34. After #2
The older one has brown hair going gray at the temples and a placid face that immediately puts me on guard. His calm doesn’t read as natural to me. It’s constructed, chosen for the effect it has on people who mistake blandness for kindness.
The younger man closes the door behind them and remains in front of it. His coat bulges over the weapon at his hip. He looks from my hands to the blood trailing from the IV site, then to the fact that I’m standing instead of lying in bed. His hand moves to the butt of his gun.
The older man removes a leather wallet from inside his jacket and displays a gold badge.
“Carrson Rowe Ashford?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Special Agent John Bowey, Federal Bureau of Investigation.” His voice is so deep it rumbles. “This is Special Agent Harris.”
I look through the narrow window in the door. Two uniformed officers wait in the hallway, positioned where they can see the room and both ends of the corridor.
“Unless you found Laurel Turner, you’re in my way.” I look past him, searching for my pants.
Bowey puts away his badge. “Carrson Ashford, you’re under arrest.”
The statement is so disconnected from the problem in front of me that it takes several seconds to make sense of it. Long enough for me to wonder whether the fire damaged more than my lungs.
Then I laugh in his face.
“Good luck with that.” I turn my back on him. “Why don’t you call Director Greenberg first? Ask him how he liked the martini he drank at my father’s estate during the ball a few days ago.”
Bowey isn’t amused. “Greenberg is no longer director.”
I turn around. “Since when?”
“This morning. Clark is acting director now.”
“And Clark’s first decision was to send you here to arrest me?”
“Oh, no.” He grins. “His first decision was to stop protecting you.” Bowey moves closer and lowers his voice so Harris can’t hear. “You aren’t above the law. Not anymore. There are people inside the government who are tired of The Order’s bullshit, the corruption.”
I give him a closer look. Few people have the nerve to say that name aloud.
His suit is forgettable. His shoes aren’t expensive. His hair is neatly trimmed, but nothing about him suggests money, influence, or power.
So why does he believe he can say that name to my face and survive it?
“Are you Order-born?”
“No, thank God. But my father was once called Anson Markham.”
He waits as though I should recognize the name. I don’t.
“Your father removed him from the path. He lost everything, moved away, and changed his name.” Bitterness twists his face. “You’ll find any excuse to confiscate another man’s property, won’t you? Take it and add it to your own fortunes.”
I see Laurel’s father at Shady Grove again, the one time he stood up and got angry.
Millions of dollars my family earned. All taken.
“The problem,” Bowey continues, “is that every man you cast out becomes an enemy. Men who once carried the same names you do. Men who know what you are and hate you for what you took from them. What happens, I wonder, when there are more of us than there are of you?”
“I don’t know anything about your father or what happened to him.”
“Of course you don’t.”
This time, he turns his back on me and walks several paces away, either certain I can’t hurt him or daring me to try.
“What am I being arrested for?”
Harris steps forward and pulls a photograph from the folder beneath his arm. He holds it out.
The image takes the strength from my legs. I stumble backward until the bed catches me behind the knees. I sit on the edge of the bed.
Ashford House is recognizable, which makes only its destruction more devastating.
The white columns are blackened. The roof has collapsed over the eastern wing, and several upper floors have fallen into the rooms beneath them.
The windows gape open, exposing scorched walls, twisted metal, and the remains of furniture inside.
The cornfield is gone. Only black earth and a few burned stalks remain.
My family built that house more than a century ago. Every generation added to it, expanded it, and buried secrets on the land surrounding it.
Now it looks like a carcass picked clean. Just the bones left behind.
“It’s ruined.” I look to Thomson, sure he’ll tell me this is a lie, an elaborate trick.
Thomson lowers his eyes. He’s already seen it. Probably stood close enough to smell the wet ash and burned wood while I lay unconscious.
Bowey gives me time to absorb the image. Harris does not. His eyes remain on my hands, following every movement as if someone warned him before entering that I prefer knives.
“When the cornfield burned, it exposed several burial sites,” Bowey says. His hands remain loose at his sides, but he’s positioned himself outside the range of my reach. “One body was more recent than the others. The victim was murdered within the past year.”
I look again at the photograph. Dark shapes interrupt the scorched earth. Excavation tents. Floodlights. People in white protective suits.
I know the name before he says it.
“Dental records identified him as Trent Riveria.”
Silas asked Laurel where we put Trent’s body. He claimed the man had a family who deserved answers, but she couldn’t give Silas any answers because she didn’t know we’d buried him where all the bodies go. Where they’ve always gone.
In the cornfield.
Now the federal government has found Trent instead of Silas.
Harris raises a clear evidence bag. “This was recovered near Riveria’s remains.”
Inside is my favorite dagger.
The dagger I left downstairs in Ashford house before the bonding. The ceremonial robe had no pockets, and I knew I wouldn’t be wearing it for long.
It shouldn’t have been anywhere near Trent’s grave, which means someone put it there.
The black resin handle has blistered and warped from the heat. Part of the grip has melted away, exposing metal beneath it, but I recognize the curve of the blade. I know the exact balance of it in my hand. I know how it looked when Laurel’s fingers held it at Sinners.
I used it on Trent the night he entered Ashford House intending to kill me. The night I tortured the location of a tainted batch of cocaine out of him so I could stop its distribution. The fact that he deserved what happened means nothing to the men standing before me.
Bowey watches my reaction rather than the weapon. “Riveria’s wounds match the blade. Preliminary testing identified your DNA on the grip.”
“Why is the FBI investigating a body found in my cornfield?”
“The burial site has been connected to an ongoing federal narcotics investigation involving multiple states.” He returns the photograph to the folder. “We have a warrant for your arrest in connection with Trent Riveria’s murder.”
Three days is not enough time to excavate a burial site, identify a body, process a fire-damaged weapon, connect the remains to a federal investigation, and obtain a murder warrant unless someone was waiting to tell them exactly where to look.
Someone gave them Trent’s name.
Someone made sure they found my dagger.
Silas or Jack?
Silas could want revenge for Trent’s death, but he asked Laurel where we put the body.
He wouldn’t have needed to manipulate the answer out of her if he already knew enough to direct federal agents to the grave.
Besides, the last thing he wants is federal agents digging into his Devil’s Dust operation.
Which leaves Jack.
The conclusion is obvious. I invoked a solo bond, reclaimed power in front of The Order, and fractured the alliances Jack intended to use against my family. Before the smoke has even cleared, federal agents arrive to take me into custody.