.” Jo remained still, trying to calm the fear that raced through her body like a whippet. “We know everything.”
Alice’s gun remained pointed toward Quinn, but that could change in a blink. “Oh, I doubt that.”
“The laptop. Your notebook. The files. They’re all at the police station.”
“You’re lying.” She licked her lips. “Olivia would never betray me.”
Jo changed tack. “Olivia needs you. Needs her mother. Put down the gun. Let’s figure this out.”
“You know nothing.”
“I understand why you did it. You found your husband’s files. Befriended Tye. Financed a new game. All so you could gain access to three innocent people you mistakenly thought were responsible for your son’s death.”
“They weren’t innocent.” Alice spoke through clenched teeth. “They enabled him. Gaming consumed my son. He couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. He lost interest in anything that wasn’t connected to a goddamn console.”
Alice’s anger pulsed through the room, and Jo steeled herself to take the shot.
Quinn’s head bobbled. “Let me tell you about the Derek I knew.” Her voice rasped as if she’d been choked.
Alice jabbed the gun deeper into her neck. “You never met him.”
Jo’s finger pressed the slack out of the trigger.
Quinn could barely keep her eyes open, but there was a freakish calm about her. “Wasn’t games. Your son’d fallen in love. Yeah, he lost weight, couldn’t sleep. He was in love. With Tye.”
“He would have told me,” she said. “He should have told me,” she repeated quieter.
She lowered the gun slightly.
Jo had to keep her talking. Reinforcements would be here any second. “Gaming didn’t destroy his life, it gave him hope.”
“Hope doesn’t come from a video game,” Alice said.
Jo watched Alice’s shoulder, waiting for it to telegraph the woman’s next move.
“Video games tell stories.” Quinn’s head jerked as if she was on the verge of collapsing. “Your son found one that told his.”
Tears welled in Alice’s eyes, but she blinked them away. “I’ve heard enough, Ms. Kirkwood. Be quiet now, please.”
The older woman’s posture changed. Confusion or defeat? Or something else entirely?
“Mrs. Walsenberg, please, lower the gun,” Jo said. “Don’t make a third mistake.”
“That implies I made two others.” A tiny smile flitted across Alice’s face and was gone. “All I ever wanted to do was protect my family.”
“This isn’t the way to achieve that.”
“How did it get to this? I’m an Ambrose. I am an Ambrose,” she repeated, and then flinched. “And I have failed.” She lowered the gun and shoved Quinn aside.
Quinn tumbled to the floor, but rather than rolling toward Jo, she took refuge behind Tye’s chair. Behind Alice.
Alice’s arm hung limply at her side, and she locked eyes with Jo. “Kill me.”
For the first time, Jo had a clear shot, but as long as Alice kept the gun pointed at the floor, there was hope for a peaceful resolution.
The chair was too small to cover Quinn’s entire body, and she fidgeted behind it. Jo willed her to stay put, out of the line of fire.
“Mrs. Walsenberg. Alice. No one else has to get hurt. We can all walk away from here.”
Quinn poked her head out, as if trying to get the lay of the land, and then crawled forward like a demented toddler.
Jo kept talking, desperate now to hold Alice’s attention. To keep her from perceiving Quinn as a new threat. “You made a mistake. But what you’re asking is cowardly. You are not a coward.”
Alice Ambrose Walsenberg pulled her shoulders back. Her grip tightened on the revolver.
Jo inhaled and let the breath out halfway. Hands steady. Resolved.
“I am an Ambrose.” Alice swept her arm to the side in an arc and leveled the gun at her temple.
52
Quinn couldn’t—wouldn’t—allow another cop to die while saving her sorry ass.
“Kill me,” Alice had said.
What was Wyatt waiting for?
On her hands and knees, Quinn peeked around the base of the chair. Tye’s chair.
Wyatt faced her. Her gun had to be heavy, but Wyatt’s aim never wavered. Her hands never shook. And if she pulled that trigger, there’d be a hole in Alice’s chest the size of a Mini Cooper.
All she had to do was pull the damn trigger.
Blood dripped on Quinn’s knuckle. She could see out of only one eye, and every time she moved, the floor came up at unexpected angles. It was like being drunk, without the fun of being buzzed first, and her head ached as if she were coming off a three-day bender.
Alice had her back to Quinn, her attention on the detective. Maybe Quinn’s words about Derek had hit the mark. Honesty had a funny way of stabbing square into the truth a person most wanted to hide. Alice still held her gun, but it was pointed down, like she’d given up.
