She jotted down the information and worked her mouth into a grateful smile. The effort was almost painful to watch.
“I’ll be there as soon as they finish with me and I can arrange transportation.”
“I’ll drive you home,” I volunteered.
The arrangements complete, Mitch tipped us a two-fingered salute and made for his dusty pickup. I followed his progress across the parking lot. So did Sergeant Roth. Not many guys look as good from behind as Jeff Mitchell does.
Roth and I leaned our hips against the fender of the patrol car, and her glance drifted from Mitch’s behind to my front. The tubular glasses I’d hooked in the V of my ABU shirt drew a puzzled frown.
“Are those some kind of new equipment item?”
“No.” I fingered the sleek optics. “They’re a component of an experimental, non-line of sight optical sensing system. I was testing it when I spotted Austin.”
“You were conducting a test?” Her gaze swept the mall parking lot. “Here?”
Officer Foster had asked the same question, in pretty much the same dubious tone. I knew I’d hear it again and tried to formulate a response that didn’t sound too defensive.
“My team and I usually test items submitted for our review at a remote site out on the Fort Bliss range, under more controlled conditions. But this particular system has potential for application in an urban setting so I decided to try it in, er, an urban setting.”
That sounded lame even to me, but Roth merely nodded. “Thank God you did!”
I hoped my team would express the same fervent approval. Rocky, our test engineer, gets a little snippy when we don’t follow precise protocols. The man has what some might call a compulsive-obsessive personality. God forbid someone should misalign his manuals or adjust the air conditioner plus or minus a few degrees outside his comfort zone.
The homicide detectives arrived while I was contemplating how I’d explain all this to Rocky and the rest of the team. After consulting with Officer Foster, the detectives questioned Sergeant Roth and me separately.
The NLOS system drew a frown and required more explanation than I wanted to give. I didn’t exactly lie, but I did hint that the El Paso Police Department should keep the precise details out of their report due to patent considerations and, ahem, national security concerns.
The two detectives spent considerably more time with Diane Roth than they had with me. Not surprising, given her relationship to the deceased. I used the interval to collect the sensors I’d positioned. They were safely back in their egg carton and the glasses once more Bubble-Wrapped when the detectives finally released Diane.
She sank into the passenger seat of the Sebring and propped an elbow on the door frame. Raising a trembling hand, she covered her eyes. The rusty bloodstains on her neck and uniform stood out in stark relief to the white bandages covering her cheek.
“You okay?” I asked, pausing with the key a few inches from the ignition switch.
“Yeah. It’s just . . .” She dropped her hand and let out a long, shuddering breath. “Ollie Austin here! In El Paso. Who knows how long he’s been stalking me. Or my kids.”
That brought her jerking upright in her seat.
“Oh, God! My babies.”
“They’re safe,” I rushed to assure her. “Mitch would have called otherwise.”
“No, no. It’s not that.”
“Then what?”
She hitched a strand of pale blond hair behind her ear and shook her head. “I can just imagine how my ex’s parents could twist this . . . this attack around and make it my fault. What perfect ammunition for their custody suit.”
“Your former in-laws are fighting for custody of your children?”
“They were,” she said bitterly. “Fighting hard. And what makes it worse is that I trusted them. I believed their promise to take good care of Trish and Joey while I was deployed. Not that I had much choice. I didn’t have anyone else to leave them with.”
“What about their father?”
Her lip curled. “Yeah, right.”
“Uh-oh. Sounds like you didn’t have any more luck in the husband department than I did.”
“You got that right. Alan didn’t want our first baby. He gave me a ration every time I had training or worked weekends and he had to play mommy.”
Thinking that Diane Roth had faced some tough hurdles, I keyed the ignition and got the Sebring headed out of the parking lot. The Franklins were dark shadows now, barely distinguishable against the deepening purple sky. A suitable backdrop, it turned out, for the grim tale she related.
