“Are you sure?”
“Green Beret, ma’am. I swear I can handle it.”
She was sure I’d be in good hands.
As soon as I was done explaining to Kage, the FBI showed up. Since I was ready to be discharged by then but still waiting on a doctor, the special agent in charge went to speak to the on-call resident, and I was released four hours after I arrived.
I rode with Ian and Kohn back downtown to our building on Dearborn and rode the elevator up to the office in silence. Once we were off, we all headed toward the meeting room.
“Why’re you pissed at me?” I prodded Ian.
“I’m not.”
“It certainly seems like it, and I don’t think it’s fair.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t do anything wrong? What would you have done?”
He had no answer.
Once inside, I sat down, and when Ryan and Dorsey joined us, they brought bottles of water with them.
As we all took seats—except for Kage—the door opened again and we were joined by six FBI agents. The person in charge was Special Agent Oliver, and Rohl and Thompson were among those he’d brought to speak to me.
“Where is Hartley now?” Kage asked Oliver.
“He’s at County Hospital with ten agents, as well as a contingent of uniformed Chicago PD officers. He’s not going anywhere.”
“Why’s he in the hospital?” Kage wanted to know.
“Marshal Jones broke his collarbone.”
Kage grunted before turning to me. “Shall we begin?”
It was interesting: Whenever the agents started to ask too many questions, Kage shut them down. When they tried getting loud, especially Oliver, Kage lifted his hand for me to stop. It didn’t take too many times for them to realize he wasn’t playing around.
Ian, sitting beside me, had trouble not fidgeting, and every once in a while he’d take my hand under the table and gently squeeze.
We were there for hours, well after midnight, before the entire story had been told and recorded by the marshals service and the FBI. When we were finally ready to break, Kage asked if Hartley was going back to Elgin.
Oliver glanced up at him. “No, he’s not, and you made certain of that, didn’t you?” He barked with so much disgust in his tone that he surprised me, and from the quiet that settled over the room, I was guessing everyone else as well.
It was quite the outburst, angry and accusing, full of venom, almost hatred, and from the way his face screwed up into a snarl, Oliver had to be furious. But even hearing all that, seeing it, wasn’t what threw me. It was my boss.
Never had I seen Kage grin, and it was even more startling to witness because of the way he did it… arrogantly, evilly, like he’d won. I was seeing no trace of the man I knew, the unflappable one, the chief deputy who personified grace under pressure. This man was enjoying Special Agent Oliver’s discomfort, the wicked curl of his lip told me so, and I couldn’t get over the change in him.
“How in the hell did you get him transferred there? He doesn’t even meet the requirements!”
“Oh, he most certainly does,” Kage assured him snidely. “He’s successfully escaped once, he killed again while at large, there is the threat of his followers contacting him, and last but not least, he assaulted a deputy United States marshal. He’s a prime candidate for ADX Florence.”
I turned to Ian and found him staring at Kage with the same expression I must have been wearing—one of utter mind-blown daze.
Holy. Fuck.
It was overkill, and I was humbled. While I knew it wasn’t just me who Kage had done it for, I was the one he looked at every day, so at the moment, it was feeling damn personal.
The only way Dr. Craig Hartley was getting out of that supermax prison was in a body bag. I’d been there once, invited to tour the facility, and the utter isolation once you were inside the soundproof cells, how easy it would be to lose all track of time, the immovable concrete furnishings, timers on the lights and the sink and shower, an automated existence that stripped away all your humanity… I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. It had been hard to breathe. I couldn’t think of a worse fate for the egomaniac Hartley was. There would be no one to worship him; in fact, there would be no one at all. It was exactly what he deserved. To not be studied or asked for help, instead put in a box and forgotten.
I was mute, so struck by the level of endgame that Kage, without putting a needle in Hartley’s arm, had achieved. He’d killed my bogeyman. Hartley could never again haunt my dreams. It was completely, and utterly, done.
“I wasn’t saying he should be remanded back to Elgin,” Oliver shouted, done in by my boss’s smirk and seeming boredom, “but another prison where we would still have access to him for purposes of—”