But other than that, the woman on the kitchen floor could have been practically anyone who’d been dead for three weeks’ time.
Three long weeks’ time.
Alyssa now pushed the intercom buzzer, and in the interview room, Manuel Conseco picked up the telephone.
“Yes,” he said.
“I have a question for Lieutenant Starrett,” Alyssa said. “And several for you, as well. Will you put me on the speaker?”
“Of course,” Manuel said. He made an adjustment to the telephone. “Go ahead, Ms. Locke.”
“Lieutenant, how positive are you that the woman in the kitchen is your wife?” she asked.
Sam glanced over at the mirrored window that allowed her to see him without his seeing her. Her anonymity was completely unnecessary in this situation, and she hoped he knew that she wasn’t in the observation booth by choice. She was there because Manny Conseco had put her there.
“I’m pretty positive, ma’am.”
Ma’am.
There had been a time where Alyssa had been dying to hear him call her that, for him to show her a little respect. But now, after the intimacies they’d once shared, it felt odd.
When they were just having a conversation or standing in the same room together, it was possible for her to pretend that Sam Starrett hadn’t licked chocolate syrup from her naked body. But for some reason, when he called her ma’am, she was instantly reminded that he had.
And, worst of all, it was hard to believe that he wasn’t reminded of it, too.
Oh, God.
“Well, I don’t know how you could be so sure,” she said, dragging her attention back to the situation at hand. “I went in there, Lieutenant, and saw her. Was she wearing some kind of jewelry or …?”
“No,” Sam said. He was emotionally wiped, and it sounded in his voice. “But she had on this pair of boots I bought for her last year. It’s Mary Lou.”
“I have a sister,” Alyssa reminded him. “She’s about my height and weight. Back when we lived together, she borrowed my clothing all the time. What does Mary Lou’s sister Janine look like, Lieutenant?”
Sam looked at the mirror again, and his gaze was suddenly sharp. “A lot like Mary Lou,” he said, and he didn’t sound quite so tired anymore. “Holy Jesus. Where’s my brain been?”
“We don’t know that it’s not Mary Lou who’s been killed,” Alyssa warned him. “There are two women missing. There’s a fifty percent chance that it is your wife who’s dead.”
“Ex-wife,” Sam said. “She signed those papers I was coming here to pick up—they were right on the kitchen counter.” He turned to Manuel Conseco. “Are we doing some kind of positive ID thing with Mary Lou’s dental records?”
“It’s standard procedure, yes.”
“And have we established yet when the death took place?” Alyssa asked.
“We’re working on that, as well,” Conseco told her.
“I want a call with that information, as soon as possible,” Alyssa ordered. “And I want absolutely nothing about this case leaked to the media—is that understood?”
“I believe I am familiar with how to do my job, ma’am,” Conseco said dryly.
Guilty as charged. “My apologies, Mr. Conseco,” Alyssa said. “This one’s particularly important. Max Bhagat will be coming down himself tomorrow.”
Sam glanced at the mirror again at that, but then quickly turned his attention back to Conseco. “Am I done here?”
“Yes,” Alyssa answered for him. “Thank you very much, Lieutenant. You’ve been very patient. If there are any other questions, we’ll be in touch.”
Sam looked over at the mirror again as he swept his hat off the table, and she knew there were plenty of questions unasked—but they were questions he wanted to ask her.
“Can I give you a lift somewhere?” she added. She might as well get this over with, otherwise he’d simply show up later tonight at her hotel. And Lord knows, she wanted to keep this man far from her hotel room.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”
She stood up, and one of Conseco’s assistants led her out of the observation room and back to the lobby.
Where Sam’s friend Noah Gaines was still waiting.
He rose to his feet when he saw her.
“Well, I’m impressed,” Alyssa said.
He was a good-looking man, almost as tall as Sam and nearly as muscular, with broad shoulders that filled out his business suit very nicely. He had light brown eyes behind glasses, that, at first glance, made him look as if he might be playing at being a scholar, like a football linebacker who was attempting to prove to the world that he had a brain.
