Kill Chain

by Meg Gardiner

  I spun around, looking up the hillside. “Phil Delaney. Dad.”

  Lily picked her way toward me. She was wearing jeans and a sheriff’s department jacket and a gun holstered on her hip, pixie haircut flipping in the wind. From beneath her professional stoicism the compassionate, wary kid peeped through.

  “Evan, this is dangerous. Come back up top.”

  I held on to the doorframe, peering at the heavy brush on the hill. The snake of panic wound around my chest, binding me, closing my throat.

  “He has to be here, Lily. Someplace.”

  “Search and rescue’s calling a chopper out to scan the hillside. As long as the rain holds off—”

  “He could be unconscious, or too weak to signal us.” Tears rose in my voice. “We can’t just walk away.”

  But I felt the tilt of the earth beneath my feet and heard the pounding of the ocean below, the greedy Pacific that fills the depths and hoards too many who fall into its grasp.

  “Come on,” Lily said.

  When Lily and I crested the lip of the hill onto the highway, the wind bit us. It was a chill April morning. The mountains, soaked from a winter of heavy rains, were florid green. Silver clouds hung ragged along their peaks. A fire truck and sheriff’s vehicles clogged the roadside, lights spinning. In the center of the highway, a California Highway Patrol officer directed traffic around the scene.

  Parked behind the sheriff’s cars was a black pickup truck. Standing next to it, talking to a uniformed deputy, was Jesse Blackburn. His eyes caught mine and all my defenses collapsed. I ran and threw my arms around him.

  “Ev, I’m so sorry,” he said.

  I pressed my face against his chest. Feeling him work to keep his balance, I tightened my grip. He steadied himself on his crutches and put an arm around my back.

  “How did you find out?” I said.

  “Brian tracked me down at the rehab center.”

  Bless my damned brother. How fast Jesse had driven to get here didn’t bear thinking about.

  “You should have called the switchboard. I was there the whole night,” he said.

  “I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “Delaney.” He pulled me hard against him. “Interrupt.”

  I shook my head. Glad as I was to have him here, I hated to think that he had torn himself away from a situation where he was badly needed.

  The deputy cleared his throat. “Ma’am?”

  When I looked up he touched the brim of his hat. “Ben Gilbert. That’s a treacherous hillside. You need to stay up here on the road.”

  “Then call out the cavalry and find my father. Otherwise I’m going to do it myself.”

  Jesse pulled me tighter, hoping to forestall a full-blown outburst from me, and nodded to Gilbert. “When will the SAR helo get here?”

  “Fifteen, twenty minutes.” Gilbert looked at him more closely. “You have a background with the coast guard?”

  “Open-water rescue. Used to be with the county.”

  Gilbert tried not to stare too overtly at the crutches. Lily, though saying nothing, looked openly quizzical. I doubted she had ever seen Jesse standing up.

  Gilbert jammed his hands into his coat pockets. His voice was crisp. “We’re trying to get a time line here. Your father left Santa Barbara yesterday afternoon, that right?”

  “Around one,” I said.

  Which would have put him here—forty miles north of my house, along this isolated strip of wild country—near two p.m. Acid threaded across my skin. The car had hung wrecked in the chaparral for almost a day without anyone knowing. Without my knowing.

  I peered down the road. “Can you tell where it went off the highway? Where do the skid marks start?”

  Gilbert’s face crimped. He rubbed his index finger along the side of his nose. “There were no skid marks.”

  He looked down the highway at my Mustang. Two black stripes trailed behind it, the skid marks I’d laid when I came ripping around the bend. I saw no others.

  “There have to be,” I said.

  “Ms. Delaney, I’ve been a cop fifteen years. When a car tears through the brush and buries itself in boulders two hundred feet downslope, that indicates a violent event occurred on the roadway. Braking before such a hard crash leaves black skid marks that are visible even after days of heavy rain. And we got nothing here.”

  “What, are you saying that he didn’t brake?”

  Gilbert looked regretful, as though he were about to hand me something bitter. “No. Least, not long as he was on the highway.”

