Breakwater

by Carla Neggers

  She didn’t call anyone back. When the messages finished, she deleted them and stared up at the ceiling, trying to empty her mind. Her apartment, with its soothing, neutral colors, was so different from the eclectic cheerfulness of her bayside cottage. Normally, she could relax in both places, but not now, with guilt and questions swarming, with fatigue sinking her deep into the sofa.

  She couldn’t even remember what her plans for the week had been. Work. Dinner with friends one night. Laundry. Grocery shopping. An aide to an Arizona congressman she’d dated three times—two movies, one truncated dinner—had disappeared. She’d known they were doomed when Lattimore had spotted her at the dinner and made a special point of saying hello, and her date had leaned over the table and whispered, “I hate that son of a bitch.”

  That was in February. Quinn had decided to take a break from dating. If a guy whose company she enjoyed fell from the sky, okay. If not—she had things to do.

  Just as she’d started to take her relationship with Brian for granted—started to think about the prospect of marriage, children—everything fell apart between them, and poof, off he went. And not just because of their different interests or Gerard Lattimore.

  “Quinn, you’re just too independent. You don’t need me.”

  Now that she had some distance, she realized that he meant she didn’t adore him enough. Love was one thing and all very nice, but adoration was something else altogether, and he needed it. He’d wanted to be stroked and admired and adored and for her not to work such long hours, have the responsibilities she had. He needed to be the center of attention—the total focus of her life.

  For weeks, Quinn had believed he’d basically told her she was selfish and boring. Now she realized he hadn’t been looking for the kind of equal, adult relationship she wanted. As much as he pretended he wasn’t self-absorbed and liked a woman with her own career, he nonetheless, at his core, wanted a woman to acquiesce to his every whim—to anticipate his whims. Scoot off to the south of France at the drop of a hat. Blow the budget on a bottle of champagne.

  Give up knitting. She remembered how irritated he would get when she was content to spend an evening knitting, sitting next to him while they watched TV or listened to music. Brian had felt as if they’d turned into his grandparents.

  The last Quinn had heard, he was seeing another intern. He wasn’t bored, anyway.

  Why am I thinking about him?

  Because of Alicia, who’d liked Brian. Because she didn’t want to think about all her unanswered questions.

  Restless, assaulted by memories, Quinn jumped up and headed outside, the streets crowded with commuters heading home from work, off to cocktail parties and early dinners, running errands. The normalcy helped soothe her taut nerves but made her feel even more isolated and alone.

  All was quiet at the American Society for the Study of Plants and Animals. Thelma had gone home, but the executive director, no relation to any of the founders, was up in his office. A former anthropology professor, he and Quinn’s parents got along well. She liked him, but didn’t want to see him or anyone else right now.

  Ducking into her office, she thought about the scut work she owed the Society. A few hours of prowling through closets and attic cubbies sounded more attractive than dinner with sympathetic friends or going back to her apartment and heating up a frozen dinner. But as she picked up a manila folder, its contents all junk from 1939, Quinn wished she’d remained in Yorkville, no matter whose feathers she ruffled.

  21

  O liver Crawford stayed in Yorkville through the week, his presence ramping up the already intense atmosphere at Breakwater Security. When he left by helicopter late Friday afternoon, taking Travis Lubec and Nick Rochester with him, Huck noticed an immediate reduction in tension among those who remained behind. With a dozen trainees arriving in less than a month, there was still a lot of work to do. Courses were designed and the facilities almost finished, but Joe Riccardi had yet to hire all his instructors. According to Vern Glover, tapped as an instructor himself, Sharon had veto power over any of her husband’s picks. She was the one with Crawford’s total trust.

  Vern didn’t approve, grumbling as he helped Huck carry a wooden crate to the walk-in gun vault at the back of the classroom building. “Either the guy can be trusted to do his job or he can’t.”

  “I thought they were equals with separate responsibilities, and they each reported to Crawford.”

