He nodded.
“White had a hard landing several weeks ago, before his crash?”
Again, Figueredo nodded.
“What does Melanie Appleton have to do with this?”
This time, there was hesitation. Finally, Figueredo shook his head, and his stubbornness to come clean whenever Melanie Appleton’s name was mentioned outraged Chase. What power had this woman had over so many men? Over White? Over Figueredo? Over Stone? “Oh no, you don’t,” she said, with enough venom Figueredo suddenly leaned forward and squeezed her thigh. She yelped. Even in the low light that was cast from the moon and from the light emanating from her kitchen, she could read the anger in his eyes. Then again, there was also something slightly frantic about his expression.“You either keep your voice down, or I leave. Got it?” he said in a low, measured tone.
Chase leaned back in her chair. “Then tell me,” and she’d softened her voice, “what’s going on. Clearly O’Donnell thinks I should know. He seems to think my knowing will help you.”
“O’Donnell is a fool for bringing you into this too soon. We had a deal. But then, White’s crash and Appleton’s death … her brother’s involvement.”
“Are you telling me you and O’Donnell are part of an undercover investigation or something like that?”
He leaned back in the chair. He took his time, but when he nodded, Chase let out a heavy sigh. She stood up and headed inside.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
She came back to retrieve the empty wine glass. “To open a new bottle.”
She checked on Molly first, drawing the child’s blanket back over her tiny body, and when she returned to the kitchen, she found Figueredo there, rummaging through a kitchen drawer. This was the third time he’d come to her home and made himself quite at home, the first time taking over the responsibilities of grilling chicken; the second time the day after the wreck when he’d shown up to offer her a ride but had been hungry and rummaged through her refrigerator; and now. “May I help you, sir?”
“Corkscrew?” he asked, his head over a drawer of utensils, and then locating it, added, “Got it.” He held it up, and asked, “Are we doing red or white?”
Chase pointed to the wine rack on the kitchen counter. “Red.”
“Good choice.” He looked over the bottles and selected one, opened it, and filled two glasses. “Is your daughter okay?” he asked, handing her a glass and gesturing toward the dinette table.
“She has a habit of kicking in her sleep. Had to cover her back up, but she’s sound asleep.”
He’d pulled a chair for her. “What I’m about to tell you must be kept in the strictest confidence for now.”
“Okay, sir.” She studied him as he removed his leather jacket. He carefully folded the jacket and draped it across the kitchen island. He unbuttoned the right cuff of his white shirt and rolled it once, then a second time, and tugged the sleeve toward his elbow. He had nice forearms, not too muscular, but with a certain combination of strength and elegance. There was a power about him, a presence simultaneously familiar and exotic, forbidden.
She blurted, “How well do you know General Armstrong?” He’d been rolling up the second sleeve and stopped. Why did she enjoy disarming him so much? She took a long drink of wine.
“Who says I know General Armstrong?” He was back to rolling up his sleeve.
“There’s an online photo of you with Armstrong in Fallujah,” she said. He’d leaned back in his chair, one hand on the table, the other on his wine glass. “You must have come in after I left.”
He shook his head. “I was there.”
Impossible, she thought, and then she blushed under Figueredo’s stare. What did he know about her and Armstrong? “And we never met? I thought you were in Afghanistan with the tribes?”
“I was. I wasn’t one of Armstrong’s staff officers, but I was often sent in to brief him on the Taliban.”
“I see,” she said.
“I saw you there,” he added. “Knew who you were.” There was something in the way he said the latter that caused her to blush again.
“And just who was I, Colonel?”
He remained quiet for a few moments, and then said, “You were Armstrong’s public affairs officer.” He pushed the wine glass aside and leaned forward. His eyes were black orbs in a sea of white, as white as his shirt, as white as his smile, and she could now picture him as a young Omar Sharif, with a thick, black beard, riding horseback, the reins in one hand, a rifle in the other. “Look, Chase,” he said, “a woman like you is pretty hard to miss in a god-forsaken place like that—especially to a man who’d been living around women covered head to toe in the amount of material you most likely have on your bed right now. So, yes, to answer your question, I saw you there. Okay? I also saw a lot of things you don’t want to know about.”
