And now here she was, looking absolutely miserable. Her arms and left cheek were badly bruised, and he spotted stitches on her neck, just above her shirt collar. Tears streamed down her face.
She’d run away from home the last time he’d confronted a former boyfriend who’d slapped her. Right now, Frank wanted his baby safe at home.
“Dad? Can I have my old bedroom back?”
He wrapped his arms tightly around her. “Pumpkin, of course you can stay here. Any time you want, for as long as you want.” He kissed the top of her head. “Your momma is out taking Jasper for a run. She’ll be back in a few.”
“Jasper?” Kathy asked, her face pressed against his chest, her voice muffled.
“I could have sworn I told you about him. We got a new dog.”
Kathy pulled away, wiping the tears from her face. “Really? After Daisy died, I didn’t think Mom was ever going to get another puppy.”
He forced a smile. “I suppose Jasper picked us and not the other way around. You’ll like him. He’s smart as all get-out and he doesn’t fuss nearly as much as some young lady I know.” He winked. “Now come inside.”
“Let me go get my bags.”
“No.” Frank pulled his baby inside and motioned toward the sofa. “You just go have a seat and relax. I’ll take care of everything.”
###
Kathy lay on her bed with the shades drawn. She’d been home for a week, and the ghosts of what had happened on that island still haunted her. The image of Brad’s bloody face was a near-constant presence.
The fear was still with her too. The anxiety gnawed at her insides, leaving her feeling feverish and exhausted.
The door to her bedroom cracked open, and Jasper’s brown nose poked in.
Kathy turned away from the door and pulled the covers up around her.
Hearing padded feet, Kathy ignored the approaching animal.
She didn’t like the idea of another dog in the house. Daisy had been her dog when she was a kid, and it had torn her to pieces when she died. Daisy could never be replaced. And this dog felt like an intruder.
The dog hopped up onto her bed and lay next to her, his head resting on her pillow.
She turned her head toward him. His doggie breath was right in her face. Daisy used to do the exact same thing.
Jasper licked her face.
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “You aren’t shy, are you?”
Jasper’s soulful brown eyes stared into hers as he gave a quiet woof.
###
Frank leaned back on the sofa and rested his head against Megan’s. “Jasper sure as heck has taken a liking to Kathy, hasn’t he?”
The dog had disappeared into Kathy’s bedroom an hour earlier. Since then, he’d heard a few soft woofs and an unmistakable giggle coming from his baby girl.
“It’s funny how Jasper can almost sense when someone is down and bring them out of their doldrums,” Megan said. She turned her head to look in Frank’s eyes. “Have you gotten her to talk about those bruises?”
Frank felt heat rising up his neck. “She won’t say a word. I figure her boyfriend did something I don’t even want to think about. Our baby’s skittish, and we both know I can be a hothead. The last thing I want is for her to just run off when she really needs us.”
Megan sighed, wrapped her arm around his and held it tight. “I hope she’s okay. She’s sleeping a lot.”
“She just needs time to get things back in order. Get her mind straight.”
A shooting pain hit his left elbow. Frank grimaced and shifted his weight.
Megan looked up at him. “Your arm’s still hurting. Why don’t you get yourself to the doc already?”
He shook his head. “It’s fine. I told you, I just pulled it funny unloading one of the bales of hay last week. I’ll take it easy for a bit.”
###
Kathy sat down at the dinner table and ran her hand across its smooth surface. Her father had built this table when she was nine years old. She remembered helping put the stain on and then watching as he covered it with countless coats of polyurethane. To this day, it still looked like a showroom piece.
The aroma of her mom’s roast beef wafted from the kitchen. Kathy knew it would be delicious, but her stomach pitched and rolled. She’d been feeling nauseated ever since the island. Nauseated and exhausted.
Kathy heard Mom moving around in the kitchen as she prepared dinner, and a wave of guilt washed over her.
