Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Pacific Grand Hotel
Tacoma, Washington
Halloway buttoned his shirt and tucked it into his pants, smoothing the fabric with the flat of his palm.
The hotel suite was quiet, insulated from the city by thick walls and heavy curtains drawn across floor-to-ceiling windows.
The Pacific Grand had been Jennifer’s suggestion, and he had to admit she had taste.
The room was decorated with muted grays and soft lighting, and linens that probably cost more per thread count than his first car draped the king bed.
A minibar glowed softly in the corner, and the faint scent of her perfume still lingered, mixing with a musky scent.
He could hear the faucet running behind the bathroom door.
Jennifer hummed something he couldn’t quite place.
He had enjoyed his rendezvous with her over the last several months, stolen hours carved out of otherwise ordinary weeks, and each time felt a little more necessary than the last. Not because he was unhappy at home, exactly, but because he was restless.
The Torrino trial had been the peak, the thing that made his career feel like it mattered, and everything since had been a slow, steady descent into paperwork and plea bargains and the grinding monotony of federal prosecution.
Jennifer reminded him that he was still the man who could command a courtroom, still someone worth wanting.
Planning to get together this week had taken a little extra caution, though, with the U.S.
marshals parked in his driveway. Two agents in a black Suburban, sitting there like a permanent fixture and checking in every few hours, making his neighbors whisper behind their curtains.
His wife had been unsettled by the whole arrangement, but she accepted it the way she accepted most inconveniences in their marriage: with a glass of wine and an early bedtime.
Tonight, he had waited until after eleven before slipping out the back. He walked two streets over and hailed an Uber. That was three hours ago. His wife slept like the dead. She wouldn’t even notice him slipping back in.
The bathroom door opened, and Jennifer emerged, fully dressed now, her dark hair pulled back and her coat already buttoned. She glided across the room and kissed him warmly.
“I’ve got an early meeting,” she said, gathering her purse from the armchair. “I need to get home and get at least a few hours of sleep.”
She paused near the door and turned back to him. Her expression was a little tighter now. “Be safe, okay? Those murders are creeping me out.”
“I’ll be fine,” he assured her. He’d spent his career reassuring people, judges and juries and witnesses, and the habit carried effortlessly into everything else. He managed what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “I’ll text you tomorrow.”
She studied him for a beat, as if she wanted to say something else, but instead she just nodded and gave him a small, careful smile before disappearing into the suite’s outer room.
A moment later, he heard the door click shut behind her.
The silence that followed was immediate and total, a sealed hush that only hotel rooms high above the city could achieve, as if the rest of the world had been shut out entirely.
Halloway didn’t feel like going home just yet.
The events of the last couple of weeks had made sleep elusive, and when it did come, it was shallow and punctuated by dreams he couldn’t quite remember but that left him with a vague sense of dread every morning.
He’d worked alongside Thomas Sterling for years, and now he was dead.
So was Judge Vance. Both murdered, and now the FBI was asking questions about specific exhibits from a trial that had ended five years ago.
He hadn’t told them everything.
He pushed that thought away and lay back on the bed with his feet crossed at the ankles.
He picked up the remote from the nightstand and flipped on the television, the screen casting a blue wash across the darkened room.
Late-night cable offered little worth watching at this hour.
He scrolled past infomercials, a rerun of some police procedural he had seen before, a cooking competition filmed in a garish color.
He settled on a news channel running coverage of Halloween events around the country and let the low drone of the anchor’s voice fill the space around him, but his mind kept returning to that afternoon and the FBI agents.
He turned up the volume on the television and tried to focus on the screen.
A few minutes later, the room door opened and clicked shut.
Jennifer must have forgotten something. It wouldn't be the first time she came back for her phone charger or her scarf. He kept his eyes on the screen, where the anchor was now describing a haunted house in some midwestern city that was drawing record crowds.
“You leave something?” he called out toward the front of the suite.
No answer.
He waited, listening. The only sound was the low murmur of the television and his own breathing. He muted the TV and turned his head toward the doorway that separated the bedroom from the suite’s sitting area.
“Jen?”
There was nothing. No movement, no sound, just, nothing.
He sat up on the bed as his pulse began to climb. He told himself it was nothing, that the door had probably just latched on its own or that he’d imagined the sound entirely.
Then the man stepped into the doorway.
Halloway’s breath left him in a rush. The figure was thin, almost gaunt, dressed in dark clothing that seemed to absorb the light from the television screen. He wore latex gloves, and his pale blue eyes stared at Halloway without blinking. His entire expression was fixed and unreadable.
Halloway’s heart lurched so violently he felt it in his throat. He scrambled backward on the bed, the sheets bunching beneath him.
“What in the hell?” His voice came out strangled, cracking on the last word.
And then the recognition hit him. He knew that face. He’d seen it before, years ago, in a different context and under different circumstances. The pieces connected in rapid succession: the thin frame, the pale eyes, the meticulous nature.
“You?” Halloway’s voice dropped to barely a whisper. “It’s been you?”
The man didn’t answer immediately. He stood in the doorway, studying Halloway. His expression betrayed nothing: no anger, no satisfaction, no urgency. Just clinical observation.
“You weren’t honest with those agents today, were you?”
Halloway’s throat constricted. He sat up straighter and pressed his palms into the mattress. “What agents? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The man took a step closer. The carpet absorbed his footfall completely.
“You didn’t tell them what you did.”
Ice flooded Halloway’s veins. Everything he’d tried not to think about for the last five years rushed to the surface at once, and in that moment, he understood with terrible clarity that this man already knew the answers to the questions the FBI had been asking.
He lunged frantically for his phone on the nightstand.
His fingers found the edge of the device and closed around it, and in that same instant, he thought of the marshals sitting in the Suburban, oblivious, watching over his wife and son while the man they were supposed to be protecting sat in a hotel room he should never have been in.
The man’s hand moved with a speed that didn’t match his stillness. Halloway saw the glint of steel catching the television’s glow, a flash of silver in the darkness, and then the blade was in him.
The knife entered his abdomen with a punching sensation that was more pressure than pain at first, as if someone had driven a small fist into his midsection.
Then the pain arrived. It exploded white-hot through his guts, and Halloway gasped as his body pitched backward onto the bed.
His hand instinctively went to the wound, his fingers wrapping around the handle of the blade before sliding off, slick with the blood that was already soaking through his shirt in a widening stain.
He tried to scream, but the air had been driven from his lungs and all that came out was a wet, ragged sound.
He rolled sideways and slid off the edge of the mattress, his knees hitting the carpet with a muffled thud before the rest of him followed.
The phone clattered from his hand and skittered beneath the bed, out of reach.
The man stood over him, watching with cold detachment. There was no emotion in those eyes, no hatred, no glee, and certainly no remorse.
Halloway pressed his hands against his stomach and felt the blood rushing out between his fingers in warm and steady pulses. The ceiling above him wavered and blurred. The television flickered its light across the walls, and the anchor’s muted face moved in patterns that no longer made any sense.
He thought of his wife, asleep in their house with the marshals outside.
He thought of the interview that afternoon, of Bishop’s sharp eyes and the questions she asked and the lies he’d offered so easily.
He thought about the Torrino case, about how it had all led in a straight and unbroken line to this hotel room, this carpet beneath his back, and this man who was kneeling beside him.
The man opened a black nylon bag and reached inside with gloved hands. The last thing Halloway saw was the shape of something metallic emerging from the bag, catching the cold blue light of the television screen.
Then everything went dark.