So he knew. She looked down, willing away the emotion that embarrassment was bringing forth. “Chase,” he said, in a tone she’d nearly forgotten existed, “none of us escaped that place unscathed. We’ve all done things we wish we could change. I saw horrible things there … women beaten by their fathers and husbands because they’d been raped by Taliban rebels. I even witnessed a rape, and because of the position I was in, I couldn’t do anything to help the poor woman without blowing my cover.” He lifted Chase’s wine glass and handed it to her. He offered a toast, “The Arabs have a saying, ‘The sands are blowing.’” He softly clinked his glass with hers. “Here’s to the winds of change.”
Chase set down her glass. “Is Armstrong behind any of what’s going on here?”
“In a sense, yes.” He leaned back in his chair as if to let that information settle on her.
“In what way?”
“He’s in charge of all military ops in the Middle East. He’s been concerned about the numbers of helicopter crashes.”
“Stone crashed a bird there during his first deployment to Afghanistan.” Figueredo nodded. She continued, “Stone always believed there was a design flaw in the 81, something to do with the swash-plate duplex bearing—it’s responsible for the tilt of the rotor—” she stopped when he smiled. Of course, he knew all this. “But why your involvement in all this, sir? You’re an intel officer, not an N.I.S. officer.”
“Armstrong was afraid of leaks within N.I.S. Besides, an officer from N.I.S. who goes around asking questions doesn’t do much but clam up an investigation. Who would suspect an intel officer?”
“But if there are problems with the 81, the problems are Corps-wide.”
“Who says I’m acting alone?”
“So there are other investigations going on at other bases?”
He nodded. “But so far, we’ve established no irregular procedures anywhere else with regard to maintenance records.”
“So, Melanie Appleton was right about White’s hard landing...and that it was covered up.”
“Yes. White was furious and threatened Farris that if the hard landing wasn’t reported, he’d take it all the way to the IG, if necessary.”
“But you aren’t suggesting Farris had anything deliberate to do with White’s fatal crash?”
“Of course not,” he said, and leaned forward. “Chase, this is huge. This goes from Hickman all the way to the Pentagon, and all the way to National AeroStar.”
“Hickman?” This was unbelievable.
He continued, “I have to admit I don’t have all the answers just yet. Look, Hickman’s in line for a cushy consulting job on the new 81 with the minesweeper… that is, if National AeroStar gets the contract. Much more negative news about the 81 and there won’t be any minesweeper contract or consulting job for Hickman. I know Farris knew about the hard landing. O’Donnell tells me Hickman knew about it too.” O’Donnell, she thought, certainly would have known what calls came in to Hickman, and if there was anyone she could trust to know Hickman’s day-to-day actions, it was O’Donnell—that is before he committed himself to the base psych ward.
“But how does S
tone fit into all of this? And Tony White?”
“Thanks to your husband—and White and Melanie Appleton—we have proof that maintenance records for two years have been altered.”
Of course, she thought, Stone’s link to Melanie Appleton. Whatever he couldn’t confess to Chase, he’d confessed, apparently, to his lover. “Shapiro told me Stone and Melanie were having an affair, so I can imagine if White confided in her about his hard landing, then Stone must have also confided what he’d known about the maintenance records, but how did you get this information?”
Figueredo’s hand suddenly came down hard on the table, startling her. “Damn that, Shapiro!” he said. “Your husband was not sleeping with Melanie Appleton. Neither was Tony White.”
“But Shapiro’s told me about Melanie’s appointment book—”
“I don’t care what Shapiro thinks he knows, I know Melanie Appleton was not sleeping with either your husband or with Tony White.”
“But how do you know this?” she demanded.
