Epilogue
A woman sits alone at a desk in a deserted room,
poring over the files spread open before her. It is nearly dawn and
she has worked through the night, living only in the world
described before her. She has spent hours now, her thoughts caught
in a dirty abandoned house on the banks of the Delaware River years
before. She can almost smell the whiskey sweat of fear radiating
off the men gathered there. She has gone through it in her mind
over and over. One drug dealer, also a murderer. Two police
officers, one also a victim. Guns. Bullets. Death. Betrayal.
Greed.
What else was in that room?
She shuffles the papers once more, rereading a
statement, then checking the report of the crime scene
investigators. She stares at the photos of a grime-encrusted wall,
the flowered wallpaper peeling off in strips, pockmarked by bullet
holes.
Something is wrong and she will not sleep until
she finds it.
That’s it, she thinks at last, tapping a
photograph with her index finger, feeling the truth in her epiphany
as it flashes through her mind. Too many bullets. Too many bullets
for two dead men to have fired.
She knew then what had happened.
Gonzales would want to block the truth.
But the truth was that Kevin Fahey had been a
clean cop. And she owed it to him to make sure that the world knew
it, too.
She would not let Gonzales stop her. She could
not.
At the very least, the dead deserved the
truth.