No. That wasn’t the Alice Walsenberg she’d come to know in recent days.
Quinn’s ears still rang with a high-pitched squeal that only she and the neighborhood dogs could hear—a souvenir from using one’s head as a doorstop. Wyatt was yapping again, but her words were garbled. Probably trying to convince Alice to put down the gun or something else from the po-po playbook that
Alice had no intention of doing.
Quinn edged closer, carefully picking up each knee and hand so she didn’t alert Alice. When she was close enough, she balanced on her hands and shifted her weight to her legs. A half-standing, half-something crouch.
Through her one good eye, Quinn saw Alice tense, her fingers whitening where they wrapped around the grip. The gun came up.
Oh hell no.
Quinn didn’t stop to think. Didn’t try to signal Jo. Wasn’t sure she remembered to breathe. She just lunged. Aimed for the center of Alice’s back.
Hit her shoulder.
Time stopped doing all the things Quinn had taken for granted over the years. It twisted back on itself, slowed, sped up, stopped.
Alice spinning. A noise so loud it silenced everything. Wyatt. The floor smacking Quinn’s already hurt head. The tangle of arms and legs. The detective holding a gun one second, handcuffs the next. Or were the handcuffs first?
Nothing made sense.
A man she’d never seen before crashed through the door. Tall. Another gun. Friend? Must be. No one shot him.
Wyatt shook her awake. Her lips moved, but Quinn still couldn’t hear shit. Or maybe the detective was fucking with her. That’d be just like her.
The tall guy held Alice by her elbow. Her wrists cuffed behind her back.
Quinn blinked. Everything changed.
Alice was gone. More cops. Different uniforms. Someone pricked a needle into her arm. Attached a line.
“No morphine,” she said. Or had she only thought it?
Wyatt leaned close to the guy with the IV. Shook her head. No morphine, she mouthed.
Quinn blinked again, and they were outside. Red and blue Christmas lights throbbed against a dizzying white swirl that fell on her face.
She closed her eyes.
Fucking snow.
53
It was three thirty before Jo escaped the station and returned home. The wind drove icy flakes across the beams of her headlights, melting the black night and white snow into a disorienting swirl of gray.
Tiny shards of ice stung her face on the short walk to the dark porch. Inside, slush clung to her boots, and she unlaced them. Left them on the mat. She eased out of her jacket and hung it on the coatrack by the door. She ran her fingers across the cloth badge sewn on the breast. Fisted the fabric. Buried her face against the fleece lining and smelled remnants of the night—her sweat, her fear, her relief—and she cried. Standing at the coat tree, trying to be quiet in a house that wasn’t hers, she cried.
“That you?” her father called out from the living room.
She jammed the heels of her palms into her eyes and wiped her nose against the sleeve of her turtleneck. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Her father clambered out of his recliner as she entered the living room. “Didn’t wake me.” He handed her a tumbler containing a generous pour of bourbon. “Wanted to see for myself that you hadn’t collected any new holes.”
“No.”
The amber liquid glowed in the firelight. She swirled it slowly, staring beneath its surface.
“All right then.” He shuffled toward the kitchen.
“Join me?” she asked.
He stopped but didn’t turn around.
“It’s been a long night,” she added.
“I imagine it has.”
He took two more steps toward the kitchen and then hung his head. Turned.
His knee must be acting up. He was dragging his leg more than usual.
At the mantel, he stopped. Clicked off the scanner. Then he picked up the wrought-iron poker and jabbed at the logs until they broke apart, sending sparks and embers in different directions.
She sat heavily on the couch and tucked her feet underneath her. Her socks were damp. “The DA is going to step down tomorrow. Personal reasons.”
She sipped the bourbon and held it in her mouth for a long moment before swallowing. What consequences the DA faced next was above her pay grade. The state would review her investigation, start one of their own. The only thing that looked like a slam dunk was the unauthorized use of confidential databases. He’d merely wanted to learn who his son had become, he’d told Squint. And then he’d blinked.
Her father refilled his glass and settled into his recliner. “Wasn’t it his wife you were chasing all over town tonight?”
“Alice tried to goad me into shooting her.”
“Never known you to let someone push you into something you didn’t have a mind to do.”
“Then she turned the gun on herself. That didn’t work out very well for her either.”
“You got everything you need for your case?”
“Everything but a signed confession. She lawyered up.”
It didn’t matter. Jo had spent hours poring over Alice’s notebook. The woman had kept excruciatingly detailed notes on diabetes and insulin therapy and knew more about the deep web and how to exploit it than Jo did.
