Patriot Lies (Jack Widow Book 14)

by Scott Blade

  Widow took a glance at his faded reflection in the sliding door.

  “Hey. What’s that supposed to mean? I look like a caveman?”

  “You kinda do. Like a man out of time.”

  “I’m not that much older than you, you know.”

  “What are you? Forty?”

  “Not quite.”

  “I’m sorry. It just hit me. I couldn’t help it. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings.”

  A blow to his ego from a beautiful woman, it wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last time.

  He clicked on the phone screen and the internet icon and googled SHG and the word: stocks.

  Before he could read any of the search results, the phone rang in his hand.

  Gray asked, “Who is it?”

  She leaned in across the counter space between them. He showed her the screen. There was no name displayed for the caller ID, just a number.

  “It’s my guy. Answer it.”

  Widow clicked the talk button. Gray reached out and tapped the speaker button. They both listened.

  A voice said, “Gray?”

  “Yeah. It’s me,” Gray answered. “What you got?”

  She mouthed to Widow, “It’s one of my guys.”

  Widow nodded and held the phone out between them.

  “The lawyer wants to talk to Widow.”

  Gray spoke to Widow.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Widow here.”

  “Widow, there are armed guards here at my house,” Aker said. There was fear in his voice. Widow figured he wasn’t used to having armed men in his house. Then again, who was?

  “I know.”

  “Did you do this?”

  “Yes. There’s no choice.”

  “Is this really that necessary?”

  “It wouldn’t have been if you’d left like I asked.”

  “We can still leave.”

  “It’s too late now. Things have changed. Trust me; the protection is for your own good.”

  “Are these guys all that dangerous?”

  Widow said, “Look what they did to Tunney.”

  “He shot himself.”

  “You still believe that?”

  Aker was silent a moment as if he was processing the truth, trying to believe it not to be true. It was easier for a normal guy like him to see the lie as the truth. Violence wasn’t a part of his reality.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just do what our guys tell you, and your family will be okay.”

  “Okay.”

  At the same time, Gray opened the screen to her MacBook and typed away on the keyboard and swiped her fingers across the track pad. Eventually, she found what she was looking for and reversed it and pointed at the screen.

  The screen showed a website. It answered the question that Widow had been asking for two days.

  At the same time, Aker answered the same question.

  “Widow, I looked up SHG. It stands for Samson, Harwin, & Gaden. I think they make weapons for the government.”

  “Yeah. I got it. Thanks. Be safe. Do what our guys tell you. Talk to you later.”

  Widow didn’t wait for a goodbye. He pressed the call end button and hung up the phone. He turned and looked at Gray’s screen. She skimmed the website and started summarizing it for him.

  “These guys are huge, Widow. Look at this. It says here Samson, Harwin, & Gaden is a corporate conglomerate. It started in the nineties and has grown to expand many different industries. But it started as a weapons company. Now, they’re into pharmaceuticals, vehicles, military and civilian, and still doing weapons.”

  “That’s a lot of pies to have your fingers in.”

  Gray nodded.

  Widow said, “And Eggers got fifty million worth of their stocks. Why? How?”

  Gray said, “There must be a connection between them and his death.”

  “Maybe. I saw the guys who killed him from a distance, on a video monitor, but they’re good. I recognized definite talent.”

  “They military?”

  “Military-trained. This company has the money to employ guys like that. Certainly. Fake NCIS badges are expensive, I bet. But with money like this, they can buy anything they want.”

  “Maybe the badges are real.”

  “Could be. That’d cost more than fakes ones. But if someone can afford it, it’d be these guys.”

  Gray asked, “Why would they want to kill him?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Gray stretched out her back like a cat.

  “Looks like we have homework to do. Let’s move to the sofas,” she said, and she climbed off the barstool. She scooped up her MacBook, grabbed her coffee, and led him back to the living room.

  She said, “Don’t spill that coffee on my stuff.”

  “I won’t.”

  Widow followed her to the living room. She took the loveseat, put her feet out, and put her MacBook on her lap. Milo followed and hopped up on the loveseat next to her. He curled up into a ball and drifted off as if it was the easiest thing in the world for him to do.

  Widow took the couch but didn’t stretch his feet out because it was her house, not his. He just set his coffee on the coffee table and sat straight up.

  Widow looked at the phone screen.

  “Your phone locked up. Got a passcode?”

  “Hand it to me.”

  Widow reached the phone over, and Gray took it and unlocked it. Then she went online and typed in a password to the NCIS private servers. She leaned up and stretched and handed the phone back to Widow.

  “Here you go.”

  Widow reached over and took it back.

  Gray said, “Just type in the search bar at the top. You can see any files I’m cleared for. Which should be all of them.”

  “Great.”

  “You start with Eggers’ file. His history and family. I’ll look into Samson, Harwin, & Gaden. See what I can find out. Bet you’re not used to this.”

  “What?”

  “Doing all your own research?”

  “I don’t mind it. I enjoy it. Part of the fun is uncovering what the bad guys don’t want you to uncover.”

  “You ever miss just being out there? Undercover?”

  “I do. I miss all of it.”

  “You can always come back.”

