by Dana Mentink
“Yet you didn’t complain to your CO?”
Her gaze dropped to her lap. “No, sir.”
“Why not? That’s protocol for harassment.”
Dennis remained quiet, her hands clenched.
“I think I can answer that,” Kendra said. “Tell me if I get anything wrong. You didn’t tell your CO because you worked hard to get where you are, a woman in a man’s profession. You’re raising a child, a son, by yourself, and you put yourself through high school at nights, working days, passed all the basic training and Airmen’s Week plus the National Agency Check and Local Agency checks. You’ve worked harder for this than anything else in your life and you didn’t want the possible stigma attached to a messy relationship with a guy you could kick yourself for even giving a second look.” Kendra raised an eyebrow. “Am I close?”
Kendra had done her homework on Lara Dennis.
Dennis swallowed. “Yes, ma’am. I just want it to be over and get on with my life, take care of my boy and make him proud of me. I messed up a lot as a teen and this is the first time I’ve made something good for both of us. I can’t jeopardize that, not for Sullivan or anyone else.” The look she gave Kendra was pleading. “Do you understand, ma’am?”
“Yes,” Kendra said quietly. “I understand completely.”
A guy she could kick herself for even giving a second look.
Unstable.
Yes, he realized. Kendra did understand.
Ethan stood outside the moment, watching two strong women who’d never met make a connection because of the lives they’d chosen and the consequences they hadn’t. The strength of it stopped him, the grace of it.
He forced himself back to the task. “Have you had any further contact with Boyd Sullivan since?”
“No, sir, and that is the honest truth.”
He looked at Kendra who gave him a slight nod. “All right. Thank you for coming in. We appreciate your time.” They exchanged salutes.
Dennis walked to the door, stopping before she crossed the threshold.
“Ma’am, if I may,” she said, looking at Kendra.
Kendra nodded at her to continue.
“Ma’am, Sullivan used to talk about people who crossed him. He said that no one would get away with humiliating him.” She twisted her cap in her hands. “Uh, I’ve heard talk and all, that you cut him down pretty good in front of his friends.”
“Say what you need to say, Dennis,” Ethan said.
One final wring of her cap and she plunged in. “He’s not going to forget, ma’am. He’s that kind of person and he’ll be carrying that grudge until the day he dies.”
“Or until we put him in prison again,” Ethan said.
“Just saying, ma’am,” Dennis said. “He won’t forget.”
Again a look passed between them, something that spoke of the instant bond they’d formed. “Thank you, Dennis.”
“You’re welcome, sir, ma’am. I hope you get him.”
“We will,” Ethan said, eyes on Kendra. “We will.”
SEVENTEEN
Private eyes and MPs had a lot of duties in common, Kendra thought. Limited glamour but plenty of legwork and reports to complete. After four phone calls, Ethan discovered that Chase McLear was off base for the day, but he managed to get him to agree to meet at a coffee shop in a town a couple hours outside of Canyon. They walked to the truck, the sun blazing at just before noon.
More coffee was fine by Kendra. Her body felt like it had been put through a violent wash cycle and chucked against some sharp rocks to dry. She was physically wrung out, but worse was the emotional upheaval that churned below the surface. The tasks of the day were all that was keeping her from reliving every terrible moment of her plunge into the creek. On top of that, their lack of progress chafed.
Had they accomplished anything at all with their most recent visit to Canyon? Lara Dennis was a dead end, she was sure of it, and the scientist, no more promising. Yvette Crenville, the base nutritionist, had been interviewed several times to no avail. Kendra was straining to muster further possibilities when Heidi Jenks caught up to them.
Ethan stood taller, tension visible in the set of his jaw.
“Jillian,” she said. “I heard about what happened after I left the drill. Are you all right?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
She waited for the inevitable and the reporter did not disappoint her.
“Would you be interested in talking a bit about your experience?”
“No.”
“It might help the investigation, you know, to get more information out there about Sullivan’s accomplice.” She lowered her voice. “I heard it might be a woman who tried to run you down.”
“How’d you hear that exactly, Jenks?” Ethan demanded.
She glared at him. “I have contacts, Ethan, that’s my job. People are always willing to talk eventually.”
“Not me,” Kendra said. “I have no comment now or ever.”
Jenks sighed. “Okay. If you change your mind, let me know.”
“I’m sure none of the details will wind up on the underground blog, right?” Ethan’s tone was acid.
Jenks stared right back at him. “I wouldn’t know, Ethan. I told you, that isn’t me. Whoever’s leaking information isn’t reporting, they’re gossiping.”
He snorted. “And you don’t do that?”
“No,” she said. “No matter what you think about me, I’m a reporter and I take my duty seriously. I have a job to do, just like the two of you, and I’m going to do it with or without your cooperation.” Turning on her heel, she stalked away.
“You trust her?” Ethan said.
“I don’t know. She was there at the drill, she knew the details of the exercise. She had plenty of time to leave and make plans to run me down, but she has no connection to Boyd Sullivan.”
“That we know of,” he said darkly.
They got in the car and drove off. With the air conditioner cranked to high, the truck gradually cooled and Kendra logged on to her email to check for any new info.
