CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
As they came up to the porch—Sloane in the lead with Kate just a few paces behind—Kate saw that the teal door was standing open. It was open four or five inches, angled into the dimly lit interior of the house. Warm, yellow light of the front room spilled out across the porch boards.
Kate tilted her head, focusing…but she could hear no movement from inside.
Sloane had already drawn her Glock and approached the door carefully.
She looked back to Kate, and Kate nodded for her to continue on.
In a consultant role, Kate no longer carried her sidearm, which meant she needed to give Sloane a good amount of space.
If things did indeed get dangerous, Kate was Sloane’s responsibility.
It made Kate feel like a liability and she was suddenly questioning her choice to even get out of the car.
But it was too late to change her mind now. Their eyes were locked on the gap in the door. As Sloane entered as quietly as a ghost, fast and low and to the right, Kate moved to the opposite side of the frame and waited several seconds.
When she pivoted inside seconds later, she found that the living room was empty.
A lamp burned on a side table beside a stack of library books.
The television was off, and there was a throw blanket had been pushed to one side as if someone had stood up quickly from underneath it.
The place was eerily quiet and had the feel of a moment that had been suddenly interrupted Sometimes it was details such as the throw blanket in the floor that, to Kate, made things feel off. Dangerous, even.
She looked ahead to Sloane, who was moving into the small kitchen area.
Kate then registered two things at once.
First, Sloane had stopped moving and suddenly went rigidly still.
Second, there was a faint noise coming from the kitchen…
a low and compressed noise that she recognized as human speech but was barely a voice at all.
And then there was a second sound underneath it, steadier and colder.
Sloane moved down the short hallway with Kate moving in closer behind her. Then, in a single, brisk movement, they were in the kitchen doorway and the room resolved itself in a single sharp instant.
Diane Marsh was backed hard against the far counter.
Her shoulders were pressed flat to the cabinet doors behind her, a steak knife raised in both hands with the blade pointed outward.
Her hands were shaking so badly that the knife trembled visibly, and her face was white and masked in terror that she wasn’t even attempting to hide.
She hadn't seen Kate and Sloane in the doorway yet because her eyes were fixed on the center of the room.
Ruth Calder stood in front of Diane with her own knife in her and, for now, was also oblivious to their presence.
She was facing Diane with her weight forward and a knife held loosely in her left hand, and even from the doorway Kate could see the staining on the blade, dark and dried and almost certainly not rust. She noted it and filed it away in the same moment, the way she had trained herself to do when there was no time to stop and think.
Ruth's face was composed in a way that was more unnerving than any expression of rage could have ever been.
She looked as though she had already decided how this moment would end and was only taking these last few moments to savor it.
As Sloane took one single step closer, Diane finally saw them. And when her eyes locked on them and confusion and hope washed over her face, Ruth was also clued in. She turned, and her eyes cut to the doorway for just a second, taking in Kate and Sloane—as well as Sloane’s gun.
She then looked back at Diane as though the armed federal agent it didn't change anything.
“FBI!” Sloane yelled. “Drop the knife and get on the ground!”
When two seconds of silence and stillness had passed, Sloane yelled out again. "Ruth. Right now. On the ground!"
Ruth still did not look at her. She kept her eyes on Diane, and in the fraction of a second that followed, something shifted in her posture, a gathering of intention that Kate recognized for what it was half a heartbeat before it became action.
Ruth lunged at Diane.
Sloane had apparently known it was coming because she was already moving.
She crossed the kitchen in two strides and hit Ruth from the side with her full weight.
The impact was loud and jarring; it carried both of them hard into the kitchen table.
The table went sideways and one of the chairs went with it, clattering off the wall.
Kate took that chaotic moment to reach out and pull Diane back by the arm.
In the same moment, moving faster than she had in months and with her heart slamming wildly in her chest, Kate was very aware of how she could no longer see the knife.
Kate's eyes went straight to where the knife had been in Ruth's hand and it was not there now.
It was somewhere in the tangle of bodies and the overturned furniture it.
