River Rising

by Merline Lovelace

  River Rising by Merline Lovelace

  She was an attorney with a shining future. He was a star witness with a dark past. Nothing could prepare them for the day their destinies would cross, and their lives would change forever....

  Major Carly Samuels, a top JAG attorney, leapt at the chance to investigate the murder of a high-profile female officer. The initial police report cited Ryan McMann, a fallen hero with ice-blue eyes and a chilling past, as a key witness to the murder. But as the investigation proceeds, it seems Ryan was a little closer to the crime than Carly wanted to believe. Now, as a web of torrid secrets conies to light, the line between witness and suspect starts to blur and the boundary between trust and betrayal is about to be crossed....

  ONYX

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  ISBN 0451408500

  Copyright © Merline Lovelace, 1999

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book is dedicated to the men and women of Air University who educate and polish the professionalism of our officers and senior enlisted personnel. Al and I spent some of the most challenging, stimulating, enjoyable years of our careers on the Air University campus.

  WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO:

  Colonel Scott McLauthlin, Air University Legal Services, for setting me straight on the niceties of murder and pretrial investigations.

  Mr. Jim Whitaker, AF JAG School, for not batting an eye when I walked into his office and told him I was thinking of writing a sizzling potboiler set at the school.

  Major Doug Goodlin, Air Force Personnel Center, for keeping my hand on the stick and my characters on the right track.

  And especially to Colonel Robert Sander, USAF Ret., chopper pilot extraordinaire. Thanks for flying those missions with me, Bob!

  Prologue

  Rain pelted the earth hard and fast, almost obscuring the body sprawled amid a stand of pines. Captain Joanna West nearly missed it as she jogged along River Road. To her right, the Alabama flowed gray and swollen from the storms that had made this the wettest spring on record. To her left, the manicured greens of Maxwell Air Force Base's east golf course shimmered under a haze of water.

  With each stride, the captain cursed the light drizzle that had morfed into a torrential downpour and caught her miles from her quarters. She wasn't into exercise under the best of conditions. Racking up one hundred lung-squeezing miles in the seven weeks she'd spend at Maxwell as a student at Squadron Officers' School pegged out her fun meter at somewhere around minus ten.

  She slogged along, thinking of all the things she'd rather be doing on what was left of this soggy Tuesday afternoon... like vegging out for an hour or two, or even logging in some research time at the Air University library. Her gray sweatshirt with born to hover emblazoned in red stuck to her chest. Her shorts clung cold and clammy to her thighs.

  Huffing, she calculated her remaining torture. Another half mile to the entrance of the minimum security prison situated at the bend in the river. Two and a half miles back to the students' quarters. She could do it, rain or no rain. Maybe.

  She'd just passed a bend in the road when a pale blur some yards off the road snagged her gaze. She blinked once, then again, in a vain attempt to clear her vision. Frowning, she swiped a hand across her eyes and squinted through the curtain of rain beyond the brim of her sodden ball cap.

  "Oh, my God!"

  She spun off the road and raced through the pines. As she drew closer, she cataloged the details with the instinctive precision of a helo pilot maintaining a hover in a howling crosswind, which Jo West had done more times than she cared to count.

  That sprawled lump was a woman. A rider, in jodhpurs and a white blouse. Slender. Blonde. And very dead, if the small, dark hole in the center of her chest and the vacant eyes turned up to the rain were any indication.

  Her heart thudding, Jo dropped to her knees beside the body. She'd flown enough missions since being assigned to a rescue unit to have gained a journeyman's familiarity with emergency medical procedures. CPR wasn't going to help here, though. The bullet had gone right through the woman's heart. The edges of the entry wound were singed black. Rain had washed away most of the blood, leaving only a stain of pale pink on her white blouse.

  Jo sat back on her heels, aching to close those awful, staring eyes, to give the woman some semblance of dignity in death. She knew better than to touch her, though, or anything else in the vicinity. Swiftly, her eyes swept the wooded area around the body. She saw nothing. Heard nothing, except the rain weeping through the pines.

