Shapiro shrugged and leaned back in his chair. He glanced over his shoulder at Marcus, and seeing him engrossed in the football game above the bar, turned his attention back to Chase. “I didn’t feel comfortable bringing my notes,” he said, causing her to sense he’d changed the subject for her benefit, “but I’ll check them when I get back to the office. Something the caller said early in the conversation led me to definitely believe he was at the base.”
“And he says he knows me—” Now she would test him.
“No, he said to talk to you.”
Okay, so he passed her little test. Or he had his story down pretty good.
“For the life of me, I can’t imagine who this could be,” she said. Shapiro was studying her. “What else?”
“We know from Melanie’s appointment book that she was meeting with your husband.”
“Yes, but this doesn’t actually confirm they were having an affair any more than her entries about Tony White implies one.” She thought back to a week ago when she’d thrown away White’s dog tags. “There’s something I should probably tell you.” Shapiro leaned forward in anticipation. “You know that Melanie brought me Major White’s dog tags?”
Paul nodded.
“I was concerned how it would affect Kitty White to know that her husband’s dog tags had been in the possession of another woman. I … threw them away the night of the crash.”
He leaned forward. “What? But Melanie had them when she died.”
Chase nodded. “That’s the big question that’s been troubling me all this time, Paul. How did Melanie get them back? Who went through my trash? And who but Melanie would have made any connection between the dog tags and her? So, somehow, she must have gained access to the base and gone through my trash.”
“Now I’m totally confused. How would she even have known they were there? There’s something we’re missing.” He stared out the window for several moments. Chase went back to picking away at the paper label on her beer bottle until Shapiro added, “So what have we got? An anonymous source who claims there’s a conspiracy to cover up the facts about the 81. Major White, an 81 pilot, dead. Melanie said White told her he was hopping mad about the hard landing and threatening to jump the chain of command for action. We know Melanie had White’s dog tags … backing up, we know she gave them to you but was later found with them—”
“Where are they now?”
“In my desk drawer. The night I had to go down to make the identification, the coroner gave me an envelope that contained Mel’s personal effects. I couldn’t open it until the next day. Ever since you said Melanie gave you the dog tags I’ve been baffled by how she had them on her when they found her. Still am.”
“What else was with her personal effects?”
“Nothing but her watch and her college ring.”
Chase glanced at her purse. “No purse? What about her car?”
“Oh sure, they found her purse inside her car, unlocked, which is why HP is so sure it’s a suicide.”
“No note. You couldn’t have missed something at her condo?”
Paul shook his head. “HP was first on the scene. They found her license and called me immediately.
“But you don’t even have the same last names—”
“Everybody at HP knows Mel and me. I used to have that beat. Mel used to be one of their shrinks-on-call,” he said. “After I made the ID, I took them to Mel’s apartment. They made me wait in the squad car while they checked things out, but there was no note.”
“But if Melanie and White were just friends—”
“Why would she have wanted the dog tags back?”
“I don’t know,” Chase said, and shook her head in frustration.
“All this just convinces me now more than ever that Melanie’s death was no accident,” he said.
“How so?”
“The dog tags and the fact that they circle back to Melanie proves there’s some sort of connection between Melanie, Major White, and … your husband. White and your husband were both 81 pilots. Both were Melanie’s patients, and I’m sorry, but it looks like they were her lovers too. Now, what this has to do with a cover-up conspiracy, I don’t know.” He was rubbing his eyes with the palms of both hands.
Shapiro’s mention of circle jogged her memory. She reached for her purse and removed the folded paper she’d ripped from the pad on her desk. Maybe she was crazy, but she needed to trust someone, even if it was going to be this reporter. She smoothed the middle crease and turned it for his viewing then slapped her hand over it. A startled Shapiro looked up from the table. “Paul, I need to know that whatever we talk about is going to remain off the record or you’re on your own. Do we have a deal?”
“Deal,” he said. “All I care about right now is understanding why Melanie died. If I’m wrong and it was suicide, then I need to understand that too.”
Chase nodded and removed her hand from the paper. “The day after my wreck, after our first meeting at The Hungry Fisherman, I tried to find a connection to all this by jotting down everything and everyone I could think of, looking for possible connections.” She gave him a minute to reflect on her scribbling.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“My daughter, Molly,” she said. His eyebrows lifted with surprise.
“And this?” She followed his finger.
“Colonel Figueredo. He’s the base intel officer.”
“You have him linked to this woman.” He was pointing to Samantha’s name. “And you have them both linked to you and your daughter. Why?”
Chase explained about the night of the wreck, how her office had been notified of the wreck at approximately the same time the wreck had occurred. “My sergeant says a man—and someone who had sounded familiar to her, though she still can’t figure out why —told her to contact Samantha Harold about picking up Molly for me.” Shapiro tossed up both hands in a what-did-I-tell-you gesture. “I’m not saying it was Colonel Figueredo,” she said, waving him back down. “Let me explain. Samantha and her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Abercrombie, are my neighbors and apparently good friends with Figueredo, and anyway, she or her husband probably told the colonel about my wreck. He just seems to show up everywhere.” Chase explained that Samantha had brought Molly to the hospital, had driven them home, and settled Molly to bed— and how Figueredo had shown up the next day.