The truth was, she’d done nothing but lie around the house for weeks. It had to be depression. Depression brought on by guilt, Brad’s death, her own survival, the blood money that was sitting in her bank account.
Dad walked into the dining room and beamed at her. “How’s my baby girl doing?”
“I’m fine, Dad,” she lied. “How’s the new pasture working out?”
He placed a large warm hand on her shoulder and kissed the top of her head. “Oh, the cattle seem to appreciate it. Did you want to come out with me sometime?”
Kathy’s throat tightened with sadness as she thought of helping out again on the ranch. Dad had grown up raising cattle and riding horses, and he could fix just about anything that broke. Ranching was in his blood. But for Kathy, the idea of being stuck here as a rancher terrified her.
She shook her head. “No. Thanks, Dad.”
Her father nodded and gave her a reassuring smile, which only made her feel worse.
Jasper padded into the room, plopped his heavy head on Kathy’s lap and let out a big breath. She gave his head a scratch. Somehow, the dog always seemed to know when she was about to break, and his comforting presence helped her maintain control.
Mom walked in with a tray of roast beef and new potatoes. She laid it on the table, then looked at Kathy and asked, “Honey, how’s your tummy? I have salad ingredients if you think you’re not yet ready for heavier food.”
“A salad would be great.” Kathy pushed back from the table. “I’ll go make it—”
“Don’t you budge, young lady.” Mom cast a frown at her. “You just relax. I’ll be back in a second.”
Dad’s gaze followed Mom as she made a beeline for the kitchen. As soon as she disappeared, he peered at Kathy and asked, “Are you sure you’re okay, Kathy? I was thinking, if there’s something… something the doc in Ash Springs can’t help with… your mom and I can take you to one of the big clinics in Vegas. Even if it’s just to talk.”
Kathy smiled at her father. It was the closest he’d ever come to suggesting that she maybe had something wrong in her head. “I’ll be fine, Dad. Don’t worry.”
Mom returned with a large wooden bowl filled with salad ingredients. “Is everyone okay with raspberry vinaigrette? I didn’t have the ingredients for other kinds of dressings.”
“Honey, that sounds delicious,” Dad remarked amiably.
Kathy smiled up at her Mom as she began tossing the salad. “My favorite.” She stroked Jasper’s head and tried to focus for once on the here and now.
While Mom muddled the raspberries for the dressing, her dad sliced the roast beef and laid juicy pink slabs on their plates. Kathy watched her parents. They were a perfect match. High school sweethearts who’d never said a cross word to each other. At least, as far as Kathy knew.
Mom and Dad were the ideal parents, and for most people, that would be a comforting thing. Yet for Kathy, it was a source of anxiety. She couldn’t fathom how she could ever be as happy or as fulfilled as they were.
Grabbing Kathy’s plate, Mom asked, “Honey, you’re going to have a full bowl of salad, right?”
Kathy nodded as Mom piled the dressed salad onto her plate and set it in front of her.
Her father cleared his throat as he always did before saying grace. They all made the sign of the cross and bowed their heads.
“Bless us, O Lord…”
Kathy’s mind wandered to a darker place. Her guilt was nearly overwhelming.
###
The lot in front of Saint Mary’s was practically empty as Kathy pulled into a parking spot. She hadn’t been to a church in five years. Not since her uncle’s funeral. He was in a car accident while Kathy was up in Alaska for a singing gig. He died in the hospital while she was on a flight home.
As she got out of the car, a warm voice exclaimed, “Bless my soul, is that little Katherine O’Reilly?”
A tall silver-haired man approached from the front steps of the church, wearing the familiar black cassock and white collar of the Roman Catholic Church.
“Yes, Father Carson, it’s me.”
Father Carson was in his seventies, but he showed no sign of slowing down. He lightly stepped toward her with hands outstretched and cupped her face with his warm hands. “My child, you look haggard. Your mother told me some of what you’ve been through, what with the disappearance of your beau and all. I’m truly sorry you’re experiencing such heartache.”
