Deadly Intent

by Pamela Clare

  “It’s not like that.” Mia’s lips curved in a fleeting smile as if Darcangelo had just said something funny. “I haven’t done anything wrong—yet. Telling you might constitute breaking the law.”

  “Huh.” Understanding dawned on Hunter’s face. “Classified information?”

  Mia nodded. “Confidential.”

  If Joaquin remembered correctly, “Confidential” was the lowest level of classified information. Still, operatives who had leaked classified info had gone to prison, even when that information wasn’t Top Secret.

  No wonder she was afraid to tell them.

  He crossed the room, sat on the coffee table across from her. “I know you’re scared. It must feel like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders right now. But we have laws that protect whistleblowers, including military personnel.”

  “Ramirez is right,” Hunter said. “I served with Special Forces and—”

  “Trash detail.” Darcangelo winked.

  Hunter ignored him. “They can’t penalize you for exposing those who break the law, as long as you disclose that information to your chain of command, the courts, or law enforcement.”

  Mia nodded. “I read the statute today, but I’m no longer active-duty military. I couldn’t find anything that protects former military personnel.”

  Joaquin saw her dilemma. “You’re in a gray area.”

  “If I tell you, you’ll have the power to destroy my life. You have to promise me that we’re off the record. If this ended up in the newspaper, I would be outside the protection of any law. You can’t tell anyone, especially not that reporter.”

  Joaquin tried not to feel insulted by this. She barely knew him. To trust him with something of this magnitude… He should feel honored. “I promise I won’t talk about what you tell me with anyone who isn’t in this room.”

  It seemed to Mia that she stood on the edge of a precipice. One more step and she’d go over that edge with no way back. But her life wasn’t the only one at stake here. If what had happened at Tell al-Sharruken was at the heart of this, there could be a dozen others, maybe more, whose lives were at risk.

  Could she trust these men?

  She looked from Joaquin to Julian to Marc.

  “We’ll have to share what you tell us with Detective Wu and Old Man Irving, the chief of police, but we can keep a tight lid on it,” Julian said. “We wouldn’t share classified information with the press or anyone in law enforcement who didn’t need to know. We might want to contact sources in the Pentagon to get whatever files exist.”

  “I’m not sure there are files,” Mia said. “There is no official record of what happened that day. The only people who know about it are those who were there and the chain of command that responded afterward.”

  “That bad, huh?” Marc said. “‘Do Not File.’”

  “Yes. Exactly.” Paper trails had been shredded, computer files purged, any mention of what had happened that day destroyed.

  Joaquin leaned closer. “You can trust these guys, Mia, and you can trust me.”

  Did she have any other choice?

  “Do you mind if I write this down?” Julian asked, notepad and pen in hand.

  She shook her head—then took the plunge, her pulse ratcheting. “Tell al-Sharruken.”

  “Can you spell that?”

  “S-H-A-R-R-U-K-E-N. It’s a place in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, an ancient Assyrian site—sand, old walls, a few stone pillars.”

  The men waited for her to go on.

  But where should she start?

  “When I joined Bravo Company, my commanding officer, Captain Bennett Powell, a West Point grad, did and said things that were … inappropriate. I reported what was clear sexual harassment to Colonel Frank, who was in command of our brigade, and to our EO rep. They patted me on the head, thanked me for coming forward, and then did nothing.” Mia had felt utterly betrayed.

  “After that, things got worse. Powell called me names in front of the others—Ice Queen, Iron Maiden, bitch, whatever. I found out later that I wasn’t the only woman to complain about him. Other women came to me, confided in me.”

  Joaquin muttered something in Spanish. “He sounds like a real asshole.”

  “I hope your story ends with him getting his ass kicked,” Marc said.

  Julian nodded. “Or better yet, his balls.”

  “I wish.” The men’s rage on her behalf came as a kind of affirmation. She hadn’t gotten that from anyone, not even her own parents. They’d told her she should expect harassment working in a male-dominated field—as if succeeding at a job previously reserved for men took away a woman’s right to dignity and respect.