  With a sudden spike of nerves, Jo shot to her feet. The skin on the back of her neck tingled at the possibility that the killer might be hidden among the pines. Watching. Waiting for another victim.

  She cast a last, regretful glance at the woman. She hated to leave her so alone, so exposed to the elements, not to mention insects and animals.

  Gulping, the captain spun around and sprinted through the pines. The federal prison facility was closer than the golf course clubhouse. She'd get help there. She ran for the road, throwing up a spray of water and pine needles with each step. She'd covered only a few yards when headlights stabbed through the curtain of rain.

  Thank God!

  She burst out of the trees and onto the road, arms waving, heart pounding. "Hey! Hey, stop!"

  The Bronco swerved to avoid her, fishtailing for some distance before hissing to a stop on the wet asphalt. The driver pushed out of the cab, his face tight beneath a crop of short, black hair.

  "Do you have a problem, lady, or just some kind of a death wish?"

  "There's a woman over there," Jo panted. "In the woods. She's dead. She's been shot."

  The driver froze. His icy blue eyes sliced to the tree line.

  "I need a ride to the prison," Jo gulped. "Unless you have a car phone? Hey! Mister!" She slapped a palm on the fender to get his attention. "Do you have a phone?"

  He dragged his gaze from the trees. "Are you sure she's dead?"

  "Yes, I'm sure."

  She yanked open the passenger door. No phone, dammit.

  "Let's go. I've got to notify the base police."

  With callous disregard for the vehicle's interior, she threw herself into the passenger seat. Her drenched shorts squeaked on the seat. The driver joined her a moment later. His door thudded, shutting out the rain.

  "Take the next left," Jo directed. "The prison's just ahead, around the bend of—"

  "I know where it is."

  The terse reply snapped her head up. Frowning, she caught the hard angle of his jaw, the nose that had been flattened at the bridge, the black hair, curling a little from the wet. The rugged profile triggered something in Jo's mind, a blurred memory, a fleeting image. Had she seen him somewhere on base? Maybe during her previous runs along River Road?

  "Do you work there? At the prison?"

  "No." A muscle jumped alongside his jaw. He shoved the car into gear. "But I spent some time there."

  The scent of leather and drenched sweats seemed suddenly overpowering. The helo pilot pushed a single syllable through her throat with some difficulty.

  "Why?"

  Arctic blue eyes cut to her face. "I killed a woman."

  Chapter One

  "I need to talk to you, Samuels. Get up here."

  Major Carly Samuels hid a smile at the brusque order that snapped across the phone line. The commandant of the Air Force Judge Advocate General School was more noted for his killer legal mind than his personal or diplomatic skills.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Now."

  "Yes, sir."

  A few quick clicks of the keyboard saved the chang
es Carly had made to the latest draft of the Air Force Law Review. In a moment of sheer insanity, she'd agreed to edit the damned thing in addition to chairing the Military Justice Division and carrying a full load of instructing duties. Not exactly a smart thing to do with her mother's re-election campaign to the U.S. House of Representatives just heating up, but Carly hadn't been promoted to major ahead of her peers and been named to her position at the Air Force Judge Advocate General School by avoiding challenges to either her mind or her energy.

  "I'm going up to see Colonel Carpenter," she informed her administrative assistant. "If my mother calls, tell her I'll stop by her place on my way home. I'm getting out of here early tonight."

  "Right," the staff sergeant drawled. "That'll be about midnight."

  "Seven," Carly said firmly, running a palm around the waistband of her uniform slacks to ease any hint of fullness from her blue blouse. A quick pat confirmed that her dark red hair was up, off her shoulders, and as smooth as she could keep it in this humid weather. "I'll be there by seven."

  "Suuure you will, Major."

