Breakwater

by Carla Neggers

  He remembered what was on his Breakwater résumé. “Vern and I did a few things in Venezuela.”

  “Really? When?”

  “Over the winter.”

  “I was at Justice until January. I know a bit about Latin American kidnappings.”

  That would figure, Huck thought. “Sweet pea, the people Vern and I rescued didn’t want the U.S. Department of Justice knowing what had gone down. It’s over. The way I live, last winter’s ancient history.”

  “What have you been doing since?”

  “Looking for work.”

  “So,” she said, “basically you’re a mercenary.”

  Suddenly, Huck didn’t want to lie to her. He’d been lying to everyone for months, for good reason, but the constant deception took its toll.

  Yet, he couldn’t tell her the truth.

  “Yeah. Basically I am.”

  He parked behind her Saab. The temperature had dropped farther, with just a few rays of sunlight breaking through the gray clouds pushing in from the west. Quinn started to take off the fleece, but Huck touched her upper arm. “Keep it. You can return it another time.”

  “Thank you for your help.”

  “Anytime.”

  He got out of the Rover and followed her to her side door. Yesterday, he’d paid very little attention to the cottage. She’d obviously worked hard on it, kept it fun—nothing about the place was uptight, especially for a woman whose job it was to assess and analyze international criminal networks and the threats they presented.

  “How long have you owned your cottage?” he asked her.

  “About two years. I love it.” She turned into the wind, looking out at the cove, the water gray now under the clouds. “Even after yesterday.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Breakwater—it’s the most beautiful spot, isn’t it? And yet now…” She kept her gaze on the water, not looking at him directly. “It was strange seeing all you bodyguard types among the lilacs and azaleas.”

  “Wait’ll they’re in bloom. We’ll look even more out of place.”

  She lifted her eyes to him. “Yesterday couldn’t have been easy for you, either. I hope you get a chance to catch your breath.”

  “Rescuing women with borderline hypothermia is kind of relaxing.”

  “I wasn’t even close—”

  “You were close.”

  She held her ground. “And you didn’t rescue me.”

  No, he probably hadn’t rescued her. Huck wondered if she knew just how much of a risk she’d taken in coming to Breakwater—and never mind the hypothermia.

  “Not that I’m not grateful for the ride,” she added quickly.

  When she pushed her door open, he saw that she’d left it unlocked. “Quinn—”

  She turned to him. “It’s okay. I forgot. I’ll lock up when I leave.” She smiled, a hint of real amusement in her eyes. “You can relax, Mr. Bodyguard. I’m used to being on my own.”

  Her smile, bright against her pale skin, and that spark of humor rocked Huck right to his toes. He’d have to steel himself next time he saw a smile coming his way. “Listen…” He paused, getting his feet back under him. “Oliver Crawford is a charismatic guy and richer than most, but he’s been through his own hell. I don’t know what kind of people he’s bringing into Breakwater Security.”

  “Then why are you there?”

  “I can handle myself and get out if I need to.”

  “If you’re suggesting Crawford is overcorrecting, in a way, after what happened to him, and hiring thugs instead of professionals—okay, point well taken. I’ll be careful.” She smiled again. “I come from a family of reckless people. I’m always careful.”

  “Why do I have a feeling your idea of ‘careful’ is different from most people’s?”

  “Because I’m standing in my open kitchen door with you right here?”

  He tucked a finger under her chin, her skin soft and not quite warm. When she didn’t tell him to go to hell, he let his fingers drift up to her mouth. Her lips were still cold. “Be sure to warm up before you go back to Washington.”

  “I will.” Her voice seemed to catch. “Huck—you be careful, too.” She smiled again. “I have a feeling caution isn’t one of your top traits, either.”

  “Quinn…”

  McCabe—what the devil are you doing?

  The woman didn’t even know his real name. But she didn’t move from the threshold of her cute little cottage, and he didn’t resist anymore. He kissed her softly, and his mouth must have felt burning hot against hers. She held on to his upper arm, and when he forced himself to pull away, he saw that some color had returned to her face. He touched his thumb to the pink in her cheek. “I’ll have to remember how best to warm you up. Never mind the ratty old fleece.”

