by Steven James
Scarlett Farrow–V
Heaven’s Gates
In the church.
In the night.
Her mom duct-taped to that chair.
Harris told Millie, “I want you to take those scissors and cut the tape that’s holding your mommy’s left arm to the chair. Go ahead. Her left arm. You know left from right, don’t you?”
She nodded.
Obediently, Millie cut the tape and freed her mom’s left hand. Immediately, her mom drew her close and hugged her. And at that moment, Scarlett could no longer remember what anyone there was supposed to say or do. She just knew what was happening was happening, and that she needed to make the right choices, do the right thing.
“Run away now,” Millie’s mom whispered in her ear.
“I can’t. I have to help you, Mommy.”
Scarlett was no longer ten and a half.
Now she was eight.
She was no longer the daughter of the man who made her touch that huge dead doll, she was the daughter of the man who died rescuing her from drowning.
She was no longer the daughter of the woman who fussed over her just so that she could make more money, the woman who called her stupid and worthless and disgusting and all those other mean, mean things, especially after she was drinking too much, but she was this woman’s daughter, the lady tied up in the chair who loved her and called her sweetie and meant it.
Millie.
She was Millie.
And this was real.
Harris took a bottle of pills out of his pocket and said to her, “Okay, now, I want you to hand this to your mother.”
Millie took it to her mom.
“Alright, Tracy,” Harris said. “It’s time to make a decision. You can end your life or watch me take hers. Send her to heaven to be with her daddy, or head to the grave yourself.”
“What?”
“One of you is going to die, here, now, tonight. The other gets to watch. Which would you prefer, that your daughter lives with the memory of seeing you die, or would you rather save her from all those nightmares, all that sorrow, all that pain? Will you choose to live with the suffering yourself or make her suffer? Those pills in your hand, that’s the choice waiting to be made.”
“Go, Millie!” she screamed. “Get out!”
Harris fired a shot toward the ceiling.
It was loud, loud, so loud there in the empty church.
And at that point, in that moment, Scarlett stopped saying the lines she was supposed to say, stopped acting the way she was supposed to act.
But they kept filming.
And that was the footage they used in the movie, the footage that earned them—her—an Academy Award nomination.
Millie knew she needed to help her mom. Needed to save her.
The words of the prayer came to her again: Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
“I’ll do it, Mommy.” Then she asked Harris, “Only one of us will die?”
He looked at her strangely.
She faintly remembered living through this before, practicing what to say and when to say it, but they were all ghostly images, soft, whispery words that might not have even been real.
“Does only one of us have to die?!” she yelled.
“Yes.”
They kept filming.
She turned to her mom. “I’ll get to see Daddy again. I’ll be in heaven. I’ll give him a hug for you.”
And before anyone could stop her, she grabbed the bottle of pills and tipped them into her mouth. She nearly gagged on them, but made herself swallow them.
As many as she could.
To save her mom.
To die, to really die, so her mom could live.
Then Harris was rushing toward her and she was feeling dizzy and her mom was screaming and trying helplessly to yank herself free from the chair.
And Millie coughed and gagged and found herself collapsing and falling asleep in a forever way that she never had before.
“Now I lay me down to sleep.”
—At least now Mommy is safe.
“I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
—Safe, safe, safe and I’ll be with Daddy.
“If I should die before I wake.”
—You won’t wake up here.
“I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
—You get to wake up in heaven.
________
Afterward, she had to go to the hospital. Someone had made a mistake. The pills weren’t supposed to be real, but they were. It was the wrong bottle. The doctors did something weird with her tummy to help her get better. All she really knew was that it hurt a lot and she didn’t get to go to heaven after all.
Later, they kept asking her if she understood what was real and what wasn’t, what was for the movie and what was happening in real life.
And she told them she did. Of course, she did. But that night, there when they were filming in the church, she really had thought that the woman was going to die, she really had wanted to die in her place, and she really had thought that taking those pills would make that happen.
________
Her mom and dad signed a bunch of papers to make sure no one was going to get in trouble after they used the footage.
They got a ton of extra money from the director, her dad spent more and more time with that young actress, and Scarlett found her mom—her real-life mom—passed out more and more often in their trailer from all the drinking she did whenever she was in there alone.
And everyone started talking about how great an actress she was.
The day when Scarlett thought she would die was the day a star was born.
77
12:34 P.M.
Dispersal in 2 hours
Back at the federal building, Ralph and I headed toward the interview room. One of the agents had picked up some burgers for us for lunch.
Ralph shook his head as he showed me the printing on his shake’s cup. “For some reason, marketers must think that if they tell us something is handcrafted, we’ll be more interested in buying it. I mean, I’ve seen signs for handcrafted steaks, handcrafted beer. This is a handcrafted shake. How do you handcraft a shake? I’ve even seen ads for handcrafted biscuits. I just have one thing to say about that—keep your hands off my biscuits.”