“Alan and I called it quits when I got pregnant again. His parents blamed me for the split, of course. Or more correctly, they blamed my military career. They thought I should quit the military and take a nine-to-five office job. Like I’m going to turn my back on all my years of training and time in service? Besides that, I’m a good cop. Damned good.”
I believed her. Judging by her actions this evening, the woman had nerves of tempered steel.
“Alan took himself out of the daddy picture completely when he fell asleep at the wheel,” she related with a shake of her head. “The highway patrol estimated he was whizzing along at eighty-five miles an hour when he sideswiped another car and rolled down an embankment. He died on the way to the hospital.”
Ouch! I could relate to that. My grandfather had passed out at the wheel of a semi after downing the better part of a bottle of bourbon.
“The in-laws blamed me for that, too. But they stayed close to their only grandkids.” Her mouth twisted. “So close they decided they could provide a more stable home environment than I could. My tour in Afghanistan gave them just the fodder they needed to initiate custody proceedings.”
“You’re kidding! Surely no court would even consider taking away your kids while you were serving in a combat zone.”
“You think?” She gave a harsh laugh. “Alan’s folks had money. Lots of it. They shelled out megabucks to find a loophole in the amendment Congress passed last year.”
“What amendment?”
“A fix to the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. It’s supposed to prevent initiation of child custody proceedings while a military man or woman is deployed. But that didn’t stop my in-laws from trying.”
Her mouth tight, she scrubbed the heel of her hand against her uninjured temple.
“I spent almost my entire fifteen months in Afghanistan wrangling long distance with lawyers. I had to stand in line for hours waiting for a phone to talk to them. And to talk to my kids. When I finally got through, my bitch of a mother-in-law would tell me they were over at a friend’s or out riding their bikes or gone for ice cream with their granddad.”
I’d only just met the woman, but I shared her anger. What a rotten thing to pull on someone dodging bullets in a combat zone.
“But it’s over now?” I said after a moment.
“Yeah.” Her hand dropped. Releasing a long breath, she turned toward the window. “It’s over now.”
I chewed on what she’d told me while we drove the few short blocks to her apartment. I wasn’t a parent. Had never even been pregnant, knock on wood. But the inherent unfairness of using a woman’s involuntary deployment to a combat zone as justification for trying to take away her children really pissed me off.
My righteous indignation on behalf of all military women was tempered by the sneaking suspicion that a good number of men in uniform had probably faced the same challenge from ex-spouses or seemingly wellintentioned grandparents. And here I’d spent most of my military career in (relatively) safe El Paso, complaining about outdated air-conditioning systems. Diane’s problems sure put mine in perspective.
We pulled into her apartment complex a short time later. It was one of those monster subdivisions, much newer and bigger than mine. The seemingly endless blocks of four- and six-apartment units were done in white, rose, or tan adobe. Fountains and pools and playgrounds invited residents to mingle in open spaces strategically p
laced among the buildings and rows of covered parking spaces.
Diane had the end unit in a two-story, rose-tinted building. When we went inside, it was immediately apparent the place housed two lively children. Toys and storybooks were scattered everywhere, along with backpacks and sneakers and bright-colored jackets.
Mitch sat on the sofa with a youngster on either side while Disney cartoon characters danced on the TV screen. The older of the two kids, a ponytailed girl of about seven or eight, jumped off the sofa when she saw her mother and ran into her outstretched arms.
“Mommy! Mr. Mitch told us you had an accident. He said you weren’t hurt but . . . but . . .”
Tears spurted from her eyes as she took in the bandages and bloodstained uniform.
“I’m okay, Trish. Honest.” Diane cradled her daughter against her good side, smoothing a tumble of curls the same pale champagne color as her own. “All I got were a few cuts from broken glass.”
Reassured, the girl pulled back with a sniffle. “Mr. Mitch said our car was smashed.”
“It was.”
The tears pooled again. “How’re you gonna take me to dance class tomorrow?”