“So how does the colonel figure into all this?”
“I wish I knew. He seems to have taken an interest in me—or more accurately, in you.”
“Me?” Paul leaned back in his chair.
“What I mean,” she said, “is that you’ve been stirring up so much angst with the general that Figueredo has offered to run interference for me with Hickman. Thanks to you and your articles about the 81, not to mention those man-on-the-street stories you keep doing, I’m not Hickman’s favorite Marine right now. A ‘kill the messenger’ thing. I lose face with the general every time I have to rush to your defense about your First Amendment rights.”
“I see. Guilt by association, too.”
“Exactly.” She went on to explain that Figueredo had driven her around that first day after the wreck.
Shapiro leaned forward, and taking her spidery drawing into his hands, studied it. “Who on this list was here a year ago?” She could read where he was going. He was searching for his mystery caller. She pointed to everyone on the page, and they agreed they could rule out General Hickman and Colonel Farris, 464’s commander. “What about Figueredo?
Chase shook her head. “Colonel Figueredo reported here about ninety days ago.”
“Before that?”
Here, she’d have to be more guarded. Figueredo was an Intel officer with a top secret past. “Somewhere in the Middle East.” She glanced at her watch and then out the window. It was dark. A movie could only account for so much time, and there was the possibility that Samantha or Paige or even Molly, for that matter, might grow worried if they didn’t soon see her car in the driveway
. “We’re obviously not going to solve this tonight. I should be heading back.”
Shapiro looked sheepishly up from the table. “Captain Anderson, I’ll have to tell HP about the connection between your husband and Melanie. This could mean something in their investigation.”
Chase felt a rising hysteria from the sudden urge protect her privacy and Stone’s reputation. She gathered her purse and keys. “Will you give me a day or so to process all this?”
“I can give you until tomorrow.”
She was beginning to feel like a cornered animal that wanted to lash out against a predator. “Look, Paul, your phone calls to Washington about the 81 are stirring up things.” She rose from the table. “All I can say is, be careful. If you’re planning on running a story—”
“That’s not what this is about … at least not yet.”
“Good. You better have all your facts straight before you do. When you start insinuating that we’re more protective of defense contracts and contractors than the lives of our Marines, well, it’s like walking into a hornet’s nest.”
“And that’s not good,” he said, pushing back from the table and retrieving their empty plates. “I’m allergic to bees. One sting can kill me.”
Chase didn’t go straight home. Instead, she went to her office where she nearly scared the life out of Sergeant Cruise, who was pulling the night duty and had the television in the press room up so loud she hadn’t heard her boss calling as she ran up the stairs.
“The second time tonight,” she said, slumping into a chair in the pressroom, dramatically clutching her chest from the adrenaline rush. “You guys are trying to kill me.”
“What do you mean?”
“North was here right after it got dark. Scared me to death, too. He said he’d forgotten to take care of something yesterday.”
“Did he say what?”
Sergeant Cruise shook her head. “Please tell me there hasn’t been another crash—”
“No crash.” Chase turned for her office. “I’ll be out of here in just a minute.”
In her office, she didn’t bother turning on the light or closing the door for that matter. She didn’t want to rouse Sergeant Cruise’s suspicions. She booted her computer. Waited. Waited. She chose a search engine, entered Dr. Melanie Appleton. The first entry was the Current’s online obituary and the story that had run the day after her death. There were hundreds of other entries, but none she could link to Shapiro’s sister. Next she entered, 81 crashes. Hundreds of thousands of entries. More crashes than North had compiled in their giant binder on the 81. Of course he wouldn’t have clipped and saved the articles about the Navy’s aircraft version of the 81, or the Air Force’s. There were entries of three crashes involving the Coast Guard’s. Many of the articles referenced the early problems that had supposedly been fixed by National AeroStar. There were articles about the National AeroStar crash and the lawsuit filed by the families of the four executives, the settlement amount undisclosed. There were articles about the recent crashes in Afghanistan and Baghdad that had been attributed to sand and dust. No mention of final crash results. No mention of lawsuits. She found her own name in many of the articles: Public Affairs Officer Captain Chase Anderson, Marine Corps Base, Hawaii … Or, according to defense spokeswoman, Marine Captain Chase Anderson. Half of these she’d never seen. She searched National AeroStar. Found the photographs of the new 81’s minesweeper, the brag sheet. What was she looking for?
She even stumbled across the insurgent attacks on which she’d been quoted while embedded with NBC when she’d been part of General Armstrong’s team. She searched General John J. Armstrong. She wasn’t prepared for the physical reaction she had when his photograph suddenly popped up. There he was, just as she remembered, and still in Iraq. General John. J. Armstrong, her Achilles heel. Her darkly guarded secret.