Her breath stopped. Sloane was down in the wreckage of the table with Ruth Calder underneath her.
Kate could see Sloane's hands working but not the blade.
She couldn't account for where it had gone and that was perhaps the worst part of the entire ordeal for a second.
The cold that moved through her in that moment was absolute and immediate.
She could not see the blade, could not see whether Sloane had been cut, and she was already calculating what to do next…
how to respond if Sloane had indeed been injured or worse.
And for a heart-stopping moment, she was somehow sure the knife had plunged into Sloane’s chest or abdomen before she had any evidence of it. But then, thank God, she heard it.
A clatter, hard and clean. Metal on tile.
The knife skidded out from under the overturned chair and traveled several inches across the kitchen floor before it came to a stop against the baseboard. Kate stood very still for the span of a single breath and let the relief move through her.
Sloane was uninjured. Kate could see it now: Sloane had Ruth pinned face-down on the tile, one knee pressed firmly into Ruth's back, and she was already reaching for the cuffs at her belt.
She did so with an almost eerie ease, despite the situation.
Ruth was making a low, pressurized sound but was no longer fighting.
She was moving and squirming, but it was hardly moving Sloane at all.
Whatever had caused her to lunge recklessly at Diane Marsh had burned itself out in the fall, and what was left of her was something smaller and quieter.
Kate kept hold of Diane's arm. The woman was gripping her back just as hard, her fingers locked in tight around Kate's forearm. Kate could feel that the shaking in Diane’s hands had not yet stopped.
She turned so that she was facing Diane directly and blocked her view of the floor, standing in the way of what was taking place in her kitchen..
"Diane, I need you to look at me," Kate said. "You're all right. Look right at me, okay?"
Diane looked at her. Her eyes were wet and her breathing was still ragged, coming in short pulls. But she was present and she was listening and that was enough.
"You're safe," Kate said. "It's over."
Behind her, she heard Sloane click the second cuff into place with a satisfying click.
Then Sloane's voice, steady and clear, was reading Ruth Calder her rights.
Her voice was firm and solid, masking any emotion.
She was simply a woman doing her job, and doing it well.
Kate had heard Sloane make arrests before, but there was something in the steadiness of her voice just now, after what had happened in the last thirty seconds, that Kate found herself holding onto.
The woman was really coming into her own and was already a force to be reckoned with.
Kate wanted to say something to her—something brief and direct and true. But now was not the time. There would be time for it later, she told herself, though she suspected she might not find exactly the right words even then. For now she turned back to Diane and focused on getting her moving.
"Can you walk?" Kate asked.
Diane nodded. Her breath had evened out slightly, still unsteady but no longer in danger of giving out on her.
Kate kept her hand on Diane's back and steered her out of the kitchen, back through the short hallway. They made their way through the living area, out onto the porch, and into the night. Diane looked around wildly, tears running down her face. Kate wondered if the woman had been sure she was going to die as Ruth had stood before her with that knife. Was she, Kate wondered, learning to appreciate the little things like the porch, the crisp night air, and the smell of flowers from a neighbor’s yard?
They were barely down the porch steps when the backup unit came around the corner and pulled up hard against the curb. A pair of officers were out of the car right away with their hands moving to their belts, scanning the front of the house.
Kate held up her badge and stepped forward to meet them at the walk. Diane remained on the porch, watching it all unfold like a woman in a very surreal dream.
"The suspect is in custody, inside," she said. "Kitchen. Agent Sloane has her.”
The officers nodded and hurried inside. When they were gone, Diane came down the stairs to meet her. The woman took Kate’s hand and said, “Thank you,” in little more than a whisper.
Those two simple words made it all better as far as Kate was concerned, Sure, she was no longer carrying a gun and she was effectively watching the cases unfold as Sloane worked her way through them.
But she would never tire of this… of knowing she had helped to save a life, even if it was in a small way in the background.
“Of course,” she said. And when the woman moved in for a hug, Kate allowed it.
And it was there hugging a stranger in a dark yard just after midnight, that Kate simply didn’t know how she would ever leave this job completely behind.