  Ignoring his knowing grin, Carly left her office. As always, the dignity and somber elegance of the Dickinson Law Center gave her a little thrill of pride. One of the many institutions that, along with the Air War College, the Air Command and Staff College, and Squadron Officers' School, made up the campus of Air University, the Law Center had been Carly's home for six months now. Terrazzo tiles echoed her swift stride as she passed the law library and mock courtrooms paneled in the same rich cherry wood that graced the halls. Above the paneling, framed art decorated the hunter green walls. Congressman Dickinson, the now-deceased legislator whose district had included Alabama's capitol city of Montgomery and Maxwell Air Force Base, had seen to it that the facility named in his honor did him proud.

  With the academic year in full swing, the center hummed with a subdued vitality that still gave Carly a high after six months. Almost four thousand officer and enlisted students from all branches of the service and a host of nations converged here each year to study everything from tort litigation and computer crimes to the legality of military actions during peace and war.

  Born and bred to the law, Carly considered her assignment as chief of Military Justice something akin to putting a chocaholic to work in a Godiva shop.

  Here she could keep her finger on the pulse of the air force's legal system, stay abreast of the latest cases, and directly influence future generations of air force lawyers... all without the hassles of her previous tour of duty as a staffer in the judge advocate general's office at the Pentagon. Still, teaching and editing the Law Review didn't provide quite the same degree of satisfaction as sending some scumbag child molester or gutless deserter to Leavenworth for an extended stay.

  Which was why Carly didn't object when her boss waved her to a seat a few minutes later and proceeded to inform her that the base JAG had called to request an officer from the center to conduct an Article 32 investigation.

  "Why don't they use one of their own?" she asked curiously.

  "Because their chief of Military Justice is going to try the case if it comes to a court-martial and they need another field grade officer to do the pretrial investigation."

  Her pulse took a little jump. "Are we talking the Smith murder?"

  "We are."

  Excitement shot through her veins. The murder had made all the local and most of the national headlines. Now, it appeared, she was going to get a chance to play in it.

  "The Article 32 has to be done fast," Carpenter advised, "and it has to be done right. The folks over at the base are walking on egg shells with this one."

  "No kidding! How often does a student at one of the air force's most prestigious schools stand accused of putting a bullet through his wife's chest? A wife who, by the way, just happens to be a lieutenant colonel, a student at the same school, and the daughter of a four-star general!"

  "That's just part of it." Carpenter leaned forward, his bushy gray brows slashing into a straight Line. "The media hasn't gotten hold of this little bombshell yet, but the only witness whose testimony puts Michael Smith at the scene of his wife's murder is Ryan McMann."

  She stared at her boss blankly. "Ryan McMann?"

  "Obviously you're not a hockey fan."

  "Hockey? You mean like in ice?"

  "Is there any other kind?"

  Carly turned on her best Alabama drawl. "Now cuh-nol, suh, y'all know I was born and raised raht here in Montgomery. To me, ice is what you poor, ignorant Yankees pollute your bourbon with. Or," she added with a her quicksilver grin, "what a well-intentioned gentleman slips on a girl's hand. Preferably in great big chunks."

  "If you had ever let the air force assign you north of the Mason-Dixon line," her boss retorted, "you'd know that Ryan McMann was once professional hockey's answer to Magic Johnson."

  Carly cocked her head, a speculative gleam in her brown eyes. "Something tells me that 'was' carries particular significance to this case."

  "You're right. McMann spent the past two years right here at Maxwell as a guest of the Federal Bureau of Prisons."

  She sat up straight, her professional instincts fully engaged. "Are you saying that the case against Smith hinges on the testimony of a convicted felon?"

  "You got it."

  "What did this guy McMann do to land in prison?"

  "He was convicted of possession of illegal substances and, ironically, a violation of the Mann act."

  "The Feds went after him for transporting a minor across state lines for lewd and lascivious purposes? What is he, a pervert who preys on little boys?"