Something about the sincerity in his voice melted the thing that had been frozen inside of Kathy.
Like a film projector skipping randomly along a movie, images of the last handful of months flashed in her mind’s eye.
Brad’s bloody face. Her sheltering in the lab. The men rescuing her from the island. Kathy staring at Brad’s empty house, wondering if he was dead.
Throughout the attack on the island, the ensuing flight from danger, and even during the three months she’d hidden herself from the world at home… at no point had she truly felt any of it.
Until now.
Tears streamed unbidden down her cheeks. The numbness broke like a dam, giving way to an overwhelming explosion of emotions—relief, guilt, terror, sadness.
She wrapped her arms around herself as if she might come apart at the seams.
Father Carson wiped away her tears. “My child, is there anything I can do to help ease your pain?”
Pulling in a deep breath, Kathy nodded. She made the sign of the cross and bowed her head.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was…”
Chapter Seven
“An investigation in Kiribati?” Nate asked. “That’s certainly different.”
“It’s not just different, it stinks.” Jeff Binghamton, a gray-haired FBI assistant director in the Criminal Investigative Division, pushed a microcassette across his desk. “That’s the audio from the initial complaint. Listen to it later, but the gist is, some corporate schmuck claims the government is illegally harassing his company, AgriMed. It’s a genetics research multinational headquartered in the US. Some of its offshore assets were destroyed.”
“Isn’t that normally an issue for the country where the assets were destroyed?” Nate asked.
“You know it. But this guy’s claiming that it was the US military that did the destroying. Here’s what we know. The maritime authorities for the nation of Kiribati received an emergency personal rescue request coming from a remote island. That island is leased by AgriMed—it seems they’ve invested millions on this island, growing some medicinal herb cocktail or some shit—so Kiribati contacted AgriMed directly.” Jeff grabbed the coffee mug off his desk and took a sip. “Those are the facts. But the corporate guy claims that when they responded, their island was a smoking wreck and some heavily armed soldiers were boarding a boat with US military markings. Further, he says one rescuee was deposited at an AgriMed facility on the main island of Kiribati.”
“Shit,” Nate said. “Did we have some operation going on over there?”
Jeff wrinkled his nose and shrugged. “That’s the thing. We got this complaint quite a while back, and I filed requests for information over at the DoD’s Inspector General’s Office. They basically returned a non-denial denial. You know the kind. ‘I’m not doing anything you need to know about.’”
Jeff leaned forward, and the bags under his eyes reminded Nate why he never wanted to go into management. The political runarounds that managers at the Bureau needed to deal with would have made him want to hurt someone, and not figuratively.
“So I did a little digging on my own, with the help of a buddy of mine at the IG’s office. Let’s just say that there were some military assets in that area at the time. So AgriMed’s complaint is at least plausible.”
“And you want me to figure out what really happened.”
“Yes. I’ll assign you a team, but I want you to take the lead.” Jeff leaned across his desk and jabbed his pointer finger in Nate’s direction. “And Nate, be careful. We don’t know what kind of crap you’ll find out there. I don’t trust these AgriMed people. My spidey senses are tingling.”
Nate scooped the cassette tape off the desk. “I’ll get right on it.”
###
The breeze blew into Nate’s face and he wrinkled his nose underneath the surgical mask. The island smelled of charred decay, unburnt gasoline, and dead fish. It seemed as if the military guys—or whoever had done this—had been pretty liberal with whatever cocktail they’d used to burn the place to the ground. Amid the charred disaster that had once been a forest of palms, a small concrete structure in the distance was the only sign of civilization.
His six agents were making faces of disgust. “What the hell?” said Eric Meadows, the youngest agent on the team. “This place smells like a gas refinery.”