  “You think he just ran off the road?”

  “Wet pavement, high speed, it can happen.”

  “He’s not a reckless driver.”

  I kept staring at the road, my mind forming nightmarish glimpses of what it had been like hitting the curve that fast.

  “What if he swerved to avoid something? An animal, or even another car.”

  Lily put up her hands. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

  “If he was swerving, and the tires caught the edge of the shoulder, and . . .”

  Gilbert shook his head. “Sharp swerve on this curve, we’d still expect to find tread on the road.”

  Jesse said, “But you don’t know, do you?”

  “That’s right. We don’t.”

  “Yes, we do,” I said. “We know he’s out here someplace, and we have to find him.”

  Gilbert’s expression was smooth, his eyes the green of the mountainside. “Ms. Delaney, how did your father seem when he left your place?”

  “He seemed eager to get to San Jose. He had a business meeting planned.”

  Even as I said it, I heard the overstress in my voice. Dad hadn’t been eager. He’d been edgy, which now seemed ominous.

  “Was there anything on his mind that could have distracted him? Anything bothering him?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  In the wind, my fingers felt numb but my face grew hot. Gilbert, I realized, knew who I was. He had heard my family’s name in the news, understood about my father, knew what had happened to me.

  “Ma’am, no disrespect. But we are speaking about Phil Delaney, correct?”

  Lily shot him a glance.

  Jesse let go of me. “Deputy, you’re about to make a guess that’s way offtrack. Don’t.”

  “I’m just covering all the angles. At this stage we can’t exclude any possibilities,” Gilbert said.

  I felt myself coiling. “You’re suggesting he drove off the road deliberately?”

  “I’m saying we had a man here who was under a lot of pressure.”

  Lily made a face, muttering under her breath, “Gilbert...”

  Jesse’s voice went frosty. “Man, stick to the present tense.”

  My blood pressure was rising. “You think he committed suicide?”

  I stepped toward Gilbert, but Jesse put a hand on my arm, holding me back. The deputy softened his tone.

  “I don’t mean to make a difficult situation even tougher, but at this stage we can’t rule anything out.”

  But though he tried to sound soothing, he was sizing me up as if I were a freak in the circus tent.

  “Anything else you want to know?” I said.

  His gaze lingered on me. “You did it, didn’t you? You’re the one who pulled the trigger.”

  I gave his stare right back. “Yes.”

  He eyed me some more and jammed his hands back in his pockets. “Would you happen to have a photo of your father? To show the search and rescue team?”

  “Yeah.”

  I took a snapshot from my wallet. It had been taken at the breakwater in Santa Barbara, and showed Dad with his arm around my shoulder, the ocean sapphire behind us. He looked good: weatherworn, with his frosty hair poking out from under a U.S. Navy baseball cap, dark eyes reflecting his restless need to take on the world. Except for my long legs I don’t look much like him, with my tomboy figure and caramel hair. What he gave me wasn’t his looks but a taste
for Tennessee whiskey and mournful country songs. Jesse had been behind the camera, and Dad was regarding him with a look so cool as to be a challenge. I was smiling but seemed slightly irked. I could have done without their jousting—Jesse’s wisecracks, Dad’s one-upmanship. Back then, I didn’t know how lucky I was. The photo was taken before violence invaded our lives, before I shot the psycho who was trying to kill me, before Dad sacrificed his reputation on a pyre in atonement.

  I handed the snapshot to Gilbert. “Keep it as long as you need to.”

  From below on the hillside the SAR team called up to the crew of the wrecker, asking them to lower the winch cable. Gilbert excused himself.

  Lily frowned. “Sorry about that.”

  “State of play,” I said. “Not your fault.”

  The wrecking crew began extending the winch.

  “They’ll be careful when they move the car, won’t they? I mean, if Dad’s . . .”

  Jesse said, “He’s not under the car.”

  I knew he was right. Dad hadn’t been thrown out and trapped under the vehicle. The fact that the driver’s door had knifed a long track into the mud spoke otherwise. The door had sprung open long before impact.

