AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yeah, and Tommy continued to look into things after you left. I thought with your blessing.”
“Yes—and no. I told him I couldn’t be involved, not until he had something substantive. I couldn’t do that to myself again.”
“You don’t need to justify yourself to me, Regan. It wasn’t healthy for you to keep all that pain front and center.”
“Well.” She cleared her throat. “Tommy told me he had a meeting scheduled with Peter Grey. He’d been trying for months, but Grey put up a wall.” By the look on Charlie’s face, he knew.
“He never told me what Grey said,” Charlie said. “All I knew was that they met, and Tommy took a leave of absence. He didn’t tell me why specifically, but I knew he’d come to me when he needed my help.”
Neither of them stated the obvious: that Tommy had scheduled a meeting with Charlie, and now Tommy was dead. It was very likely that his murder was related to something he learned in the last month.
“I didn’t want to be involved.” Her voice cracked. The guilt seeped in. She couldn’t let it, or she wouldn’t be of any use to Tommy now.
“Anyone would understand why, Regan. Dammit, you can’t put this on your shoulders. Tommy was a big boy, he knew what he was doing. I talked to him nearly every day about the office, I should have pushed him to share more. But I didn’t.”
“So we either both should feel guilty, or neither of us,” she said.
“No—this isn’t on you, on me, or even Tommy. No matter how many secrets he was keeping, he had a reason for it. This is on the shooter. One hundred percent. Okay?”
He waited until she nodded.
Shewasangry at herself because she had turned her back on Tommy when she left in October. Yet...she’d made the best decision for herself out of a group of mediocre options. She didn’t regret leaving. She regretted that she hadn’t had the strength to stay.
“It was a dark time for everyone, but it was hell on you, Regan. You did everything you could to find out what happened. But with Hannigan dead...” His voice trailed off. He didn’t need to finish his thought. With Chase’s killer dead, the truth died with him. Regan’s divorce followed. The soul-destroying grief gutted her, left her hollow with a perpetual fluttering of butterflies in her stomach.
Charlie understood. He was a father. He had been here when Chase was murdered; he’d helped in the manhunt for Adam Hannigan. The evidence was overwhelming, but during his arraignment, Hannigan pled not guilty. The statement he made to Regan may or may not have been ruled admissible by the judge—they hadn’t gotten that far in the pretrial proceedings before his murder.
“I didn’t mean to kill the boy. I’m sorry.”
A year before Chase’s murder, Adam Hannigan’s brother Michael had attempted to rob Potomac Bank in Arlington. In the process, Michael had killed one of the hostages, Regan had been part of the team that responded, and she had killed Michael when he didn’t immediately drop his weapon.
There seemed to be no reason for Michael to have killed the hostage—the teller had done everything he wanted. As soon as he had turned the gun on the teller, Regan got the green light from the FBI negotiator in charge to take the first clean shot. It was a clean kill. They saved the other eight hostages, and she hadn’t lost any sleep over shooting Michael Hannigan.
Until Adam Hannigan avenged his brother’s death.
Allegedly.
On the surface, it made sense—he killed her son like she killed his brother. Only nothing in his personality, background, or current life suggested that Adam Hannigan would have been so angry or grief-stricken that a full year after his brother’s death he would go after her child.
“I didn’t mean to kill the boy...”
Regan and Tommy had never believed that Adam Hannigan killed Chase out of vengeance. They didn’t knowwhyhe’d targeted Chase or the Warwick family, but Hannigan’s comment after he was captured told Regan that Chase wasn’t the target. Maybe Grant—which the FBI considered. But their conclusion was the same: the motive for the shooting was the same.
And for a time, Regan believed it. That her lawful actions as a US marshal had made her family a target. But she kept coming back towhy.
Regan had finally convinced the FBI to let her talk to Hannigan, and he agreed. The night before she was to sit down with the man who shot and killed her son, he was stabbed by convicted killer Peter Grey in a room full of witnesses.
She and Tommy had gone around and around with the FBI about that, but they were unswayed. A coincidence, the lead agent said.
She didn’t buy it. A coincidence that Hannigan wanted to talk to her, to tell her something, and then turned up dead? Tommy was nearly positive that Hannigan had been hired to kill Grant—but they found nothing, not a shred of proof, that he was a hired gun. And when the FBI closed the case, that was it—every investigative lead dried up.
Regan’s marriage was falling apart. She couldn’t sleep more than an hour or two a night and her mental health was in the balance. So she put it all behind her and went home, to Flagstaff, Arizona, and moved in with her dad.
“He called me yesterday morning,” Regan said after the silence lasted just a few beats too long. “Three in the morning, it went to my voicemail. I now know that he was dead less than ten minutes after he left this message.”
She pulled out her phone and played Tommy’s message to her.
“Regan, it’s Tommy. I’m close to the truth about what happened to Chase. I’m laying it all out to Charlie this morning, but I wanted to talk to you as soon as possible. I think I have a good case for the DOJ. Call me when you get this message. I—well, just call.”
