The Last Widow: The latest new 2019 crime thriller from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author

by Karin Slaughter

  Faith told Murphy, “My partner already identified Adam Humphrey Carter as the man who abducted Michelle Spivey. He recognized Carter’s face because Carter was one of the men who took Sara Linton.”

  Murphy’s eyebrow raised, but that was all she gave.

  Faith said, “Carter was part of the team that brought Michelle Spivey to the hospital. She was going to die without surgery. They risked everything to keep her alive. You don’t open yourself up to that kind of exposure if you’re trafficking a woman for sex. She gets sick, you cut her up and cram her into a suitcase, or you dump her in a field and drive away. You can always grab another woman off the street—assuming you’ve got a kink for forty-year-old lesbian mothers.”

  Without thinking, Faith had leaned forward the same way she would during an interrogation, cutting off Murphy’s personal space to let her know who was in charge.

  She went with her body’s instinct. “Either Michelle Spivey’s got a golden pussy, or she’s integral to whatever the IPA wants to do next. That’s what the chatter is about. They’re planning a large-scale attack, and they need Michelle, a doctor from the CDC, to do it.”

  Murphy sat back in her chair. She looked at Faith as if she’d just seen her for the first time. “Everything you’ve said is conjecture. Show me the concrete pieces that link them all together. Give me the evidence to present to a judge so I can get warrants.”

  Faith so badly wanted to roll her eyes. “You’re the FBI. Break down some doors. Carter gives you all the probable cause you need.”

  Van took over. “There are no doors to break down. The IPA is nomadic. They live in tents in the middle of nowhere. We find one camp and they’ve bugged out to the next. They have people on the inside. Our inside, your inside, every inside you can imagine. And no offense, but your boss hasn’t been a lot of help.”

  Murphy said, “Georgia and New York are the only two states in the country whose constitutions do not explicitly subordinate all military groups to civil authority. But in all honestly, every state has been looking the other way on these private militia and paramilitary groups.”

  Paramilitary groups.

  Faith felt her body break out in a cold sweat.

  This was the nail Faith had been hammering around all day.

  Martin Elias Novak, their high-value prisoner, had spent time with a so-called civilian border patrol in Arizona. These were men who felt like the federal government wasn’t doing enough to secure the southern border, so they set out with rifles and shotguns to do the job themselves. From what Faith could tell, most of the men were just looking for a reason to camp out, get away from their wives, and pretend they were more important than their actual lives as accountants or used car salesmen would indicate. The more dangerous factions were steeped in the theories of the Posse Comitatus, who believed that the government should be violently overthrown and returned to white Christian men.

  Apparently, they lacked access to photographs of the majority of the United States Congress, the president, the cabinet, and most of the judges packed onto state and federal courts.

  Murphy provided, “There are around three hundred paramilitary groups active in the US right now. This isn’t a regional issue. Every state has its share. So long as they keep their heads down, there’s no reason to poke the bear. We don’t want another Waco or Ruby Ridge.”

  She wasn’t wrong to worry. Both sieges had not only been public relations disasters for the FBI, they had reportedly inspired countless acts of violence, from the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building and the Boston Marathon to perhaps even the Columbine High School Massacre.

  Then again, the FBI had mishandled tip-offs about the Parkland Shooter, Larry Nassar, the Pulse Night Club Shooter, the Texas Terrorist Attack and countless red flags around Russia’s involvement in various misdeeds. Not to mention one of their own informants had just helped a bunch of his buddies set off two bombs at a major urban hospital.

  Van seemed to read her mind. “These multi-pronged investigations take money and patience. We’re hoping this latest display will shake more resources out of DC. Novak robbed all of those banks for a reason. They’re sitting on a ton of cash. The chatter points to something big happening.”

