“Erase all evidence,” Smith said, sweeping a hand around the room. “Then you would have to cut Daryn loose. Tell her she was rejected. Send her back out into the world, where she was afraid of Franklin Sanborn.”

Understanding gradually crept onto Sean’s face. “And then kill her. Faith and Department Thirty would get the blame.”

“Senator McDermott did a fine job reading his daughter’s impassioned letter on national television,” Smith said. “There she was, at the eleventh hour, trying to be reconciled to her father, only hours before her death. Now Department Thirty has been taken to the public, and so has its renowned Officer Kelly. McDermott can rant and rave about a federal government department out of control, a department that could have protected his darling daughter from terrorists, but chose not to. And look what happened to her! Your department will be dismantled. There will be Congressional hearings, and you’ll be the star witness. How’s our mutual friend, Director Conway, handling all this, by the way?”

Faith had to think for a moment, that Conway equaled Yorkton. “He can take care of himself, and the department,” she said. “You might be surprised.”

“It’ll take a lot for you and the department to overcome this,” Smith said. “But it won’t matter to me. I’ll be gone. I already have my next identities in place. No more David Corcoran of Evansville, Indiana. I hate to leave Franklin Sanborn behind, though. I wondered when you would make that connection.”

Faith felt a chill. She had never before felt that she could simply raise her weapon and destroy another human being. The man she had killed two years ago had been purely self-defense. He’d shot at her, and at others, and she’d simply shot back. This was different. Smith was, as far as she could tell, unarmed. She recalled that he usually preferred to stay away from weapons himself, leaving actual violence to his “subcontractors.” It would be easy to simply erase him from the face of the earth.

She raised the gun. She took aim at a spot on his chest.

Smith acted as if he didn’t have a gun aimed at him from less than five feet away. “But all of this, for all its beauty, wasn’t the coup de grace. You watched your brother’s destruction, saw a girl that you could have protected be killed, and saw the famous Department Thirty veil of secrecy peeled away on national television. Were you writhing in pain by then, Officer Kelly? I know how tough you can be, or think you can be, so I added an afterthought. It had taken you so long to develop the affair with Special Agent Hendler. It’s very hard for you to commit, isn’t it? You were never sure, and still he patiently waited for you. He was patient to the end, wasn’t he? Waiting for you to show up at his condominium. If you’d come a little sooner, you might have saved him. Don’t you think so?”

Faith began to circle the chair. It was the only furniture in the room, the only thing to break up the emptiness. “I will kill you right now,” she said. “This isn’t about Department Thirty or Daryn or anything else. It’s only about you and about me. And you finally pushed too far. When you killed Scott, made him get on his knees and shot him, that was it. You’ve taken everything I have, and I’m going to return the favor.”

Faith heard a low rumbling from outside, growing louder.

“Was he on his knees?” Smith said, following Faith with his eyes. “What a clever touch. Go ahead, shoot me. Send me straight to hell, not that I believe in such a thing. It won’t change the fact that your life is gone. You have nowhere to go, nothing to do. Everything you’ve worked for is in ruins. Everything. Killing me won’t bring any of it back. It just seals your own fate. So go ahead.”

“Wait a minute,” Sean said, his voice rising above the storm. “You didn’t know he was on his knees? You didn’t shoot Hendler? What about Daryn?”

“Oh, no,” Smith said. “I didn’t assist Daryn in her exit from this life. I avoid bloodshed if at all possible.”

“Then if you didn’t do it,” Sean said, “who did?”

“I did.”

Faith and Sean turned at the voice. Britt slowly descended the stairs into the living room.

THE TALL GIRL WITH THE STRINGY HAIR AND THE muscular build came down one step at a time, walking very slowly, cradling a sawed-off shotgun in her arms.

“I know how to use this,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t. You.” She gestured at Faith. “Drop it or I’ll blow a great big hole in you.”

Faith backed away from Smith. “Who are you?”

Britt looked at Sean. “You know who I am.”

“You were Daryn’s friend,” Sean said.

“What else?” Britt prodded.

“You loved her.”

Britt nodded as if satisfied. “You never did, that’s for sure. After you came along, she wanted you all the time and she didn’t want me so much anymore. She said it would be that way for a while. I thought it was all for The Cause.”

Faith still hadn’t dropped the Glock. “You…you loved Daryn McDermott?”

“I said drop it,” Britt said. “You think I’m nothing but a stupid whore? Well, I’m not. I’m worth more than any of you. Daryn showed me that I could be more. Now drop the gun!”

Faith bent over and gently put the pistol on the floor.

“You knew,” Sean said. “You knew about the tumor.”

Britt nodded. “She already had it when she came to Oklahoma City the first time. The doctors had just told her a couple of weeks before she left on her tour. She told me she’d be coming back, that she’d come back for me, that she had a plan. She told me about Sanborn.” She glanced at Sean. “She told me about you, too, that you’d be coming, and what to tell you when you got there.”

“When I found you at the motel,” Sean said, “you already knew. It was all part of the plan, for you to tell me about Daryn becoming an escort named Kat Hall, and how to find her. Even then-” He looked ill.

“As I told you,” Smith said, “everything from the moment you met Owens was part of the illusion. Go ahead, Britt. Tell the rest.”

“Daryn asked me…when the time came…if I would do it for her. She wanted me to.”

Sean’s hands were shaking badly. “I just remembered something. You told me you wanted to take her pain away. Out there on the deck, the first day we were here.”

Britt reached the foot of the stairs. “I did. I took away all her pain. She told me everything she wanted me to do. She told me to listen to Sanborn after she was gone, that listening to him would be just like listening to her.”

“So that day downtown,” Sean said, “you took my Jeep so you could implicate me in Daryn’s murder. I’d left my gun here in the house. You took it, you used it to kill Daryn, and left it along with her bloodstains in the Jeep.”

Britt nodded. “Uh-huh. She called me that night, after she’d done you one last time, so your come would be inside her. She wrote her dad a letter, all about The Cause. Then she called me. I took away her pain.”

“But why put her in the tree?” Sean said.

“That was to make people pay attention. And they did, didn’t they?”

“You put her there yourself?”

Britt nodded with a perverse pride. “Sanborn had already timed the security guard, to see how long he took on his rounds. I had twenty-five minutes. I’d already taken Daryn’s pain. She’d kissed me and thanked me before I did it. But I think she was scared too, at the very end. It was one thing to come up with an idea, and another to actually know someone was going to shoot you. But I told her I loved her before I pulled the trigger. I think that helped her. I think she was at peace.”

“The tree,” Sanborn prompted, as if he were bored.

“Right,” Britt said. “I’m strong, and Daryn was a tiny little thing. I put the rope around her neck while we were still in the car, put her over my shoulder, and carried her to the tree. It was the middle of the night-there was no one around, just the guard, and he was on the other side. I lifted Daryn up, let her feet dangle, and wrapped the other end of the rope around the tree. Then I just drove away. I even had seven minutes to spare. I took the Jeep and parked it at Southeast High School. That’s not far from where I work. I knew someone would find it there. Then I walked up the street to the Oasis, back to my regular room.”