  “When we deployed to Iraq in 2013, I was company XO. I stayed at the FOB—the forward operating base—most of the time, handling administrative tasks while the rest of the company hauled around toilet paper and MREs.”

  Powell had used that time away to alienate others from her, degrading her behind her back until his nicknames for her had become widespread at the FOB.

  “One day, I came across a couple of E-fours talking about selling something, discussing how much they thought they’d get for it. I thought it was illicit drugs. It turned out to be artifacts.”

  Marc gave a low whistle. “Looting.”

  Mia nodded. “Powell had been taking a group of a dozen soldiers off base, using the supply company as a kind of cover to look for artifacts. It’s a violation of the code of conduct and international law. It could have gotten us in serious trouble with locals, destroying any goodwill we had left with the nearby communities. I reported it to Colonel Frank. I thought they’d be court-martialed.”

  “Let me guess—he did nothing.”

  “He yelled at Powell, I think, but Powell denied it and claimed that I had some kind of grudge against him. Colonel Frank buried it.” Mia swallowed, a helpless sense of rage building inside her. “The rest of that deployment was misery. Powell found all kinds of creative ways to get back at me—putting camel spiders in my tent, locking all of the female sanitary supplies in his office so that I had to ask for them each month, excluding me from meetings. Someone put a coffee can full of human feces in my tent.”

  Joaquin muttered something in Spanish, his eyes dark with anger. “And no one did anything to stop this son of a whore?”

  “No. Nothing. I told myself it didn’t matter. I was there to do a job for my country, not to win a popularity contest. But, still, it was hard.” She realized this wasn’t part of the story she was trying to tell them. “Sorry. None of that really matters. I guess I drifted off topic.”

  “No, no.” Joaquin touched a reassuring hand to her shoulder. “You just tell the story as it comes to you. We’re listening.”

  Mia took a sip of her water. “It all blew up one day in September. I was in my office, and one of the men ran in to say that one of our guys was sick. I found Andy in his bunk, coughing, his nose running. I thought maybe he had the flu—and then I saw the blisters. They covered his hands and legs—huge, yellow blisters.”

  Mia told them how she’d called for a medic and gone with Andy to medical, only to find a half-dozen other men there with the same symptoms. “Most had blisters. Some were having difficulty breathing. The medical staff had no idea what was going on. Jason worked hard to treat their burns and relieve their pain. He was the one who called around, did the research, and figured it out. It took a few days, but he figured it out.”

  “Jason Garcia, the homicide victim?” Julian asked.

  Mia nodded, her throat growing tight. “He was a kind and good man.”

  “What was it?” Joaquin asked.

  “It turns out that Powell had taken his gang out to Tell al-Sharruken, where their shovels had hit a buried cache of old shells. Some of the shells were cracked. They dug the shells out, handled them. They didn’t realize the shells were leaking. Andy, Powell and the others—they had all been exposed to mustard agent.”

  9

  Mustard age
nt?” Joaquin stared at Mia, stunned by what she’d just told them. “You mean mustard gas?”

  “It can be a liquid or a gas, so mustard agent is the more accurate term,” Hunter said. “But, yeah, mustard gas.”

  Darcangelo shot Hunter an annoyed glance. “Thanks for the chemistry lesson.”

  “Hey, any time.”

  But Mia wasn’t listening to them, her body rigid, her gaze turned inward as she relived the horror of what she’d seen. “It turned out that they had been exposed three days prior. The symptoms don’t show up right away. When they started to get sick, they hid it, knowing they’d get in trouble. But a few of the younger guys were so afraid that they spilled it all. Those who were badly affected, including Andy and Powell, were sent to Germany for treatment and then shipped home.”

  Joaquin listened while Mia described the clusterfuck that had followed as the colonel she’d warned went into full CYA—cover your ass—mode.