  “Novak is not necessarily connected to any of it.” Murphy kept tempering Van’s words. You didn’t climb that high in the FBI without being a political animal. “The IPA cannot at this time be definitively linked to anyone but Carter. Yes, we have chatter, but it’s called chatter for a reason. It could be nothing. We don’t leap to conclusions in the Bureau. We build solid cases based upon actionable evidence. Your partner was supposed to go undercover and gather that evidence, but that’s impossible now that they know what he looks like.”

  Faith felt a question niggling in the back of her mind. “Why is an agent from the GBI going undercover if this is an FBI investigation?”

  Murphy’s eyebrow went up. She was either surprised or impressed.

  Van said, “We can’t get the resources. The current climate at the Bureau dictates that white Christian males can’t be terrorists.”

  “Aiden.” Murphy’s voice was a warning.

  He held up his hands in a shrug. “My grandmother and great grandmother walked out of a Nazi death camp. I tend to take these things a bit more seriously.”

  Murphy stood up. “In the hall, please.”

  Faith didn’t wait for the door to close behind them. Nor did she try to eavesdrop on the dressing down. She started paging through the files.

  The Invisible Patriot Army.

  Black-and-white photos showed groups of young white men dressed in tactical gear. Some of them were marching in procession. Others were practicing drills in a boot-camp course with climbing walls and razor wire. Every last one of them was armed with some kind of weapon. Most had two or three. Their belts were strapped with holsters and knife sheaths. AR-15s were slung over their shoulders.

  She found the photo of Michelle Spivey in Puerto Rico. The woman had devoted her life to saving people, vaccinating children, stopping pandemics in the most inhospitable parts of the world.

  There was another photo pinned to the documents. A selfie showed Michelle with her wife and daughter. The eleven-year-old was ebullient. A Christmas tree was behind them. Newly opened presents were strewn across the couch. The Michelle in the photo had roughly six more months before life as she knew it was over.

  Which begged the question—

  What did a well-funded, well-trained paramilitary organization want with a woman who specialized in the spread of infectious diseases?

  7

  Sunday, August 4, 2:26 p.m.

  Sara closed her eyes against the darkness. She could feel the vibrations of the road shaking through her body. They were in the back of a box truck now, the sort of thing you rented to move an apartment. Michelle and Sara were handcuffed to rails on opposite sides. Both of them were gagged so they couldn’t communicate with each other or call for help. As if their voices would carry over the truck’s diesel engine and the rumble of endless roads they traveled down.

  What this meant in the immediate was that Sara’s Walkie message to Faith about the white van was useless. Two men had met them at a closed gas station off of 285. They were muscle-bound and young, sporting the sort of square-jawed looks that you saw on Army recruitment posters. One drove off in the white van. The other followed him in a nondescript car.

  Sara didn’t have to be told that they were going to abandon the van as far away from their true destination as possible. Nor did she have to be told it was a very bad sign that neither man had bothered to conceal his face.

  Sara knew too much, and what she didn’t know, she was quickly figuring out.

  Dash never raised his voice, but the effect of his words was like a general on the battlefield. Sara had overheard him relaying softly worded instructions into a burner phone as she was being led to the truck. She’d caught some names—Wilkins, Peterson, O’Leary—before Dash had broken the phone in
two and tossed it into the woods. Every man that Sara had laid eyes on so far had the bearing of a soldier. Shoulders back. Eyes forward. Hands clenched. They were organized into a command structure. They had committed an act of domestic terrorism against a hospital.

  Militia. Freemen. Weathermen. Guerillas. Eco-terrorists. Antifa.

  The groups went by different names, but they were all aligned by the same purpose: using violence to bend the rest of America to their will.

  Did it matter?

  Sara’s world had shrunk to the four walls in which she was trapped. She had no idea how much time had passed since the gas station, but she’d been captive long enough for her thoughts to keep spinning in the same cramped circle.

  She worried about Will. She worried that Cathy would not take care of him. She worried about the pain in her wrists from the handcuffs. The sweltering heat depleting fluid from her body. The darkness making her lose track of direction and time. She worried about Will.

  Only occasionally did she drop the barrier that kept her thoughts so tightly wound and worry about herself.

