Chapter 8 - The Cornered Predator
The arrest of Jonathan Duncan did not conclude with the dignified click of handcuffs in the sanctuary.
As the federal marshals maneuvered him through the narthex toward the heavy double doors leading to the granite portico, the reality of his total, catastrophic annihilation finally punctured the narcissistic armor that had protected him his entire life.
He realized what was waiting outside.
Outside on Commonwealth Avenue, the sound was not the polite murmur of wedding guests; it was the roar of twenty-four news vans, the thrumming chop of two television news helicopters hovering over the Back Bay skyline, and the flashing strobe lights of six Boston Police cruisers blocking traffic from Arlington to Berkeley.
Jonathan stopped dead in the vestibule, planting his feet against the heavy coir matting.
“No,” he snarled, his body going rigid. “Not out the front. Take me through the rectory! Take me through the private garage!”
“You don't get the executive entrance today, Mr. Duncan,” the lead marshal said, shoving him forward with a heavy forearm against his spine.
With a sudden, berserk surge of strength, Jonathan twisted his shoulders, using the weight of his broad frame to drive the marshal sideways into the stone baptismal font that stood in the corner of the vestibule.
The heavy lead-crystal bowl of holy water shattered on the floor, sending five gallons of water splashing over the limestone flags.
The second marshal reached for his taser, but Jonathan, his hands still cuffed behind his back, used his head like a battering ram, slamming his forehead directly into the officer’s face. The marshal’s nose gave way with a wet, sickening crunch; he stumbled backward, clutching his face as blood sprayed through his fingers.
For four seconds, Jonathan Duncan was loose inside the vestibule.
He didn't run for the street. He turned back toward the sanctuary.
His eyes were completely blown out, the pupils swallowing the hazel irises until his eyes looked like two holes drilled into a skull. His forehead was split where he had headbutted the marshal, blood pouring down over his left eye, coating his cheek in a jagged crimson mask.
He saw me standing at the top of the chancel steps, flanked by Diane Albright and Clara.
“You think you won?” he roared, charging down the center aisle like a wounded bull, his patent shoes slipping on the wet trail of holy water he had dragged into the church. “You think you walk away with my money, you miserable little bitch? I will spend every dollar I have left to buy your skin! You will never sleep! You will never leave a room without looking behind you! I will have you cut into—”
He never finished the threat.
From the sixth pew, where he had been sitting in silence since the unmasking began, stepped Marcus Vance.
Marcus was my older brother—a forty-four-year-old master sergeant in the Massachusetts State Police who had served two tours with the 10th Mountain Division in Kandahar. He had spent the last eleven months playing the role of the intimidated, small-town brother-in-law, enduring Jonathan’s condescending jokes about state trooper salaries with his jaw clenched so hard he had cracked two molars.
Marcus didn't draw his service weapon.
He simply stepped into the center aisle, planted his combat-shined boots on the marble, and met Jonathan Duncan’s charge with a textbook, lead-foot front kick delivered with two hundred and ten pounds of bone, muscle, and steel-toed boot directly into Jonathan’s diaphragm.
The sound of the impact was like a wet carpet being beaten with a wooden baseball bat.
*THWACK.*
The air exploded from Jonathan’s lungs in a high, wheezing whistle.
His forward momentum stopped instantly; his body folded inward around Marcus’s boot like a pocketknife before he was launched backward three yards, landing flat on his back in the center aisle, his head bouncing off the stones.
He lay there, gasping like a carp on a dock, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly as his diaphragm spasmed, unable to draw air.
Marcus stepped over him, looking down with an expression of cold, professional disgust.
He adjusted the cuffs of his service uniform.
“That was for the broken shoulder, you son of a bitch,” Marcus said softly.
The two federal marshals, one with his nose streaming blood, rushed down the aisle and dropped onto Jonathan with three hundred and eighty pounds of combined weight, their knees driving into his thighs and kidney area with administrative ruthlessness.
Within forty seconds, they had dragged him to his feet, secured a canvas spit-hood over his bleeding head, and hauled him backward through the heavy oak doors into the glaring November daylight.
When the doors opened, the sound from Commonwealth Avenue rushed into the cathedral like the roar of the Atlantic hitting a seawall:
*“Mr. Duncan! Did you embezzle from the maritime pension fund?”*
*“Jonathan! Is it true Clara Duncan was found alive in Switzerland?”*
*“Look over here! Look at the cameras!”*
The flashes from fifty high-speed press cameras flickered through the open doorway like a summer lightning storm, illuminating the spit-hooded scion of Massachusetts royalty as he was shoved, head-first, into the steel cage of an unmarked federal transport van.
Inside the church, the silence returned.
It was not the reverent, holy silence Jonathan had purchased with his foundation grant.
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It was the silence of a battlefield after the artillery has ceased firing, when the smoke begins to clear and the survivors look down at the ground to see what has been lost, what has been saved, and who is still left standing.
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