  She dropped her hand, clearing her throat, more color rising to her cheeks. “I guess it’s been a weird couple of days for both of us.”

  “You can trust me. Remember that, okay?”

  She just stared at him.

  Before he went any further, Huck returned to his Rover and got back on the road, hoping Quinn would heed all sensible advice and resume her normal activities back in Washington. He had a job to do, and she was one hell of a distraction.

  19

  A licia Miller’s death had cast a dark shadow over her unit at the Department of Justice. Gerard Lattimore could feel the despair of her grieving colleagues. For weeks, they’d watched her struggle emotionally, casting about for balance, pushing herself to be positive. For a brief window a couple of weeks ago, she’d seemed to pull herself together and was almost happy. By late last week, she was clearly falling apart.

  And I did nothing, Gerard thought.

  He stood at Steve Eisenhardt’s cubicle. Steve was among those having the most difficulty coping with Alicia’s death. “How’re you holding up?” Gerard asked.

  “I’m managing.”

  “I don’t know what to say—”

  “There’s nothing to say.” Eisenhardt, who hadn’t even glanced at his boss, tapped on his keyboard. “It was a terrible accident. Alicia—she deserved better.”

  “Her family’s handling arrangements. They want to keep everything quiet, private. There’s been talk of holding a small memorial service here—”

  “I’ll say goodbye in my own way.”

  Prickly. Gerard nodded. “We all will.”

  Eisenhardt swiveled his chair around, looking up now, his eyes sunken, as if he hadn’t slept since he’d heard the news about his colleague—and friend. Perhaps, in his own mind, at least, Gerard thought, more than a friend.

  “Steve—get some rest. Go home early if you need to.”

  “Thanks, but I can do my job. It helps. You know—Alicia never was right for this place.”

  Gerard didn’t argue with him.

  “She was beautiful and well connected, but she didn’t belong.” He swiveled back to his monitor, his tone accusatory as he continued. “Maybe I noticed because I’m new.”

  “She wasn’t one to confide in anyone—”

  “I saw what was happening. I didn’t say anything.” His look turned into an accusatory glare. “Doesn’t Justice have protocols for handling someone who’s obviously falling apart? If we’d all done something—said something—Alicia might still be alive.”

  “We all did the best we could, Steve. We’ll probably never know for certain what was going on in her mind. You’re talking as if she committed suicide. We don’t know—”

  “Kayaking in a thunderstorm is suicide, period.”

  “I understand how you feel. If there’s anything I can do—if you want to talk—”

  “What about Quinn?” His tone had lost some of its edge. “Do you know where she is?”

  “On her way back to Washington, I imagine.”

  “She’ll push for answers, won’t she? I don’t know her all that well, but she strikes me as the type not to be satisfied with surface answers.”

  Gerard sighed, re
gretting his gesture of sympathy. Steve Eisenhardt had his own way of thinking—he didn’t make life easy for himself. “I don’t know what Quinn will do.”

  “Your friend Oliver Crawford—he can’t like having a body wash up onshore practically on his doorstep down there. Alicia said she’d met him. You don’t think Quinn will blame him for anything, do you?”

  “Blame him for what, Steve? He and Alicia only met each other a month ago. Oliver’s a busy man—”

  Steve was barely listening. “Think Quinn knows anything about his kidnapping over the winter?”

  Gerard frowned. “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry.” He smiled feebly, looking awkward. “I can’t focus right now.”

  “I understand.” Gerard had no intention of pursuing Steve’s crazy line of thinking regarding any connection, even a professional one, between Quinn and Oliver’s kidnapping. Eisenhardt was in no shape to make coherent judgments. “At least give yourself today before you try to work on anything important. We all need some time.”