  Sara knew what was coming next.

  Michelle Spivey had been raped and drugged into submission. Even if Carter was waylaid by his injury, there would be others like him, comrades in arms.

  There were numbers to the organization.

  In the squalid heat of the truck, arms handcuffed above her head, Sara tried to resign herself to the inevitable.

  She had survived it once before.

  Hadn’t she?

  Back in college, Sara had been lucky in her rape.

  It felt strange to frame it that way, but Sara was not considering the physical violation. That act had been the most devastating moment of her life until the death of her husband.

  The luck came after.

  She was a young, educated white woman. She came from a solidly middle-class family. She had at that point in her life only had one sexual partner, her boyfriend from high school. She was more likely to dress in sweatpants than a miniskirt. She seldom wore make-up. She didn’t really drink. She had tried pot once in high school, only to prove to her sister that she could. Most of Sara’s life had been spent with her head in a textbook or her butt in a desk chair.

  In other words, there wasn’t a lot of material for the defense lawyer to use in his quest to turn the blame on to Sara.

  The attack had happened inside a women’s toilet stall at Grady Hospital. Sara had been handcuffed. Vaginally raped. Stabbed in the side with a serrated hunting knife. She had yelled “no” once before her mouth was duct-taped shut. There was no argument to be made for consent. She couldn’t recall many of the details before or after—that was the nature of trauma—but she could to this day clearly summon the face of the man who had raped her.

  The crystal blue eyes.

  The long, stringy hair.

  The rough beard that smelled of cigarettes and fried food.

  The clamminess of his pale skin when he thrust against her.

  And still, Sara was lucky that her attacker had been found guilty of rape. That he wasn’t offered a plea deal on a lesser charge. That she was given the opportunity to have her voice heard in court. That the judge wasn’t lenient in his sentencing. That there were other women her attacker had raped, so there was not just one lone woman accusing him but several.

  Which mattered so much more than it should.

  After the trial, Sara was very lucky that her parents had forced her to move back home. She’d already dropped out of her hard-won neo-natal surgical fellowship. Fallen behind on her bills. Stopped going outside. Stopped eating. Stopped breathing the same, sleeping the same, seeing the world the same as she had before.

  Because nothing was the same as before.

  When Sara had left for college, she had vowed that she would never live in Grant County again, but she’d found herself grateful for the familiarity. She knew almost everyone in town. Her mother and sister were there to hold her when she was wracked by uncontrollable sobbing. Her father slept on the floor of her bedroom until Sara felt safe enough to be on her own.

  But, she never truly felt safe the way she had before.

  She did eventually feel better. She’d managed to gather the remaining pieces of herself and put them back together. She’d started to date again. She’d gotten married. She’d lied to her husband about why she couldn’t have children. Even after Sara had told Jeffrey the truth, they had never really talked about it. He was a police officer, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the word rape. On the rare occasion it came up, they both referred to it as what happened at Grady.

  The truck’s tires hit a rut in the road.

  Sara felt her body lift into the air, then slam down. A sharp pain jarred her tailbone. Her wrist jerked against the handcuffs. Her shoulders ached.

  She waited, teeth clenched, until the ride smoothed out again.

  Sara took in a deep breath. Her lungs strained against the wet, stagnant air. She squeezed her eyes closed and tried to circle her thoughts back into the previous loop: Will needed medical attention. Cathy would not take care of him. Sara’s wrists ached from the handcuffs. She was dehydrated from the heat. She had no idea how much time had passed or where she was.

  Will.

  Cathy would advocate for him. She would force him to stay in the hospital. She would put cool cloths on his head because she knew that Sara loved him.

  Didn’t she?

  Sara had only ever bickered with her mother about Will. She had never told Cathy that she was deeply, irrevocably in love with him. This was what Sara should’ve said in the kitchen: She still got butterflies when Will walked through the door. She left lipstick hearts on the bathroom mirror for him to find. She had intrinsically trusted Will from the moment she’d met him—so much that Sara had told him what happened at Grady even before they had started a relationship.

