by Lee Child
Unlike Rachel’s twin indentions, Timmy had had a solitary dimple on his left cheek.
She squeezed her eyes shut as the wave of pain hit her, palatable. Unconsciously, her hand fiercely rubbed her forehead.
“Hannah, you okay?”
It was the senator speaking. She lied. “I’m fine.”
“I know you’re disappointed. I’m furious about this, and I promise you I’ll take it to the voters. I’m not going to sit back and let this power play go unnoticed. My chief of staff is crafting a press release, and I’m having a press conference—with Paula—immediately after the committee hearing.”
Hannah nodded, though she only heard part of what he said. She’d known this could happen. And, really, why had she come to testify in the first place? It wouldn’t bring Timothy back. It wouldn’t piece together her destroyed marriage.
You did it to save other children.
And now other children were still at risk because of politics. Politics that allowed juvenile sex offenders to move quietly into neighborhoods without anyone knowing. Politics that allowed those perverts to live across the street from an elementary school, to watch the little boys and little girls walking to and from school every day.
They could slip out because people who had no idea how to care for these criminals were put in positions of authority. Did they even understand that their young charges hurt other children? That it was only a matter of time before they escalated from sex crimes to murder?
What was the difference between a seventeen-year-old paroled rapist and an eighteen-year-old paroled rapist? The public was allowed to know when the older predator moved into their neighborhood, but not the other.
“Hannah?”
It was her sister Meg’s motherly tone. The sign that she was worried.
Rachel started fussing in her stroller and Meg reached for her. Hannah interrupted.
“Let me take care of her,” she said.
“All right,” Meg agreed, her eyes following Hannah as she left with the baby.
Matt had known Hannah for more than five years, ever since he was the prosecutor in her son’s murder case. She’d always been a quietly strong woman, even though he’d never forget the pain in her eyes. How could he? Five years later it was still there, a permanent reminder of the uncaring bureaucrats and a callous system that made it more profitable to house sex offenders in middle-class neighborhoods than in prison.
Of course, the group homes were officially “nonprofit,” but the people that ran the facilities also owned the food supply, laundry services, van companies. Investors quietly bought up houses in middle-class neighborhoods and leased them out to the nonprofits at inflated rates. Then there was court-ordered counseling, attorney fees, private security companies—Matt had only touched upon the money trail of those connected with these facilities.
“How’s she holding up?” Matt asked when the door closed.
“Hannah’s strong. She’s gotten through the worst of it, and now that the divorce is final I think she’ll be okay. It’s just—”
“What?”
“Every time Hannah speaks, she relives Timmy’s murder.”
Matt hated thinking he was partly to blame for Hannah’s pain. He’d sympathized with her, he took care of her needs, but he’d never failed to use Timmy’s murder to advance his goals. While his goals were for the protection of all children, he’d lost sight of his own humanity in the process. And the idea that maybe everything he’d asked Hannah to do had kept the wounds festering, instead of healing.
He wished he could help Hannah move forward, reclaim her lost life. Five years was a long time to grieve.
But he’d never lost a child to violence.
III.
HANNAH PUSHED her index fingers into her temples, pushing back the agony.
She’d lost her only child. Then she’d lost her husband. Eric wasn’t dead, but he was dead to her.
“Why weren’t you watching him? How could you let this happen?”
He’d apologized, but the damage was done. Eric thought she was responsible. That her actions and inactions had resulted in Timmy being stabbed six times after enduring a rape.
Rickie Coleman said he didn’t mean to kill Timmy, that he was scared of going to jail if he was caught. And the judge only gave him nine years. For manslaughter, not murder.
The sixteen-year-old Coleman lived right down the street from Timmy’s school in a group home for juvenile sex offenders. Timmy had passed by that house every day, unaware of the depravity that hid behind the door.
If she’d only known, she’d never have let Timmy walk home alone. Or even with friends. She would have picked him up. Or arranged a neighborhood carpool.
Dammit! His school was only three blocks from home! He should have been safe.
She worked only ten minutes away and had adjusted her work schedule in order to meet Timmy when he came home from school every day.
But he never came home that day. She called every friend and ran from her house to the school, calling his name, her panic growing.
She ran right past the house where Timmy lay dead in the backyard, to be discovered three hours later when the owner came home from work.
The house next door to the group home.
Rachel let out a yelp and Hannah cleared her head. Remembered where she was … in a restroom in the California state capitol.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” she said and changed the wet infant’s diaper. Rachel reached up and pulled Hannah’s long brown hair. Hannah was in the handicap stall, which she’d often used when Timmy had been in a stroller. Now, she needed it for privacy more than safety.
“Sorry, Rachel,” she murmured as she reached under the stroller. Her hand touched the cold metal.
Are you sure?
Of course she was sure. Her son was dead, her marriage was over, and she had nothing left but distant memories of happiness and current memories of pain.
