Chapter 4 #3
They headed for the west wing, Sebastian leading her to the doctor’s office.
Vivi wasn’t there. He grabbed Sutton’s hand for a few seconds to quickly draw her inside and shut the door behind them, leaving only an inch cracked open that he could peer through.
“Black file cabinet, second drawer from the bottom. It’s filled with her notebooks. ”
“Shouldn’t we just ask her if I can have one?”
“What fun is that?” he said without looking at her as he kept watch on the hallway.
Sutton shook her head and opened the drawer. Inside, there were a dozen or more brand new spiral-ringed notebooks. She selected one with a deep blue cover. “Got it.”
He chin-nodded at a towering bookshelf with colorful plastic baskets lining the highest shelf. “Pens are there.”
She was impressed by the doctor’s organizational style. Each basket contained pen colors that coordinated with its color. Sutton picked two black, a blue, a red, a yellow, and a purple.
Stolen stash in hand, the two of them snuck back out, but not until Sebastian snatched a book from Vivi’s collection. Sutton didn’t miss the title—The Mind of a Killer.
Rather than returning her to her room, he suggested they go to the lounge. She agreed.
Sutton spent the rest of the morning filling the pages. None of her supplies were artist-grade materials, but she didn’t care. The pens moved across the white space, filling it with marks she controlled. For a few hours, the carousel of memories that haunted her slowed to something manageable.
She drew the hawk she’d seen over the tree line.
Then a lynx—not copying Sebastian’s design, but creating her own version.
Hers curled on a rocky outcrop with its ears tipped toward something the viewer couldn’t see.
She flipped the page quickly when she felt Sebastian’s eyes on her, which was childish, but the alternative was thinking about why she’d drawn it in the first place.
Lunch was sandwiches and sodas, much like what Mack had given her the previous night that she hadn’t eaten. Garrett interrupted to pull Sebastian out of the kitchen and speak to him alone. Sutton tried to eavesdrop, but they were too far away.
When Sebastian returned, he looked grim.
“What?” she asked.
“Claire is on her way. She has news—I don’t know what.”
The woman arrived at the compound at half past two. Sutton had built a mental image of an FBI agent in a dark suit, with a severe expression of a woman who viewed witnesses as sources of information to be mined.
Claire appeared younger than that image with auburn hair and sharp green eyes.
She wore dark jeans and a navy blazer, with a badge clipped to her belt.
When she shook Sutton’s hand, her grip was firm but not performative.
“Sutton. I’m sorry we’re meeting under these circumstances. I know this is a lot.”
“Everyone keeps saying that.”
“Because we all know it’s true. Let me give you what I’ve got, and then I’ll need you to walk me through last night again in as much detail as you can manage.”
The team assembled around the briefing table—Garrett at the head, Sebastian to Sutton’s left, Vivi at the opposite end with a notebook and pen in hand. Jasper entered with a laptop and sat on Garrett’s right, his fingers resting on the keyboard ready to pull up anything in seconds.
Claire opened a file and laid out what the FBI had so far.
The victim was confirmed as Virginia Galbraith.
The cause of death was three gunshot wounds to the chest from a suppressed nine-millimeter.
The ammunition was military-grade hollow points, the kind of rounds that weren’t available at a sporting goods counter.
No casings recovered at the scene, which meant the shooter had policed his brass—a hallmark of professional training.
The vehicle had been located forty minutes after the shooting, burned to the frame in a gravel lot off Route 12. It had been stolen from a long-term lot at Missoula International two days prior. No prints, no DNA, no surveillance footage of the theft.
“This was a planned operation,” Claire said. “The vehicle was staged in advance. The ammunition was sourced through non-standard channels. The post-engagement protocol is consistent with trained operatives, not street-level violence.”
Hearing the details laid out in clinical language didn’t make them easier to absorb.
It made them worse. Ginger’s death being translated into evidence categories and operational terminology seemed cold.
The distance between the human version Sutton had lived and the procedural one Claire was narrating made her chest hurt.
Next, Claire activated a voice recorder and asked Sutton to again walk her through what Ginger had said to her before the shooting and what Sutton had witnessed happening to her outside the parlor. She even asked Sutton why she’d run all the way to the farmhouse to find Sebastian.