“Not gas,” said Mike Anderson, a former Marine infantryman. “I’ll never forget that smell. The gas and detergent and death. I don’t need the forensic lab guys to tell me someone Napalmed this place all to hell.”
Shaking his head, Nate remembered this smell from his days in the Special Forces. He glanced at the surf along the rocky beach and noticed the pockets of dirty bubbles.
“All the more reason for us to get this all over with,” Nate yelled over the squawking seagulls, facing his team. “I don’t plan on ever coming back to this hellhole, so gather as much evidence as you can. Anderson, Sanchez, and Smith, you survey the east flank of the island. Johnson, Liu, and Meadows, you take the west. I’ll go straight up the middle, and we’ll meet on the north end. Everyone keep their radios turned up. Understood?”
The agents nodded, and Nate began trudging through the post-apocalyptic terrain, the burnt remnants of foliage crunching beneath his boots. Every once in a while, something caught Nate’s eye and he pulled out an evidence bag, labeled it, and placed some burnt remnant of a dead tree, coconut, or crab into it.
As he neared the structure at the center of the island, he encountered a large palm that had fallen over but wasn’t too badly burnt. It had blown asunder—likely from boiling sap—but large pieces of it remained mostly intact, and when he kicked the trunk, it didn’t break apart.
Grabbing an iron bar from his pack, he levered it under the palm and grunted with effort as he shifted the tree, revealing some crushed but unburnt vegetation. As he added new things to his growing collection of samples, he spotted a bright color inside the trunk. He took out his tweezers, fished around, and extracted a red, downy feather. It was the first sign of life on this island, besides the dead seagulls and crabs on the beach. He put the feather into a baggie and moved onward.
He frowned as he approached.
Although the rest of the island was covered in ashy debris, the area in front of the broken building was clear. That was strange. Was this perhaps where the company was farming its medicine? Was that why it had been cleared of debris?
He was sure to take plenty of samples here, wondering what kind of plants could be worth a multi-million-dollar investment. Then he approached the building.
It was a plain, blocky, one-story concrete building. It remained largely intact, though its windows were blown out and its metal door hung by only one hinge.
He stepped inside. The concentrated fumes of the accelerant were overwhelming.
They really wanted to get rid of whatever was in here.
Ash covered the flo
or, yet despite the apparent heat of the blaze, the fire hadn’t completely destroyed everything. On the floor were a series of blackened lumps. Nate walked over to one and, using a small metal pick, carefully probed the debris.
Surprisingly, the piles were relatively solid.
Scraping some of the char off, he found the warped and partially melted remains of a computer’s motherboard. Most of the chips that would normally have been soldered onto the board must have popped off and been consumed by the fire.
Next to the destroyed computer was a burnt and misshapen metal object that Nate recognized as a microscope.
All along the walls of the small building, Nate saw similar paired lumps. Broken computer next to a broken microscope.
Nate yanked the radio off his belt. “You guys finding anything?”
“Anderson here. So far, nothing but dead crabs, seagull shit, and lots and lots of dead seagulls. I’m thinking they ate some of this gasoline-soaked crap.”
“Liu here. West side is the same story. I’ve collected a couple of these sorry gulls, just in case. This place is an ecological disaster.”
“All right guys, change of plans. Meet me at the concrete building at the center of the island. I’ve found some bits of computers. They’re probably a lost cause, but just in case, I want to bag them up for the lab guys in Quantico. I’ll need help cataloging all this stuff and dragging it out of here.”
“Roger that. East team will be there in twenty.”
“Ditto for the west team.”
Hooking the radio back onto his belt, Nate stepped out of the building to escape the smell. He scraped the toe of his boot on the ground as his mind raced and he began to work through what he knew.
“Some big pharma conglomerate was pissed because someone destroyed their drug crop? That was certainly plausible. But there was more to it.
“The military destroyed this place, but why? No harmless crop would need to be burned to the ground like this. They wouldn’t destroy microscopes or computers unless someone was hiding something.”
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