“I’m not sure you really want to say that.”
“That’s probably true.”
The injuries of the man we’d apprehended weren’t severe enough to keep him from being interviewed. The three men who’d escaped were still on the run.
Our team had located the suspect’s passport in an Alamo rental car near the restaurant.
His name: Ali Mahmoud Saleem. He was a translator from Kazakhstan and had entered the country Wednesday night on a flight from Frankfurt. We were waiting to see what Homeland could dig up with the Kazakhstan government regarding his past and his possible association with any known extremists or terrorist groups, but the country’s intelligence agencies weren’t being as cooperative as they could have been.
On the ride over here, TSA had provided us with footage and a transcript of Ali’s encounter with the border agents in Atlanta.
Angela and Lacey were still processing the photos I’d taken of the car disappearing down the street but were only able to grab two digits from my picture. They were analyzing makes, models, and plate numbers now.
Before starting the suspect’s interview, while Ralph and I had a minute here, I called Sharyn to touch base with her.
She told me she was working with Schwartz to try to get the Bluebeard to make a move.
Bait.
I wasn’t happy about that.
But at least she had a partner with her to try and stop this g
uy.
But does Blake have him?
I couldn’t be sure either way.
I mentioned to Sharyn my conversation with Calvin about Bluebeards, and some of the observations he’d given me. “Flello was gay, by the way,” she said. “I’m not sure that made it into the case files.”
“So, the Bluebeard was more interested in where than in who,” I muttered. Then I added, somewhat offhandedly, “It looks like right now we have a whole lot of geese flying overhead.”
“What do you mean?”
“Goes back to the first time I went goose hunting with my dad when I was twelve. As you know, we lived near Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin, and basically, millions of Canada Geese would settle there in the marsh before moving on with their migration south.”
“Millions?”
“Yes. My dad knew a farmer who owned a cornfield on the edge of the marsh. One morning, Dad and I went out there before dawn and set up a blind. So we were huddled behind this tangled mesh of camouflage fabric held up by chicken wire in those rows of old cornstalks. And then they came. This huge flock of geese. Thousands and thousands of them, rising up across the horizon and coming toward us. The sky was dark with geese. All honking and flapping overhead.”
“Did you get one?”
“Not quite. I aimed my shotgun and started firing, and you’d think that with that many geese, I would’ve at least hit one.”
“You missed them all?” She sounded slightly amused.
“Yeah, I didn’t hit a single goose. Not a single feather fell to the ground. So I looked at my dad and said, ‘How did I miss? There were so many geese!’ And he told me, ‘You aimed at the flock, son, you didn’t aim at a goose.’”
She caught on. “Right now we have to be careful not to aim at the flock. There are too many things going on in both of our cases. We need to zero in on them one at a time and pick them off.”
“Precisely. I’ll take the Blake goose for now,” I said. “You stay on the Bluebeard one.”
“Aim carefully.”
“I will.”
Talking about hunting with Sharyn felt a little strange since it was something I more typically spoke with Christie about—she’d grown up in Minnesota and also learned to hunt with her dad, just as I had.
A common experience.
A shared past.
They can bring you together.
Sometimes they’re one of the only things that can.
I hoped her talk with Tessa had gone well.
++++
Christie’s phone buzzed with a call.
Tessa’s ringtone.
Finally.
She picked up and Tessa said, “Yeah? What is it?”
Christie told her that she had gone to Detroit to see Patrick, and that she was coming back to New York City tonight.
“Don’t lose him, Mom. Seriously. He makes you happy. He’s right for you. When you’re with him, you have this lightness around you that I’ve never seen before. And, okay, he can be pretty annoying and obsessive with his work sometimes, but what guy isn’t a pain in the butt—I almost said ‘ass,’ but okay, ‘butt’—once in a while? You wanna do what’s best for me, do what’s best for you. I never had a dad around. Things can be different now.”
“I never knew how strongly you felt about all this before.”
“Well, I do. But don’t tell him. I don’t want it to go to his head.”
After the call, Christie decided that there was one thing she wanted to do before leaving Detroit.
See Sharyn Weist one last time and make sure, in person, that things were where they needed to be between them.
++++
After 9/11, each of the Bureau’s Field Offices was equipped with a Hazardous Materials Response Unit, or HMRU. It was a designated floor or suite with enhanced cyber capabilities, interview rooms, portable and flyaway instrument packages to allow for on-site chemical and biological analyses, several dozen HAZMAT suits with air tanks and N95 fitted respirators, and other emergency communication and response equipment for dealing with a domestic terror attack. Most people aren’t aware of the HMRUs. It’s not something we typically advertise. Sometimes the less open you are about things like this, the better.