She glanced out the window at the quiet tarmac below, then over to 464’s hangar. What bothered her most? That Stone had kept her in the dark about the therapy or that Stone might have been sleeping with the woman? Chase glanced back at the computer screen and the photo of a serious General Armstrong in his battle fatigues beside a shelled Iraqi government office in the center of Baghdad. He looked a little more tired than she remembered the creases around his eyes a little deeper.
Talk was that Armstrong was a rising star, close to his third now, and could go all the way. He’d punched every career button: Naval Academy, combat officer in Vietnam where he’d earned those two Silver Stars for bravery. He’d orchestrated the entire ground war of Desert Storm that the service academies were already studying in warfare classes, and strategically implemented air and sea activities in the early push to Baghdad, not to mention how he’d strategically moved on her.
He’d been married once. His wife had died suddenly, tragically, from a brain aneurysm about seven years earlier. They’d had two children—a son and daughter, who were grown and living on their own. Where his children were or what they’d done with their lives, Chase hadn’t a clue. She’d asked about them one night and he’d changed the subject, giving away nothing except a hint of difficulty that lay between him and his son. No surprise there. Being the son of John J. Armstrong surely meant having to fill pretty big shoes.
But after his wife’s death, John had gone a little crazy. He’d been a colonel then, a regimental commanding officer at Camp Pendleton in California. He started hanging out in the bars off base, and one night, he got mixed up in a brawl with a guy over something no one had been able to recall. The Oceanside police broke up the brawl and threw both men in jail for a few days. The story of the fight made national headlines. Everyone assumed Armstrong’s career was over, but when you’ve got two Silver Stars for bravery, something like a bar brawl gets whitewashed with a letter of reprimand. Two years later, he pinned on his first star. Three years after that, he had his second one and was back in combat, orchestrating Desert Storm, answering only to Swartzkopf, Powell, and the first George Bush.
She’d asked him one night in his tent after their lovemaking if there weren’t someone back home to whom he wrote … someone waiting for his return.
“Only the wives of my friends who are wagering on who’ll be the one to fix me up.”
“So, what’s wrong with being set up on a date?” she’d teased, and lay her head against his shoulder. “It must be hard for you to meet someone when you’re surrounded by men all day.”
“I prefer to meet women the old-fashioned way,” he said, nudging her.
“What … in a bar across a crowded, smoky room?” Referring to the O’Club tent at Qatar. “Good luck with that.”
“I met you, didn’t I?”
“You already knew me—that quick meeting in DC a lifetime ago, remember? Besides, we can’t start wars just so you can get laid, General.”
He filled the tent with laughter. He did this to her … this bawdy bantering they’d claimed as their defense for squeezing out of life every precious second, when you had to worry about roadside bombings and suicidal jihadists. But she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t been attracted to him since their first meeting a few years earlier. Something had transpired between them that day. He was a war hero, one of the last true heroes in the Corps. To say his name was to evoke a legend: John J. Armstrong, the Marine with two Silver Stars. They say anyone with a Silver Star or Medal of Honor has already died inside from what they’ve lived through and seen. But Armstrong was anything but dead; a risk-taker, sure. And in a tiny desert tent city in the middle of a war zone, he’d plucked Chase Anderson from obscurity and risked it all. If caught, they’d have faced a court martial on charges of adultery, fraternization, and conduct unbecoming an officer. But they’d gotten away with it up to then. She didn’t want to think about the humiliation a public news scandal would have cost Stone and Molly, her parents, and the Corps.
Chase stared back at the computer screen, at the photograph of Armstrong, who was flanked by other officers. She peered closer. Something about
the Marine to the left of Armstrong appeared familiar. The caption beneath the photograph only revealed Armstrong’s name. But the man to Armstrong’s left—was it possible? She highlighted and copied the photograph, pasting it into another program so that she could magnify it. Even grainy, she thought she was certain now. The man on Armstrong’s left was none other than Colonel Figueredo. A chill raced from her shoulder blades to the top of her head, which refused to stop tingling.
She heard footsteps outside her door.
“Ma’am,” Sergeant Cruise asked, “have you been in here the whole time? You nearly scared me to death again.”
Chase felt another chill trickle up her back. “Why?” Damn Shapiro and his conspiracy theories that were spooking her.
“I could have sworn I heard you leave a long time ago.” Chase smiled. “You’re just hearing Hawaii’s night marchers, Sergeant Cruise.”
“Don’t say that! That story gives me the creeps … but I could swear—”
Cruise was awfully jumpy tonight, but so was Chase. She rummaged through her desk, choosing a small spiral notebook as a pretense for coming to the office. “Got it,” she said, holding it up.
From the driveway, she stared at her dark home, a black hole between her two neighbors’ that were still awash with light. At Paige’s, the upstairs light that Chase knew to be Sara’s bedroom was on. She tried to picture Molly as she must be by now in her nightgown, silly and giggly from a sugar overdose of brownies and soda. At Samantha’s house, the porch light was on, as well as the lamp in front of the large picture window. An upstairs flickering of colored light through bedroom sheers hinted at a divided household … someone upstairs watching television, while someone was downstairs possibly reading.
An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) Page 15