One hundred and forty mile per hour winds were not something Maggie could relate to. Damage, however, was something she could.
Hurricane Isaac had already killed sixty people across the Caribbean. Within several hours it had gone from 145 mile per hour winds to 150. The storm was expected to hit Grand Cayman in a few hours. One million Cubans were said to have evacuated in anticipation of the monster hitting there on Sunday. Moving at only ten miles per hour, the hurricane was expected to enter the Gulf by Monday.
On every projected path Maggie had seen in the last several hours, Pensacola, Florida, was smack-dab in the middle. Charlie Wurth hadn’t been kidding when he told her they would be driving down into the eye of a hurricane. Consequently, there were no available flights to Pensacola. Tomorrow morning she was booked to fly to Atlanta where Charlie would pick her up and they would drive five hours to the Florida Panhandle. When she asked him what he was doing in Atlanta—his home was in New Orleans and his office in Washington, D.C.—he simply said, “Don’t ask.”
Wurth still had difficulty acting like a federal government employee. He came to the position of assistant deputy director of Homeland Security after impressing the right people with his tough but fair investigation of federal waste and corruption in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But Wurth, like Maggie, probably would never get used to the bureaucracy that came with the job.
Maggie knew she should be packing. She kept a bag with the essentials. She just needed to add to it. What did one pack for hurricane weather? Sensible shoes, no doubt. Her friend Gwen Patterson was always telling Maggie that she didn’t have the appropriate respect for shoes.
She glanced at the time. She’d need to call Gwen. She’d do that later. The foray with today’s killer was still too fresh in her mind and on her skin. Her friend the psychiatrist had a knack for reading between the lines, weighing pauses, and detecting even the slightest of cracks in Maggie’s composure. An occupational hazard, Gwen always said, and Maggie understood all too well.
The two women had met when Maggie was a forensic fellow at Quantico and Gwen a private consultant to the Behavioral Science Unit. Seventeen years Maggie’s senior, Dr. Gwen Patterson had the tendency to overlap maternal instincts into their friendship. Maggie didn’t mind. Gwen was her one constant. It was Gwen who was always there by Maggie’s side. It was Gwen propping her up during her long, drawn-out divorce; setting up vigil alongside Maggie’s hospital bed after a killer had trapped her in a freezer to die; sitting outside an isolation ward at Fort Detrick when Maggie’d been exposed to Ebola; and most recently Gwen was again by her side at Arlington National Cemetery when Maggie paid her last respects at her mentor’s gravesite.
Yet there were days like today when Maggie didn’t want to confront her own vulnerabilities. Nor did she want her friend worrying. Maggie knew her insomnia was not just the inability to fall asleep. It was the nightmares that jolted her awake. Visions of her brother Patrick handcuffed to a suitcase bomb. The image of her mentor and boss lying in a hospital bed, his skeletal body invaded with tubes and needles. Herself trapped inside an ice coffin. A takeout container left on the counter of a truck stop, seeping blood. Rows and rows of Mason jars filled with floating body parts.
The problem was that those nightmare images were not the creation of an overactive or fatigued imagination but, rather, were memories, snapshots of very real experiences. The compartments Maggie had spent years carefully constructing in her mind—the places where she locked away the horrific snapshots—had started to leak. Just like Gwen had predicted.
“One of these days,” her wise friend had warned, “you’re going to need to deal with the things you’ve seen and done, what’s been done to you. You can’t tuck them away forever.”
The cell phone startled both Maggie and Harvey this time. She patted him as she reached across his body to retrieve the phone. She wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Gwen’s voice.
“Maggie O’Dell.”
“Hey.”
Close. It was Gwen’s boyfriend, R. J. Tully, who happened to be Maggie’s partner. That was before the FBI buckled down on costs. Now they found themselves working singularly and assigned to very few of the same cases. However, Tully had been one of the contingency there today at the warehouse, one of half a dozen agents who witnessed Kunze’s kill shot.
“Thought I’d check to see if you’re okay.”
“I’m fine.” Too quick. She bit down on her lower lip. Would Tully call her on it? Gwen would. Before he had a chance to respond, she tried to change the subject. “I was just about to call Emma.”
“Emma?” Tully sounded like he didn’t recognize his daughter’s name.