of the room, spends a minute typing something, then disappears through the door leading to whatever is on the other side of the one-way mirror. For a marshal, he seems awfully comfortable around the facility and its components. I’m not really sure what I expect of him, but it’s not this: a man with the keys to the kingdom, able to run the show.
I sit down in the chair at the end of the table and sink into the seat. I rest my damp head against the back of the chair, and just as I close my eyes for a few seconds, Sean reappears through the first door again. As he walks my way, he chucks a bottled water in my lap.
“This room will be full by daybreak,” he says, then sits down several seats away from me. “People coming from all over—New York, DC, Baltimore, of course. You better have something really interesting to say.” He stares at me like he might lunge toward me, give me one more round.
“It’s gonna be bigger and better than anything they could imagine.”
He wipes his face. “This is your big moment, Bovaro. Enjoy it. People are going to care about you, really love you, all the way through getting you deposed. Then you’ll return to being nothing. Same loser, different name.”
I sit up a little, want to help him understand that his annoyance has more to do with the fact that he’ll be ushered out when the real dealmaking and information transfer begins. Instead, I rest back again and say, “You don’t like us much, do you?”
“You who?”
“Criminals who flip on their own.”
Without any hesitation: “Hate you. Really takes all my strength to provide even the thinnest protection. The few witnesses in this program that are innocent—people like Melody and her parents—I love ’em. They’re braver than anyone you know, possess a willingness to sacrifice and a commitment to doing the right thing that you’ll never understand.”
I wish I could correct him, want him to know he and I might have more in common than he thinks. I spent twenty years of my life committed to successfully protecting Melody—something he failed at after only a few days.
I stare back, spill my thoughts. “You know you’re a terrible marshal.”
He narrows his eyes and grins slightly, then drops his eyes, spins his wedding band around his finger.
“When you phoned me,” he says, “you asked if I lost something. I didn’t lose anything.” He looks back up at me. “She walked away.”
Melody’s fast confession in the kitchen of my father’s house floods my mind. I so easily recall the panic on her face as she offered up the scattered details of those loose hours lost from the spa.
I slide down in my chair. “You guys offered her a deal to turn on me,” I say. Everything she said, all genuine. I hate that I let even the slightest doubt cross my mind, feel a deepening of sadness at losing her forever, knowing her love for me was so real that she gave up having the best of everything the government could offer in order to remain with me.
Sean nods a little. “They were going to give her the ultimate incentive.” He goes back to spinning his wedding band. “Any town, any job, any money.”
I stiffen. That precise definition of her deal wasn’t just Gravina’s general description of what’d been offered to Melody; those were his exact words: any town, any job, any money. I process the information over and over, my eyes dim and mouth open like I’m about to sneeze, except something far more jarring is brewing. I lean forward, put my elbows on the table, intertwine my fingers and start cracking knuckles, need to find a way to call Peter and tell him the name he needs to take very seriously, give him the proper direction to vent his impending indignation.
“But,” Sean adds, “once you’d brainwashed her into thinking you cared about her, and by the fact that she’d truly grown weary from being in this program her whole life, she apparently wanted nothing to do with it any longer. Wouldn’t even listen to what they had to say.” He leans forward, points a finger. “And the result of her decision was her own murder.”
“If only she’d had a marshal capable of protecting her.”
Sean leaps out of his seat like he’s going to grab me by my shirt and toss me out the sixth-floor window, but he merely reaches in his back pocket.