“Andy’s still not using his car or his credit cards, as far as I can tell,” she said.
A movement behind them caught both their attention. Ethan stared into the rearview mirror. “Black car, tinted windows at our six o’clock.”
“I see it,” she said, staring into the side-view mirror.
“Changed lanes to stay with us, two cars back.”
“I saw that, too.”
“Can you get plates?”
She squinted into the side mirror, making a note in her phone. “Got it.”
He handed her his phone. “Text it to Linc. Have him run the plate numbers.”
She did. “He said to give him a minute.”
Ethan continued on, keeping pace with the flow of traffic. Kendra could not get a good look at the driver. Goose bumps prickled her skin and she could recall the roaring of the engine as the driver came at her on the bridge, aiming for a kill. Possible suspects clicked through her mind. Sullivan? His female accomplice? Andy? Her palms were slick as she gripped the phone, the minutes stretching along with the miles until she thought she would scream. It’s like a combat zone, with potential enemies around every corner.
The phone buzzed. She read the details from Linc’s message aloud to Ethan.
“The car belongs to a real estate agent, Louis Bickford. No ties to Baylor or Canyon that Linc can see.” Kendra deflated, sagging against the seat. Frustration edged out over relief.
Ethan groaned. “Do you think we’re getting paranoid?”
Was she? The familiar tightness squeezed her belly. She bit her lip, staring out the window as the black car gradually eased back into the flow of traffic.
“Hey,” Ethan said, startling her by taking her hand. “You drifted away there for a minute. Di
d I say something wrong?”
“No.” She swallowed. “It’s just...my mom had severe paranoia, exacerbated by her addiction, before she was hospitalized full-time. It...hurt, when she turned that paranoia on me.” She could still hear her mother’s screams from her hospital bed. Get her away from me. She hates me. She wants to kill me. Her mother’s rejection had ripped open such a gaping hole, leaving Kendra vulnerable to Andy, and seeking alcohol and drugs to fill it.
“Aw, man,” he said. “I’m sorry. Let me just try to pry my boot out of my big mouth.”
She squeezed his fingers. “There’s no way you could have known.” Her eyes drifted to the scarf still rolled up on the floor. “I think Mom tried her best, but she was sick and addicted. It was hard not to take it personally, though, especially when I was younger, but I’ve grown. I understand now. People have flaws, big ones.”
“But it still hurts.”
She heaved a sigh. “Yeah, it hurts, but I think God’s going to make something good out of it.”
“How?” His brown eyes were so warm and sincere, she found herself articulating it aloud.
“It came to me as we talked to Lara Dennis about her son. For a long while, I thought I would never have kids because I didn’t want to risk breaking their hearts like my mother broke mine, but you know what?” A spark of new hope danced inside her. “I think I’m going to be a better mother because I know how hard that job is, and how incredibly important, like Lara Dennis does.”
He looked as though she’d slapped him. “Ethan? I think it’s my turn for a boot in the mouth. What did I say?”
“Ah, it was a bone of contention between me and Jillian.” His face flushed. “I really wanted kids and she told me she did, too, so every month after I thought we’d started trying, I’d get my hopes up.” He shrugged. “She just gave it lip service, never intended to have children, not with me anyway.”
“Then she’s crazy.” She couldn’t stop blurting out the words.
He didn’t seem to hear. “I decided a guy who couldn’t tell that his own wife was lying to him probably wasn’t good father material. I’m not going to have a family.” He forced a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Gonna stick to dogs.”
She clasped his hand between hers. “Like I said, He uses that stuff for good. Jillian’s betrayal and my enormous mess-ups and everything. Don’t focus on the rearview, right?”
For a moment, he looked at her, eyes shimmering, as if he was probing in search of some answer he keenly wanted. Then he squeezed her fingers again and pulled his hands away, his face expressionless behind the handsome mask.
“I learned my lesson,” he mumbled. “I’ll leave it at that.”
She’d made him uncomfortable by mentioning children. Yes, he was working on letting go of the hatred for his ex-wife, but the damage would take a long time, maybe a lifetime, to overcome. It dragged her heart down and she ached for him. As the miles silently wore on, she lost herself in the beat of the country music.
Bless the broken road.
That led me to you.
Thank You, God, for the broken road that led me to Ethan Webb, she prayed inside. The prayer was automatic and she knew in the deep places that they would not travel that road together much longer. But for now, for the moment. with the warm sun and the snoring dog and Ethan’s strong profile and the purple scarf at her feet, she thanked Him.
Ethan gripped the wheel, pulling into the parking lot of a coffee shop, and parked in the shade.
From the back seat the dog gave a might yawn.
“Titus is coffee shop approved?”
“He goes where I go. End of story.” He scoped out the outdoor seating area. “I’m gonna sit him in the shade, grab a table away from everyone else. Want to get us some coffee?” He reached for his wallet.
“You have to ask? Don’t worry. It’s on me. A stall tactic until I buy you and Titus that steak dinner.”
He chuckled. “You make me laugh, and that’s a rare gift in this world.”
