The Last Widow (Will Trent 9)

“Please, miss, you don’t understand.” Dash’s teeth were chattering. Tears edged into the corners of his eyes. “Please. Call the CDC. I don’t want to die the same way they did.”

Epilogue

FOUR DAYS LATER

Sunday, August 11, 10:17 a.m.

Sara was pulled awake by the sound of a dog lapping water from the kitchen bowl. She squinted at her watch, but found only her bare wrist. She turned to see if Will was in bed, but there was no Will.

As usual, he had risen at the crack of dawn. Sara had listened to him stirring a packet of hot chocolate into a mug, talking to the dogs, doing his stretches, checking his email, because Will’s bedroom door opened up next to the kitchen and Sara could never sleep late when she stayed here.

She pulled Will’s pillow to her face. She could still smell him on the sheets. After wasting countless hours in her cabin prison cataloging the ways she was going to screw him, Sara had been unable to do anything for the last three nights but cry in his arms.

Will seemed content to just hold her. She knew that Dobie’s death still weighed on him. The fact that he was even talking to Sara about it was evidence of his turmoil. He was plagued by ifs. If Will had shot Dash before the van doors had opened. If he’d shot Dash outside instead of trying to get the people out of the way. If Will’s two shots hadn’t missed when he’d first seen Dash on the Capitol lawn.

If he’d managed to get Dobie to drop the rifle before the sniper’s bullet had ended his short, hate-filled life.

Though Sara agreed with the choices Will had made, she hadn’t tried to rationalize his actions or smooth away the blame. She knew that Will had to get there on his own. Sara was familiar with all the different ways your best, most educated decision could result in the worst outcome. Sara had always carried around inside of her the memory of every patient she had ever lost. Now, Benjamin, Grace, Joy, Adriel, all of those little pieces of white confetti, had joined the unforgotten souls that lived inside her heart.

She looked at the clock by the bed.

10:21 a.m.

They were supposed to meet her family for lunch in two hours. Sara had sequestered herself at Will’s for too long. She had wanted to hide from the minute-by-minute deluge of information, that her father continuously watched on the news.

Eddie was obsessed with learning more about Dash. About Gwen and Martin Novak. About the surviving brothers who were still spreading their message of racist, misogynist hate to any reporter who would hold up a microphone to their ugly mouths.

Forty-six dead at the Capitol. Ninety-three wounded. All of the survivors had been infected with botulism by the coated bullets. All of them had been infused with HBAT.

Even Dash.

Fortunately, there had been no infections from the Air Chef meals. The aluminum food containers were being loaded onto the conveyor belts when the FBI had raided the facility. Testing had shown that botulism coated the bottoms of each tray. Had the food been processed and loaded onto planes, every passenger who ate a meal on any of the thousands of flights out of Hartsfield would’ve been infected with the toxin.

The assumption was that Michelle Spivey had been taken to the airport that day so that Dash could blow up the country’s main strategic stockpile of HBAT. Without the antitoxin, there would have been countless deaths. Botulism could be a slow-moving, unpredictable toxin. As Dash had said, even the historians would not be able to arrive at a final tally. Sara could only imagine how furious Dash had been when Michelle had collapsed just yards away from completing the mission.

Or maybe he hadn’t been furious.

Maybe by the time they had driven Michelle to Emory Hospital, Dash had persuaded himself that the HBAT didn’t matter. He had two bombs ready to go. He had a hospital deck with staff and visitors streaming in and out.

Brothers, let’s go with plan B.

Sara’s main question had been about how Dash had obtained a vial of HBAT in the first place. Gwen had recognized the antitoxin, which meant that Dash had known about it, which meant that they were probably keeping an emergency supply in case they got infected. The substance was highly controlled, only available to civilians through Homeland Security or the CDC.

Beau Ragnersen had finally provided the answer. The HBAT had come from his personal cache.

Under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi military had produced 19,000 liters of botulinum toxin. 10,000 liters of the toxin had gone into aerial bombs, artillery shells and warheads. They had tested the neurotoxin’s effectiveness on Iranian prisoners of war. HBAT had been standard issue in US military push packs ever since. Beau Ragnersen had smuggled one home from Afghanistan as a souvenir. In addition to the antitoxin, he had treatments for everything from chlorine poisoning to anthrax. Though Beau denied having any involvement with the IPA, the fact that he had handed over the antitoxin was enough circumstantial evidence to tie him to multiple counts of murder in the first degree and conspiracy to commit two acts of domestic terrorism.

Amanda believed it was only a matter of time before he started telling the truth.

Will believed that Beau’s nihilism would kick in and he’d ride out the death penalty.

Sara rolled onto her back. She stared up at the ceiling. The faces of the sick children from the bunkhouse swarmed into her vision. Benjamin, Adriel, Martha, Jenny, Sally. The infected eyes, the running noses, the hacking coughs. They would’ve likely all survived the measles outbreak, albeit with lasting scars.

Sara wondered when Gwen had decided that it wasn’t worth trying to save them. As with Tommy, the woman wouldn’t want to waste supplies on lost causes. The suitcase in her car was filled with medications she’d taken from the bunkhouse. There were more white dresses in the trunk, along with a list of hotels between North Georgia and Arizona, where Gwen had apparently been planning to meet Dash once the Message had been delivered. New Camp. New brothers and sisters. New children.

If Gwen had let herself think about it, she would’ve known that Dash was finished with her. The constant child-bearing, the lack of medical care and nutritional support, the relentless demands of either breastfeeding or carrying a new baby for so many years, had depleted her body of the ability to give Dash more children.

Sister, let’s go with plan B.

Sara would not revel in Gwen’s death, but neither could she mourn it. Finally, after a lifetime of abuse at the hands of Martin Novak and then Dash, after turning that abuse around on her own children, on the entire Camp, Gwen had run out of ways to supply the men in her life.

Esther. Charity. Edna. Grace. Hannah. Joy. Adriel.

All of the children at the Camp had been autopsied. All of them had shown signs of sexual and physical abuse.

Sara covered her eyes with her hands. She was plagued by her own ifs. If she had realized sooner that the children were being abused. If she had connected the droopy eyelids, the paralysis, the slurred speech. If she had confronted Gwen. If she had stopped Dash. If she had managed to break into the greenhouse and destroy the botulism before anyone else could be infected.

If-if-if.

Sara had known about botulism since childhood, but only in an abstruse way. Cathy canned vegetables every summer. Tessa and Sara had been more interested in arguing over who got to read the thermometer than asking why the temperature mattered.

In medical school, Sara had been made aware that hypotonia, colloquially called Floppy Baby Syndrome, could be a sign of infant botulism, but the symptoms—lethargy, difficulty feeding, an altered cry, a descending flaccid paralysis—were difficult to translate onto adults.

The only other time Sara could recall learning about the neurotoxin was when she’d read a paper in the Journal of American Medical Examiners. A prison inmate had died with no obvious cause. Guards had found a bag of pruno under his bunk. The prison wine had been fermented by combining a potato, a handful of hard candy, and a sock with a piece of bread inside. The sealed bag and the low temperature had created botulism.

Will’s dog barked in the kitchen. The sound echoed down the two feet of hallway to the bedroom. Sara could hear Betty tapping her head against the flap in the dog door. This was normal morning behavior. The Chihuahua used the door to come into the house, but she refused to use it to go out. She would headbutt the flap until Will or Sara got up and opened the door.

Betty barked again.

Sara closed her eyes. Tiny pieces of white confetti floated across her eyelids.

She got out of bed. She opened the door for Betty. The kitchen TV was on, but muted.