  When he returned to his office, Gerard was surprised to have Oliver Crawford on the line. They’d already exchanged condolences over Alicia’s death. The last thing he wanted to do was to dwell on the tragedy, keep being reminded of it. If he could just dive into his work, he could pretend that he’d never heard the terrible news, at least for a little while.

  But he shut his door and sat at his desk, then picked up the phone. “Ollie. What’s up?”

  “I saw your Quinn Harlowe today.”

  Gerard squirmed. “I wouldn’t say she’s ‘my’ Quinn Harlowe—”

  Crawford laughed softly. “No, of course not. I can see why you didn’t want to let her go. She’s an attractive, intelligent, determined woman.”

  “There’s nothing romantic between us. I admire her though—”

  “Bullshit. You can’t fool me, Gerry. She kayaked out here. She gave my security people fits. She’s a wreck because of her friend’s death, but still she’s asking questions, trying to make sense of such a tragedy.”

  Gerard took a breath, picturing Quinn in her kayak, twenty-four hours after finding her friend drowned. He hadn’t lied—there was nothing romantic between them. He would keep at her to come back to work for him, provided he thought he had a chance of persuading her. He’d half hoped she’d crash and burn on her own and have to turn to him for help, but he’d just heard that she was being asked to sit on an independent, privately funded council tasked to assess and prioritize key emerging international crime threats. A coup for anyone, but for someone as young as Quinn, newly out of the Justice Department, it was impressive. As a historian, she would bring a different perspective from the politicians, the lawyers, the law enforcement people.

  Although his interest in her was primarily professional, Gerard did think of her paddling on the Chesapeake.

  “We’re all still reeling here because of Alicia,” he said, sounding lame even to himself.

  “You must be. My staff tells me she was out here early Monday morning. I was in Washington in meetings all day—I had no idea. I gather she was very upset and not making a lot of sense. Hysterical, really. It’s so sad.”

  Gerard didn’t want to get into any details about Alicia’s mental state, even with a friend. “It’s a tough one, that’s for sure.”

  “The FBI was here earlier. They know all we know.” Another awkward, halfhearted chuckle. “I want to stay on law enforcement’s good side, especially with this new security services company just getting up and running.”

  “You know I can’t intervene—”

  “Of course not. We’ll see you out here soon?”

  “I plan to get my boat out on the water again in a week or two. I haven’t—I don’t know if Yorkville will be the same now.”

  “Make it the same,” his longtime friend said with an intensity—an urgency—that was palpable. “Make it better.”

  But when he hung up, Gerard could only think how much he wanted to turn in his resignation and go away somewhere. All his ambition had seemed to flatten in the past few days. He felt spent and useless, and, he thought, decidedly uneasy.

  20

  O n her way back to Washington, Quinn stopped in Fredericksburg, parking at the brown-and-white marker for Lee’s Headquarters. She’d put on dry clothes and a fleece vest before heading out from Yorkville, but now they felt slightly warm to her. She climbed up the steep hill, the only hiker on the old, well-traveled path. The trees weren’t fully leafed out yet, but they would have been bare when the Battle of Fredericksburg was fought in mid-December 1862, the last Virginia battle of that difficult, bloody year.

  She found her grandfather at one of the cannons atop the hill, where he said he’d meet her when she’d called from her car. The breeze lifted his thinning white hair, and the clear April air seemed to make his eyes, the same hazel color as hers, look even brighter and more alert. A slight man of eighty-two, Murtagh Harlowe had never had the restless soul of his father and grandfather.

  As she walked along the cold hill, Quinn imagined Robert E. Lee directing his commanders. The Confederates had won the battle, but at enormous cost to both sides—nearly eighteen thousand injured and dead.

  “Hey, Granddad,” she said. “Aren’t you freezing?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a fine day for a walk. I’m just glad I can still make it up that hill.”

  Her grandfather had met Alicia back when she and Quinn were at the University of Virginia together. Alicia’s interest in the Civil War was minimal, but she’d loved listening to Murtagh Harlowe tell stories. Quinn had dragged her along on a battlefield tour, explaining how Lee had entrenched his army on the hills above town and fought off Union assaults—too much detail, too much history, for Alicia, the budding, ambitious lawyer. She liked the views of the Rappahannock River and their lunch after the tour in a quaint restaurant in Fredericksburg’s historic downtown.

