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

by Karin Slaughter

  She looked down at their hands.

  His left. Her right.

  She said, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For letting me love you.”

  He went quiet. His fingers wrapped tightly around her hand.

  Sara had railed against him so many times for his silence, but in this precious moment, words were unnecessary. Will’s thumb traced along the inside of her palm. He gently caressed the lines and indentations, then pressed into the pulse at her wrist.

  Sara closed her eyes. She leaned her head against the door. She listened to her heartbeat through the peaceful, easy silence until it was time for him to go.

  PART THREE

  Wednesday, August 7, 2019

  ONE HOUR BEFORE THE MESSAGE

  18

  Wednesday, August 7, 8:58 a.m.

  Will sat in the back of another van, his AR-15 gripped between his hands. Dobie was on one side of him. Dash was on the other. The three men from Bravo team were on the opposite side of the van. They were suited up in their training gear, including the padded vests that would stop a BB pellet but not a real bullet. Their black hoods were rolled back to fight the heat. Their rifles pointed up at the ceiling. Their holstered guns and sheathed, eight-inch hunting knives tapped the metal floor as the tires rumbled over asphalt.

  They were in slow traffic, probably on the interstate. Rush hour stop-and-go. Possibly heading into Atlanta. Possibly not.

  Will looked at his watch.

  8:58 a.m.

  The vans had left the compound two hours ago. Will hadn’t had a chance to return to the clearing. They had practiced infiltrating the fake building until midnight. They had slept together. Pissed together. Eaten breakfast together. The world had closed in. The compound had gone eerily quiet. The sun wasn’t even up when they were told that it was time to prepare for battle.

  Gwen had been the only woman to preside over their leaving, feeding them a cold breakfast, blessing them with a prayer as she stood in her white wedding dress. She had read a short verse from her Bible, a warning about destruction being in their midst, oppression and deceit in the streets. Everyone had bowed their heads, clasped together their hands. Gwen’s prayer was nothing like Cathy’s humble request that Sara be returned to her family. Her voice had been filled with hatred and righteous indignation as she commanded God to rid the world of the mongrels and their enablers.

  “Blood and soil!” she had screamed, her fist raised.

  Every single man but Will had chanted along, “Blood and soil!”

  Forty men in total. Armed to the teeth. Clad in black. Sitting in the back of five vans rolling down the interstate toward a scene that would soon erupt into unspeakable violence.

  “Fuck.” Dobie shifted on the floor beside Will. He was sullen and confused. He didn’t understand why he had woken up in the woods. He was angry about missing the drills. He was mad at Will for teasing him about it. He was clearly hung over from the Percocet.

  He was still a boy, but he was just as willing to commit murder as the rest of the men.

  Will looked away from Dobie’s miserable face.

  He had seen the aftermath of a mass shooting before. For obvious reasons, the news reporters always fixated on the number of dead, but it was the survivors Will thought about now. The ones with traumatic brain injuries, lost limbs, deep scars, wounds that would not heal. Some of them would live in fear for the rest of their lives. Others would be paralyzed by guilt. They would live, but life as they knew it would be over.

  Unless Will could stop it.

  “Fuck,” Dobie muttered again. He was looking for attention.

  Will kept his voice low, telling the kid, “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Shit,” Dobie angrily crossed his arms. “What am I supposed to do, bro, sit behind a cash register at the Kwiki Mart like some raghead?”

  Will couldn’t stand to look at him again. He knew that the core thing he hated about Dobie was the same rotten core that had festered inside of Will’s own eighteen-year-old self. Dobie had no real autonomy, no moral compass. He was nothing but a loaded gun waiting to be pointed in any direction.

  The difference for Will had been Amanda. She had descended into his life six months after he’d been forced to leave the children’s home. Will was sleeping on the street. Stealing food. Working for bad men who paid him to do bad things. Amanda had dragged Will away from a life of crime. She had pushed him into college. She had forced him to join the GBI. She had made it possible for Will to be the kind of man who could be with a woman like Sara.

