Vicki Hinze - [War Games 04]

by Kill Zone (epub)

Hardheaded. “The point is he has no emotional refuge right now,” Morgan said. “When things are bad at work, we cope by focusing on our home lives. When we’re in hell at home, we find solace at work.”

  “That’s my point.” Taylor Lee lifted a hand. “You could have offered him solace.”

  Morgan tossed that suggestive comment right back in the form of a glare. “A devastated man with no refuge doesn’t need your damn games, okay?”

  “Men always need games,” she countered. “They love them.”

  Outrageous. “Why are we having this conversation? It’s absurd,” Morgan said, too tired to bother hiding her exasperation. “And you’re engaged, and you’re going to marry … this one, remember?” The guy’s name had slipped her mind again.

  “Rick,” Taylor Lee said pointedly, her pout now genuine. “So you’re telling me you didn’t try to seduce Jackson Stern or even notice his looks?”

  Morgan rolled her eyes. She’d noticed. “We were a little preoccupied talking about his dead sister-in-law and his brother being accused of her murder.” Morgan took off down the corridor back toward the conference room. “I can’t believe you.”

  “What?” Taylor Lee seemed genuinely clueless and irked by Morgan’s objections.

  “Don’t pull that with me. I know you, remember?”

  Taylor Lee shot her a pointed look. “And I know you and what you’re thinking. So don’t pull that above-it-all crap with me.”

  “I never claimed to be above anything.”

  “Good thing.” Taylor Lee laughed, warm and husky. “You think he’s hot.”

  “You’re hopeless. I swear you are.” Morgan lifted a hand. “He’s grieving in the bowels of hell, and you’re talking about his body and me seducing him? Don’t you see? That’s sick.”

  “Like hell it is,” Taylor Lee hotly defended herself. “Seduction is a great comfort to someone grieving. It’s affirmation that they’re alive. I’ve heard you say that several times.”

  “Not when you don’t know the person. We’re strangers, for pity’s sake.”

  “Strangers can comfort.”

  “They shouldn’t. Not with sex.” Morgan could smack her. “There’s a level of intimacy required to offer comfort that lasts past orgasm—intimacy that doesn’t exist between strangers.”

  “That’s absurd. Great sex is great sex,” she said with a shrug and a huff. “And I always find great sex comforting.”

  “Intimacy and sex can be as different as apples and oranges. But you would see them as being the same,” Morgan snipped, and then lifted a hand to halt Taylor Lee’s comeback. “Listen, just drop it. I’m exhausted, and I’m not in the mood for sparring or nonsense. When it comes to men, you’ve got a one-track mind.”

  “That is so not true,” Taylor Lee protested, flicking her hair back over her shoulder. “I’m adept at multitasking.”

  Raw to the bone, Morgan ignored her, walked into the conference room, and sat down at the table. Commander Drake was already seated in a chair at the head of it. Jazie had changed from green to blue scrubs and had somehow managed to shower; she smelled of soap. Twisting her long blond curls into a ponytail at her nape, she claimed a chair on the commander’s left, directly across the table from Morgan. With a healthy yawn, Taylor Lee dropped into the chair beside Morgan.

  Steaming cups of coffee had been placed on the stainless conference table. The small room brimmed with the rich smell of it. Morgan glanced down at her watch. Nearly six-thirty. Feeling the weight of pulling an all-nighter, she reached for her mug and then took a steamy sip. Strong and black, the coffee burned her throat going down.

  “Jazie?” Commander Drake blew into her white cup, cooling the coffee. “Let’s hear your impressions report on the body.”

  “Only two words came to me, Commander,” Jazie said. “Help Bruce.”

  Frowning, Drake set down her cup. “As in, help him because he had snapped and killed her? Or help him because she sensed danger for him and couldn’t do anything about it?”

  “I wish I knew, but I don’t.” Jazie frowned her frustration about that. “All I heard from her were those two words. So there was no context to weigh—”

  “Did you hear anything from anyone else?” the commander cut in, picking up on Jazie’s pseudo-cagy specificity. Sometimes the key hid in asking the right question.

  “I heard plenty,” Jazie confessed, blowing it all off. “But that’s normal. It’s a morgue, Commander.”

