Marathon

by Brian Freeman

  “I saw a guy with a backpack. He bumped into me.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Lake and Superior. I saw him heading toward Canal Park. This was like fifteen minutes before the bomb went off. So the timing made me suspicious, that’s all.”

  “What did the man look like?” Bei asked.

  “I’ve been trying to remember, but it all happened fast. Dark hair. Black jeans, I think, and some kind of colored shirt. I’m pretty sure he had a beard.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  “I only saw him for a second,” Michael said.

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

  “I think so, but look, I’m not saying he did it. Believe me, I know what it’s like to have the police suspect you of something you didn’t do.”

  “Yes, I’m aware,” the detective replied, “and I’m sorry about what happened to you back then.”

  “All I’m saying is, I saw him, he had a backpack, and he was heading toward Canal Park.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Well, he—he looked Muslim, too.”

  “Muslim,” Bei said. “Do you mean Middle Eastern?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Michael folded his arms across his chest. “Don’t pretend that doesn’t mean anything to you.”

  Bei said nothing. She eyed the empty street. “Okay, I appreciate your sharing this with me, Mr. Malville. If you remember anything more, please call me. In the meantime, I’d suggest that you and Evan head home now.”

  Michael felt a cool brush-off in her tone. He knew that he’d committed a politically incorrect sin. He’d dared to say the word Muslim out loud, even though that was what everyone was thinking.

  “Whatever you say,” Michael replied.

  Bei headed back to her Avalanche, but he could read the tilt of her head, and he watched her checking out the red button prominently displayed on his trench coat. The button that Dawn Basch had handed him personally.

  #noexceptions

  * * *

  Serena had already run more than twenty-six miles, but adrenaline, which had kept her going through the marathon, kept her going again. This time it was driven by fear.

  An hour had passed. She couldn’t find Cat.

  She’d gone up and down Canal Park Drive, checking everyone who had taken refuge in the doorways. She’d described Cat to every cop and every emergency worker she encountered. No one had seen her. She called the girl’s phone again and again, but there was no answer. She had visions of Cat’s phone destroyed by the blast. She pictured Cat, bleeding, injured, hidden in some corner of a building near the lake, unable to summon help.

  This was how it was at mass crime scenes. She’d been on the other side of it, as a cop, but she’d never been personally affected. Something terrible happened, and all you could think about was finding the people you loved and making sure they were safe. And always, always, every empty minute without news made you fear the worst.

  She watched ambulances come and go, carrying victims to the hospitals. The street was largely empty of civilians now. Only the police stayed behind, taping off the scene and protecting what they could from the weather. The drizzle through which she’d run had turned to a downpour, filling the curbs with rivers that were tinged red. Shrapnel washed downstream. What should have been a day that was electric and alive had become a gray funeral.

  And still no Cat.

  Serena shared a bond with Cat that was different from what Jonny felt. He saw her as a daughter. Serena saw her as a much younger sister. They’d lived similar lives, both growing up with abuse, both unwanted and alone. Serena had escaped her drug-addicted mother and remade herself as a cop in Las Vegas. She was convinced that Cat could remake herself, too, but nothing came easily for the girl.

  When they’d met Cat, she was pregnant. She’d been desperate to keep her child, but in the end, she’d let a Duluth family adopt him and give him a good home. Making the right choice didn’t mean it was the easy choice. Her baby’s new parents had invited Cat to be a part of the child’s life, but so far, she hadn’t even had the courage to visit. Just seeing her son, she said, would tear out her heart.

  Helping Cat was the hardest work Serena and Jonny had ever done, but Serena was also convinced that it had brought the two of them together as never before and let them put aside their own pasts and doubts and get married. She felt a debt of gratitude toward the girl that would be impossible to repay.

  Sheer, wicked tiredness began to take its toll, but she couldn’t stop searching.

  Serena thought about Cat, on her own the previous year, and she remembered the girl taking refuge inside the city’s infamous Graffiti Graveyard. A killer had been chasing her, and she’d hidden from him among the graffiti-covered concrete pillars of I-35. It wasn’t the first time she’d sought protection there, she’d told Serena. The homeless hung out under the freeway, like a city within the city.