At second glance, and after exchanging a few sentences with the man, it was obvious that he was a scholar who simply took very good care of one very nice body.
It was a very nice body that had a wedding ring on the left hand.
“We were in there a long time,” Alyssa continued. “I’m surprised you’re still here.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s not being held,” she told him. “But until we can establish that he was miles away from here at the time of Mary Lou’s death, he’ll be considered a suspect, which doesn’t make him very happy. I’m doing what I can to make sure that doesn’t take any longer than it has to.”
“He’s lucky to have you as a friend,” Noah said. It was obvious that he was curious about her.
“How long have you known Sam?” Alyssa asked. He wasn’t the only one who was curious.
“We’ve been tight since seventh grade,” he replied. “Although to be honest, we haven’t been in touch much since my grandfather died a few years ago. I haven’t spoken to him in months. Maybe that’s why he never told me about you.”
There was an awful lot loaded in that statement. “There’s nothing to tell,” Alyssa said coolly.
Noah just smiled, and it was clear he’d learned a lot from his childhood friendship with Sam Starrett. He had the same kind of killer smile. “If you say so.” He turned, because there came Sam, escorted out to the lobby by Manuel Conseco.
“We’ll be in touch,” Conseco said.
“I’m sure you will,” Sam drawled, as he put his baseball cap back on, adjusting it until it fit just right.
Noah took out his cell phone. “I’ll call us a cab.”
Sam stopped him with one hand, but waited until Conseco was gone before he spoke to Alyssa. “Would you mind dropping Noah off on the way to … wherever it is we’re going?”
“Of course not,” she said. It would give her a chance to check out where this guy lived—this childhood friend of a man she couldn’t quite believe had actually had a childhood.
“Thanks.”
“You know you’re welcome to stay at our place,” Noah told Sam. “Claire’s probably already got the bed made in the spare room.”
“I know,” Sam said. “And I appreciate it. I might take you up on it. Just … not tonight.”
Noah looked from Sam to Alyssa and back. “Oh,” he said. “Sure, uh … okay.”
“No,” Sam said, shaking his head and laughing. It was the laughter of a man who was told during a five-mile tightrope walk that hurricane-force winds were approaching. It wasn’t about humor, just faintly amused desperation. “I know what you’re thinking, Nos, and believe me, you’re wrong. I need to talk to Alyssa.” He turned to her, all laughter gone from his voice and face. “I need to find out why my dead ex-wife is so important that Max Son-of-God-Almighty Bhagat is coming all the way to Florida tomorrow. I’d like to know what the fuck is going on that I haven’t yet been told.”
Noah shot Alyssa an apologetic look. “Excuse his language,” he said. “He’s still acting out against his father.”
“That’s not funny, fuckhead.” Sam’s patience had obviously all been used up. “And you goddamn well know it.”
Alyssa stood silently by as Noah was contrite. “Sorry, Ringo. It’s late and … I didn’t mean to make light of you or any
of this. You know that.”
Sam nodded, his anger instantly evaporated. “Yeah. I’m sorry, too.”
Noah took out his cell phone again. “I’ll catch a cab home,” he said. “The sooner you guys talk, the sooner Sam here can try to get some sleep.”
“That’s not necessary,” Sam said, but Noah was already walking away.
“Call me tomorrow, brother. Hey, call me tonight if you want to talk. Or just come on over. You know the way. I’m here if you need me, man. Day or night.”
“I know. Thanks, Nos. Thank Claire again, too.”
“Will do.”
Alyssa could have sworn she saw a glint of tears in Sam’s eyes. But then he turned toward her, and beneath the bill of his baseball cap, his expression was grim.
“What haven’t you told me?” he asked.
It was after 2100 before the door to the spartan bachelor officers quarters opened to reveal Kelly standing in the corridor with the guards.