  He told Dobie now what Amanda had told Will all those years ago. “You do what’s right, not what’s easy.”

  Dash said, “Amen, brother.”

  Will gritted his teeth so hard his jaw throbbed.

  He’d spent the last twelve hours looking for opportunities to kill Dash. The man was never alone. Gerald shadowed him. At least two brothers were always flanking his sides. The blue Simunition kit on his Glock 19—Will’s Glock 19—had been changed out by the time Will had left Sara’s cabin. Even now, Dash kept habitually checking the chamber to make sure the gun was loaded. Will was not against a suicide mission, but there had to be at least a 10 percent chance of success.

  Dash said, “We do the Lord’s work today, Major Wolfe.”

  Will grunted. He didn’t need to be Jack Wolfe anymore. He slipped his fingers under the padded vest. Sara’s headscarf was folded against his stomach. Will had found it where she’d left it at the top of the stairs. A single red hair was wrapped inside. Now, he rubbed the hem between his fingers. He could feel her lips pressing into the palm of his hand.

  My love.

  Dash tapped the butt of his rifle on the floor. Every time he felt the men start to lag, he made another speech. “Brothers, today, we reclaim our dignity. That is our Message. We won’t be ignored. We are the leaders of this world!”

  Feet started banging on the floor. Fists were raised as they cheered.

  This was what Will was going to do when they arrived at their destination:

  As soon as the van doors opened, Will would use his Glock and his Sig Sauer to kill as many of these men as possible. The rifle was too risky. Will didn’t know how many civilians would be on scene. The fact that all of his targets were wearing black uniforms easily identified them as the enemy. They were over-confident from the endless drilling. They would panic the second bullets started firing back at them.

  Will had sixteen rounds in the Glock, eleven in the Sig Sauer. Two more magazines on his belt increased the total by thirty.

  Forty men. Fifty-seven bullets.

  The first two shots were going to stop Dash’s heart.

  19

  Wednesday, August 7, 8:58 a.m.

  Faith looked at her watch.

  8:58 a.m.

  She was sitting on a bench inside Atlanta airport’s international terminal. Her head was in her hand. Her cell phone was burning the tip of her ear. Amanda had been livid since they’d lost Will yesterday afternoon, and her temper had reached DEFCON levels when she’d been ordered to brief the governor at the Capitol this morning.

  She told Faith, “Everything we’ve found out so far points to the airport. Michelle Spivey was there right before the bombing. Dash and his crew must have been with her. What were they planning? Why did they risk exposure? Did they succeed? Is there a second part to the plan?”

  Faith didn’t need to be reminded of the questions. She had worried them around in her head like an oyster making a pearl as she fought traffic to get to the airport this morning.

  Amanda said, “The last thing that I should be doing right now is standing around watching a bunch of greedy politicians shove biscuits into their mouths.”

  In the background, Faith could hear footsteps and voices echoing around the Capitol’s marble atrium. The governor had called a special session to vote on funding the latest hurricane clean-up. The building didn’t have a cafeteria, but where there w
ere politicians, there were always lobbyists willing to bribe them with free food.

  Amanda said, “Lyle Davenport didn’t pick his attorney out of the phonebook.”

  Faith got a bitter taste in her mouth. Davenport was the punk who’d driven the red Kia up to Will at the Citgo yesterday. Amanda had sent a highway patrolman to pull him over for speeding. The subsequent search had revealed an unlicensed weapon in his car. The kid was already holding his lawyer’s card when he was told to lace his fingers behind his head.

  Faith told Amanda, “Spending a night in jail hasn’t persuaded Davenport to mention Dash or the IPA. His arraignment is in three hours. First-time offense, white kid from the suburbs, he might get bail.”

  “And if we tip off the prosecutor to who he is, then Will’s cover will be blown.” Amanda uttered a very rare, very nasty curse.

