Gallantly will I show the world that I am a specially selected and well-trained soldier. My courtesy to superior officers, neatness of dress and care of equipment shall set the example for others to follow.
Energetically will I meet the enemies of my country. I shall defeat them on the field of battle for I am better trained and will fight with all my might. Surrender is not a Ranger word. I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy and under no circumstances will I ever embarrass my country.
Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to fight on to the Ranger objective and complete the mission though I be the lone survivor.
RANGERS LEAD THE WAY!
Hoo-rah, Sam thought. Damn hero. No wonder this appealed to him. He’d never given anything less than one hundred percent, be it school, the military or his heart. And when he knew he couldn’t give everything to Sam, he’d walked away rather than shortchange her. Donovan was a Ranger to a T, always had been.
“That’s Hal Croswell there.” Susan pointed at the picture above the plaque. “And Xander. I think the other is Billy Shakes. That’s not his real name. It’s William Everett. No one went by their given names, always nicknames. Hal was Jackal—Eddie always said he was crazy. Xander was Mutant, because of the X-Men thing, and Billy Shakes was a Shakespeare fanatic.”
“What did they call Eddie?” Sam asked.
“Doc, mostly. Since he’d been to med school, even though he dropped out. Or MH. For Mother Hen.”
Oh, how that fit.
“Since he’d been to med school, was he a medic?”
“No. Eddie was an infantry officer who happened to have medical knowledge. Medics are usually enlisted men who are recruited and go through specialized education for combat medicine. He went through a bunch of the training, but he was a special case. If one of the guys got hurt, it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for him to work on them himself if the medic was otherwise engaged.
“That crew went out on nearly every mission together. They spent weeks marching through the mountains looking for Bin Laden, trying to keep the Taliban from killing everyone—Eddie found them particularly brutal. They didn’t seem to care if the enemy died, or their own people. So long as things went boom.”
Sam couldn’t help herself; a small laugh escaped her lips. Susan arched an eyebrow.
“Honestly, I didn’t sleep while he was gone. Iraq I could wrap my head around. That was just sheer hell, knowing every time the phone rang, it might be the call that he’d been blown up. He used to tell me stories about the IEDs they discovered. Every day the roads would be swept, and every night, the Iraqis would find ways to lay the bombs down again. But Afghanistan—I didn’t know anything about their mission, and that was harder to deal with. His silence. It was all very hush-hush. I still don’t know. He never told me. But he came back different afterward. Got out and never looked back.”
“Bin Laden?”
“Perhaps.”
“Glad we finally got him, at least,” Sam said.
“Eddie was ecstatic. Not riot-in-the-street happy, but he truly thought that might be the real beginning of the end. Al-Qaeda may be a hydra, but Bin Laden’s face was on all of the heads.”
Sam stared at the picture. She’d never noticed that Donovan and Simon had the same smile, half-crooked, devilish and devastatingly cute.
“Who was the fifth man? The blond over on the right, kneeling?”
Susan’s face changed. “Oh. That’s Perry Fisher. King, they called him. He’s…passed.”
“Killed?”
“Yeah.” Susan reached to the picture, straightened it, though Sam hadn’t noticed it was crooked. “King was larger than life. Handsome, funny, the jokester of the crew. His wife, Karen, and I had our babies the same week. This was Vicky. Eddie and King came home together for the births. Those two were inseparable, crowing about the kids, smoking cigars in the hospital, getting in all sorts of trouble. Lord, that was a fun week. Then they went back over, and King was killed a month later. Eddie wouldn’t talk about it. Every time I brought it up, he got tears in his eyes and walked off. They were so close, it just about killed him.”
“Three dead,” Sam murmured. “What a shame.”
“Yeah. What a shame.”
“You said Eddie came back from his last tour different. Different how?”
Susan shrugged. “Angry. That’s really the only way to put it. He used to tell me things—nothing compromising, but the little details, the intimacies that he had with his men. He missed them. He was a good leader, well, you would have seen that, even back then. He missed having them around, the camaraderie, the responsibility. The adrenaline, too—being a Ranger was one thing, but being an officer in a war zone is pretty intense. Constant concern and worry for your men. But after King died in the field, it all changed. Eddie was angry with the government. He was sick of ‘nation building.’ He felt like they were treading water, and losing good men and women for no good reason. He almost seemed relieved to be away from them.”
“So something might have happened?”
“I’m sure a lot of things happened.”
“You know what I mean. Something was different on the last tour.”
Susan tapped her fingers against her closed lips, a nervous tick Sam had noticed her doing before.
“I just always assumed it was about the mission when they lost King. That he disapproved of what they were doing and lost his best friend at the same time. But Eddie would never say that. Hell, I may just be making it up. Looking back, I can read a thousand different things into a single gesture.”
“Looking back is dangerous, I know. But we’re going to have to. Two members of the same unit being murdered isn’t a coincidence. Did Fletcher ask about any of this?”
