The Last Widow

3

Sunday, August 4, 1:33 p.m.

Faith Mitchell checked her watch as she pretended to study the diagram of the Russell Federal Building on the giant video monitor at the front of the classroom. The tedious asshole from the Marshals Service was running through the prison transport plan, which the previous asshole from the Marshals Service had run through an hour ago.

She looked around the room. Faith wasn’t the only person having a hard time concentrating. The thirty people assembled from various branches of law enforcement were all wilting behind their desks. The city, in its wisdom, turned off the air conditioning in all government buildings over the weekends. In August. With windows that didn’t open so that no one could jump out just for the pleasure of the wind in their face as they plummeted to their death.

Faith looked down at her briefing book. A drop of sweat rolled off the tip of her nose and smeared the words. She had already read through the book in its entirety. Twice. The asshole marshal was the fifth speaker in the last three hours. Faith wanted to pay attention. She really did. But if she heard another person call Martin Elias Novak a high-value prisoner, she was going to start screaming.

Her eyes rolled to the clock on the wall above the video monitor.

1:34 p.m.

Faith could’ve sworn the second hand was ticking backward.

“So, the chase car will go here.” The marshal pointed to the rectangle at the end of the dotted line that was helpfully labeled chase car. “I want to remind you again that Martin Novak is an extremely high-value prisoner.”

Faith tried not to snort. Even Amanda’s composure was starting to slip. She was still sitting ramrod straight in her chair, seemingly alert, but Faith knew for a fact that she could sleep with her eyes open. Faith’s mother was the same way. Both of them had come up in the Atlanta Police Department together. Both were extremely adaptable, like dinosaurs who’d evolved into using tools and forwarding memes that had stopped being memes two months ago.

Faith opened her laptop. Eight tabs were open in her browser, every one of them offering advice on how to make your life more efficient. Faith clicked them all closed. She was a single mother with a two-year-old at home and a twenty-year-old in college. Efficiency was not an attainable goal. Sleep wasn’t an attainable goal. Eating an uninterrupted meal. Using the bathroom with the door closed. Reading a book without having to show the pictures to all the stuffed animals in the room. Breathing deeply. Walking in a straight line.

Thinking.

Faith desperately wanted her brain back, the pre-pregnancy brain that knew how to be a fully functioning adult. Had it been like this with her son? Faith was only fifteen years old when she’d given birth to Jeremy. She hadn’t really been paying attention to what was happening to her mind so much as mourning the loss of Jeremy’s father, whose parents had shipped him off to live with relatives up north so that a baby wouldn’t ruin his bright future.

With her daughter Emma, Faith was aware of the not-so-subtle changes in her mental abilities. That she could multi-task, but she could barely single-task. That the feelings of anxiety and hypervigilance that came with being a cop were amplified to the nth degree. That she never really slept because her ears were always awake. That the sound of Emma crying could make her hands shake and her lips tremble and that sometimes Emma’s nightlight would catch the tender strands of her delicate eyelashes and Faith’s heart would be filled with so much love that she ended up sobbing alone in the hallway.

Sara had explained the science behind these mood changes. During the stages of pregnancy and breastfeeding and childhood, a woman’s brain was flooded with hormones that altered the gray matter in the regions involved in social processes, heightening the mother’s empathy and bonding them closely to their child.

Which was a damn good thing, because if another human being treated you the way a toddler did—threw food in your face, questioned your every move, unraveled all of the aluminum foil off the roll, yelled at the silverware, made you clean shit off their ass, peed in your bed, peed in your car, peed on you while you were cleaning up their pee, demanded that you repeat everything at least sixteen times and then screeched at you for talking too much—then you would probably kill them.

“Let’s discuss the tactical quadrangle we’ve created on the west-bound streets,” the marshal said.

Faith let her eyes take a really slow blink. She needed something outside of work and Emma. Her mother euphemistically called it a work/life balance, but it was really just Evelyn’s polite way of saying that Faith needed to get laid.

Which Faith was not opposed to.