  Suddenly, Serena knew that Cat had hidden there again. When she was scared, when she was alone, when she was hurt, she would go back to her roots. It was a sister’s intuition. Cat was back at the Graffiti Graveyard.

  Serena didn’t know where she found the strength to run, but she ran. She was on the boardwalk near the lake, and she reversed course, sprinting between two hotels. She headed for the old ore ship, the Charles Frederick, which was docked in the harbor, and then she ran along Railroad Street bordering the freeway. When she reached the short slope that led to a flooded ravine beneath I-35, she skidded downhill and splashed through the shallow water to an iron ladder propped against the opposite wall. She climbed it and dropped down into a narrow tunnel between the freeway ramps. Normally, traffic buzzed by in both directions overhead, but not today.

  Immediately, she shouted Cat’s name. The long stretch of grass and mud was deserted, and her voice echoed back to her, but no one answered. Concrete slabs propped up the freeway, and wild graffiti turned every square inch into a rainbow of guerilla art.

  “Cat?” she called again. “Cat, are you here?”

  Serena heard something from behind one of the pillars. Someone was crying.

  “Cat? It’s Serena.”

  The noise of the sobbing guided her. Thirty feet away, she spotted the girl sitting on the wet ground, her hands wrapped around her knees. Serena hurried to her and knelt at her side.

  “Cat, are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  The girl couldn’t talk. Her black hair was plastered to her face in ropes. Tears streamed down her pretty skin, mixed with dirt and blood.

  “Let me get you to the hospital,” Serena said.

  “I don’t need to go there.”

  “You’re bleeding,” Serena told her.

  Cat shook her head. Her eyes were haunted. “It’s not my blood.”

  Serena understood, and there was nothing to say. She reached out and gathered up the girl tightly in her arms. She held on, letting Cat cry herself out in a muffled wail that echoed from everywhere in the tunnel. Above. Below. From the shadows of the ravine.

  Eventually, the girl grew quiet, but Serena didn’t let go.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” she asked.

  Cat separated herself from Serena and grabbed something from the ground beside her. It was a dark-colored beret, which the girl twisted between her fingers. She held it out for Serena to see.

  “What’s that?” Serena asked.

  Cat sniffled. “I stole this.”

  “What?”

  “I was coming to find you at the finish line, and I saw this in the window of one of the shops. I went inside, and I took it.”

  Serena shook her head. “Why? You have money.”

  “I don’t know why. I just did it.”

  It was always that way with Cat. Two steps forward, one step back. The girl had made progress, but she kept doing things—making mistakes—that gave her a reason to justify the self-hatred she felt. You gave up your baby, so you must be a bad person.

  “Why are you telling
me this?” Serena asked.

  Cat’s voice rose. “Don’t you get it? If I hadn’t stolen this hat, I’d be dead. I went inside, took it, and as I walked back out, the bomb went off. If I’d kept going past the store, I’d be dead. I’d have been right there where the explosion was. What does that mean, Serena? Why would God do something like that?”

  “Oh, Cat,” Serena murmured.

  “I should have been punished, and instead He saved me. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Nobody deserves that kind of punishment. Nobody. This had nothing to do with God. This was someone cruel and evil who did this. Period.”

  “You can’t imagine what it was like. There was this huge explosion, and smoke, and I felt like I’d been hit in the chest. A woman ten feet away got struck by something, and the blood sprayed from her face onto mine. I saw people on the ground. I saw somebody’s hand, Serena. A hand, just lying there. Everybody was screaming. And there I was, with this beret I’d stolen, and all I could think was: I’m supposed to be dead.”

  “No, you’re not,” Serena said.

  “Who could do something like this?” Cat asked. “I mean, everybody looks forward to the marathon. It’s something good for the whole city. Who could rip it apart like this?”

  Serena wanted to say something, but she had no explanations.

  “You know what I feel?” Cat asked.