“All of it. I even printed him out a copy of the picture from our computer. He’s trying to find the rest of the guys, make sure they’re aware of what’s going on. Though Xander is going to be hard to find. That man’s been off the grid for a while now.”
“I’m glad Fletcher’s on top of this. He seems like a decent guy. All right. Where’s Donovan’s journal?”
Susan looked sheepish. “In the locked drawer. I put it back after I looked at it this morning. I’d never gone in there before now. It was his private place, and I respected that. But I knew the journal was there. He’d lock it up every time he wrote in it. The key was on the key chain found with his car. They gave it to me, after… Here.” Susan pulled the keys from her front pocket, went around the desk and unlocked the drawer on the left side.
“He has several more of these in his boot locker up in the attic. I just didn’t bother going through them. I figured if there was anything relevant, it would be in this year’s journal.”
The book Susan handed over was red leather, bound with a thin cord. Sam accepted the weight in her hands almost reverentially. She felt wrong about this, delving into the private world of her ex-lover. This was the kind of stuff her friend Taylor Jackson, a lieutenant with the Nashville homicide unit, did for the force. Sam didn’t investigate crimes, didn’t go digging in people’s private worlds. She wasn’t used to it, to seeing the most cherished personal moments laid bare for the scrutiny of strangers.
Well, how different can it be than seeing their heart? Or their brain? That’s where it all comes from, anyway. Stop dillydallying.
“You may be right. Let’s look through this, see if it tells us anything. We might want to get the ones from his last deployment, too, when King died. But I can start here.”
She opened the journal. Donovan’s distinct scrawl leaped out at her, the edges of the words dotted with ink. She choked out a laugh. “He still uses that leaky fountain pen?”
“Yeah. He’s had it for years. I can’t get him to give it up.”
>
Sam met Susan’s eyes. “I gave it to him.”
Susan bit her lip. “Oh.”
The tension crowded back into the room. Sam shouldn’t have said that, damn it. What was she doing?
She distracted herself with the opening page of the journal. It was dated I.I.MMXII. The first of January, 2012. All in the elegant scrawl, all in Latin. Sam sighed.
“Do you have a pad of paper I could use? And maybe something stronger than water? It’s going to be a long night.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Capitol Hill
Detective Darren Fletcher
There is a moment in every murder case when things begin to coalesce. Whether it’s within the first hour—when a witness spills their guts, the idiot criminal has been identified and you’re off to apprehend him—or twenty years later, when the piece of the puzzle that’s been missing for decades suddenly drops in your lap, there’s always a moment.
A smoking gun.
Fletcher thought he might be looking at his.
There was a dizzying array of papers spread out on his coffee table. The analysis of the sand from Donovan’s and Croswell’s lungs, identified as coming from the Savage River. The ballistics report, showing they’d both been shot with Donovan’s personal weapon. A photograph of five men in uniform, arms interlinked, intently cheerful, as if proving what a good time they were having. The autopsy reports on Donovan and Croswell. Financials, phone records, personnel files. And two notes that read “DO THE RIGHT THING,” both of which had been given to the dead men prior to their murders.
Do the right thing.
So what had these two men, who served together in a very sticky, rampantly political war zone, done wrong? These guys were heroes. Heroes didn’t do bad things, they did good things. And yet someone felt otherwise. Someone who thought Donovan and Croswell had done something so bad that they’d been threatened. And, when they didn’t respond to the killer’s satisfaction, murdered.
Something in these papers had the answer. He’d combed through everything multiple times. The problem was, as much as he knew in his bones the smoking gun was right here in front of him, he wasn’t seeing it. That intangible connection between the facts just wouldn’t come to him.
He’d made a list of all the things that didn’t fit—the blue truck, the baseball cap, the fact that Croswell had been murdered in an empty home not his own. Made a list of things he needed to find out—whether Croswell and Donovan had been in touch recently, what Donovan was working on, why Croswell was supposed to go to Colorado to interview for a job, who made the 9-1-1 call, a warrant to talk to Croswell’s therapist, another call to Donovan’s boss, why someone had broken into Donovan’s home. It hadn’t been trashed, and there was no trace evidence found. Nothing was missing. Only the baseball cap left behind.
All this, and now the sand from the Savage River, plus two names of men he needed to find and warn, or, perhaps, arrest: Alexander Whitfield and William Everett. Mutant and Billy Shakes.
Fletcher had no doubt that one of those men was most likely the killer. He shuffled the papers around until he found the picture. Five healthy young men. Three of them dead in a year’s time frame. Two by the bullet of one’s gun. All but one had survived the war, only to be gunned down in their homeland.
The odds were astronomical.
He sat back on the couch and took a sip of his beer.
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was missing something bigger than all of this. And that piece of information he didn’t have in front of him.
He needed to call in a favor.
He thought it through long and hard. Favors in this town were, on the surface, a dime a dozen. But in reality, a real favor, the kind he was talking about, that wasn’t exactly illegal, but barreled off into the murky gray area of ethicality, was what D.C. was built on. He didn’t like to become indebted to people, because there would be a serious quid pro quo involved.