  Jesse put a hand against the small of my back. “You look chilled to the bone. Let’s get out of the wind.”

  We climbed into his pickup. He turned on the engine and set the heater on high. For a few moments I stared at the wrecker.

  “Dad did not kill himself.”

  “Hell, no. Die without a fight? He’s too mean.”

  I grabbed his hand, knowing he meant that as a compliment. He rubbed his hands over mine, trying to warm me, and gazed at the diamond solitaire on my finger. It had been some months since he’d put it there.

  “You didn’t tell Gilbert about your dad’s mood when he left,” he said.

  “No. He’d use it as ammunition.”

  He gazed out the window. “What do you think happened to him?”

  Dread balled in my throat. Dad’s strange good-bye rose in my head, a warning.

  “I don’t know.” The wind gusted, rocking the truck. I swallowed the urge to cry. “How bad were things with Buddy?”

  “Don’t worry about that right now.”

  But he was worried himself—the circles under his blue eyes told me so. As did the fact that he had spent the whole night at the spinal injury unit, his cell phone turned off. His face, handsome and worn with sleeplessness, looked troubled. I squeezed his hand and he shook his head.

  “The kid’s right on the rim,” he said.

  Buddy Stoker was nineteen years old, and, three months past the motorcycle wreck that had paralyzed him, his morale ranged from despondent to terminal. He was one of the SCI patients Jesse worked with as a peer counselor at the rehab center.

  “I’ve thrown him a line, and I’m hounding him to hang on. I don’t know if he will.”

  Hanging on, Jesse knew, could be hell. When a BMW rammed his own bike, he went from all-American to paraplegic in half a second. A year of hospitals and rehab brought him to the shattering reality that his legs would never work right again. Fucking Fact of Life Number One, he called it. Some things you cannot change. But these days he told the newbies it was nonetheless possible to get back up and keep going, that you could navigate the world without walking it.

  “His folks are with him; don’t worry,” he said. “And this is where I need to be right now.”

  “Thank you.”

  The wind shook the truck. Outside, the wrecking crew worked the winch. The cable went taut as they started to haul the car up the hill. I blinked at the sight, my throat constricting.

  I thought, Dad, what the hell happened out here?

  Whistle-blowing is like prophecy: Tell the truth and people never thank you. They stone you for it. So you’d better be tough.

  My father was a rusty nail. But for months he’d been reeling under a hail of rocks.

  Phil Delaney, for decades an insider—ramrod-straight naval captain, weapons designer, graduate of the Naval War College, sometime naval intelligence agent, and chartered member of the old boys’ network—had become an outsider. He blew the whistle on a dirty government operation, one that had caused people to die. People I grew up with. And for that he was made to pay.

  The government had yanked his security clearance. His consulting business had dried up. He was being shunned by the military and intelligence worlds to which he had dedicated his life. The men in the shadows wanted him made an example of. An ambitious U.S. Attorney was eager to oblige, and had spent months investigating him in hopes of obtaining an indictment. My father had become a pariah.

  He had done it for honor. For duty. For the dead.

  He had done it for me.

  I thought back: Less than twenty-four hours ago, he had been standing beside me under a soaring blue sky, watching a bunch of kids take their marks at Los Baños del Mar pool. Flags snapped on masts along the beachfront. Around the pool, noise was rising, spectators hooting and stomping. Near the starting blocks, sunlit and serious, Jesse gathered the kids on the team he coached, psyching them up. Dad watched with a smile that gradually faded to wistfulness, until he turned away and gazed out at the ocean. I wondered if he was thinking about Jesse’s sure touch with kids, and me with my empty arms. When his cell phone rang, he strode for the exit.

  I found him outside, staring at the marina as if expecting enemy fire to erupt from the fishing fleet. His white hair bristled in the sun.

  “I have to leave,” he said.

  I frowned. “Now?”

  “This isn’t a diversionary tactic. It’s business.”

  Business? Right. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow. Meantime, hold out against the forces of darkness. You have the moral high ground.”

  “I drove off that talk radio guy with a rake, not principle.”