  “Not now. Not after experiencing freedom the way I’ve experienced freedom.”

  Gray said nothing to that. She just went to work, and so did Widow.

  They worked through the morning and through lunch and into the late afternoon. Every so often, Widow had to tap the phone’s screen because it would dim, some kind of power display setting.

  For hours, he sifted through Eggers’ Navy records and combed through his NCIS file and any known affiliations. Then he read about known affiliates and combed through their files. He read about missions he had never heard of. A lot of the details were redacted, even on the official files. Sometimes his mind filled in the blanks, and sometimes he just moved on. There was a lot of information, a lot of bureaucratic BS. After Action and Crime Reports are not page-turners. Many times he got bored and thought about quitting. He thought about catching a bus. Maybe he could head down south for the winter. But he snapped out of it and refocused on research.

  Eggers had been active duty for nineteen years. He was a SEAL for sixteen, as many years as Widow’s entire Navy/NCIS career combined.

  Eggers had grown up in a small town in Nebraska, where he married his high school sweetheart. She passed away when he was in the service. His daughter, Maven, left for college around the time he jumped ship back in two thousand. He never contacted her after he dropped out of the Navy, and the NCIS and Navy records didn’t indicate any known information about her current whereabouts.

  Gray spent the whole morning and most of the afternoon searching through Samson, Harwin, & Gaden’s website and reading articles about them posted on business websites. She spent a good bit of time learning about stocks and trading
just so she could understand the lingo. She also looked through public contracts and any filed court cases related to SHG. Being a company worth so much money, they had the equivalent of a law student’s nightmare of briefs to read through. But she sifted through them, searching for any connection she could find to Eggers.

  As they approached the late afternoon, Gray said, “You finding anything?”

  “Yeah. A lot. I found out about his daughter. She was born Maven Eggers.”

  “Maven?”

  “That’s her name. Don’t look at me. I didn’t pick it.”

  “What else?”

  “She’s like a ghost. It’s weird. She’s obvious for most of her life until twenty years ago when Eggers quit the Navy. And here’s something interesting. He didn’t quit. He went AWOL.”

  “AWOL?”

  “Yeah, right when he was coming up on his twenty-year mark.”

  “He could’ve just retired.”

  “But he didn’t. Something must’ve scared him away.”

  Gray asked, “What about the daughter?”

  “She vanished. Her trail went cold.”

  “She marry? Change her last name?”

  “Nothing here about that. There’s no paper trail.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. Why would anyone follow her? Unless there was an investigation about him vanishing.”

  “There was an inquiry, but he was almost twenty years in. No one’s going to kick up a fuss about a man quitting a month or two before he could retire anyway.”

  They didn’t say anything more about it. They went quiet again, back to their respective projects. Until twenty-one minutes later. Widow said, “This is interesting.”

  “What?”

  “Back in two thousand, Eggers’ last year in and about six months before he took off, he was in a SEAL platoon. And one of his teammates was gay.”

  “So?”

  “He was murdered.”

  Gray sat up straight.

  “Murdered? Did Eggers have something to do with it?”

  Widow read off the phone’s screen, glancing up at Gray and back down at the screen.

  “No. They accused a sailor named Dwayne Shore. The whole thing happened right before Eggers dropped out. The next summer, Eggers was up for reenlistment, and he didn’t reenlist. He just missed his retirement with that one. It all happened twenty years ago.”

  “There must be an NCIS file on the investigation.”

  “That’s what I’ve been reading. Eggers had nothing to do with it. Other than they were on the same SEAL platoon.”

  Gray asked, “Did SEALs kill their own for being gay? I’ve heard rumors of that sort of thing, like killing their weakest link. I’ve heard of it in the Corps and Army too. What do they call it?”

  “Code Pink. I’ve heard of it before too, from all over the military. But I’ve never heard of a SEAL doing it. Guess it’s possible. But the SEALs I knew didn’t care about being gay or straight or black or white or orange or purple. All they cared about was if you could shoot straight and follow orders and you had your brother’s back.”

  “Still, it might be connected. Probably a long shot.”

  Widow said, “As ugly as it might get, we should turn over that rock anyway. Until we get something more solid to go on.”

  “Agreed. Read me the rest.”

  Widow read the summary report and relative news clippings about the whole story. Some were from the Navy Times, and some were from other news outlets.

  In the end, he recapped it for both of them to hear.

  Widow said, “A gay SEAL was murdered. An NCIS investigation concluded that he was killed by his lover, another sailor, Dwayne Shore. Shore wasn’t on the SEAL teams. He was an E-3, a seaman.”

  Gray asked, “What happened to him?”

  “Shore went to prison for the crime, where he hung himself. It’s very detailed. He stuffed toilet paper rolls under the cell door so no one could break in and save him in time. And he hung himself from the bars on the window. He used bed sheets, ripped up and twisted and doubled to be strong enough to do the job.

  “It also says that he pleaded his innocence until the day he died. Even claimed he was innocent in a suicide note.”

  Gray asked, “What’s in the note?”

  “It photocopied right here. He wrote: I prayed to God that I would be found innocent. I guess the truth will be revealed in my death. Henry, I love you. And that’s all he wrote.”

