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Did Clint own a weapon? There’s nothing registered in his name, but that doesn’t mean anything. Not with the vibrant black market of guns in America.
“And him? How did he die?” I don’t say either Henry’s or Brennan’s name when I look at the body. It can’t be Brennan. It can’t be Henry. It can’t be either of those men. It just can’t.
“He was shot point-blank. Two bullets collapsed his lungs and shredded his diaphragm and ascending aorta. The bullets were fused in the remnants of his tissues after the fire.”
I’m both thankful for her clinical speak and despise it to my core. “Also a .45?”
“No. All three came from a nine-millimeter.” She pauses. “He was dead before the fire started. There was no soot or particulate matter in his lungs or his airway.”
What’s worse? To imagine your lover was executed in cold blood, or that he burned alive? In both nightmares, I imagine Brennan calling my name, desperately holding on, waiting for me to save him—
“Henry carried a nine.” Sheridan’s voice is small. Broken.
“We were unable to locate any fragments or remnants of Agent Ellis’s service weapon. We did recover the melted casing of Agent Stewart’s weapon in the front footwell.”
Sheridan paces away, his hands gripping the back of his head.
My mind hauls up theories, discards them, rebuilds them out of wreckage. The only scenarios where Henry gave up his weapon are apocalyptic. Henry, crawling out of that inferno, determined to get to Brennan. Henry, wounded, in agony, dying, but struggling to his last breath to save Brennan.
In those moments, someone could have gotten his weapon off him.
These facts are puzzle pieces thrown across a pitch-black room. Things aren’t adding up.
One unidentified corpse and two missing men. Both men meant the world to me in entirely different ways. Best friend. Lover.
Love of my life.
President of the United States.
And Clint Cross, missing CIA analyst, with a domestic terrorist’s library and a photo of Brennan.
Clint found something, Director Liu said. He brought his concerns and the raw intelligence straight to the director. He had a reputation for always being right. He pulled intelligence out of thin air.
What if it was all out of thin air?
What if he set the whole thing, the whole damn thing, in motion six months ago?
If Clint thought the world needed to be rid of Brennan, he could have used his position and reputation at the CIA to spin a fake reality out of his own delusions. What if everything, from the moment Clint went to Liu, was a fantasy? The first step in a long, patient plan that came to fruition on an isolated road in Rock Creek Park at one in the morning, where Clint Cross waited to ambush the motorcade?
Clint clearly had violent fantasies, if his PlayStation was anything to go by, but did he turn them into action? No one wakes up and decides to murder the president that same day. There’s a radicalization path, a journey. A series of steps that leads to overt acts. What was Clint’s journey?
What happened on that road in Rock Creek Park? What happened in that gully, as the flames started to engulf the SUV? Did Clint get Henry’s weapon off him? Did he look Henry in the eye before he shot him and left his body to be consumed by the fire?
Did he execute the president?
Did he murder my Brennan?
“Sheridan—” It takes a moment for my voice to work. “Where’s the paper we recovered?”
He pulls the burrito wrapper from his suit and hands it over. The balled-up mess lies in a pool of dingy water at the bottom of the plastic wrap.
Ahn looks like we’re giving her a diseased rodent. “What is this?”
“Something we recovered from the garbage disposal of our chief suspect. It wasn’t shredded quite like he’d hoped.”
“I’ll dry it out and see what we can recover.”
“Tell me about the fire. What do you know?”