  In the months since Dad blew the whistle I had consistently rejected interview requests from the media. That only egged them on, because I’m a freelance journalist myself when I’m not cadging work with law firms, writing appellate briefs, revising my new novel, and generally doing what Dad thought of as avoiding a grown-up career. Newspapers, tabloid television, and moonbat bloggers had been contacting me with questions, outrage, and, in the case of one conspiracy nut, the request to let me be artificially inseminated with his pure, libertarian, non-CIA-CONTAMINATED sperm.

  When a spook blows the whistle, all the ghosties come out to play.

  Dad put his arm around my shoulder. “Don’t worry; your old man’s fine. I knew the score going in. Jesse and Lavonne told me flat out: Don’t do it unless you’re willing to start over. You pull the fire alarm like I did, you never work in the industry again.”

  Lavonne Marks, Jesse’s boss, was counseling Dad on strategies to keep him from being indicted. He gave me a sidelong glance.

  “I’m not feeling sorry for myself. And don’t you either, Kit. Not on your life.”

  “I wouldn’t dare.”

  From my experience of men in pain, pity corrodes you both. Support works better. And occasionally a kick in the butt.

  Which, annoyed that he was leaving so abruptly, I delivered. “If you’re meeting with Jax Rivera, tell her it’s time to stop yanking my chain. You and I have a deal, remember? You talk about the work you did with her; I listen.”

  For a second he held my gaze, as though considering whether, finally, to give up the unexhumed ghosts that filled his past.

  “I love you, Kit. You’re a better daughter than I deserve. Always know that.” He kissed my forehead. “I don’t know when I’ll see you again.”

  Something in his casual tone sounded ill-omened. “Dad?”

  He touched my face. “You can’t believe everything you hear. Remember that, if everything else fails.”

  It felt as if a fist had grabbed my stomach. “I should have known something was going to go wrong. I should have pressed him harder, or gone with him.”


  “Don’t think that way,” Jesse said. “The guilt train stops right here. Park it and get off.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, refusing to cry. I would cry when Dad climbed out of the SAR helicopter, bold as brass, saluting the pilot and thanking him for the lift. Jesse put his hand on the back of my neck.

  “The visit was good, till the end. He’s warming to you,” I said.

  He gauged my face and said, “Yeah. But he doesn’t trust me yet.”

  “He will. When he knows you as well as I do.”

  Outside, the wrecker winched the car up to the road. Jesse and I got out of the pickup. The fist squeezed my stomach.

  The car was a gruesome carcass. The hood was crumpled and the driver’s door swung like a broken wing. Carefully the crew of the wrecker hauled it onto the flatbed and began strapping it down.

  Gilbert came over. “The Highway Patrol’s Accident Investigation Unit will take the lead on reconstructing what happened here. They’ll want to talk to you, but you don’t need to hang around waiting for them.”

  I nodded absently, remembering Dad loading his things into the car and hugging me good-bye.

  The chassis whined as the wrecking crew cinched it down. I walked to the wrecker and stood on tiptoe to peer at the car. I could only glimpse the driver’s seat. I boosted myself up onto the flatbed and opened the back door.

  “His computer case is gone,” I said.

  The driver of the wrecker said, “What are you doing?”

  I turned to Jesse. “I saw him put his computer case on the floor behind the driver’s seat.”

  Gilbert approached. “Ms. Delaney, what are you doing?”

  Scooting along the edge of the car, I popped the trunk. As it yawned open, my stomach sank. There was Dad’s carry-on suitcase.

  Gilbert’s mouth pinched. “The computer must have been thrown out in the crash.”

  “He put it flat on the floor in the back. And the car didn’t roll, didn’t flip. If anything, the impact should have wedged it tighter under the driver’s seat. But it’s gone.”

  The wrecking crew shot me dirty looks. I didn’t care. Edging my way around the side of the car, I climbed into the backseat. My chest tightened as I thought of Dad being in the car when it went over. But now I was feeling something else, an urgency, a prickle of distrust. As if things unseen and malevolent had been at work here, beyond a wet road and the force of gravity.