  “Tell me.”

  “Helpless,” Cat said, sounding older than her seventeen years.

  “I understand.”

  “This is just how it was when I was living on the streets. I mean, yeah, I was scared all the time, but you get used to being scared. You deal with it. The worst part of it was feeling helpless. Like there’s nothing you can do to change it. Like things are going to be bad forever, and you might as well give up.”

  Serena realized she was crying, too. She wasn’t a sister to this girl. She was a parent, and she wanted to make it better for her, and she couldn’t. She knew exactly how Cat felt, because she felt the same way. It was how the entire city of Duluth felt at that moment.

  “That’s what these people want,” Serena told her. “That’s why they do this. To make us give up. But you know what? We can’t.”

  5

  Special Agent Gayle Durkin of the Minneapolis office of the FBI kept one photograph on her desk. Otherwise, her cubicle was impersonal, perfectly organized, and all work, which was a good description of Gayle herself.

  The photograph showed her twenty-six-year-old brother, Ron. His face was at arm’s length to the camera on his phone; he was taking a selfie, with a sly grin on his face. He had shoulder-length brown hair and a rainbow-colored headband, and Gayle could see his Che Guevara T-shirt, which he’d probably worn just to annoy her. Brother and sister couldn’t have been more different. Ron was the hippie; Gayle was ultraconservative. She could see the Paris street and outdoor café tables behind her brother, and on the horizon, the upper half of the Eiffel Tower. He’d taken the selfie and texted it to her in Minnesota, with the caption: You’re at work. I’m here. Who’s got life figured out?

  Ninety seconds later, the bomb went off. Six people died in the Paris bistro, including Ron and the ISIS radical who’d worn the suicide vest.

  That was two years ago.

  And now another bomb. Close to home.

  Gayle watched the television footage streaming on her computer monitor. One of the local stations already had a helicopter hovering over Lake Superior, with a camera angle on the destruction in Canal Park. She recognized everything. Duluth was her hometown. She’d grown up there, and her parents still lived in the same house on Martin Road near Amity Park they’d owned since they got married. She and Ron had watched the finishers at the marathon a dozen times from the exact site of the blast, and she’d run the half marathon once herself.

  The camera panned, and she could see the rest of the city. Away from the lake, Duluth climbed sharply, with streets as steep as those in San Francisco. She saw the towers of the antenna farm atop the hillside, framed like metal soldiers against black clouds. The cluster of downtown buildings terraced on the skyline—the Greysolon, the circular Radisson Hotel, the sprawling St. Mary’s hospital complex, and the stone clock tower of the old high school—made Duluth look like a big city, when it was really just a small town dressed up to look more sophisticated, like a girl wearing her mother’s clothes.

  For an old city, Duluth was young. Thousands of college students filled the breweries and coffee shops and kayaked on the lakeshore, and they’d made the city strangely hip. A town that had been carved out of the winter wilderness by the raw, hard labor of mining and shipping was now the artsy, outdoorsy hub of Minnesota.

  Gayle had only been back to Duluth once since Ron died. His ghost was everywhere, which made the city oppressive to her. Her parents had learned that if they wanted to see their daughter, they had to drive two and a half hours to Minneapolis, but even those visits were rare and awkward. She worked twelve-hour days six days a week, and she didn’t like taking time off—her job was her life. Her sterile apartment in Brooklyn Center, not even a mile from the FBI headquarters building, wasn’t made for overnight guests, so her parents stayed at the Super 8 when they came to town.

  After spending eighteen years in Duluth, she’d joked to Ron that she wanted to go somewhere warmer for college—so she went to the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. She double-majored in psychology and sociology and then stayed for a psych master’s degree. She got a job with Hennepin County conducting applicant interviews for sensitive positions dealing with the public. Her specialty was reading faces and body language, and she was so good at sniffing out people who were misrepresenting their backgrounds that her colleagues began calling her the Lie Detector.

  She’d worked at the county for three years and then passed the test and training to join the FBI. At that point, she was twenty-seven years old. Now she was thirty-three.