Sutton’s face heated with embarrassment. “I spoke to Sebastian early in the day, and I was…scared. I just reacted.”
Sebastian didn’t look at her. No one but Claire and Vivi did. Vivi made notes, her gaze shifting to look at Sebastian.
“I should have called the police,” Sutton said. “I should have…” Her voice trailed off. “I knew that man was coming after me, and I panicked.”
Claire offered a sympathetic smile. “You did exactly the right thing. Sebastian was the safest option.”
Sebastian was the safest option. Sutton felt the words settle in her chest, and also knew the irony. The man who’d killed her brother was now her refuge.
Claire shut off the recorder and referred to the notes on her phone.
“There’s something I wanted to tell you.
The FBI has had a file open for approximately eighteen months on a possible domestic network with connections to intelligence and political circles.
The file is thin—more gaps than facts. It’s classified under the codename Inkwell. ”
Claire thumbed through her notes. “The connecting thread in the Inkwell file is a tattoo. Multiple sources have reported that individuals in sensitive positions—law enforcement, political staff, intelligence-adjacent contractors—bear an identical tattoo on the inner left bicep. The design is abstract and not a gang symbol. We’ve never been able to trace the artist or determine the tattoo’s significance. ” She paused. “Until now.”
Sebastian sat straighter. “Ginger Galbraith was investigating this network?”
Sutton felt it, too—her spine straightened. “She showed me the picture of it on a man’s inside bicep. You think it’s the same group?”
“I do. Penn had a client list that may have intersected with the individuals in our Inkwell file.”
Sutton’s hands were in her lap, fingers laced together so tight the knuckles blanched.
Penn’s name, spoken in this room full of operators and federal agents, had a different weight than it did in her own head.
To her, Penn was her complicated, infuriating, talented, secretive brother who’d turned into a monster on national television. In this room, he was something else.
“Sutton.” Claire’s voice was careful now. “Did Penn keep records of his work? Client logs, portfolios, sketchbooks—anything that might document who he tattooed and what designs he produced?”
Sutton stared at the table. The wood grain blurred. Penn’s sketchbooks—she’d saved at least three of them.
They were battered sketchbooks with black covers and elastic closures, the pages thick with ink and pencil and the occasional coffee stain.
She’d taken them from his apartment after the shooting, when her mother couldn’t bring herself to go and her father wouldn’t.
She’d packed them in a box with a few other things—his favorite mug, a pocket knife, a vintage Bowie concert tee—and carried that box from D.C.
to Blackridge like a reliquary. It lived under her bed.
She’d kept them because they were his. Because his hands had held those pencils and his mind had filled those pages. Sometimes, on the worst nights, she’d press her palm flat against the cover and pretend she could feel him in the paper.
Now, it sounded like they were evidence.
Her voice was steady. Her hands were not. “I have three of his sketchbooks at my apartment.”
Claire leaned forward. “We need those sketchbooks.”
“We’ll get them for you,” Garrett said.
Vivi touched Sutton’s shoulder as she stood. “Before you go, there’s one more thing you should both see.”
Sutton’s stomach dropped. She’d had about all the more-things-you-should-see she could absorb in a single afternoon, but she followed Vivi’s gaze to the wall monitor, where Jasper pulled up a split screen.
Cable news dominated on one side. Social media feeds were on the other.
The cable news chyron read: Galbraith Daughter Murdered In Rural Montana—where is Agent Whitaker?
The social feed was worse. A scrolling river of posts, most of them paired with the same small set of photographs—Sebastian on a stretcher, Sebastian at congressional testimony, Sebastian and Ginger at some charity function six years ago, her laughing up at him while he kept his eyes on the crowd.
The captions underneath were speculating, theorizing.
Grieving a girl most of the posters had never met and eulogizing her alongside the man who’d saved her life once, as if the two of them had been a love story.
Sebastian stood abruptly and walked to the wall. Everyone, including Sutton, watched him cross his arms as if shielding himself. He said nothing, just reading the screen with a shuttered expression.
“The news broke late last night,” Vivi said. “It went international within two hours. The #FindBastian tag has been trending in three countries since this morning. Reporters have already been calling the Galbraith family, Sebastian’s family, and everyone associated with him publicly.”