“Hi,” she said.
Tom stood up from the desk where he’d been making notes on a legal pad that the lieutenant from the JAG office had left behind. “Hey. I am so sorry. They wouldn’t let me call you.”
“I figured,” she said. She was wearing that dress that he loved—the one with the sweeping long skirt and the print with the tiny blue flowers that matched the color of her eyes. With her hair down around her shoulders, she looked sweetly feminine and barely old enough to drink.
She looked completely harmless. Which was obviously her intention.
“Five minutes,” one of the guards told her now. “Sorry it’s so short, ma’am, but I’m not supposed to let you in here at all.”
“I know, and thank you so much.” She was holding Tom’s dress uniform—his choker whites—still under the plastic from the dry cleaners. She brought it inside the room and hung it in the closet as the guard left the door just slightly ajar. She had the box that held his medals, too, and she set that down on the bed. “I thought you might need these.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know if it’ll help, but it sure as hell can’t hurt.”
She stood there then, just looking at him, a flash of color in the otherwise antiseptic room. Worry for him radiated from her.
“Nobody’s told me anything,” Kelly said. “Just that they were holding you here. I couldn’t even get them to tell me how long they intended to keep you. And they wouldn’t let me in to see you, wouldn’t even let me call. Admiral Tucker’s been particularly nasty. He says I have no rights—that technically I’m not even allowed onto the base because we’re not married.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Tom, what is going on?”
“I don’t exactly know,” he said. “I haven’t been able to get many answers from anyone, either. But it’s, uh, bad, I think. I haven’t been charged with anything, but the implications …”
“What do they think you’ve done?”
Tom shook his head, hating to have to tell her. It would almost be easier to list the things they thought he hadn’t done. “I don’t know for sure, but from the questions I’ve been asked, I think they want to try to charge me with providing assistance to known terrorists, theft and sale of weapons and/or government property, conspiracy to assassinate the United States President, and oh, yeah, the big T. Treason.”
Kelly was gaping at him. He’d managed to shock her completely, twice in one day. “That’s absurd!”
“Yeah, well, they don’t think so,” he told her. “There’s this senate investigation thing going on and, I don’t know, some kind of bullshit-squad fingerpointing antiterrorism subcommittee from hell that’s really doing little more than providing some nasty politicians with a whole lot of airtime on CNN.”
“They honestly think you’ve been providing assistance to terrorists?”
He motioned for her to keep her voice down, and she glanced back at the open door.
“They can’t be serious,” she said more quietly but no less intensely. “Tom, anyone who knows you—”
“Yeah, that’s the thing,” Tom said. “They kind of waited to do this until Team Sixteen was out of town. And Admiral Crowley’s still in the Middle East. He won’t be back until the end of the month.”
Admiral Chip Crowley was a SEAL himself. He was the commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, and in the past he’d been one of Tom’s staunchest supporters.
“They’ve been asking a lot of questions about an incident that happened about a year and a half ago,” Tom continued. “An Army helo went down in a lake in …” He didn’t know how much of this he was at liberty to tell her. Up until a few hours ago, he’d believed it was still classified information. But if everyone and their uncle in the U.S. Senate knew about it … Still, until the word came down his chain of command, he was going to keep it cryptic. Kelly was smart enough—she’d figure out what he was saying without his saying it. “A country that Team Sixteen visited recently.
“It was carrying certain essential equipment when it crash landed,” he told Kelly. “The flight crew was rescued by Air Force PJs, but the helo sank. The lake was pretty deep, so Team Sixteen came in to try to salvage both it and that equipment, but it turned out to be too much of an al-Qaeda hot spot. It’s hard to run a salvage op in the middle of a firefight, so we ended up scuttling the helo and everything on board. I signed off on it—that all that equipment was properly destroyed.