“We’ll work something out. Joey, baby, come give Mommy a kiss.”
I got a funny twinge watching the toddler waddle over to his mother. I’m pretty sure my maternal gene is severely constrained, if not totally deficient. Good thing, too, as my family is totally dysfunctional. My alcoholic mother certainly didn’t set much of an example and watching my siblings battle with their various offspring over the years had pretty much nixed any desire in me to engage in similar skirmishes. My brief marriage to Charlie Dumbass Spade had only underscored the wisdom of that decision.
Yet seeing the joy in Diane’s eyes as her son reached for her with chubby arms stirred all kinds of sensations. Weird sensations. Like a sort of empty feeling. And a little stab of envy.
Not just in me, I realized when I caught the way Mitch’s expression went closed and tight. He was thinking of his daughter, I knew.
Mitch rarely talked about the fourteen-year-old who lived with her mother in Seattle. Or the grim circumstances that forced him to stay away from Jenny for her own protection. In the months he and I had been seeing each other, though, I’d come to understand how deep the hurt of that enforced separation went.
“Well,” I said after Diane had nuzzled her son’s neck and elicited a round of high-pitched giggles, “I guess we’d better go.”
She pushed to her feet and held out her hand. “Thank you. Again.”
“You’re welcome.” I returned her strong, sure grip. “Again.”
After all we’d been through together, I hated to leave her without wheels. “Do you need a ride to work tomorrow? My team and I are scheduled to depart for our test site at the crack of dawn but I could swing by early and drive you to the post.”
“I should be okay. My car insurance covers a rental. I’ll call Enterprise tonight and set something up. But I appreciate the offer.” She turned to Mitch. “And I appreciate you taking care of these two imps.”
“My pleasure.” A slow smile crinkled the skin at the corners of his eyes. “First time I’ve seen The Princess and the Frog. I’ll have to guess how it ends.”
Ponytailed Trish piped up with a gracious offer. “You kin take the DVD ’n’ watch it, if you want. Joey ’n’ me already know how it ends.”
“That’s okay. I’ll catch it some other time around. ’Night, guys.”
“ ’ Night.”
Mitch and I were quiet as we walked out of Diane’s apartment into the starry February night. The temperature had dropped with the sun and a brisk wind swept in off the high desert.
“Mind if we skip Perry’s?” I asked as we approached our separate vehicles. “I’m not in the mood for noise. How about we order a large pepperoni to go and chow down at my place instead?”
He skimmed a glance over my face. I must have looked like I’d just helped take down a would-be assassin or something, because he backed out of pizza altogether.
“You need to decompress. Better you go home and get some sleep.”
I suspected the tight expression I’d glimpsed inside the house a few moments ago might have something to do with his calling it a night. As I said, he doesn’t talk about his past much. But I know he’d turned to booze after he’d been forced to cut off all ties with his ex-wife and daughter to keep them safe from the vicious killer who’d sworn revenge against Mitch by going after his family.
He was off the booze now. Had been since well before we met. The hurt was still there, though.
“How long will you be out at the site?” he asked.
“We’re scheduled for ten days.”
“You coming home over the weekend?”
“I don’t think so. Our agenda’s pretty crammed. This is the first time we’ve gone fully operational since the fire at the lab.”
“Then I’ll see you when I see you.”
I reminded myself this was exactly what we both wanted from our still evolving relationship. Stimulating companionship. Mutual understanding of the demands of our respective careers. Really hot sex every time the opportunity presented itself, which evidently wasn’t the case tonight.
Nodding, I lifted my mouth to his. “I’ll see you when I see you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
MUCH as I hated to miss out on an evening with my sexy Border Patrol agent, I have to admit my tail was dragging when I pulled up at my apartment. Getting caught in a lethal cross fire sure takes it out of you.