  To survive in the FBI boys club, she had to be twice as tough as the men, physically and mentally. Her life was simple. She worked long days; she exercised at the gym during the evening. She slept six hours each night. She’d never had a serious romantic attachment, and she didn’t want or need one. She was confident that she was generally the smartest person in the room, and it was usually true.

  Gayle was five-foot-nine and full-figured, but her extra weight was muscle, not fat. She kept her brown hair in a short, practical cut with slightly messy spikes across her forehead. She had brown eyes, a rounded nose, and a V-shaped chin. She wore women’s suits from Penney’s. Nothing expensive. Nothing fancy. Whenever she was outside, she hid her eyes behind sunglasses, so she could watch the world unseen.

  Nobody at the Bureau really liked her, but they respected her. She was frustrated, though, because she’d been trapped in the penalty box—behind a desk—for more than a year. It was her own fault. Ten months after Ron died in Paris, she’d interviewed a teenage Somali immigrant in St. Cloud about his online contacts with Islamist radicals. The kid had lied to her. It was all over his face. Her job was simply to pass her notes up the food chain, but Gayle kept seeing Ron’s face with every lie. She imagined this kid walking into a crowded space, somewhere like the Mall of America at Christmastime, and blowing up everyone around him. She lost it. She threw the kid into a wall and fractured his shoulder. The case against him fell apart, and the Bureau settled a lawsuit brought by his family.

  Gayle kept her job, but since then, she’d been a paper pusher, analyzing videos of interviews conducted by other agents and writing reports. She hated it, but the only way to get back into the field was to take your punishment without complaint. Despite what she’d done, nobody blamed her. If anything, she’d won some fans among agents who felt the way she did, even if they couldn’t say so out loud.

  Her phone rang in her cubicle. Gayle tensed.

  She’d been waiting for the phone to ring since the first report of the marathon bombing had come in. Patrick Maloney was call
ing. He was the Special Agent in Charge of the Minneapolis office, and he’d only be calling her for one reason. He was going to bring her in from the cold. It was a disaster, it was Duluth, and they needed her.

  “Agent Durkin, I’d like to see you,” he said.

  “I’ll be right there, sir,” she told him.

  Gayle practically ran to the elevator. The small wait to get to the top floor made her impatient. She smoothed the lines of her suit as she made her way to the corner office, and she used a pocket mirror to make sure she had no remnants of her lunch salad stuck in her teeth. When she reached Maloney’s office, the door was open, and she could hear him inside, on the phone. The secretary told her to wait, and she sat in a cushioned armchair with her knees squeezed together.

  She heard snippets of the conversation and realized that Maloney was talking to the president. That was when the import of what was going on really dawned on her.

  Fifteen minutes later, Maloney appeared in the doorway and motioned her inside.

  She liked him. Everyone in the office did. He was from the old school. Despite being the top man in a cocky organization, he projected an aura of calm, organized efficiency, with no ego at stake. He was sixty years old, extremely tall and thin, but there was nothing fragile about him. Gayle suspected that Maloney could have easily outpaced her in a marathon. His gray hair never varied in length, because he had it trimmed every week. She’d never seen a single hair of his mustache or eyebrows longer than any other. His suits were dark and perfectly pressed.

  Maloney was a workaholic like her, but unlike her, he’d managed to maintain a family life. He’d been married for thirty-five years. He had four children and six grandchildren. He was soft-spoken and not given to shows of enthusiasm or emotion, because emotion didn’t solve crimes. He simply got the job done, and he declined to play political games.

  That tendency hadn’t served him well in the agency’s bureaucracy. Maloney had begun his career in Baltimore and then D.C., and for years, he’d been on the fast track. Agency watchers had buzzed about him as a future director. However, he’d made the mistake of not toeing the administration line on a domestic terrorism case in the 1990s. Maloney chose facts over politics, and not long after that, he’d been transferred out of Washington to lead the Minneapolis office. It was a promotion in name but not in fact. They were exiling him to the wilderness.