  Drake hooked the handle of her mug. “Did you hear anything else from anyone that’s of interest to this case?”

  Jazie shook her head. “Just Laura’s ‘help Bruce,’ but the old man they found under the bridge …”

  The commander nodded. “The John Doe?”

  “Yes.” Jazie’s face flushed, and she laced her fingers atop the table. “He, um, doesn’t know he’s dead yet.”

  Drake’s eyes stretched wide. Morgan held off a groan, wishing Jazie had kept that to herself. Some things just couldn’t be explained to those who hadn’t experienced them. “His name is Paul Dodd,” Morgan said, at the same time Jazie did, to diffuse focus and then deliberately turned Drake’s attention back to Laura. “Help Bruce.” The same two words Morgan had intuited. She’d naturally assumed they had been Laura’s words, but now Morgan had doubts. Had she intuited them from Laura or from Jazie? Either of them could have left the oral imprint. “Was it Laura’s voice, Jaz?”

  The question surprised her. “I … I don’t know. I never heard her voice. I thought so—seemed natural—but I can’t say it was for a fact.”

  Morgan nodded. “Same here.”

  “So is that it, then?” the commander asked Jazie. When she nodded, the commander turned her gaze. “Taylor Lee?”

  “She fought hard, Commander.” Taylor Lee set down her cup. It clinked against the metal table. “I picked up on three attackers, all male. Every image I saw was consistent with what I observed at Laura and Bruce’s residence.” The S.A.T. team had walked through the Stern home before the mission the previous evening.

  “Consistent?” the commander asked for clarification. “But not the same.”

  “I can’t say with certainty. What I saw in the morgue was splintered,” Taylor Lee added. “That happens a lot in violent deaths. But Bruce did do everything humanly possible to get Laura to leave him. That was clear.”

  Jotting notes down on a yellow legal pad that would never leave the conference room, the commander paused. “What exactly was splintered?”

  “He did get physical with her.” Taylor Lee snagged the coffee pot from the counter, then refilled the cups. When she set it back on its warming pad, she went on. “But I think he just grabbed her by the upper arms, like you would if you were trying to get someone to hear and listen to you, or if you wanted to force them to understand whatever you were trying to tell them. It was more like that than him trying to hurt her.” Taylor Lee paused a long second. A range of emotions chased each other across her face. “I don’t believe he actually hit her, and I know he wasn’t with the men who killed her. He had nothing to do with … No, let me put it this way. He didn’t do it.”

  Morgan stiffened. Taylor Lee had alluded to Bruce being somehow involved or connected, but mindful of Drake’s grief over her husband’s murder, she was trying to tread lightly, and frankly she didn’t have a lot of experience at it. Taylor Lee typically spoke the truth as she saw it and let the chips plunk down wherever they may. Interesting that she felt protective of Commander Drake.

  Drake picked up on it, too, but let it pass without comment. “How do you know he didn’t commit the murder?” she asked Taylor Lee.

  “When the men attacked her, Laura was in bed alone.” Her hand at her throat, Taylor Lee gently massaged her skin. Though she didn’t sense or feel events like Morgan did, her visuals could be horrific, and of course she reacted emotionally to them. “Bruce wasn’t there.”

  “Wasn’t in bed, or the room, or in the house?”

  “In the
house. I can’t explain how I know that, Commander.” Taylor Lee shrugged. “I just know he wasn’t there.”

  She noted it on the legal pad. “Anything else you want to add?” A frown settled in, wrinkling the skin between her eyebrows. “Perhaps something in the way of physical evidence we can use to save his ass?”

  Taylor Lee looked at Morgan and then back to the boss, her expression deadpan. “I’m not sure his ass should be saved.”

  Surprise rippled over Drake’s face. “But you just said that he didn’t kill her.”

  “That’s right. He wasn’t there. The three men she fought murdered her. Well, technically, one of the three did.” Taylor leaned forward. “But in the last couple of months Bruce inflicted a lot of pain on Laura. A lot of pain,” she repeated for emphasis.

  “You said he didn’t hit her.” Drake’s frown deepened, carving lines from nose to mouth along the sides of her face. “You’re confusing the hell out of me, Taylor Lee.”

