“You want the truth, Kate, here it is. Here is your chance. The gate is open, Kate. Do you want to walk through?”

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

Phil Cavetti parked his car across from the blocked-off blue-shingled ranch in Orchard Park, New York, which was ablaze in flashing lights. He dropped his shield in front of a local cop guarding the taped-off walkway leading up to the front door. The cop waved Cavetti through. There was a doggie bed on the landing, and a little plaque nearby that read HOME OF CHOWDER. WORLD’S FAVORITE CANINE.

The door was open.

Stepping into the house, the first thing Cavetti saw was the outline on the floor of the first victim, Pamela Birnmeyer. She’d been an agent with the U.S. Marshals Service, out of the Warrants and Bonds Division, for six years. He’d met her once. She had a husband who taught computer science at a local college and a two-year-old at home. Probably why she’d put in for hazardous duty. Extra cash.

Cavetti swallowed a rush of bile. He hadn’t been to a fresh crime scene in years.

He followed the commotion into the kitchen. He had to avoid a couple of FBI crime-scene specialists who were kneeling, trying to lift shoe prints off the floor. The body of the second victim had been removed, but a bright scarlet smear was still visible on the white fridge where her body had crumpled to the floor.

The gnawing feeling in his gut returned.

Alton Booth met his eyes from across the room. The FBI agent nodded for Cavetti to come over.

“And just when you thought you were getting ready to retire…” the FBI man said with a cynical snort. He handed Cavetti a stack of black-and-white prints.

They made Cavetti sick to his stomach. In twenty-six years, he’d never dealt with anything like this. He’d never lost a witness. He’d never had an identity uncovered. He’d never, ever been penetrated.

Now this.

The woman had died from a nine-millimeter bullet to the brain, but that wasn’t what made him feel like a queasy rookie looking over his first grisly kill. It was her hands. He’d read about it in the report, but the pictures were worse. The palms were charred black. Both. From the burner on the stove. She’d been tortured, just as Maggie had been. One hand was all it would have taken for the killer to be certain she didn’t know a damned thing. But two, both palms-that was just for the sport.

“Least now I guess we have an idea what Maggie Seymour may have divulged.” Booth rolled his eyes.

Cavetti knew these people. The woman’s husband was more than just an asset in an investigation. Cavetti had placed him in his current identity twenty years ago. He’d watched him build a new life. Get married.

He felt responsible.

“What makes it worse is, I’m pretty sure the poor woman didn’t even know.” Cavetti sighed disgustedly. “She had no idea who her husband really was.” He handed back the photos. “Any leads?”

“Dry-cleaning truck,” Booth replied. “A woman across the street said one was parked in front of the house around the TOD last night. We found it at a closed water-treatment plant down the hill. The delivery kid took two in the chest. He was thrown in with the dress shirts and sheets. That totals five. Not including the pooch. So tell me”-the FBI man looked around-“who kills like this?”

Cavetti didn’t reply. They both knew the answer. The Russian mob. The drug cartels. Colombians.

“This Raab fellow.” Booth shook his head. “You starting to get the feeling we may have been duped?”

This wasn’t just Raab. Cavetti was sure. Raab wasn’t a killer. At least, not like this. Still, Raab led to Margaret Seymour. Maggie led to Mercado. Mercado led here.

Raab and Mercado.

Cavetti suddenly had a premonition about who might be next.

He handed the photos back to Booth. “You know how to reach me. Let me know if anything turns up.”

The FBI man smiled. “Seen enough? Where you headed?” he called after him.

“Blue Zone,” Cavetti answered. “That’s where the hell everyone else seems to be, right?”

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Kate listened to the whoosh of a late-night car driving in the rain on the street. The glow of the streetlamp outside her bedroom window had never seemed quite so bright. Her eyes were open. The clock on the table next to her bed read 3:10 A.M.

She couldn’t sleep.

Mercado’s question kept reverberating in her head. “The gate is open, Kate. Do you want to walk through?”

How could she deny it any longer?

Her father had been part of the Mercados. It had been his family, not just his brotherhood but his family-his real family-from birth. Fraternidad. His own father had been the head of it. He had kept this concealed from those he loved. If he ever really did love us. Now he was free to go after his brother for betraying him. Kate’s mother was dead. Her brother and sister were in hiding.

This kind of truth didn’t set anyone free.

Her mind kept coming back to the picture of the dark European-looking woman holding her infant son. Kate’s grandmother. They had come here from Colombia, not Spain. “For years, he has been my protector,” Mercado had said of her grandfather. The grandfather she thought had died in Spain decades ago. Now he had died. The old commitments were gone. It had sent her father on a journey of vengeance and reprisal, so vile, so unbelievable, that every time she thought about it, it felt like a fist in her abdomen. Their family had been sacrificed so her father could get inside the program.

Where his brother had been in hiding for twenty years.

Kate turned away from the window. What was it Margaret Seymour had told them? “I’m sort of a specialist in the Mercados.”

They had the same case agent.

Mercado’s story was true, Kate understood, no matter how it hurt to accept it. No matter how it made the past twenty years of their lives seem like a flimsy façade.

She saw it in his face. He knew about Rosa. He knew Kate’s true name. He had the matching half of the broken sun. Her father was alive. It no longer made Kate feel elated; it made her feel sick. She knew that it all had to be true.

We’re your family, Ben, not them. You have to choose.

Now she knew the meaning of those words. Su deber. His duty. What hurt as much as anything was that he had been lying to her all these years. To them all.

Kate sat up, her nightshirt cold with sweat. Next to her, Greg stirred. She didn’t know anymore what was right to do. Take everything she knew to Cavetti. The haunting picture she’d found-Ben and Mercado. What Howard had divulged. How her father had brought himself down. All that the old man had told her in the park.

Why?

WITSEC had never played straight with her. All along, they’d been protecting Mercado. All along, they knew his secret.

It was her father they were desperate to find.

At some point Kate drifted off to sleep-brief, fitful. She had a dream. Her father was in the gazebo where she first told him she wouldn’t be coming into the program. He seemed so distant there, so beaten. So small. His touch was tremulous and afraid.

When he turned to her, there was a malevolent glimmer in his eyes.

Kate’s eyes flashed open. The clock read 4:20. Her pillow was drenched with sweat. Her heart was beating like mad.

She had misjudged it, his reaction.

All along, Kate had thought it was simply shame pouring out. That was why he couldn’t look at her. A shame he’d never had to bear before. But that wasn’t what was on his face.

It was the face of the man from her flashback on the train. A nightmare from her childhood. Someone she’d never seen before. With his hand gripping her mother’s arm. A foreign glimmer in his eye.