He hesitated. “Because I was sleeping with her.”
Chase had left Figueredo at the table to pace around her kitchen in what seemed a necessary effort to settle into her brain all these revelations. So, Stone had been faithful, after all. Did this news make her feel any better or merely guiltier about her own infidelity?
And now this revelation that Figueredo had been sleeping with Melanie Appleton. What was she expected to do with that? She wondered how Paul Shapiro, who thought he’d always been close enough to his sister to everything about her private life, would deal with this news. How would Detective Okamoto? The latter caused Chase a sudden burst of discomfort. After all, just hours earlier, she’d been questioned as a suspect on the flimsy grounds of the jealous-wife motive. Here, across from her in her own kitchen, was Melanie’s lover and informant. If the colonel could stand by and watch a woman getting raped, did that make him capable of murder?
He was bringing her the empty wine glasses. “Thank you,” she said, and took them with shaky hands. She rinsed the glasses and set them upside down on the drain board. Figueredo was standing in front of the refrigerator that was decorated with family snapshots from a year ago and Molly’s most recent drawings from kindergarten. “Your daughter has your eyes,” he said.
“Everything else about her is her father,” Chase mentioned and went to stand beside him. She pointed to the photo taken at Diamond Head and the one at the gate to Sacred Falls, though the park had been closed for some time. “Have you heard the story about the night marchers?” He hadn’t, so she told him, explaining how Molly had the same sort of fearful fascination with the idea of ghostly chiefs marching every night toward the sea the way other kids obsessed about sharks.
When she reached out to straighten the snapshot of a smiling Stone in Bermuda shorts and T-shirt with Molly on his shoulders, Figueredo moved so close behind her that she could detect his aftershave, woodsy and clean, and could feel the warmth of his body and the stiff fabric of his trousers against the back of her leg.
From over her shoulder, he said, “Melanie Appleton was your husband’s therapist, Chase. He told her everything he felt guilty about. He left her with copies of the altered maintenance records. Thanks to Stone, we know how high this cover-up goes.”
“What I can’t understand is why Stone just didn’t report Farris and Hickman to DC. ”
“Last summer, he made the mistake of following an unlawful order from Farris to alter the 81’s maintenance records. Who knows why, Chase. He just did. Maybe he bought into whatever Farris told him about the mission and the importance of keeping the 81 flying—the whole war-effort speech. Whatever it was, your husband made the lethal mistake of buying into it, and once he did, he turned himself into a victim of blackmail.”
“Oh my God,” she said, thinking back to Stone’s drinking, his pulling away from her. Of course, he couldn’t have confided in her: she was the base public affairs officer, for crying out loud. “Poor Stone,” she said.
“Poor Stone?” he asked. “You’re the one I feel sorry for, you and your daughter. You didn’t ask for this. Your husband put himself in this mess. Don’t you get it, Chase? Your husband was deployed back to the war to keep him quiet. If not for his following that unlawful order in the first place, he’d be right here—” He stopped midsentence, and she wondered why. He’d folded his arms across his chest, and his feet were shoulder-width apart, as if he were planting himself in the middle of her kitchen, preparing for whatever assault she might launch.
But she could see his point. Why had Stone, the one man she’d always seen as so highly principled, followed such an order in the first place? She knew how he felt about the 81. She’d heard his gripes for years. In fact, one of their worst arguments, and their last, had been over the media flight she’d had to go on with Tony White.
One thing was certain: Stone would never intentionally put himself or her and Molly or any of his Marines in harm’s way. There had to be a better explanation than what Figueredo was telling her. She draped the damp dishcloth over the edge of the sink. Figueredo had moved close again, and with both hands on either side of her, he had her pinned in place against the sink. The glass of the kitchen window before them acted as a mirror, something she realized before he did, and she was trying to read his body language, the way his head appeared to be intimately tracing the length of her neck and the way his right shoulder was beginning to press against her back. His expression transformed from contempt to … what? lust? … then to … maybe … remorse? He looked up and caught their reflections, and they stared at one another.