  Quinn tried to pull herself out of her pensive mood. “What was it Robert E. Lee said up here? About war—”

  “At the height of the battle, Lee was reported to have said, ‘It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it.’” Her grandfather looked out from the summit toward the surrounding hills and valley, once witness to so much carnage. “Quinn, are you going to be all right? I’m sorry about your friend’s death.”

  On her way to Fredericksburg, Quinn had turned on the radio and realized Alicia’s death had made the news, although no mass of reporters had descended on little Yorkville—not for the drowning of a kayaker. “I’ve been acting like a crazy woman since I found Alicia.”

  “You’ve never experienced anything like that before.”

  “And I never want to again. It was horrible.” She thought of the gulls but wouldn’t paint that particularly awful picture for her grandfather. “There’s so much I can’t get out of my head.”

  “Give yourself time,” he said quietly.

  “I have about a thousand questions, it seems like. So much doesn’t add up, at least not in the way people want it to.”

  “What people?” But he didn’t wait for her response. “It’s how things add up for you that matters right now. Is there anything you need to do?”

  Quinn fixed her gaze on the old cannon. During the battle, Lee’s Hill—Telegraph Hill, as it was known in 1862—served as an artillery position as well as Confederate command headquarters, firing on Union positions and being fired on. Lee himself was almost killed. But his death those bleak days wasn’t meant to be. He would live through the deaths and maiming of thousands more on both sides over the next two and a half years, until the Confederate final surrender at Appomattox.

  The Union army, so badly defeated at Fredericksburg, would go on to win the war.

  “I keep thinking there’s something I’m supposed to do,” Quinn whispered.

  “You’re a catalyst, Quinn. You always have been. You push for answers. You make things happen. You don’t settle.” Her grandfather put a bony hand on h
er shoulder. “That’s why you wanted to go out on your own. It’ll be why you succeed.”

  “It’s only been three months. The jury’s still out—”

  “Not for me. If your questions about Alicia’s death need answers, you’ll get them.”

  “I don’t want to get arrested.”

  He smiled gently. “I’d like you not to get arrested, too. I’m not suggesting you break the law. Short of that, do what you have to do.”

  She sighed. “You make it sound so simple.”

  “A lot of difficult things ultimately are simple.” He studied her a moment. “Is there a new man involved?”

  She thought of Huck Boone, his thick arm around her, his compelling, uneasy mix of self-control and unbridled energy. He hadn’t told her everything, Quinn thought. He hadn’t even come close. “Just another wrong man.”

  “Ah.”

  A longtime widower, her grandfather nonetheless understood the ups and downs of romance. He’d had relationships but had never remarried after his wife died when Quinn was two. She had no memory of her grandmother, but understood her to have been a gentle soul, too, although both her grandparents had encouraged their only son to be true to his nature as an adventurer and risk-taker.

  Her grandfather walked back down the hill with Quinn, and she gave him a ride out to his car at the end of the road, passing intact trenches from the legendary long-ago battle. Somehow, the peacefulness of the landscape seemed to make her feel even more the horror of the death and destruction that had taken place there.

  “Trust your instincts,” her grandfather said when she hugged him goodbye.

  Traffic back to Washington didn’t bog down. Quinn arrived at her apartment before dark. She had a studio on the third floor of an unremarkable ivy-covered building a few blocks from her office, sacrificing the space she would have had in a cheaper area for location.

  Collapsing onto her sofa, she listened to messages from her parents, a string of friends she and Alicia had in common, Gerard Lattimore again and—to her surprise—Brian Castleton, her ex-boyfriend’s voice cracking as he said how much he’d miss Alicia. But Quinn couldn’t help thinking that Brian must have been relieved she hadn’t been around for his call and got her voice mail instead.