Rachel gurgled in her stroller, reached again for Hannah’s hair. She allowed the baby to grab a handful, a tear falling onto Rachel’s little pink dress.
“I love you, Rachel,” she whispered. “I hope your mommy forgives me.”
Hannah loosened the gun which she had strapped down with duct tape under the stroller that morning when she’d volunteered to load Rachel’s stroller into the car.
She had watched people coming and going through security during her numerous trips to the capitol. The guards passed the strollers around the metal detector and only took a cursory glance at the contents. Diaper bags and backpacks were run through the X-ray, but not the strollers themselves.
After more than a year of delays, bill amendments, and testimony that made her heart bleed, Hannah had suspected that Timothy’s Law would never pass. She’d hoped she was wrong, that the bill would get out of committee, but she’d brought the gun anyway. Just in case. And her instincts had been right.
She and Meg had grown up on a farm in the Central Valley and their father taught them to shoot at a young age. Hannah never expected to use a gun on a human being.
Senator Black was anything but human.
“Let’s tell your mommy you want a walk,” she told Rachel, securing the gun in the small of her back, under her loose-fitting blouse. “Auntie Hannah has a meeting.”
IV
“I’M NOT GOING to sit here and pretend none of us knows exactly what happened today. Senator Ramirez was unceremoniously removed from the Public Safety Committee after faithfully serving for seven years. Why? Because she supported Timothy’s Law.”
He stared at his fellow committee members one by one. They in turn looked disgusted, bored, and angry. Angry at him, perhaps, because he was shining a high-wattage light on the dark dealings of the capitol.
Good bills were killed because of special interests every day of the week. Matt’s bill was simply another casualty.
“We’ve heard enough,” the chair, Senator Thomas, said. “You’re getting very close to being censured.”<
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“Censured? You think I care about being censured when you sit there and abstain on a bill that would protect children?”
“Senator Elliott, that is enough.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Matt noticed Hannah Stewart enter the committee hearing room. She came in through the rear entrance and sat in the back row.
He couldn’t drag her through another hearing, not like this. Her face was ashen, and she was as skinny as he’d seen her during the trial when her sister told him she’d lost weight, going from 140 pounds to less than 110.
“It may be enough for this room, but I will continue to fight for child safety legislation even if some of the members of this committee believe in politics over innocent lives.”
He retook his seat, Thomas staring at him icily. He stared back. He wasn’t going to let them get away with it. He knew what he would tell the press.
Without fanfare, the committee voted. Three ayes, four abstentions.
Failed.
The next time he looked up, Hannah was gone.
V.
THOUGH HANNAH had grown up listening to her father’s tirades about the corruption of government, she’d always believed in the system. That good people ran for office—people like Matt Elliott, the man who’d prosecuted Timmy’s murderer. The man whose eyes teared when he told her the judge was going to give Coleman a lenient sentence. That Rickie Coleman would be a free man at the same time Timmy should have been graduating from high school.
Senator Elliott was not to blame. He’d done what he could.
It was Black’s fault. Simon Black, the man who’d stacked the committee for the sole purpose of killing Timothy’s Law. A man who cared more about politics than a little boy who’d bled to death, alone, crying for his mommy … .
Hannah screamed, but no sound escaped her tight throat. She heard Timmy’s silent pleas every time she closed her eyes, every time she tried to sleep. But never in daylight, never like this.
She pretended to look through her purse as she watched the traffic in the corridor. It didn’t take long before she saw the group she needed. Six women of different ages, walking with briefcases and purpose. She quickly trailed after them, standing only a foot from the rear as they opened the door and piled into the waiting area.
The short woman of the group announced them. “Betsy Franklin with the Nurses Coalition. We have a meeting with Senator Black.”
The secretary checked the schedule, nodded, and told them to have a seat and she would let the senator know that they’d arrived.
If any of the women noticed her, they must have assumed she also had an appointment with the senate leader. They didn’t comment. She didn’t offer an explanation.
She sat in a chair while Nurse Betsy Franklin spoke to Black’s secretary. Hannah hadn’t been in this office before, but she was a good observer. She watched as the secretary vaguely nodded toward a door behind her and to the left. Was Black’s office right on the other side of the door? Or down a hall?
Now that she’d made her decision, an eerie calm descended around her.
Killing Senator Black wouldn’t bring Timmy back from the dead, but it would punish him for what he’d done to stop justice. It would make a statement: that people who had the lives of others in their hands could not callously disregard the dead, or the living.
“Janice, I’ll just be a sec.” A tall, lanky man with a boyish face and graying hair walked past the secretary with a half smile at the nurses. He opened the door, closed it. But Hannah saw what she needed to see. A short hall, then double doors.
Where that bastard worked.
Rickie Coleman was to blame for killing Timmy. But what about the system that put him there in the first place? Even though Coleman was now in prison and the staff fired, that house was still open and operational in her old neighborhood. Nearly every day she drove by, watched as the so-called counselors, who looked barely old enough to vote, escorted the six teenage boys from the house to an unmarked van. Followed as they drove across the county to “school.” Their school was housed in a recreation center that also held a preschool and several after-school programs. They put those sexual predators in the same building with innocent children.