She managed to face him, although this position felt no less vulnerable. At least she’d have the use of her hands to fight him off, if necessary. “All this time, you must have been grieving over Melanie’s death,” she said, hoping false empathy would disarm him.
Figueredo lowered his face to hers. “I said we were sleeping together, Chase. I didn’t say I was in love with her. Sure, I’m sorry about her death, and the best thing I can do to honor her is to find out what happened.” The man was maddening. Figueredo had a way of discarding one persona for another with the ease of a chameleon.
Maybe it was the adrenaline coursing through her, but she took a gamble. “It was you, wasn’t it?” she said, in a voice that sounded strangely similar to hers. His eyebrows lifted into a question. “You’re the one who found the dog tags I’d thrown away … you were here that night, just hours before Melanie was found dead.” He was stoic, unwilling to commit, unwilling to deny. The hysteria that was growing into a huge lump in her throat was threatening to choke her. “How did you know where to find them?”
“It was a lucky find,” he admitted. “When I didn’t find them around here …” he glanced around the kitchen and nodded toward the living room, “I just happened to look through your trash … and there they were. Why on earth did you throw them away?”
She ignored the question. “And you let me face Detective Okamoto today as a suspect in her murder? How did you get in here?”
He rolled his eyes. “Give me some credit, will you?”
She was trembling and thinking of Molly sleeping peacefully down the hall, and though she knew he could no doubt feel the effect he was having on her, she refused to lower her gaze. “If Melanie weren’t sleeping with White, then why did she want the dog tags back? Why did she have them in the first place?”
“Melanie was White’s beard.”
“Her what?” She gently pushed against his left arm to see if he would allow her to pass, but he stiffened.
He let out a heavy sigh. “A beard—a ruse. Melanie and White had been pretending for a year before I got here that they were having an affair.”
Her mind reeled with confusion. She thought back to the photo of Melanie wedged in White’s cockpit. “But why?”
“We decided to allow the ruse of their affair to continue a while longer. By then, White had already left his wife….”
“So Kitty belie
ved they were having an affair?”
He nodded. “She knew what we wanted her to think. Believe me, it was the kind thing to do.”
“What?” Chase asked. What monsters of cruelty, they’d all been, and she pushed hard this time against his arm, but he was stronger than she. She tried the other side, but with no luck. She was about to push against his chest, but he caught both hands, and spun her around, pinning one arm painfully against her back. He pressed her hips against the sink. “Colonel, please,” she said. She looked above the sink and read the plea in her own expression that was staring back at her. If not for Molly, she would have screamed out, hoping her voice would reach Paige or Samantha. She glared at his reflection, but when his eyes met hers, she saw something soft in his expression, pleading.
“Melanie was rash in giving you the dog tags.”
“Why me?”
“Because she couldn’t find me. Because she’d been your husband’s therapist, and she knew how close White had been with your husband.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Understand this … your husband didn’t deserve a woman like you, Chase.” He relaxed his grip on her arm, but he kept her pinned against the sink.
For a moment, they faced each other down in the reflection. Finally, Chase managed to squeak, “Get out of my house, Colonel.” As soon as she could close the door on him, she’d call the provost marshal Major Sims, and Detective Okamoto—even Shapiro.
“You’re holding loyalty for a man who doesn’t deserve it.”
Her bottom lip was trembling. “I said, get out. Don’t make me scream … my neighbors will hear me, you know.”
“I’m betting you won’t scream.” His right hand began tracing the outline of her figure. He took a step back, and then he kicked her legs open. She gasped. “No, please …” He was staring back at her, and when his hand slid down her back, over her hips, and dove into the private hollow he’d created for himself by pressing her harder over the sink, she gasped again. She tried to resist, tried to bring her legs back together, but he had her pinned as if he meant to take her right there.
An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) Page 21