  “I thought Powell would face a court-martial, but Colonel Frank couldn’t admit that he’d been told about his troops looting. The Pentagon didn’t want word about the mustard agent to get out.”

  “Why not? Wouldn’t it be good to warn people that this shit is out there?”

  “Not when the U.S. government supplied the chemicals that made it,” Hunter said. “We gave Iraq the chemicals to make mustard agent and Sarin during the Iraq-Iran War. It’s not a secret, not when so many U.S. and Coalition troops have been hurt by the shit since 2003. But it’s not really public knowledge either. The suits in D.C. aren’t in a hurry to admit to the world that the U.S. violated the Geneva Convention.”

  Joaquin had heard and seen a lot of fucked-up bullshit in his years at the paper, but this was in a league of its own. “So that shit is there because of us?”

  Hunter and Mia nodded.

  Mierda.

  “I went above the colonel’s head, told the brigadier general of our division that I had reported what Powell was doing. But no one cared that Powell had endangered his own men. What mattered more to them was the potential for embarrassment. ‘US troops wounded by chemical weapons while looting,’ doesn’t make a favorable headline.”

  Joaquin could see that. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”

  “I was promoted to captain and told not to discuss the matter, which was now classified. The entire incident was swept under the rug.”

  “What happened to the looters?” Hunter asked.

  “Most of the men involved were discharged, some unfavorably. None of those who were disabled by the mustard agent—Powell, Andy, Chris Hedges, Tony Rigatti—got disability benefits. It wasn’t because they’d been off base without authorization or looted artifacts. It was solely because they’d been injured by a substance the government doesn’t want to acknowledge.”

  “Mustard agent.”

  “Did anyone threaten you, Mia?” Darcangelo asked.

  Mia shook her head. “I didn’t see Powell or Andy or any of the others again until I got back from that deployment, but they hated my guts. They all blame me for the fact that they didn’t get disability benefits, though I had nothing to do with that. The last time I saw Andy, he spent the entire half hour I was there shouting at me, calling me names.”

  For a moment, there was silence.

  Joaquin spoke first. “Thanks for trusting us, Mia. I know it must have been hard to do when everyone you ought to have been able to trust has disappointed you. But we’re not like those guys. We’re not going to let you down.”

  When she looked into his eyes again, he saw it—doubt and, beneath that, a fragile hope that this time would be different.

  Darcangelo thanked her, too. “It’s going to make a big difference to this investigation. Now we have some idea where to start looking for the killer.”

  Hunter nodded. “It doesn’t take years of work in law enforcement to see what might motivate one of these guys to hurt you—or implicate you.”

  Sí, claro. Absolutely.

  But Joaquin had questions. “Why would one of them strike out at the others? Why kill the medic? What could anyone have against him?”

  “I don’t know. It makes no sense. I just have a gut feeling that what happened at Tell al-Sharruken is behind this somehow.”

  “Can you give us a list of the soldiers who were part of the looting?” Darcangelo asked.

  “Yes. There’s something else you should know. I’ve got a loaded pistol in my handbag, and I don’t have a concealed carry permit.”

  Joaquin jumped to her defense, not sure how Darcangelo and Hunter would react to this. “A fine is better than ending up dead.”

  Darcangelo looked over at Hunter. “We’ll deal with that later.”

  Hunter nodded. “We can probably get the sheriff to issue an emergency concealed carry permit—once you’re no longer a person of interest in that first case.”

  Mia looked relieved at this. “Thank you.”

  “I’m afraid we’ve got to ask one more thing of you, Mia.” Darcangelo was using that soothing voice again. “We need you to tell Detective Wu everything you told us. He’s the detective assigned to these cases. He needs to hear this from you.”

  Mia insisted that Wu come to Joaquin’s place. She didn’t trust the detective the way she did Julian and Marc. It took him a half hour to get there. In the meantime, Joaquin made her a cup of Mexican hot chocolate.

  “What? None for me?” Julian looked hurt.