Retrieving the NLOS system from the Sebring’s trunk, I lugged it from the parking space to my front door. I rent a one bedroom, one bath in a military-friendly complex located twenty minutes from Fort Bliss’s west gate. Most of the residents are singles like me or young couples from the post. The gregarious crowd makes for lively Friday and Saturday evenings out by the pool. So lively, bathing suits have been known to become optional on occasion.
My comfy if somewhat messy apartment always gives me a feeling of intense satisfaction. Took me a while to figure out why. I now know it’s a delayed response to those twelve weeks of hell otherwise known as officers’ training school. Talk about life-altering experiences!
If asked, I would’ve categorized myself as a relatively neat person before I shipped out to OTS. All those weeks of cupping my bras and folding my panties into precise, three-inch squares shattered that illusion forever.
So can you blame me if I dropped the NLOS carton on the coffee table? And tossed my hat on the next nearest horizontal surface? And hitched my ABU blouse on the back of a chair? Each of us has to assert our individuality in our own ways.
Sorting through my mail took all of three minutes. The bills I tossed aside. The stack of glam mags I carried with me into the bedroom. My boots came off next and were left to lie where they hit. My pants landed in a heap. They were followed by my standard-issue yucky brown T-shirt and sports bra. I suffered a pang of real regret as I shed the sleek hipsters I’d worn in anticipation of a post-pizza session with Mitch, but the tight knot of tension at the base of my skull indicated he’d been right on target. I needed to decompress.
I was up to my chin in scented bubbles and perusing the latest issue of Allure when the cell phone I’d positioned within reach jangled. I checked the caller ID, saw it was Pen, and flipped up the lid. Her face filled the screen, topped by wide eyes and her loose, lopsided bun. She usually fastens the topknot with pens, pencils, chopsticks, whatever’s handy. The implement sticking out of her salt-and-pepper hair tonight defied definition.
“I just saw the nine o’clock news on Fox!”
“Never mind the news. What’s in your hair?”
She patted around her bun and extracted a meat thermometer. The kind with a long, pointed stem and a round face for reading degrees of doneness.
“So that’s where it went to,” she said on a surprised note. “I cooked a tofu and chickpea loaf for supper and looked all over for this thing.
”
“Pen!” Gulping, I watched her stab it into the bun again. “Be careful with that.”
“Yes, yes. But let’s get back to the news. I just heard a report that two women from Fort Bliss were involved in a shooting incident. When the newscaster mentioned that one of the women was an Air Force lieutenant, I was worried it might be you.”
“It was.”
“I knew it! You’re all right, aren’t you?”
“I’m fine.”
“The report gave only sketchy details. What happened?”
“The police are still sorting through evidence. Right now, though, it looks like a vet suffering from PTSD came after the female soldier who rejected him. I, uh, just happened to be in the vicinity.”
“Ha!”
Pen has this unique laugh. It’s a cross between a snuffling snort and a high-pitched whinny. When you add sarcasm to the mix, the sound makes even the most stalwart among us wince.
“Things never ‘just happen’ around you, Samantha.”
I squirmed in my bubbles for a moment. “Okay, I might have been trying out the NLOS system that came in this afternoon and sort of spotted the shooter.”
Not surprisingly, she zeroed in on my reluctant admission. “You conducted a test? Without observers or the proper protocols?”
Another squishy squirm. “It wasn’t an official test.”
“Obviously. Rocky’s not going to be happy about this.”
Rocky wasn’t. He beeped in while I was still on the line with Pen. I hung up on her and took his call. With great reluctance, I might add. After assuring my erstwhile test engineer that I was, in fact, the female Air Force lieutenant named on the news, I mentioned the NLOS tryout. I figured I might as well, since Pen would blab to the rest of the team anyway.
I finally calmed Rocky down and disconnected, only to have the phone chirp again in my hand. Sighing, I went through the same litany with Dennis O’Reilly, then Sergeant Cassidy. Every last bubble had disintegrated by the time I finally climbed out of the tub and caught the tail end of the ten p.m. news.
Now You See Her Page 4