  Gray stared at Widow. Her eyes were glassy, partially from staring at a computer screen all day and partially from the story he’d just told.

  She said, “That’s horrible.”

  “It is. Tragic.”

  “You think there’s a connection?”

  “Not sure. Fifty million dollars in stock from a weapons giant and now a dead gay SEAL.”

  “Any more details?”

  Widow thumbed through the reports onscreen. He read some more out loud.

  “The dead gay SEAL had just gotten back from a mission with five others,” Widow said. He looked up at Gray and asked, “Can you get their names? They’re not listed here.”

  “Sure. That’ll take some strings pulled. But I’m sure Cameron can get all we need. SEAL missions younger than thirty years old are protected under the National Security Act.”

  Widow took a pull of his coffee, which was the third jumbo cup he had so far.

  Gray asked, “What was his name?”

  “Henry Cho. Born in Los Angeles. He died right before his thirtieth birthday.”

  Gray stood up and moved to the sofa, next to Widow. She smelled like roses and incense. It was nice. Widow tried not to make it known that he liked it. She leaned up next to him, and they both looked at Cho’s case and history.

  Gray read out loud.

  “Cho was stabbed to death. He was stabbed sixteen times.”

  Gray scrolled to the case evidence, which included photos of Cho’s dead body and stab wounds at the scene of his apartment.

  “Jesus!” she said, “Look at those wounds. They’re deep.”

  Widow said, “And strategic.”

  “They looked chaotic to me.”

  “They are chaotic but strategic and tactical.”

  “They look more like a crime of passion to me, not tactical.”

  “They start out tactical. Look at this one,” Widow said as he pointed at a deep wound on Cho’s abdomen.

  Gray looked.

  Widow said, “See this one?”

  Gray nodded.

  Widow said, “It’s up under the ribcage into the heart. And the killer twisted the knife in such a way that no paramedic could save him. He bled out and suffered a long, agonizing death. The rest of these wounds are done not out of passion, but they’re frenzied, as if the killer started with a killing wound he had been trained to do, and then he went into a rage and stabbed the body over and over. But it was that first wound that killed him. Cho was never going to walk away from that one.”

  Gray was quiet a long minute. Then, she said, “Scroll back to the top. There should be a photo of him. I want to see him.”

  Widow scrolled up with one finger until they found a link. As Gray reached across him, her fingers grazed the back of his hand. She clicked the link, and the screen changed until they were both staring at Cho’s face.

  Like Gray, Cho was also Asian American. Widow wasn’t sure which specific country made up the Asian part.

  Cho had a wide smile. It was all lips. He didn’t show his teeth. He had kind eyes, also like Gray. He looked youthful and vibrant. He had a tuft of thick black hair, even clipped a quarter inch from his scalp.

  Gray said, “He was so young.”

  “Twenty-nine when he was murdered. I have no idea how old he is in this picture. He could be twenty-one or could be eighteen. The Navy takes them the day of their eighteenth birthday?”

  “Either way, he was just a baby in this photo, and when he was killed.”

  “You’re thirty-one, rig
ht?”

  “Yes. But I’m an NCIS agent now. I already did the Navy thing.”

  “True.”

  She turned her head and looked into his eyes.

  “Remember my birthdate?”

  “You didn’t tell me the date. Just the month.”

  “Which is?”

  “August.”

  She nodded and reached across him again and clicked the back button at the top of the browser. The screen went back to the file summary. She put her hand on the phone and scrolled through the pages until she found what she was looking for, which was a list of witnesses and Navy personnel and NCIS agents involved in the case.

  She tapped on the screen over the names and looked up at Widow, into his eyes.

  “We should talk to the agents who investigated. They can tell us more. That’s them there.”

  “We should go see Cho’s parents too. Maybe they can tell us something.”

  “Okay. Where’re they now?”

  Widow looked through the file.

  “Looks like Cho’s last known address was Los Angeles, in the Hollywood Hills. His mother’s name is on a deed there. I guess we’re going to Hollywood.”

  “Hollywood? We can just call her on the phone.”

  “Her son was murdered. You want to call her? Better in person.”

  Gray said, “He was murdered twenty years ago.”

  “Still, better in person. We’re investigating here. We need to see, touch, smell, and taste evidence, not just hear it.”

  “You’re going to taste evidence?”

  “Sometimes. Like a narcotics cop might taste a suspected powder.”

  Gray shrugged and said, “Why do I get the feeling you’re just trying to get a free trip to California out of the NCIS?”

  Widow shrugged.

  “Okay. So we’re going to California.”

  Gray stood up from the sofa and stretched in another catlike action. She turned and looked out the window and then she looked at her wristwatch.

  She said, “It’s getting dark. We’re not going to get a flight out tonight. Plus I’m tired from reading all day. You probably are too. I should take you back to your hotel.”

  “I don’t have a hotel.”

  “Where are you staying? You got a friend in DC or something?”

  Widow thought of Kelly Li again. She lived in DC. He could go see her. He could probably stop by unannounced. And she might be glad to see him. That’s if she was even home. Secret Service agents worked a lot.