“SHE WAS YOUR PARTNER’S WIFE?” AVERY ASKED, LEANING CLOSE TO Walt—a position she found herself in as she hung on every word of his story.

“My dead partner’s wife, yes,” Walt said, taking a needed swallow of rum. “That’s why she hadn’t returned my calls all week. She was busy dealing with her own tragedy—her husband’s death. She had no idea I was Jason’s partner or that I was the other agent who’d been shot. We were together for a year and she never told me she was married. She knew I worked in the New York field agency for the Bureau, but she never pressed me for details about my job. I always took it as sort of a separation of church and state. You know, let’s not talk about work. Let’s just enjoy each other’s company. But she didn’t want to know anything about my work because she didn’t want to know if I knew her husband.”

“What happened to you?” Avery asked in a hesitant voice. “What was your injury? It was the same thing that got your partner killed?”

“Jason and I were on a routine surveillance operation. We thought we were just in for another long night of taking photos and gathering intel on a suspected Al Qaeda cell. As we were watching the building across the street, a man in a ski mask approached the front of our van and opened fire. The bullets that found my body somehow managed to avoid all the important plumbing.”

“How close did they come?”

“Very. One pierced my heart.”

“My God, Walt. And Jason died?”

“He was gone before the ambulance arrived.”

“Who was the man? In the ski mask?”

“That’s the bitch of the story. He was an asterisk to the whole ordeal. The guy was a strung-out meth addict. We were watching the apartment building of a suspected Al Qaeda sympathizer, tracking his movements to see if we could link him to anyone important. The building across the street was running a meth lab. We had no idea, but the meth-heads caught wind of us and got nervous. So one of them walked outside and started shooting.”

Avery’s mouth hung open for a moment. “Absolutely nothing to do with the war on terror?”

“Nada.”

“Did you talk to her after the funeral? Meghan?”