But his gut told him to do it. There was something more to this case than met the eye. And he had a feeling the information he needed was going to be locked away where prying eyes couldn’t find it.
He had two choices. Make the call, lose some sleep and maybe find the answer. Or sleep well and work harder tomorrow.
Hell, she might still be so pissed at him that she hung up when the phone rang. Or, she’d have mellowed, and look back on their time together fondly.
Hardly. But a man could dream.
He sifted through the papers one more time, already knowing what he was going to do.
It would have to be the favor.
He picked up his cell and dialed a number he knew by heart.
One ring. Two. Three.
Fletch, this is probably the worst idea you’ve had in a very long time.
He started to hang up when a quiet voice answered.
“What do you want, Fletch?”
“Hey, Felicia.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
McLean, Virginia
Dr. Samantha Owens
Sam read and translated as best she could, pausing only to accept dinner and another drink from Susan. The food was simple fare, tomato soup and crusty bread that only partially filled the empty space in her stomach. They sat at the kitchen table in silence, each lost in her own thoughts, spooning the warm soup into their mouths absently. The tension hadn’t dissipated after Sam’s comment about the fountain pen, and she felt bad about it.
The soup was nourishing, but not filling. The scotch, on the other hand, a sixteen-year-old Lagavulin, curled up in the remaining empty holes and lit a merry fire, making Sam cozy from the inside out. It wasn’t a cure, but a damn good intermediary medicinal.
After the first twenty minutes of frustrated page flipping, Sam set the journal on the desk thoughtfully and looked to the bookshelves for a primer she knew Donovan would have close by. It didn’t take long to find. His battered copy of Wheelock’s Latin was on the third shelf, happily nestled between Pliny and Vergil. She took it reverentially and went back to the desk. “Never come between a man and his Wheelock,” Donovan used to crow.
Better equipped, she set back to work.
Sam hadn’t talked to Donovan in years, but the tenor of the entries told her something was definitely wrong. His words were melancholy at best, downright miserable at worst. But it didn’t say why. He wasn’t thrilled with his new job, she did gather that. They had him hopping, and while he enjoyed the work, she got the sense his boss wasn’t his favorite person. There were a number of references she couldn’t decipher; her Latin translation skills were a little rusty.
The first thing Sam had done was flip to the page dated the day before Donovan’s murder. It seemed like the most logical place to start. She’d gotten horribly choked up—he mentioned the day off from work, how he was looking forward to spending some quality time with his family. The girls featured prominently in his missives to himself, he was tickled with them both. Especially Ally, the one he saw himself in so clearly.
Sam understood that.
A child, a creation, something made of love, and desire, and passion, and fear, became the best, and the worst, part of you. To have them stripped away was inhumane punishment. Just as it was for a daughter to lose her father. Sam had been lucky, her parents had lived to see her graduate and become a doctor before they passed. In marrying Simon and having the twins, she’d found a family again. And now even they had been taken from her. Punishment, surely. But for what? Why? She would never understand.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three.
She shook herself slightly, to refocus, and the journal’s pages flipped of their own accord. The book settled open to April 10. Sam glanced at the page, a vivisection of Donovan’s all-day meetings with a representative from NATO, and started to turn the page
back to where she was already reading when she felt the slightest bit of resistance.
She flipped the page open and saw April 4.
The journal skipped several days. That was unusual for Donovan, a natural chronicler. He had a fresh entry for each diurnal and, as Susan had said, wrote up the happenings of his day religiously, no matter how short or mundane.
Five days in April, missing.
She looked closer, pulling the binding apart as far as it would stretch. The resistance she’d felt was from tiny slivers of paper, left over from where the pages had been cut out of the journal. It acted almost like a bookmark.
Sam went into the kitchen. After dinner, Susan had respread the financial papers on the kitchen table and had her glasses on as she perused something. She heard Sam come in, looked up and raised her eyebrow.
“Need a refill already?”
“No, thank you. Did you see this, Susan? The pages have been torn out here, or cut out. From April 5 to April 9. What happened those days?”
Alarm colored Susan’s face. “I don’t know… . Nothing I can think of offhand. Let me go get my calendar.”
“Did Eddie keep his own calendar?”
“Top right drawer. But he carried most of that info on his BlackBerry. His admin at work would probably have a better idea of his work schedule. The calendars we keep here are for family stuff. That’s why he doesn’t have a work laptop at home anymore—he was trying hard to keep work at work, but had his BlackBerry on all the time, for emergencies.”
Sam went back to Donovan’s office, pulled the drawer open and found a cocoa-colored leather day timer. The leather was well broken in, but the pages inside were crisp and white, barely used. She opened to April 5, and saw nothing. All the pages were blank, actually, except for one. The previous Tuesday had a small notation on it. A cross, with the letters BS.
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