  His childhood had been steeped in abuse. He hadn’t tried to soothe Sara or fix her or soften the language around what had happened because he couldn’t live with the truth. Will understood at a basic level why a random noise could still terrify her. Why she never went for a run past dusk, even with the dogs. That, without explanation, she was going to circle a parking lot twenty times to get a spot closest to the door. That sometimes, she wouldn’t flush the toilet at night because she was afraid the noise would drown out the sound of an intruder.

  That was what Sara would tell her mother if she ever got away—

  Will understood why she still thought of herself lucky.

  The truck started to slow. Sara waited, straining to hear other cars or people or anything that would indicate their location.

  The gears stripped. The engine rumbled. Sara lurched against the wall as the truck backed up. The brakes squealed, then the truck stopped again.

  There were male voices outside. She heard a low murmur and guessed this was Dash. Then there was shouting. Feet kicking up gravel. She assumed that an unpaved road meant that they were in a remote area. They hadn’t paused for a light or a stop sign in a while. The air had gotten cooler. Perhaps they were at a higher altitude. Sara had not heard another car around them for quite some time.

  The door rolled up. She closed her eyes against the light.

  Sunlight. Still daytime.

  She looked for Michelle. The woman was sitting opposite Sara. Her hands were cuffed above her head. The gag in her mouth had slipped out, but she hadn’t said one word this entire time.

  “Dr. Earnshaw.” Dash’s arm was in a proper sling. The white edge of a bandage jutted above the collar of his fresh T-shirt. Someone had already taken the bullet out of his shoulder. There was a man with a rifle standing beside him.

  He told Sara, “Or should I call you, local doctor?” He waited for Sara to ask for clarification. She would not give him the satisfaction. “That’s what they’re calling you on the radio. A local doctor was taken hostage when she ran to the hospital to offer help.”

  Sara tried to swallow, but her mou
th was too dry. She didn’t know what emotion he was expecting—relief that they were looking for her? Gratitude to be told the information? She already knew that they were looking for her. She would stab out her own eyes before she showed this man any appreciation.

  She said, “Maybe they’re holding back my name because they don’t want you to threaten my family the way Carter did with Michelle’s eleven-year-old daughter.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sure he was only fooling around.”

  “His exact words were—” Sara had to clear the rasp from her throat before she could continue. “‘The way you’re talking makes me wonder how tight your daughter’s pussy is.’”

  Dash looked off to the side. “That’s jarring language coming from a woman.”

  “Try hearing it with a loaded gun pointed at your head.”

  Dash nodded to someone in the parking lot. “Let’s get her out of the truck and into the air conditioning. I think the heat’s gone to her head.”

  A large, hairy man climbed into the back of the truck. His belt had an eight-inch hunting knife sheathed on one side and a holstered gun on the other. He fished out a set of keys from his pocket and uncuffed Sara from the rail.

  She rubbed her sore wrists. Her mind threw up options. She could punch him in the groin. Try to get his knife or gun.

  And then?

  “Dr. Earnshaw?” Dash said, his tone indicating she had a choice, the armed men around her making it clear that she did not.

  Sara stood up on shaky legs. She used her hand to shield her eyes from the sun. Her inner Girl Scout guessed it was mid-afternoon, between three and four o’clock. Her watch had read 2:17 behind the strip club. An hour or two on the road. They could be anywhere.

  Dash offered a hand to help her down.

  Sara refused. She took in her surroundings as she climbed from the truck. They were parked in front of a one-story motel with a long porch lining the front of the rooms. Rustic-looking, like a fishing lodge. Sara couldn’t tell if the business was closed or just vacant. There were no other cars in the lot. The area was definitely rural. Mountainous. Trees were everywhere. She couldn’t hear traffic from the road. Across the street, she saw a skeezy-looking bar. The sign outside had a cartoon rabbit holding a mug of beer.