Page 36 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

Carter’s jaw worked, his silence as good as agreement.

“I…” An excuse – a tepid and unbelievable one – formed on his tongue, but he closed his mouth. Excuses had always been his game, but he wasn’t just Aidan anymore. Not just Ghost’s fuckup son. He was VP. He had the patch and everything. And both of these chuckleheads had voted him as such.

He squared his shoulders, and made eye contact with them, one and then the other. Hands on his hips, one boot cocked out, he belatedly realized he was mimicking his dad. All the better.

“Do either of you actually think I’d go running to spill my guts to the FBI? About…what? Mercy? All the criminal shit we’ve done? Are you fucking serious?”

Carter’s brows flew up, and then he sank down into the collar of his cut. “Uh…”

“You, Roman?” Aidan asked – no,demanded. “You ran away like a little bitch back when Duane was president, and now you’re gonna accuse me of turning rat?”

“Uh…”

“Fuck you both.” Aidan wasn’t angry, but found himself warming to this new approach. To this authority. Shit, was this why Dad was such a shithead? Because it felt damn good to throw his weight around?

Inwardly, a part of him was screaming:I’m not ratting! I’m not! I swear! I would never…

Outwardly, he plucked his helmet off his handlebars and said, “Take a ride with me.”

~*~

The cuffs probably weren’t necessary, but the pat-down definitely was. Fox didn’t find a gun, but Deborah Sawyer had a slim stiletto knife tucked into an interior pocket of her skirt. Fox disappeared it, then pushed her down into a cheap plastic chair at a cheap plastic table, and told her to put her cuffed hands on top where they could see them. Ghost wasn’t convinced she wouldn’t scream, but so far, she was keeping her lips pressed flat in a white, trembling line.

Fox squared off from her, hands in his pants pockets, head tilted at an eerie angle that brought to mind watching animals at the zoo.

“You’re not really DOJ, are you?” she asked, but she didn’t sound sure. Her gaze was narrow, but her mouth tremulous, and for the moment, Ghost was content to lean back against the edge of an empty desk and watch Fox do his thing. He so rarely had the chance to do so, up close like this.

Fox stared at her – a stare that would have a grown man shrinking down in his seat. Sawyer was tough; Ghost could grant her that. “Had many dealings with us lately?”

“I…”

“How about you let me do my job, and you worry about keeping yours. Of course, after the conversation we’re about to have, I don’t think that’s going to be possible.” He sent an offhand look to Ghost and said, “Check her bag.”

Enjoying this? Ghost planned to ask him later. Giving your president orders?

He set the laptop bag over on the desk where he was leaning and pulled out a slim HP. The side pockets contained an array of flash drives, labeled with initials in silver Sharpie. He laid them out one by one, the click of plastic on plasticloud in the mostly-empty space. Seven total. Her gaze, he noted, flickered with fear when he set down the third, markedCL.

Ghost opened the laptop and was greeted by a password screen.

Fox sent her an expectant look. “You can tell me, or I can waste time getting my IT guys to hack into it. I’m going to find out what’s on it either way.”

She pursed her lips, and stared him down. Not unflinching, but steady. “What is this about?”

Fox glanced over, and Ghost handed him the file folder ready and waiting on the desk. From it, with more flourish than necessary so the glossy photo paper snapped loudly, Fox withdrew photo after photo, and slapped them down in front of her.

Close-ups of the girls rescued from the auction at the Beaumont Building, teary-eyed, too-thin, with dark bruises from restraints on their wrists and throats. Girl after girl after girl.

Then came the crime scene photos: the men and women of Abacus’s upper echelon: the husband and wife charity directors sprawled across the floor of their home, and in their backyard, blood pooling beneath them from lone, fatal gunshots. The senator, burned to a blackened husk in the backseat of his chauffeured car. The restauranteur with his head caved in like an Easter egg on the tiles surrounding a pool in France. And Jack Waverly, slumped in a velvet theater seat, skewered with a sword cane, his fat face slack and blotchy in death, eyes staring unseeing at the stage where he’d watched all those too-thin, bound girls be bid upon by his friends and acquaintances.

Sawyer winced at sight of Angelo Rawlings’s brains spilled in a puddle of pool water, and when Fox laid down Waverly’s photo, she gulped audibly and turned her face away. “Enough,” she said, and put a hand up to shield her peripheral vision.

“You’re the Deputy Director ofForensics, aren’t you?” Ghost spoke for the first time. Fox sent him a look that warned caution, but didn’t cut him off. “You’re not going to get queasy over crime scene photos, are you? Has it been too long since you were in the field? Or were you never qualified for the job in the first place?”

According to the file Mike had given them, Sawyer’s rise to directorship had been meteoric, especially considering her low test scores as a trainee.

“Or,” Fox said, “is it harder to look at these images when they’re images of your friends?”

Her head whipped back around at that, threads of silver hair flying loose from her tight bun to cling at the sweat-damp skin of her temples and forehead. Her eyes were huge. “What? I don’t – these aren’t myfriends.” But she was too rattled to sound contemptuous, her breathing too quick to sell the lie.

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