“And Will can?” Faith was perplexed. Amanda was like a mother to Will. If you were worried that your mother was going to run you down with her car. “Where is this coming from? Will’s your favorite. Why are you holding him back?”

Instead of answering, Amanda flipped through the briefing book, pages and pages of single-spaced text.

Faith didn’t need an explanation. “He’s dyslexic. He’s not illiterate. He’s better with numbers than I am. He can read a briefing book. It just takes a little longer.”

“How do you know he’s dyslexic?”

“Because—” Faith didn’t know how she knew. “Because I work with him. I pay attention. I’m a detective.”

“But he’s never told you. And he’ll never tell anyone. Therefore, we can’t offer him accommodations. Therefore, he’ll never move up the food chain.”

“Christ,” Faith muttered. Just like that, she was closing down Will’s future.

“Mandy.” Maggie Grant walked into the room. She had a bottle of cold water for each of them. “Why on earth are you both still in here? It’s cooler in the hallway.”

Faith angrily twisted the cap off the bottle. She couldn’t believe this Will bullshit. It wasn’t Amanda’s job to decide what he was capable of doing or not doing.

“How’s your mother?” Maggie asked Faith.

“Good.” Faith gathered up her stuff. She had to get out of here before she said something stupid.

“And Emma?”

“Very easy. No complaints.” Faith stood from the chair. Her sweaty shirt peeled off her skin like a lemon rind. “I should—”

“Send them both my love.” Maggie turned to Amanda, “How’s your boy doing?”

She meant Will. All of Amanda’s friends referred to him as her boy. The term reminded Faith of the first time you meet Michonne in the Walking Dead.

Amanda said, “He’s getting by.”

“I bet.” Maggie told Faith, “You should’ve locked that down before Sara entered the picture.”

Amanda guffawed. “She’s not sweet enough for him.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Faith held up her hands to stop her own decapitation. “Sorry. I was up at three in the morning dragging a toy box into the front yard. The sky was awake, so I was awake.”

Faith was saved bastardizing more lines from Frozen by a ringing cell phone.

Maggie said, “That’s me.” She walked over to the windows and answered the call.

Then Amanda’s phone started to ring.

More rings echoed in the hallway. It sounded like every phone in the building was going off.

Faith checked her watch. She’d silenced the notifications before the meeting, but she turned them on again now. An alert had come in at 2:08 p.m. through the First Responder Notification System:

EXPLOSIONS AT EMORY UNIVERSITY. MASS CASUALTIES. THREE MALE WHITE SUSPECTS FLED IN SILVER CHEV MALIBU LP# XPR 932. HOSTAGE TAKEN. CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

For a moment, Faith lacked the ability to comprehend the information. She felt a nervous sickness rattle her body, the same sensation she got when she saw an alert for a school shooting or a terrorist attack. And then she thought about the fact that Novak’s team liked explosions. But a university wasn’t their M.O. and Novak’s safe house was well outside the city.

“Send all available agents,” Amanda barked into her phone. “I need details. Descriptions. A casualty estimate. Have SOU coordinate with ATF on securing the campus. Let me know the second the governor calls out the National Guard.”

“Amanda.” Maggie’s voice was tightly controlled. This was her city, her responsibility. “My bird will meet us on the roof.”

“Let’s go.” Amanda motioned for Faith to come.

Faith grabbed her bag, the nervous sickness turning into a lump of concrete inside of her stomach as her mind started to process what had happened. An explosion at the university. A hostage taken. Mass casualties. Armed and dangerous.

They were all running by the time they reached the stairs. Maggie led them up, but the other officers from the meeting were pounding their way down in a furious rush because that’s what cops did when something bad happened. They ran toward the bad thing.

“I’m giving the authorization . . .” Maggie yelled into her phone as she sprinted past the next landing, “. . . 9-7-2-2-4-alpha-delta. 10-39 every available. I want all birds in the air. Tell the commander I’m five minutes out.”

“One of the bombers was wounded.” Amanda was finally getting information. She glanced back at Faith as she climbed. Shock flashed across her face. “The hostage is Michelle Spivey.”

Maggie muttered a curse, grabbing the railing to pull herself up the next flight. She listened into her phone a moment, then reported, “I’ve got two wounded, nothing about Spivey.” She was breathing hard, but she didn’t stop. “One perp was hit in the leg. Second in the shoulder. The driver was dressed in an Emory security uniform.”

Faith felt the sweat on her body turn cold as she listened to the words echoing down the stairwell.

“A nurse recognized Spivey.” Amanda was off the phone. She shouted to be heard over their footsteps scuffing the concrete treads. “There’s conflicting information but—”

Maggie stopped on another landing. She held up her hand for quiet. “Okay, we’ve got an eye-witness from Dekalb PD saying that two bombs went off in the parking structure across from the hospital. The second detonation was timed to take out the first responders. We’ve got at least fifteen people trapped inside. Ten casualties on the ground.”

Faith tasted bile in her mouth. She looked down at the ground. There were cigarette butts where someone had been smoking. She thought of her dress uniform hanging in the closet, the number of funerals she would be attending in the coming weeks, the number of times she would have to stoically stand at attention while families fell apart.

“There’s more.” Maggie started up the stairs again. Her footsteps were not as brisk. “Two security guards found murdered in the basement. Two Dekalb PD killed when the bombers made their escape. One more is in surgery. Fulton County sheriff’s deputy. Doesn’t look good for her.”

Faith resumed the climb at a slower pace, feeling gut-punched by the news. She let herself think of her children. Her own mother who had done this job. She knew what it was like to wait for news, to not know whether your parent was dead or alive or hurting and all you could do was sit in front of the television and try to convince yourself that this wasn’t the time they wouldn’t come home.

Amanda stopped for a moment. She put her hand on Faith’s shoulder. “Ev knows you’re with me.”

Faith made her legs keep moving, kept climbing up the stairs because that was all that she could do. It was all any of them could do.

Her mother was watching Emma. Jeremy was at a video game tournament with his friends. They all knew Faith was downtown at the meeting because she had complained loudly about it to anyone who would listen.

Two security guards murdered.

Two cops murdered.

A deputy who probably wouldn’t wake up from surgery.

All of those patients in the hospital. Sick people—sick children, because there wasn’t just one hospital at Emory, there was Egleston Children’s Hospital a block down the street. How many times had Faith driven Emma to the emergency room in the middle of the night? The nurses were so kind. Every doctor so patient. There were parking structures scattered around the building. An explosion could easily send one collapsing onto the hospital.

And then what? How many buildings had been destroyed during the aftershocks on 9/11?

Finally, Maggie pushed open the door at the top of the stairs. Sunlight sliced into Faith’s retinas, but her eyes were already filled with angry tears.

The second detonation was timed to take out the first responders.

She heard the distant chop of helicopter blades. The black UH-1 Huey was almost older than Faith. SWAT used it for fast roping and fire rescue. Men were already suited up in the back. Full tactical gear. AR-15s. More first responders. They would have to go room by room, structure by structure, and ensure there were no other bombs waiting for the signal to detonate.

The chopping got tighter as the aircraft drew closer.

Faith’s thoughts kept a silent cadence between the slicing rotors—

Two-guards-two-families.

Two-cops-two-families.

One-deputy-one-family.

“Mandy.” Maggie had to yell to be heard over the roar of the engines. There was something in her voice that made the air go taut, a knot being jerked into a string.

“It’s Will, Mandy. They hurt your boy.”

4

Sunday, August 4, 1:54 p.m.

Sara made a mental note of the Porsche driver’s estimated time of death as she checked the F-150 driver’s lacerated scalp.