  “In theory, not in practice. In practice, Joe reports to her.”

  Sometimes, Vern was smarter and more observant than he let on. Huck had decided not to underestimate him.

  They set the crate in front of the locked, alarmed metal door.

  “That’s it,” Vern said. “I’ll take it from here.”

  “I can help you—”

  “Don’t need your help. You’re not authorized for access.” Vern was breathing hard from the exertion of hauling the crate from the parking area, where he and Huck had offloaded it from a van to the vault. “We’re on a need-to-know basis around here. You don’t need to know.”

  “Locked doors always kick my curiosity into high gear.”

  “Tough.”

  Huck shrugged. “An open environment can build trust. You shut too much up tight, people will start filling in the blanks, and not necessarily in a way you’d want.”

  “What kind of bullshit is that, Boone?”

  McCabe, he thought. My name is McCabe. Reminding himself periodically helped him stay focused on who he was, what he had to do. “Maybe you have shoulder-fired missiles in there.”

  Vern didn’t smile. “Think you’re funny, don’t you?”

  “I wasn’t making a joke, Vern. Shoulder-fired missiles could come in handy in our work.”

  He didn’t bite. “We’re a legitimate operation. You want to do well around here, you’ll learn to take orders and keep your mouth shut.”

  “I was never good at clicking my heels together and saluting smartly.”

  Joe Riccardi had come down the hall behind them. “We need independent thinkers.” He spoke in an even, measured tone. “I believe those were your words, weren’t they, Vern?”

  Vern gave a small hiss through his teeth. “I just want to finish this job and get out of here. I have a date tonight.”

  “In Yorkville?” Joe smiled. “Not much nightlife around here.”

  “I make my own nightlife,” Vern said, grinning now.

  Joe shifted his attention to Huck. “You can go. Why not get out of here, take yourself out to dinner? The crab cakes at the marina restaurant are the best in town. We’ve all had a hard week. A lot of work, a lot of emotion. Let’s take the weekend to regroup.” With a brief pause, he took a breath. “Alicia Miller drowned. That’s now official. Her death was almost certainly an accident. Despite her odd behavior over the weekend and on Monday, she didn’t leave a suicide note or specifically tell anyone she planned to kill herself, and, of course, there’s no evidence of foul play.”

  “Toxicology results?” Huck asked.

  “They screened for alcohol and drugs of abuse. She was clean.”

  “What about medications—”

  “She wasn’t on any medications.”

  Huck nodded, somehow not satisfied. “I guess that ends it, then.”

  “Yes.” Riccardi’s tone didn’t change. He gave Huck a flicker of a smile. “Crab cakes, Boone. Take the night off.”

  Dismissed.

  Huck returned to his room at the barn. Cully O’Dell had gone home to Fredericksburg for the weekend. Although he was just a kid, he was a whiz at all the techie stuff, working with Crawford’s tech gurus in Washington to set up systems at Breakwater. But what he wanted to do was bodyguard work. “I don’t want to be the loser in the van with the headphones.”

  Nothing about O’Dell was hard-cover vigilante.

  Lubec and Rochester were another matter.

  Huck showered and put on clean jeans and a clean shirt, fancy enough for crab cakes in Yo
rkville, Virginia.

  Since he was alone in the converted barn, he slipped up the hall to Lubec’s room—no complicated locks on the door. A credit card did the trick, and Huck was in, the room identical in setup to all the others and obsessively tidy, not so much as a wrinkle in the bunk. Moving quickly, Huck did a reasonably thorough search.

  No photographs of the wife and kids or a girlfriend. No checkbook or credit cards in drawers, closet, pants pockets, on top of the dresser.

  No rocket launchers under the bed.

  No computer.

  Lubec had ten one-hundred-dollar bills in a clip out in the open on his dresser. A cash-and-carry kind of guy.

  Huck returned to his room. The search was a waste of his breaking-and-entering talents.