She smiled, realizing that it had been a long time since she’d shared laughter with a good man. A rare gift, for sure. Sullivan would be caught, and she would track down Andy Bleakman on her own. Once the case was closed, their time together would end. The laughter would be only a memory. So be it. She’d savor each chuckle and smile, storing them carefully away in her memory.
The twinge of sadness remained as she pushed past the coffee shop door.
* * *
Ethan faced Chase McLear. McLear’s green eyes took in every detail, the space, exits, entrances, everything a former Security Forces guy would notice. He gave Kendra a long look.
“She’s not leaving my side until Sullivan is caught,” Ethan said, by way of explanation. “You’ve heard about the threats.”
McLear played with his coffee cup. “I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. You know I had nothing to do with Sullivan. I’m minding my own business, training my dog. This is crazy and you know it.”
Ethan thought so, too. McLear and Queenie, his beagle, were almost through their sessions and Queenie would be one of the first dogs ever to be qualified as an electronic sniffer at Canyon. McLear was also the single father to young Allie after her mother had abandoned the child.
But he needed to keep his emotions out of this investigation.
“I don’t want to be here any more than you do, but your name is on the prison list. You visited Sullivan.”
Chase put the cup down hard, splashing coffee over the edge, each word sharp as a blade. “I did not.”
“Can you explain why your name’s on the list?”
“I can’t.” He grimaced. “But one Security Forces guy to another, if I were you, I’d be coming to two possible conclusions.”
Ethan watched for any sign that McLear was lying, a change in the timbre of his voice, a sideways glance, an unusual gesture. He saw only confusion and mounting frustration. “Do my work for me then, Chase. What are my two theories?”
McLear rolled his coffee cup between his palms. “First theory. I did visit Sullivan because I’m his accomplice. Maybe I paid off a prison staffer to keep my name off the list, but I refused to keep paying off said staffer and he or she corrected the record.”
“Good theory,” Ethan said. “What’s the second?”
“That someone is trying to frame me, to throw suspicion off themselves.”
“And to which theory do you ascribe?”
McLear scowled. “What do you think?”
Kendra stood and walked to the trash can to throw her paper napkin away.
“Ethan, this isn’t some adventure story here. This is my life,” McLear said. “And my kid’s life.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Ethan snapped. “There are a lot of lives at stake.”
Kendra’s for one. He glanced her way again, noticing the way the sun burnished her hair into copper fire. She brushed a flyaway strand back, her attention drawn by something.
McLear smacked the table, claiming his attention. “Ethan, someone is manipulating the evidence and this investigation. I’m not guilty of anything and you know it.”
“I don’t know anything right now, Chase, but I’m gonna find out, I promise.”
McLear started to answer when Kendra called Ethan. He turned to her and when he saw her expression, he hurried to her side. Titus scrambled after him. The patrons gave the dog a wide berth.
“Isn’t that the car?” she whispered, craning her neck toward the parking lot.
He followed her gaze to the black car, the one that he’d thought had been following them earlier. Coincidence? There weren’t very many coffee shops convenient to the freeway here. Maybe the Realtor had stopped, too. But Ethan knew there were not too many coincidences in combat zones, either, only missed clues that got a person dead.
“Kendra,
stay here, I’m going to—”
His words were drowned out by the crash of breaking glass.
EIGHTEEN
In a blur, Kendra saw Ethan catapult down the landing into the parking lot, Titus keeping pace at his heels. The sound came from under the trees where Ethan’s truck was parked next to an older model Mercedes. Across from the two vehicles was the black sedan they’d had Linc trace earlier, empty, as far as Kendra could tell.
She heard the sound of more shattering glass, then the thwack of a blunt object against metal.
Racing after Ethan, hand on her gun, she yelled at a patron to call the cops and hit the blacktop, sprinting. Zeroing in on the noise, she saw bits of broken glass sparkling through the air as a man—Caucasian, medium height, wearing a baseball cap pulled low on his brow—brought a tire iron down on the windshield of Ethan’s truck.
Ethan shouted as he closed in and the man flung down the tire iron and hurtled into the driver’s seat of the Mercedes, the engine already running.
She caught up just as Ethan leaped at the door of the Mercedes, which the driver had not had time to close fully. Titus jumped up at the back windows, scratching and clawing as the driver gunned the engine, headed for the parking lot exit. Kendra’s fingers itched to fire at the rear tires, but with Ethan and Titus so close, she didn’t dare.
With a grunt of frustration, Titus bounced off the car, rolling once and springing to all fours again. Undeterred, he again started to chase after the car and Ethan, his legs churning into blurs of brown fur. Ethan managed to wrench the door open and reach in to grab the driver.
Her heart soared. Finally. They would have something tangible, someone to interrogate. A fist struck out and punched Ethan in the jaw, sending him flying onto the pavement, where he tumbled over twice, coming to rest on his back. The car roared away onto the main street, out of sight in a matter of moments.
A patron raced up, a phone to his ear, blinking incredulously. “That’s my Mercedes. That guy just stole my car.”
“Hot-wired it,” another said. “Had it running the whole time while he bashed in some guy’s windows. What a looney.”