The journal read like a manifesto. Alice had believed the files meant her husband was going to deal with those responsible for their son’s death. When he didn’t, she vowed to do it herself.
She’d targeted Tye first. Ingratiated herself as a silent investor in his game, set him up in the converted garage rent-free until the project took off—all to get close to him. Gain his trust.
Access to Quinn had proved more challenging. Ironically, it was Tye who had sparked the solution by mentioning how misogynistic gaming could be and how Quinn had already suffered. Alice had pressed him for details and duly recorded the possible consequences. Trolling, doxing, SWATting. She’d written pages about the dark web. How to access it. Search it. Step-by-step instructions on spoofing. She’d relished being able to weaponize the internet. And for a while, it was enough.
For months she’d plotted her revenge. On the anniversary of Derek’s death, Alice put her plans into action. She guilted Tye into raising a toast to Derek and calmed him when he began to feel ill. Made sure he was seated before he passed out. Anger drove her to recreate the scene he’d considered the pinnacle of his game. And she took a grim pleasure in destroying Tye while he was surrounded by all the things he’d thought would bring him comfort. She smashed every game and console and joystick he owned. Belatedly, she worried that the damaged items might prompt questions, and she gathered the pieces and disposed of them in a dumpster. But she kept the laptop. It was another portal to the dark web, and she wanted it for her final plans for Quinn.
Ronny was the last to be mentioned, and Jo had the impression that Alice almost felt bad about murdering him. Maybe because he was the son of a friend, or because of his relationship with Derek. She didn’t torment him, didn’t want him to suffer, but in the end, she couldn’t forgive him.
Jo struggled to reconcile the woman captured in the pages with the woman who had led such a charmed life before her son killed himself. The rage and desperation and sheer meanness contained in those pages would take Jo a lifetime to forget.
“What’s really bothering you?” her father asked.
The journal aside, she could choose any one of a handful of options. Getting passed over for promotion. A personal best for the number of times in a single day she’d had to explain herself to the chief. The way her coworkers looked at her, as if afraid to even say hello. Her impending divorce. She stuck with the truth.
“I still don’t know jack-shit about internet crimes, and someone got hurt because of it.”
“You didn’t know a thing about money laundering before you went up against Xavier Buck. You didn’t let that stop you. Figure it out.”
The fire popped and spit an ember at the screen.
“I talked to Aiden about applying to the FBI. He thought I’d be a good fit.”
“You don’t do anything by half measure, do you?” He scratched the stubble on his cheek. “I suppose I should have seen that coming. You were the only one at the department with the balls to take down the Walsenbergs. I don’t imagine car burglaries or
stolen bike reports are going to seem very exciting by comparison.”
The level of appreciation she’d had for her hometown had waxed and waned over the years, but she’d never been able to break its pull. Some days Jo wondered why that was. Then she’d gaze up at the mountains, breathe the fir-scented air, and feel the relentless tug deep within her chest.
This was home.
The place she’d sworn to protect.
“I decided against it.”
She had only to close her eyes, and it was as if she stood on the edge of the ridge. Red cliffs hedged the valley with still-green firs and spruces, bare-limbed cottonwoods and paper birches. Even now, next to a fire, she heard the piercing call of a bald eagle winging along the Animas River.
“The world’s changing, Jo. Crimes are changing.” He knocked back his shot. “What doesn’t change are the people breaking the law.”
He used both hands to push himself out of the chair. “What time you need to be back at the station?”
God, she didn’t want to think about that yet. “Squint and I are serving a search warrant at ten.” After that, the hospital. Get an update on Quinn’s condition. Make sure the docs weren’t still worried about a brain bleed.
He nodded. “I’ll make sure the driveway’s dug out.”
54
Six Months Later
The June sun highlighted the scar that peeked out from under Quinn’s graduation cap. Jo tracked her progress as the recent grad pressed her way through the throng toward the bleachers where Jo sat with Squint. It was the first time Jo had seen Quinn wear anything remotely resembling a dress.
“Well, that was an excruciating ceremony,” Quinn said from the edge of the track as she waited for them to pick their way down. “Can I peel this thing off yet?”
“You’re a graduate,” Jo said. “You are free to do whatever you want—within certain statutory limitations.”
Quinn waggled a scrolled and beribboned paper in Jo’s face. “Blank. With all the tuition the college collects, you’d think they’d at least hand out a coupon to El Tecolote or something.”
“You were here on a scholarship,” Jo said. “I’m sure they’d be happy to accept repayment in exchange for a coupon.”
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