#TeaserTuesday: The Truth

 

When Fox laid down Waverly’s photo, she gulped audibly and turned her face away. “Enough,” she said, and put a hand up to shield her peripheral vision.

“You’re the Deputy Director of Forensics, aren’t you?” Ghost spoke for the first time. Fox sent him a look that warned caution, but didn’t cut him off. “You’re not going to get queasy over crime scene photos, are you? Has it been too long since you were in the field? Or were you never qualified for the job in the first place?”

According to the file Mike had given them, Sawyer’s rise to directorship had been meteoric, especially considering her low test scores as a trainee.

“Or,” Fox said, “is it harder to look at these images when they’re images of your friends?”

Her head whipped back around at that, threads of silver hair flying loose from her tight bun to cling at the sweat-damp skin of her temples and forehead. Her eyes were huge. “What? I don’t – these aren’t my friends.” But she was too rattled to sound contemptuous, her breathing too quick to sell the lie.

Fox pulled out a digital audio recorder, clicked it on, and set it on the table, just out of her reach. Folded his arms. “Tell us about Abacus. About how you like to buy and sell young women.”

She stared at him a moment, and then her lashes flickered, and her eyes welled, and her lip trembled. She broke, and Ghost tipped a mental hat to Fox’s judgement call on approaching her first.

Somehow, over the years, up to his eyeballs in enough crises and mundane worries alike to drink and smoke and stress himself into the hospital, he’d managed to amass the sort of talent and loyalty in a crew that could more than likely topple a small country, if they set their minds to it. The FBI had all their tech and their government money, but Ghost had the smartest, savviest killers in the country under his roof.

How many of those killers, he wondered, his own son included, would trust him once they learned the truth?

All the main players in this book are hiding something. Ghost's sin is perhaps the most egregious, but they're all in it "up to their eyeballs." 

I'm currently sitting at 34k words (102 6x9 book pages), which seems like alarmingly few, given what needs to happen, but the last two weeks have been very good story-mapping weeks, and I'm starting off this week with a clear vision of the scenes I want to use to get us to the finish line. I know it's been a difficult wait, but we're almost there! Thank you all for your patience.