The problem was finding a man. Faith wasn’t going to date a cop, because all you had to do was date one cop and every cop would think he could screw you. Tinder was a no-go. The guys who didn’t look married looked like they should be chained to a bench outside of a courtroom. She’d tried Match.com but not one of the losers that she was even remotely attracted to could pass a background check. Which said more about the type of men Faith was attracted to than internet dating sites.

At this rate, the only way she was going to get laid was to crawl up a chicken’s ass and wait.

“So,” the marshal clapped his hands together once, loudly. Too loudly. “Let’s review Martin Elias Novak’s résumé. Sixty-one-year-old widower with one daughter, Gwendolyn. Wife died in childbirth. Novak served in the Army as an explosives expert. Not too expert—in ’96, he blew off two fingers on his left hand. He was discharged, then took some odd jobs working security. In 2002, he was in Iraq with a private mercenary force. By 2004, we clocked him joining up with some fellow vets on a citizens border patrol in Arizona.”

The marshal steepled together his fingers and slowly bowed his head. “Arizona was the last time we saw him. That was 2004. Novak went off the grid. No credit card activity. Closed his accounts. Canceled his utilities. Walked out on his lease. His pension and disability checks were returned as undeliverable. Novak was a ghost until 2016, when he popped up on our radar at a new job: robbing banks.”

Faith noticed that he’d skipped over a big piece of the puzzle, the same way every single speaker had skipped over the glaring detail in all of the previous meetings.

Novak was an anti-government nut. Not just a guy who didn’t want to pay taxes or be told what to do. Hell, no red-blooded American wanted those things. His time with the so-called citizens border patrol put him at a whole other level of dissent. For six months, Novak had kept company with a group of men who thought they understood the Constitution better than anybody else. Worse, they were willing to take up arms and do something about it.

Which meant that thanks to all of those bank robberies, someone, somewhere, had half a million bucks to aid the cause.

And no one in this room seemed to give a shit about it.

“All right.” The marshal clapped his hands together again. Someone in the front row jumped at the sound. “Let’s bring up Special Agent Aiden Van Zandt from the FBI to talk about the reason Novak is such a high-value prisoner.”

Faith felt her eyes roll back in her head again.

“Thank you, Marshal.” Agent Van Zandt looked more like a Humperdinck than a Westley. Faith didn’t trust men who wore glasses. At least he didn’t clap or offer a long preamble. Instead, Van Zandt turned toward the monitor, offering, “Let’s go to the video. Novak is the first man through the door. You can see the two fingers of his left hand are missing.”

The video started to play. Faith leaned forward in her seat. Finally, something new. She had read all of the police reports but hadn’t seen any footage.

The screen showed the inside of a bank, full color.

Friday, March 24, 2017. 4:03 p.m.

Four tellers at the windows. At least a dozen customers standing in line. There would’ve been a steady stream all day. People cashing their checks before the weekend. No security glass or bars at the teller counter. A suburban branch. This was the Wells Fargo outside of Macon, where Novak’s team had taken their last stand.

On the screen, things moved quickly. Faith almost missed Novak coming through the doors, though he was dressed in full tactical gear, all black, a ski mask covering his face. He held his AR-15 at his right side. A backpack was slung over his left shoulder. The pinky and ring finger were missing from his left hand.

The security guard entered the frame from Novak’s right. Pete Guthrie, divorced father of two. The man was reaching toward his holster, but the AR swung up and Pete Guthrie was dead.

Someone in the classroom groaned, like they’d just watched a movie, not the end of a man’s life.

The rest of Novak’s team swarmed into the bank, quickly taking up position. Six guys, all dressed in the same black gear. All waving around AR-15s, which were as ubiquitous in Georgia as peaches. There was no sound with the video, but Faith could see open mouths as the customers screamed. Another person was shot, a seventy-two-year-old grandmother of six named Edatha Quintrell who, going by the witness statements, had not moved fast enough getting down on the ground.

“Military,” someone needlessly said.

Needlessly, because these guys were clearly a tactical unit. Less than ten seconds through the door and they were already opening the teller drawers, tossing the hidden dye packs aside and shoving the money into white canvas bags.