  The two of them started bickering—in Spanish.

  Marc leaned down and spoke for Mia’s ears alone. “Darcangelo spent a lot of time as an undercover operative in Mexico.”

  “Ah.” That explained it.

  Joaquin returned with the mug of hot chocolate, set it on the table, then took a throw out of a nearby chest and wrapped it around Mia’s shoulders.

  How had he known she was cold?

  Wu arrived a few minutes later, and Mia went through the entire story again. It was easier this time, perhaps because she’d done it once. Or maybe having Joaquin sitting beside her made her feel safer.

  Whatever the case, it was clear that Wu respected Julian and Marc. He took notes, interrupting her from time to time to ask questions. But never once did he hint that he thought she was lying as he’d done when he’d questioned her at the station.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he asked.

  Seriously?

  “Until last night when I’d heard that Jason had been killed, it didn’t dawn on me that there could be a connection. I don’t take the divulging of classified information lightly, and, frankly, sir, you haven’t given me reason to trust you.”

  That felt good.

  Wu nodded as if that made sense to him. “Just doing my job. You’ll be happy to know that a K9 search of the grounds at the Botanic Gardens found no human remains. The security footage proves that you didn’t go near the mulch yard at any time from the day of Mr. Meyer’s disappearance through the time when the evidence was found in the wood chipper.”

  Relief washed over Mia. Finally, they were getting somewhere.

  Wu went on. “Also, the only prints on the driver’s license are Meyer’s.”

  “So I’m no longer a suspect?”

  “No.”

  Another surge of relief.

  She found herself smiling. “I can go back to work.”

  Wu stood. “I’m going to have to talk to Irving to see how he wants us to handle this from here. Are you going to be staying here now?”

  Startled by this question, Mia looked from Wu to Joaquin. “Uh… I…”

  Joaquin answered for her. “She’s welcome to stay here in my spare room until she feels safe at her own place.”

  “We need to get you that emergency concealed carry permit,” Hunter said. “Call the sheriff’s department tomorrow and pick up the application. Darcangelo and I will help you get whatever you need from the DPD.”

  “Thank you.” Mia stood, reached out, shook Julian’s and Marc’s hands. “I appreciate all yo
u did tonight. I know it’s late.”

  “Happy to help.”

  “It’s part of the job.”

  They turned to go, walking with Wu toward the door.

  Wu stopped, turned to face her once more. “You trusted me tonight, so I’m going to trust you. If you see the man in the black hoodie again, call 911. Don’t try to talk to him. Don’t open the door for him. Don’t follow him. That fits the general description of a man an eyewitness saw fleeing the scene of Jason Garcia’s murder—and a man who showed up on the surveillance videos from the Botanic Gardens.”

  Mia stared after him, chills skittering down her spine as the men walked out the door and Joaquin locked it behind them. Questions sprang to her mind. How long had Wu known there was another suspect? Why had no one warned her earlier? Was the eyewitness the reason they’d been released last night?

  Joaquin crossed the length of his apartment. “You were amazing tonight, Mia. You’re a true hero. I know that couldn’t have been easy. How are you feeling?”

  “Relieved in a way. Drained.”

  “I bet.”

  “Did you know that they had an eyewitness and another suspect?” She could see the answer on his face.

  “I knew about the eyewitness, not the security footage.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “They made me promise not to say a word. I’m sorry.”

  She couldn’t fault him for keeping a promise. “That’s why you came so quickly to get me, isn’t it?”

  He walked up to her, rested his hands on her shoulders. “I care about what happens to you, Mia.”

  His words hung in the air as Mia wondered what he meant by that.

  “It’s late. You must be exhausted. We should get to bed.”

  Mia took her handbag with her firearm to her room and changed into her nightgown and bathrobe. Then she went into the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. When she had finished, she opened the door and stepped into the hallway to see Joaquin standing shirtless in the kitchen in a pair of dark blue pajama bottoms that hung perilously low on his hips. He was checking his pistol.