“This is your home.”
His statement caused tears to move into my eyes. This place would be theirs for only a few more weeks, and then all of us would be going in separate directions.
“My other home.”
He followed me, reaching for my arm. “Why are you leaving?”
“I need some time to think. My head … feels like it’s going to explode.” I put my free hand on my chest, pushing against my lungs. “And I’m …” I swallowed, the words not coming to me. “I feel like I can’t breathe.”
“Pearl, don’t go.”
His fingers tightened on my wrist, and I pulled out of his grasp.
“I have to. I … need things to feel right, and they don’t at this moment.” I moved to his door. “I’ll call you the second I get home from New York.”
“Pearl—”
“I love you.”
I was halfway down his hallway when I heard, “I love you too.”
Air wheezed through my lungs, my chest throbbing as I opened his apartment door, and once it clicked behind me, the tears finally fell.
Fifty-One
After
Ashe
One of the brothers was dead, the other taken into custody, where he would battle out the death penalty in court. He would either die from lethal injection or behind bars as an old man, but prison was where that motherfucker was going to spend the rest of his life.
And now that I was home, I couldn’t get a goddamn minute of the last several hours out of my head.
I stripped off my tactical gear and locked my gun in the safe in my closet. My only wish as I walked back into my room was that it had been my bullet that caused Tamerlan Tsarnaev to take his last breath.
Now that it was all in the attorneys’ hands, it was time to repair our city. Lives had been lost; hundreds had been wounded. Even more were going to suffer from PTSD.
The spirit of Boston was in turmoil.
And my best friend was dead.
His fiancée and family inconsolable.
My plan was to drink until I couldn’t think.
I picked up the bottle of liquor that I’d placed on my nightstand on the way in, making sure the drapes were closed on every window before I climbed into bed. I unscrewed the top and held the glass mouth to my lips, swallowing until my throat burned so badly that I couldn’t take another sip.
I wanted to erase.
Forget.
Even if it was for a goddamn hour, I just needed a break from this pain.
It had been relentless, not letting up when I was in that fucking weirdo’s house, not when we were getting fired at by the bombers, not even when we took the sole survivor into custody.
It ate.
Soiled.
Churned.
And I couldn’t take it.
Before I began guzzling again, I shot off a text to my family, letting them know I was okay, and then I clicked on Alix’s last message.
Me: I don’t know how much news you’re watching right now, but it’s over. One dead, one in custody.
Alix: Just tell me you’re all right.
Me: I’m home. Safe. I’ll check on you tomorrow after my hangover.
“I didn’t think you were going to make it in today,” Rivera said when I took a seat at my desk the next morning, gripping a large coffee, a headache throbbing from inside my skull.
When I’d woken up, the room spinning, the floor unstable beneath my feet, I’d thought about calling in. But I had known what would happen if I stayed home, and the booze and dwelling weren’t going to help me move forward. The best thing for my brain, what I knew how to do better than anyone, was bury myself in work.
“I’m not going to lie; I feel like shit.” I held the coffee to my lips, wincing as I swallowed.
“Not surprised. I can smell the whiskey all the way over here.” He rested his arm on his desk, chin leaning against his palm. He was quiet, stuck in his thoughts until, “I can’t get last night out of my head. Every time I close my eyes, I see those bastards’ faces.” He brushed his hand over his forehead. “What they did to Dylan, our city, every person involved—it makes me fucking crazy the more I think about it.”
The anger inside me was certainly unhealthy.
The ache in my chest, creating an even bigger hole, would never heal.
But there was something else about last night that was bothering me.
Something that had trickled into my mind after I got home from Watertown and was drinking in bed.
“You’re not alone, buddy.” I gripped my temples to ease the ache on each side. “There’s this feeling inside me that I can’t shake.”
“Of course you can’t. You just lost your best friend.”
I took a drink of the coffee and set it down. “Not about that. About one of the houses we infiltrated last night.”
“In Watertown?”
I nodded. “The guy …” I tried to think of the right description. “I don’t know. There was just something off about his place, and I was too fucked up over Dylan to really take it all in the way I should have.”
“What’s your gut telling you?”
I looked around my desk, at the piles of folders, the stapler, some random paper clips—anything that would trigger that nagging feeling I’d had when I got back to my condo. “I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s not going away.”
“Lay it all out. Maybe I can help.”
I chugged a few more mouthfuls of coffee, forcing the fog out of my mind so I could unfold each of the minutes we had been inside his home. “There was nothing striking about the house,” I started. “Typical colonial style, sparsely decorated. He graduated from Wentworth with an engineering degree hanging in his office and now owns an accounting firm. He was watching a show on crafting when we came in.”
“Crafting?” His brows rose.
“You know, stitching or whatever that shit is that older women like to do.”
“Interesting.” He shifted in his seat. “Keep going.”
“When we aborted and we were on our way out, one of the agents who had gone upstairs told me the dude was into some kinky shit and it was taking them forever to look through it all.”
He shrugged. “People have strange interests. That doesn’t alarm me.”
“Me neither. We’ve seen our fair share of it in the homes we’ve been in over the years, but, man …” I put my mind back there—to the feeling I’d had when everything inside was so fucking perfect. “Not a single thing was out of place. Not just tidy. I mean, no clutter, not even a wrongly tilted piece of art.”
“Canvases or sculptures?”
I crossed my legs, my foot beating in the air, like his had drummed on the floor. “Canvases, and they were bizarre and moody. Abstract. Almost cartoonish, but I could see the shape of a woman’s body in the swirls of one.”
“What other details did you pick up?”
“Just the photos in his living room. There were some by the TV and a few more by his couch.” I recalled their black frames, how there hadn’t even been a speck of dust on the glass that covered them. “They were of the same girl—a blonde, roughly twenty years old or so.”