  Faith silently ran through several of her own. Her anger was not restricted to the jackass kid who’d invoked his legal rights. Faith had spent two hours hanging out of a helicopter with a pair of binoculars looking for Will. It was only by sheer perseverance that she’d spotted the dirt bike outside of the two-mile radius. None of the residents in the area had recognized the bike. No one reported seeing a teenager and a man on the road, let alone another vehicle picking them up. The bike’s VIN number had been scratched off with a grinder.

  She told Amanda, “Forensics is going to try an acid treatment to raise the VIN. If that doesn’t work, I have some other ideas.”

  There was a loud noise on Amanda’s end, a bunch of men laughing. Faith heard Amanda walking away from them. There weren’t a lot of areas in the Capitol for privacy. The Gold Dome was basically an echo chamber.

  “Talk to the airport commander,” Amanda ordered, as if Faith wasn’t at the airport right now to do that very thing. “I don’t care what you have to do or what lies you have to tell, but find out what Michelle Spivey was doing on that service road Sunday morning and report to me the second you hear. The very second.”

  The background noise abruptly stopped.

  Faith looked at the time.

  9:01 a.m.

  The commander of the Atlanta Police Department’s airport precinct was officially late for work. Faith had a feeling that he wasn’t going to be much help anyway. Everybody had a piece of the airport. The man couldn’t take a crap without coordinating with the FAA, the TSA, Homeland Security, and various law enforcement agencies representing Fulton and Clayton County as well as the cities of Atlanta, College Park and Hapeville.

  Then there was the FBI.

  Faith assumed that Van had confiscated any relevant security footage of Michelle Spivey. This entire morning already felt like the worst Groundhog Day ever. Will had disappeared again. Sara was still missing. So was Michelle Spivey. There were no more leads to follow. They had no idea what Dash was planning. Another night had dragged out with Faith pacing and cursing and fuming and looking up useless information online.

  She had never for a minute trusted that stupid GPS tracker in Will’s holster. The device was too thin. It wasn’t waterproof. The signal relied on the old 3G network. Despite Amanda’s orders, there was no way in hell that Will was going to turn it on unless he was actually physically in possession of Sara. God only knew what he was doing right now. He could be injured or lying dead in a ditch. Dash was a psychotic killer. Michelle was stone-cold crazy. Sara had no way of protecting herself. The IPA was so terrifying that the woman who was in charge of monitoring them was losing sleep.

  Faith dropped her head back against the bench. She stared at the squiggly blue neon arcing across the high ceiling. Every agency in the state was on high alert, but no one knew what they were supposed to be looking for. They were in Bin Laden Expected to Attack in US territory. The presidential briefing had hit a month before 9/11, but in what intelligence agencies called a Failure of Imagination, no one had thought something so outrageously brazen would ever happen.

  As Aiden Van Zandt had said, there wasn’t a lot of there there.

  The piercing wail of a toddler pulled Faith out of her misery. There was a certain amount of peace in knowing that she was not the mother on the other end of that wail.

  Faith stared at the massive security screening area. The precinct commander would exit through the employee line. Passengers slowly funneled through the eight open lanes, unpacking their bags, taking off their shoes, standing with their hands up in the scanning machines. Faith couldn’t believe the airport was so busy this early in the morning. The international terminal was huge, almost as big as a soccer field, with a balcony ringing the second story of the atrium. There were fast-food places and a fish restaurant and a bookstore and cafes and airplanes waiting to whisk you away from your life.

  Faith had never been on an international flight. Her cop’s salary, along with her propensity for having children out of wedlock, had put a major dent in her travel budget.

  “We’ve got to keep meeting like this.”

  Faith didn’t bother to turn around. The sound of Aiden Van Zandt’s voice had drilled into her brain like an earwig.

  He sat down beside her. He was cleaning his glasses with his tie. “Good morning, Agent Mitchell.”

  She got to the point. “Why are you here?”

  “There’s a lot of us here.”