“No one’s told me directly,” he continued, “but I’ve been getting a pretty strong hint that some of that equipment has since surfaced.” He could tell from her eyes that Kelly knew damn well that the equipment he was referring to was weapons. “And I know I’m prone to coming up with the worst-case scenario, but I’m starting to believe that that equipment surfaced in Coronado last year, when the President was attacked.”
“What?” Kelly breathed.
“Maybe I’m wrong—no one’s telling me anything. But the questions they’re asking make me think that’s what happened.”
“Could it be coincidence?” she asked. “Or—”
“A setup,” he grimly finished for her.
“But who?”
“I don’t know.”
Kelly started to pace. “Were you part of the team that did the dive and set the explosives?”
She was going to hate hearing this. “No, but I was part of the team that went down after to make sure the explosives did the trick.”
And he’d gotten shot on his way back out of the water. It wasn’t serious, little more than a nasty nick on his left forearm. Kelly had looked at him hard when he came home, and he’d skillfully avoided all of her questions, letting her believe without flat-out lying that he’d cut himself while climbing into a helo.
Which was pretty much the truth. He’d just happened to cut himself on a ricocheting bullet.
But right now she was distracted by the time—they had very little of those five minutes left—and she didn’t connect that op to his injury.
“Who went down to rig the explosives?” she asked him.
Tom was already shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No way, Kel. It was Sam Starrett and Cosmo Richter and I’m pretty sure Ken Karmody. And a bunch of the tadpoles. Gilligan, Muldoon, Lopez, and maybe Silverman. Oh, and Mark Jenkins, too. I’ve been sitting here trying to remember the details of that op. One thing I do know for sure is that those men—any of my men in Team Sixteen—would rather die before letting terrorists get their hands on that kind of … essential equipment.”
She nodded. “I know you believe that, but—”
“What I’ve been trying to remember is the timeline of the events. When did the Black Hawk go down? How long was the flight crew in the water before the PJs got them out? How long before Starrett and his squad made the scene?”
Tom rubbed the back of his neck. “One thing I didn’t do was order an inventory of the equipment that was submerged in that lake. The cargo area of the helo was intact—I do remember Starrett including that informatio
n in his report. His team didn’t have to search for stray crates scattered at the bottom of that lake. But we didn’t have the time or resources to open boxes or even count them. I had an inventory list that had been made when the helo was loaded. I signed off on that equipment, saying that it had been destroyed, but there were quite a few opportunities for some of that stuff to walk away pretty much anywhere down the line. All I know for sure is that I didn’t take it, and my men didn’t take it.” He sighed. “I’ve told this to the investigators about fifteen thousand times. But it’s not getting through. It’s like some kind of witch-hunt, Kel. They only hear what they want to hear.”
“What can I do to help?” Kelly asked.
“I don’t know,” Tom said. He reached for her, and she went into his arms, holding him as tightly as he held her. “I honest to God don’t know.”
CHAPTER
FOUR
“What kind of freaking idiots would think for even half a second that Lieutenant Commander Paoletti could be part of a terrorist plot to assassinate the President?” Sam Starrett was incredulous.
Alyssa knew exactly what he was feeling. To anyone who’d worked with Tom Paoletti, the idea was inconceivable. “The kind of idiot whose job depends on him successfully blaming someone. There are a lot of frightened people out there who only know that three terrorists managed to get three very deadly weapons past the high-level security of a United States naval base and discharge those weapons at the U.S. President,” she told him as they headed downtown in her rental car.
The streetlight filtered in through the windshield, casting shadows on Sam’s face. This was surreal. That she was sitting in a car in Sarasota, Florida, with Lt. Roger “Sam” Starrett and discussing the fact that Tom Paoletti had been brought in for questioning in connection to a terrorist attack on U.S. soil was completely surreal.
“We’re the most powerful nation in the world, and those men came into our country, onto one of our military bases, and nearly managed to kill our leader,” she continued. “And here we sit, looking foolish, because we still don’t know much more about who was behind this attack than we did just a few days after it happened.”
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