  "The victim was a seventeen-year-old groupie who'd boasted to her friends that she intended to add McMann to her list of trophies. She also allegedly supplied the drugs the Feds found in his room at the time of the bust."

  Carly didn't buy it. Sex and drugs were almost synonymous with professional sports these days. There had to be more behind McMann's conviction than the fact that he got high and made it with a seventeen year old.

  "Why didn't he cop a plea and get off with a fine and a slap on the wrist, like all the other jocks?"

  Carpenter picked up his silver pen and thumped the end on his blotter a time or two. "McMann's team was in the finals for the Stanley Cup at the time of his arrest. There was some talk that the big money guys arranged the bust and subsequent prosecution to get him off the ice, but that was only one of the wild rumors flying around at the time. Then the girl OD'd, McMann shocked everyone by changing his plea to guilty, and the rest is history."

  "Now he's a key witness in a murder case." Carly blew a soundless whistle. "No wonder the folks over at the base are so nervous about this one."

  "So, do you want it?"

  "The Article 32 investigation? Are you kidding? Yes, sir, I want it!"

  Carpenter allowed himself a small smile. "I told the base JAG you'd report to him in an hour. He'll have an office, the case file, and your letter of appointment waiting for you." The smile disappeared almost as quickly as it had come. "Clear your schedule for the next ten working days, Samuels. I don't need to tell you that this investigation takes priority over all other duties."

  "No, sir."

  Carly swept him a salute and executed a reasonably smart about-face. That particular maneuver sometimes proved tricky in the spike heels she wore to add a few inches to her scanty five-feet-three. She didn't consider her petite stature, dewy soft magnolia skin, and silky auburn hair a detriment to her profession. Nor did anyone else who'd spent more than two minutes in a courtroom with her. But she'd long ago learned to maximize her presence with hand-tailored uniforms, subtly dramatic makeup, and the extra leg-inches provided by high heels.

  With a nod to the support staff outside the commandant's suite, Carly took the stairs that branched on either side of the impressive entrance to the center and headed back to her office. The thrill of the hunt she always experienced at the start of a case thrummed through her.

  This
was the law she'd cut her teeth on, first as an area defense counsel, providing everyone from dopers to degenerates with the defense that the Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice entitled them to. Then as a prosecutor, sending those same dopers and degenerates to small, comfortless cells at Leavenworth. She didn't for a second doubt her ability to sort through the facts in this case and determine whether or not the evidence supported convening a court-martial to try Lieutenant Colonel Michael Smith for the murder of his wife.

  As she strode through the paneled halls, she had no idea that her confidence in herself and her abilities would soon take a direct hit. Or that a former hockey player turned convicted felon would send her spinning into a foreign, frightening universe, one that existed on the far side of the law as she'd always practiced it. Her only thought as she cleared her desk and her schedule for the next few days was how much she'd missed the adrenaline rush a case like this always gave her.

  Forty-six hours later, Carly flicked an impatient glance at the clock on the conference room wall.

  Ten-fifteen. Lieutenant Colonel Michael Smith was supposed to have arrived at ten sharp.

  Exasperation added an edge to her fine-boned features. She should have expected Smith and the high-priced, showboating criminal defense attorney he'd hired to keep her waiting. G. Putnam Jones had a reputation for theatrics that put O. J. Simpson's entire defense team to shame.

  The attorney had already started playing his games with her. An Article 32 investigation didn't require the presence of the accused when taking testimony from witnesses, only that he be notified of the time and place of said testimony. Jones had assured Carly that he and his client would be there. Much as she'd like to, she couldn't just shrug off their tardiness. Not with the level of visibility that accompanied this case.

  "We'll give them another five minutes," she told the stenographer seated at the far end of the conference table.

  The paralegal nodded and went back to the racing magazine he'd brought with him. Restless and impatient, Carly strolled to the windows of the small conference room allocated for her use in the base headquarters building. Outside, another spring storm splattered the rain-soaked earth.