  “Sorry. I’m tired, and it’s showing.” She straightened in her chair and chose her words carefully. “Bruce inflicted a lot of emotional pain on Laura,” she said, her voice tight with disdain. “You know that can be worse than physical abuse, Commander.”

  Morgan forced herself not to groan. That comment would go over like a lead balloon.

  Drake dropped her voice and sent Taylor Lee a warning look that Morgan prayed the woman didn’t ignore. “In the last couple of months,” Drake said, “at any time Laura Stern wanted to walk out and leave Bruce Stern, she was free to do so. You said yourself he did everything he could to encourage her to go. She chose to stay, and that, in my humble opinion, makes an inarguable statement about whether or not his ass should be saved. Obviously, Laura considered him worth saving. She hung around. Even now her message to us is to help Bruce. That should carry enormous weight, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, ma’am, it should.” Taylor Lee reached for her coffee cup and wisely kept her judgments and any further opinions of Bruce to herself.

  Morgan breathed a little easier and let the tension tightening her muscles seep away. Sally Drake was a dangerous woman to piss off. She wore her power lightly, but if she felt the need to wield it, she did so with a master’s ease. And she had a lot of it to wield.

  “Is that it?” the commander asked Taylor Lee. “Or is there something else you want to address?”

  “No, that’s it. But I do have one question.” Taylor Lee sat back and thought through what she was about to say, clearly not eager to stomp on another of the commander’s hot buttons anytime soon. “Do we know if Kunz’s assassins turned up at Magnolia Beach harbor?”

  “It’s possible, but we can’t verify it yet,” Sally Drake said with a nip to her inner cheek. “Too many tourists down there, confusing the scene. As of fifteen minutes ago, the marina’s still packed with people watching the remnants of the tropical storm.”

  Magnolia Beach was a small community, but during tourist season, it was a madhouse. Many of the visitors had never experienced a storm or hurricane and were unhealthily curious.

  Bad luck for the S.A.S.S., but with the harbor crawling with strangers, there was no possibility of the task force identifying Kunz’s men on the boardwalk or in the marina itself. A lot of vessels would be seeking safe harbor from the storm. So unless the assassins pulled an overt attempt to kill the man standing in for Jackson, odds were they wouldn’t be spotted. “The crowds down there work against the assassins just as much as they work against us,” Morgan said. “People tend to notice high-powered rifles. It’s not something most people see routinely.”

  “Yes,” Drake agreed, then set her pen down and folded an arm over the pad. “Two forty-eight took a lot of photos while the Sunrise entered the harbor. Hundreds of them. Darcy is reviewing the digitals now, cross-matching people on site with those on Intel’s known and suspected G.R.I.D. operatives’ lists.”

  “Mmm.” Jazie sighed. “Huge effort.”

  Drake disputed it. “It’ll take her a couple hours.”

  “Ah, I forgot,” Jazie said. “Having total recall certainly has its perks.”

  “Yes, it does. The computer is running a cross-match, too, to double check,” Drake said. “Frankly, it’s redundant. Darcy doesn’t miss. If she gets anything significant, she’ll fax it to your office, Morgan.”

  Morgan nodded, waiting to be sure Taylor Lee was done, and then addressed the commander. “Could you clear up a discrepancy for me?”

  “I’ll try.” She motioned for Morgan to go ahead.

  An uneasiness crept through her for some unknown reason, and Morgan twisted on her seat. “In the pre-mission briefing, we were told that Bruce had been back home from Iraq for three months. When Laura visited my office, she also said he’d been back home three months.”

  “That’s correct, Morgan,” Sally Drake said. “He returned from Iraq in May.”

  “I’m afraid that our information and Laura’s was incorrect,” Morgan said, her stomach hollow from all that truth implied. “Jackson was with Bruce in Iraq just two days before he returned stateside—”

  “I don’t see the conflict.” The commander lifted her hand, calling the question. The pen in her hand glinted in the light.

  “Jackson says Bruce returned home three weeks ago. They were together in Iraq two days before he returned.”

  The color leached out of Sally Drake’s face. Body double. Body double. Kunz …

  “Oh, man.” Taylor Lee groaned. “This sounds really bad.”

  Jazie held off commenting, but her normally sunny expression sobered.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Commander?” Morgan asked, knowing the answer. Her stomach felt so tight her ribs ached.