Now, Ralph and I touched base about how we wanted to tackle the interview.
The standby good cop/bad cop routine has its advantages, but neither one of us really pulls off the good cop part all that well.
“Wing it,” he said.
“Right.”
The interview room was across the hall from the HMRU’s armory and the storage area for the biosuits. A bathroom lay just beyond them.
A few offices were located along the hallway, so we downed the rest of our food, Ralph scarfed his handcrafted shake, and just after we’d deposited the trash in one of the rooms, SAC Kennedy met up with us and said, “I just got word. DeYoung wants Saleem transferred out before anyone here talks with him.”
“What?” Ralph exclaimed. “That doesn’t sound like DeYoung at all.”
“Apparently, it’s coming down the pipe from the Pentagon. They want to take him to an undisclosed location for his interview.”
“An undisclosed location, huh.”
“Yeah.”
“Once that happens,” I said, “we won’t get another chance to talk with him.”
If we’re going to get Dylan from Blake, we at least need Fayed in order to negotiate an exchange. Even if we don’t go through with it, if Fayed’s gone, we lose our bargaining chip. And this guy Ali is our ticket to Fayed.
Unless he is Fayed.
Is that even possible?
“No, we need to interview Ali now,” I told Kennedy. “Today. And with my history with Blake and with Ralph’s experience in the military, it needs to be the two of us.”
“When is this transfer supposed to happen?” Ralph asked him.
“As soon as Dr. Qiao’s plane lands. Two o’clock at the latest.”
“Listen,” I said to him. “Remember how you told me that story about the copperheads? About assumptions?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if those men in your story hadn’t stayed away from the boy so long, they could have saved him. Sometimes it isn’t assumptions that are deadly. It’s hesitation. It’s not taking action when you have the chance.”
Kennedy chewed on that for a moment. “It’s too bad I didn’t run into you guys to tell you not to start the interview. I’ll be in my office, but you didn’t hear me say that either.” He eyed Ralph briefly. “No excessive force.”
“Do I look like the kind of guy who would use excessive force?”
“I have a feeling that if I Googled ‘excessive force’ your picture would come up.”
Yeah. I liked this guy.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Ralph said.
“You don’t have much time. Make it count.”
Kennedy left.
I grabbed a stack of manila file folders from the inbox of whoever worked in the closest office. I had no idea what the files contained, but their contents didn’t matter.
Sometimes props can be invaluable in an interview.
Ralph entered first, and after I was in the room as well, I locked the door behind us.
++++
A Hook’dup notification came through on Sharyn’s phone from someone with the username lonelydad.
The man’s photograph showed him standing in a church with a black hoodie shading his face. A nice photo. A little foreboding, but well oriented and not like the typical selfies of most of the profiles.
The message read: Snowball4. I’d like to meet you. Simone told me you’d be in the area.
Sharyn’s heart began to race.
This was him.
When? she typed.
Now. Using TypeKnot, he sent a residenti
al address about fifteen minutes from where she was. Come alone. I’ll know if you don’t.
On my way.
After the exchange, she said to Schwartz, “He told me to come alone.”
“Of course he did. Don’t worry about me. I’m not gonna bail on you when we’re this close. Trust me when I say this: I’m here for you, Sharyn.”
78
A lot of psychology goes into preparing for and carrying out an interview.
For example, just setting up the room: you don’t put the table in the middle like they do in crime shows on TV. Instead, you slide it against one wall and position the suspect’s chair so he’s in a sense trapped between the far side of the table and the wall behind him.
Not so blatant that he gets defensive, but just far enough so he subconsciously feels trapped.
So yes, we put him in a corner with his back against the wall.
Both literally and figuratively.
What makes people talk? Either pain or promises. In an interview you need to discern what’ll motivate this person more—suffering or relief, either for themselves or for someone else.
And through it all, empathy is usually much more effective than threats.
You become whatever the person needs. If it’s a father figure, you step into that role. If it’s a lover, you flirt with him. If it’s a confidant, you allow him to confess and get things off his chest. And often people do want to confess, they just don’t know how. Or they don’t know how it’ll benefit them if they do, because, literally, telling the truth could cause them to spend the rest of their lives behind bars. So what’s in it for them? That’s what you need to figure out.
Often, it’s effective to tell the suspect, “A lot of people out there are saying terrible things about you. That you’re a monster, that you don’t care about innocent life. I’m here for the truth. I need you to tell me what happened. I’d like to get your story out there. I’d like to set the record straight. What do you need to tell me?”
It’s amazing how concerned people can be about their reputation and about making sure the public doesn’t think that they’re evil.