Van Zandt said, “We scoured four previous months of footage trying to find someone casing the bank, but nothing stuck out.” He pointed to Novak. “Look at the stopwatch in his hand. The closest precinct is twelve minutes away. The closest patrol is eight minutes out. He knows how much time they have down to the second. Everything was planned.”

They hadn’t planned on one of the customers being an off-duty police officer. Rasheed Dougall, a twenty-nine-year-old patrolman, had stopped by the bank on his way to the gym. He was wearing red basketball shorts and a black T-shirt. Faith’s eyes had automatically found him in the bottom right corner. Belly flat to the ground. Hands not over his head, but at his side near his gym bag. She knew what was going to happen next. Rasheed pulled a Springfield micro pistol out of the bag and shot the guy closest to him in the belly.

Two taps, the way they were trained.

Rasheed rolled over and caught a second guy in the head. He was aiming for the third when a bullet from Novak blew off the bottom half of his face.

Novak seemed unfazed by the sudden carnage. He coldly looked at the stopwatch. His mouth moved. According to the statements, he was telling his men—

Let’s go, boys, clean it up.

Four guys moved forward, two teams each shouldering one of their fallen accomplices as they dragged them toward the door.

Novak scooped up the white canvas bags of cash. Then he made his custom move: He reached into his backpack. He held up a pipe bomb over his head, making sure everyone saw it. The bomb wasn’t meant to blow the vault. He was going to set it off once the car was out of range. But before he left, he was going to chain the doors shut so that no one could leave.

As violent criminal acts go, it was a solid plan. Small towns didn’t have enough first responders to handle more than one disaster at a time. An explosion at the bank, casualties falling out of broken windows and doors, was the biggest disaster the locals would ever see.

On the screen, Novak slapped the bomb to the wall. Faith knew that it was held there by an adhesive sold at any home improvement store. Galvanized pipe. Nails. Thumb tacks. Wire. All of the components were untraceable or so common that they might as well be.

Novak turned toward the door. He started pulling the chain and lock out of his backpack. Then he unexpectedly collapsed face down on the ground.

Blood spread out from his body like a snow angel.

Some of the men in the classroom cheered.

A woman rushed into the frame. Dona Roberts. Her Colt 1911 was pointing at Novak’s head. Her foot was on the man’s tailbone to make sure he stayed down. She was a retired Navy cargo plane pilot who’d just happened to be at the bank to open an account for her daughter.

Damn if she wasn’t wearing a strapless sundress and sandals.

The image paused.

Van Zandt said, “Novak took two in the back. Lost a kidney and his spleen, but your tax dollars patched him up. The phone to detonate the bomb was inside his backpack. According to our people, the first bad guy who was shot in the stomach could’ve survived with quick medical intervention. The bad guy with a hole in his head obviously died at the scene. No bodies were found dumped in a twenty-mile radius. No hospitals reported gunshot victims fitting the description. We have no idea who these accomplices are. Novak didn’t crack under questioning.”

He didn’t crack because he wasn’t the average bank robber. Most of those idiots got arrested before they could count their money. The FBI had basically been invented to stop people from robbing banks. Their solve rate was north of 75 percent. It was a stupid crime with a high chance of failure and a mandatory twenty-five-year sentence, and that was just for walking up to a teller and passing a note saying you would like to rob the bank, please. Waving a gun, making threats, shooting people—that was the rest of your life in Big Boy prison, assuming you didn’t get a needle in your arm.

“So …” The marshal was back. He clapped together his hands. He was a real hand-clapper, this guy. “Let’s talk about what happened in the video.”

Faith checked her Apple Watch for messages, praying for a family emergency that would pull her out of this never-ending nightmare.

No luck.

She groaned at the time.

1:37 p.m.

She pulled up her texts. Will had no idea how lucky he was to be skipping this stupid meeting. She sent him a clown with a water gun to its head. Then a knife. Then a hammer. She was going to send him an avocado because they both despised avocados, but her finger slipped on the tiny screen and she accidentally sent him a yam.