  Sally Drake’s color still hadn’t returned. “It’s possible we have an active Bruce Stern operative,” she said. “G.R.I.D. involvement would explain him seemingly being in two places at once. No one other than Kunz has demonstrated the ability to substitute a man who could fool his wife …”

  “Maybe he wasn’t fooling her,” Morgan said, aware that Jazie and Taylor Lee were absorbing everything like sponges and struggling to make sense of the conversation. “Maybe that’s why there was such strife between them. Jackson was shocked by that.”

  “Maybe so.” Stiffening, Drake hissed in a breath of air. “According to Joan Foster, we’ve got over fifty unidentified cases that she worked on while she was Kunz’s captive. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have total recall. We’d be foolish to deny that it’s highly possible Bruce and not Jackson was the victim.”

  “Of what?” Taylor Lee asked, now out of patience. “Yes, of what?” Jazie added, just as eager to understand all of it.

  Morgan ignored them. She had to; dread and fear had burst inside her and burned her throat. Bruce held a high-level job, worked with biological warfare in sensitive antiterrorism sectors. The ramifications of an active body double working in Bruce’s place for an undetermined length of time could be staggering—a dream come true for Kunz and G.R.I.D., but horrific for the U.S. and for Bruce. No one in the chain of command, from the S.A.S.S. to the president, could publicly reveal a thing about body doubles as evidence to clear Bruce of any wrongdoing—even if the S.A.T. could prove it, which would be next to impossible.

  “I realize we’ve entered a highly classified zone here, but is it possible for us to avoid the cryptic aspect of this discussion?” Taylor Lee let out a sigh of pure frustration and propped an elbow on the table. “The images are senseless and making me crazy,” she complained. “It’s like I’m stuck in a room where everyone is speaking some lost language known only to ancient wise men or something. What are you two talking about?”

  Morgan held the commander’s gaze, waiting to see if she would disclose their specific suspicions and unwilling to bet either way.

  “Commander, please?” Jazie begged. “What I’m hearing is as confusing for me as what Taylor Lee’s seeing is to her. How can we do our jobs if you’re not willing to give us what
we need to interpret things accurately?”

  “That’s a fair question, Jazie,” Drake said, then glanced from Morgan to each of them. “Kunz uses body doubles, like Saddam Hussein and his sons did. Like many do.”

  “Okay. Hussein had a dozen or so, didn’t he?” Jazie asked.

  “We know this, Commander,” Taylor Lee said. “Remember, we consulted on the mission with Captains Amanda West and Mark Cross. His double was exposed by eating peanuts. He, unlike Mark, wasn’t allergic to them.”

  “Then you remember that there are other doubles inserted in highly classified, sensitive positions, ones we’ve yet to identify.”

  “Joan’s doubles, you mentioned earlier … Holy cow!” Taylor popped the table. “You think Bruce Stern was doubled?”

  “Oh, my goodness.” Jazie gasped. “That would make sense of the discrepancy in his return home and of the stress between him and Laura.”

  “It would,” Morgan agreed.

  Taylor Lee swiped her hand down her face, taking the possibility in. “So … the double wanted Laura to leave him before she noticed all the small details a wife would notice—and Laura realized the man in her home who was supposed to be her husband wasn’t Bruce?” Taylor frowned. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m considering it possible,” Morgan said. She wasn’t ready to accept it as fact … yet.

  “Well, if this is so and Bruce was doubled, then who do we have in the brig?” Jazie asked. “Bruce, or his body double?”

  Sally Drake’s frown cut the grooves in her face even deeper. Her elbow propped on the table, she cupped her chin in her hand. “That’s an excellent question.”

  “One we’d better answer as soon as possible. We can’t know for sure through traditional means, Commander. Kunz has substituted DNA before,” Morgan explained to Jazie and Taylor Lee, who hadn’t been fully briefed on his tactics during earlier consults.

  “Oh, shit.” Taylor Lee caught herself too late.

  “Yeah,” the commander said, letting her off the hook.

  Morgan went back to their priority. “If Bruce was doubled—which certainly would explain some of Laura’s concerns—then it could be that Kunz switched the double out at some point and reinserted Bruce into his own life.” The hair on her neck stood up. “If he did, then the question we really need answered now is when it happened.”