When she’d gone to the Recreation Board, she was told that, “There have been no reported problems. And they pay their rent on time.”
She’d been in the building enough over the last six months to know that she couldn’t simply walk into the pro tem’s office. The secretary would ask if she had an appointment. And she doubted that Senator Black would talk to her, even if she did tell him she wanted to see him.
Hannah, are you sure you want to do this?
She wasn’t sure of anything. She couldn’t sleep, she could barely eat. She’d never wanted to move, but she couldn’t live in the same house where Timmy had lived. She was in limbo, going through the motions of life.
Her soul had died the same day as Timmy.
The man left Black’s office ten minutes later and Hannah jumped up.
“Ma’am, you can’t—”
Hannah closed the door and ran to the double doors, opening them at the same time as the secretary opened the outer door.
“Sergeants!” the woman called.
Hannah closed the door.
She’d noticed Matt Elliott had locks on his doors, and was pleased to find that so did Senator Black. She turned it.
“Ms. Franklin?” Senator Black asked, confused, as he rose from his desk.
Recognition crossed his tanned face as he stared at her.
“Hannah Stewart,” she said, though it was unnecessary. “You killed Timothy’s Law.”
Fists pounded on the door behind Hannah. She drew the gun.
“Senator? Senator?” a muffled voice called through the door. “Get the sergeants!”
“Mrs. Stewart—” Black put his hands up, slowly. He stared at the gun, not at her.
Her enemy cowered in front of her. Sweat formed along his receding hairline. She should kill him now. But her hand trembled, so she held the gun with both hands; her purse fell to the floor with a thud. She jumped, heart pounding.
She’d never shot a person before.
“You sacrificed innocent children for politics,” she said, surprised that her voice sounded normal.
“Mrs. Stewart, put the gun down.”
He tried to sound tough, but his voice cracked at the end. He was scared. He feared for his life when the lives of the innocent meant nothing to him.
“That group home, the same one that Rickie Coleman slipped out of to kill my son, is still in operation. And because of you, it will not be shut down.”
“That’s not the role of state government—”
“Bullshit!” Swearing surprised her as much as her volume. “You stacked the committee! You killed my bill!”
“Mrs. Stewart, it’s only legislation—it can’t bring back your son.”
“Timmy! His name is Timmy! Do you know how many juvenile sex offenders escaped and hurt children? Do you?”
“Mrs. Stewart—”
“We don’t know because they’re minors and their records are confidential! And because the people who run those homes make millions of dollars they’ll never be shut down. The group home in my own neighborhood? The owner makes three times the market value every month on an inflated lease. Is that the price of a child? Seven thousand dollars a month?”
Black took a step toward her and Hannah fired the gun.
VI.
“SENATOR, they’re evacuating the building,” Greg exclaimed as he ran into Matt’s office, his lips in a tight, white line.
“What’s going on? Bomb threat?”
“There’s a gunman in the building.”
“They’d lock down if there was a gunman loose, not evacuate,” Matt said. His instincts hummed.
“I’m just relaying what the sergeants told me. He’s in the historic building; the annex has been locked down and is being evacuated. It’s mandatory.”
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Matt waved his hand dismissively at Greg and turned on the television by remote.
“ … capitol building is being evacuated. Nothing more is known at this time.”
The picture switched from a reporter outside the east entrance of the capitol to the bureau chief. “Sources in the building tell NBC news that every office has been ordered to evacuate immediately. A gunman is in the building. Wait—”
The reporter listened to his earpiece. “A shot has been confirmed fired. Three separate sources report that a shot has been fired on the second floor of the historic building. Sources indicate the shot may have come from Senate Pro Tem Black’s office, a Democrat from Los Angeles.”
“Simon,” Matt whispered.
He pictured the look on Hannah’s face when he told her about the committee.
Suddenly, the last five years took on a different face. For the first time Matt clearly saw what he’d done. The last major case he tried before filing for office was the Timothy Stewart murder. It was the judge’s idiocy that had propelled him to seek the senate seat. He’d wanted to fix the system in a way that a prosecutor couldn’t—by changing the laws.
And then he brought Hannah Stewart in to help his cause. She’d seemed the perfect spokeswoman for reform; an eloquent, attractive mother, a person the press and the people could relate to. She joined his bandwagon to change the laws, to ensure that children were protected and violent predators—whatever their age—were locked up where they couldn’t hurt others.
It had been his cause because he’d lost in court when he hated to lose—and rarely did. Sure, Rickie Coleman had been convicted, but the judge threw out the first-degree murder charge—believing Coleman when he said he didn’t intend to kill the boy—and Coleman ended up with manslaughter and a nine-year sentence.
Matt had wanted to change the system, fix what was broken, and he’d used every means possible.