  Faith took a closer look at the passengers inside of the terminal. Not all of these things were the same. Two businessmen stood with rolling suitcases at the top of the stairs. To the right, a woman leaned over the balcony railing reading her texts. To the left, another businessman paced down the corridor as he talked into his phone. On the ground floor, two women were having breakfast at the bookstore cafe. Another man stood in a TSA uniform by the exit for security.

  The fact that Faith had only been here for fifteen minutes was no excuse for not noticing that they were all wearing the springy earbuds that FBI agents favored. Her brain quickly jumped to a conclusion. The chatter from the hate groups must have picked up. Michelle Spivey had been at the airport last Sunday, so the FBI was at the airport.

  Just like Faith was at the airport.

  She thought about calling Amanda at the Capitol, but she didn’t want to get her head bitten off for telling her boss something that she likely already knew. Whatever information exchange Amanda had going on with the FBI was not something she was choosing to share.

  Faith told Van, “You’ve got a lot of agents here.”

  “I like to think of them as my posse.”

  Faith knew better than to ask a direct question. She leaned back against the bench. She asked him, “When did the right to hate become conditional?”

  “I’ll need more context.”

  “I’ve been reading about these militias and anti-government groups.”

  “Ah.”

  Faith said, “At the Bundy standoff, militiamen pointed guns at federal agents, and they were allowed to walk away. At Standing Rock, a bunch of Native American protesters were shouting and holding up signs, and they got attacked by dogs and shot with water cannons.”

  “Both of those things are true.”

  “It reminds me of my son when he was a little boy. All kids do this, really. They get to this point in their lives where they realize that things are unfair. It pisses them the hell off. They can’t bend their little minds around it. They whine about it constantly—it’s not fair, it’s not fair.”

  Van nodded. “That is a familiar whine.”

  Faith didn’t ask how it was familiar. She was more concerned with her brown-skinned daughter and how armed groups like the IPA might get away with hurting her. “I’ve put up with a lot of shit in my life, but I’ve never gotten shit because of the color of my skin. I’m sick of things only being fair for some people. It’s not right. It’s not American.”

  Van seemed to think about what she’d said. “That’s a fairly provocative statement for a law enforcement officer.”

  She shrugged. “Provocateur’s gonna provocotate.”

  Faith w
atched a kid begging his mother for a pack of cookies. The two female agents in the bookstore were studiously avoiding the conflict.

  She silently returned to her original question, the one that Van wasn’t going to answer.

  Why was he talking to her?

  The FBI had taken Beau into custody two days ago. Faith assumed that because Beau had flipped for one agency, he would flip for the other. Which meant that Van knew about the plan for Will to infiltrate the IPA. Either Kate Murphy had sent him here for information or he was trying to hone his way in.

  Faith tested her theories. “This is the part where you tell me how Michelle met Beau, and what you’ve gotten out of him since you snatched him out from under us.”

  “I thought this was the part where I asked if I could buy you a cup of coffee.”

  Faith had to nip this in the bud. “Listen, I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life raising children. There is not one item of clothing in my closet or in a drawer that isn’t stained with some kind of fluid. I cheat at Chutes and Ladders. I have sacrificed my own son’s life to win at Fortnite. I will destroy any stupid moron who claims that Jodie Whittaker isn’t the best Doctor Who, and I will quote every single line from Frozen until your eyes start to bleed.”

  He asked, “Do you really expect me to believe that you hang up and fold your clothes?”

  “Let it go.”

  Van laughed. “All right, Mitchell. Follow me.”

  Faith picked up her messenger bag and looped it over her shoulder. She looked up at the balcony as they walked toward the gates. The agent talking into the phone was tracking their progress. The businessmen had started rolling their bags.

  Van took a right, leading her down a long, anonymous hallway. His badge worked on the door because his badge apparently worked on every door in every secure building. Faith heard a loud buzz, then they were inside a darkened room with dozens of large, color monitors and rows of tiered desks with people intently studying their screens.

  She bit her lip. She was going to end up blowing this guy just for his access to secret government control rooms.