“They’re only going to see through this if they’re looking in the right direction,” she said.

Then she started forward.

“The key is to make sure they aren’t.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Two

Fish in a barrel,” State Detective Marsh grunted as he sidled next to Zack Lindwell at the entrance to the monument, while the second officer—a BPD homicide detective who’d accompanied the puggish statie from the crime scene at the warehouse—remained a step behind. “You might want to stay out of the way, Lindsy. Wouldn’t want you creasing that pretty suit if things get physical.”

Zack wasn’t sure which was bothering him more, the eager look on Marsh’s face or the way the man’s right hand rested on his sidearm, still thankfully holstered beneath his jacket. Zack doubted the rough-and-tumble cop would be able to restrain himself much longer. The stocky man’s deep-set eyes flashed with violent anticipation—or more accurately, anticipation of violence. No matter that they were in a very public setting—a goddamn tourist spot on the Freedom Trail—surrounded by innocent civilians, or that the suspects included a young woman with no prior arrests and an ex-con whose record, though admittedly long, showed no indication that he’d ever carried anything more dangerous than a pocketknife. It was clear that Marsh intended to bring this case to a rapid conclusion, and if bullets needed to fly to get him there, so much the better.

To be fair, Marsh had just come from a crime scene that included two young men lying dead on the floor, victims of some gruesome, paralytic agent. And that dead fence with the missing fingernails was now slowly bloating in a cabinet at the morgue. Marsh was under a fair amount of pressure to make a collar—and by some stroke of fortune, the opportunity had just been handed to him on a silver platter.

Zack still hadn’t decided whether they’d just gotten ridiculously lucky, or if they were overestimating their quarry. His tech team at the Boston Bureau in Chelsea had barely had time to begin their phishing operation on Hailey’s phone when a source at the BPD had called him with the news: although Marsh hadn’t gotten around to alerting him, the two fugitives had been spotted on surveillance footage coming out of an Orange Line subway train at a stop in Charlestown, and then had been picked up on foot crossing past three more cameras on their way to Bunker Hill. As a final nail in their proverbial coffin, a camera mounted on the museum across the street had caught them in real time entering the monument itself, and as of that moment, they’d yet to reemerge.