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ChapterFifteen
Reese
Now
Headquarters is on H Street, five blocks from the White House. It’s all brick and glass and looks like the head office of a bank. There isn’t even a sign outside. Still, it’s a far better place than the Hoover Building. The old FBI headquarters is a brutalist labyrinth as welcoming as a prison.
Sheridan and I drive into the underground garage. Headquarters is on lockdown, and Sheridan’s badge doesn’t give him access, but mine does.
The basement is where the forensic teams work their magic. Labs stretch the length of a city block: ballistics, fingerprints, trace evidence, serology, toxicology. Even the famous ink lab is down here.
People seem to forget the Secret Service is a law enforcement agency. We’re not just bodyguards. We’ve got some of the best forensic technicians in the field—no matter what the FBI claims—but this is going to be the biggest investigation of everyone’s life.
Between the underground garage and the labs is a cavernous, warehouse-like space jutting several stories up into the belly of HQ. It’s where we bring our fleet vehicles and haul in evidence for processing. Cars, trucks, even boats. Automotive bays line one wall, each outfitted with computers, portable X-ray machines, and digital imaging arrays.
Right now, the burned wreckage of Brennan’s SUV is laid out in the center, inside a portable clean room with walls of plastic sheeting strung up on a PVC frame. Techs in anti-static coveralls are disassembling the SUV piece by piece.
One bags a broken screw and sets it on a metal tray next to dozens of other individually bagged screws.
Two techs up front are pulling apart the blackened remains of the engine. All the ash from the fire was collected, and in another clean room, techs sift through it grain by grain.
They’re hunting for human remains. Brennan’s remains.
Sheridan’s steps slow as we pass.
I’m not here for the SUV. I’m here for the room at the far end of this hall: the morgue.
Sheridan doesn’t need to come in with me. That’s his best friend, too, laid out on the morgue’s cold steel. Ahn has already started slicing and dicing, and though most agents will stand in on an autopsy, or at least review the gory aftermath, several times in their career, no one should ever see someone they loved carved up and dissected.
Sheridan should remember Henry the way he was. The older brother, the jokester, his mentor. He looked up to Henry so much—
We’re both moving on adrenaline and rage, though. We’re thirsting for justice. No, not justice. Revenge. And there’s no fuel more potent than fury. Sheridan was a Marine. He’s seen death up close.
But it’s different when it’s someone you loved.
I still before I yank open the steel door. Sheridan almost runs into me, and his hand lands on my shoulder as he steadies himself. He’s trembling.
“You sure you want to see this?”
“Are you ordering me to stay out?”
“No. I’m giving you the choice. Do you want to see what’s on the other side of this door?”
His jaw clenches. He looks away. Fluorescent lights burn on both of us, highlighting all the ways we’re broken. There’s still mud on his neck, right above the line of his collar. My own skin pulls where mud and soot have dried.
“We’re wasting time,” he finally grunts. “Let’s go.”
The smell hits first: formaldehyde, smoke, and the mix of rot, blood and bleach that all morgues share. That smell is baked into the walls, seared into the air, and no matter how clean the place is scrubbed, the stench of death lingers.
Sheridan gags, and his steps falter. He turns to the side, braces one hand against the wall by the door. I keep going.
Ahn is leaning over a blackened body on a gurney. On the wall overhead, digital displays play a close-up video feed of her work, zoomed in to magnify the exact cuts her scalpel is making into charred flesh along burned-black bone.
There’s another gurney against the wall, the remains covered with a sheet. A shield lies on the corpse’s chest. It’s not the one either Stewart or Henry was wearing last night. Those melted. Someone brought a replacement down as soon as the body was identified.
I need to know. I go to him first.
It’s Stewart. I know Henry’s badge number, and this isn’t his. I grasp the edges of the gurney, and the cold steel burns through the thin cotton sheet against my palms. “I’m sorry.”