  He took his Rover into town, driving past Quinn’s cottage. Her Saab wasn’t in the short driveway. Just as well she didn’t come down to Yorkville for the weekend. He parked at the dead end and got out, a cold wind gusting off the water. The tide was coming in, the sun low in the west, leaving behind a dull, almost eerie light on the bay. He could see Quinn’s osprey swooping toward its nest.

  What are we missing?

  What the hell are we all missing?

  Getting into the gun vault and finding something incriminating in Travis Lubec’s room would be progress where there was none, but Huck was more interested in the big picture. So was the task force. Who were the key players in this vigilante network? What were their plans?

  If Quinn’s neighbors, the retired couple, had drowned in the bay, that would be one thing. A tragedy, but it wouldn’t have raised the questions that Alicia Miller’s death did. She had been a DOJ attorney under Gerard Lattimore, who was friends with Oliver Crawford—an accomplished, self-controlled woman who’d sobbed to her friend about ospreys trying to kill her.

  Doesn’t add up.

  If the events of the past few days didn’t add up for him, they didn’t add up for Quinn Harlowe, either. What had she been up to this week? But Huck stopped himself from going any further. His curiosity wasn’t just professional—it was personal. If she’d been at her cottage, he’d have whisked her off for crab cakes, and he didn’t need to be doing that. He’d been nearby when she yelled for help after finding the body of her friend. Otherwise, they’d have no reason even to know each other.

  Not that Quinn did know him. As far as she was concerned, his name was Boone and he worked for a startup private security company and a man she didn’t really like.

  He took the loop road past Clemente’s dump of a motel and saw him out on the dock having a cigarette with the crotchety owner.

  Huck bit back his impatience. Diego Clemente and Huck McCabe, two of the U.S. Marshals Service’s finest, and here they were, smoking cigarettes and off to eat crab cakes.

  Sharon Riccardi, sitting on the porch steps of the main house at the Crawford compound, called to Huck as he headed up the brick walk after his dinner out, the night black under an overcast sky. Several lights were on in the house, but as he approached Sharon, he saw that she was drinking wine in the dark, wearing a long black, filmy sleeveless dress with a shawl and no jewelry. She tilted her head back and raised her glass at him. “I’ll bet the mosquitoes don’t dare to bite you.”

  “I don’t know about that, Mrs. Riccardi.”

  “You’re very fit, aren’t you?” She rose, somewhat unsteady on her feet; she wasn’t wearing shoes, although the night temperature was cold to go barefoot. “I like fit men.”

  “Mrs. Riccardi—”

  “Sharon.” She sipped her wine, her black shawl falling into the crooks of her elbows. Her gaze drifted over him. “All that hard muscle. You’ll be an inspiration to the new men when they arrive.”

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “Inside, asleep.” She gestured toward a second-story window. “We get to live here in luxury. Don’t you think we’re lucky?”

  “It’s a nice house.”

  “Joe doesn’t even seem to notice. I think he’d be happiest living in a foxhole. All I’d need to do is drop in once in a while.” Her eyes raised to his. “Conjugal visits.”

  Huck wondered how many glasses of wine she’d had and decided to keep asking questions. “He ever see combat?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t know him that well.” She laughed at her own comment. “An odd thing to say, isn’t it? He’s a very private man. He was wounded by his first wife. Now he’s more careful about what he reveals.”

  “You two seem to have a good thing going here with Breakwater.”

  She gave a dismissive shrug. “Oliver always has something new for me to do. He’s had a rough time since he was kidnapped.” This time, she took a bigger drink of wine. “I remember those terrible days.”

  “Did you ever lose hope?”

  “No, I didn’t. He says he didn’t, but I don’t know. The kidnapping still haunts him. I believe it will until the day he dies. All he can hope for now is to see justice done.”

  “The kidnappers—”

  “Strange how fate works. We heard just this week that two of them were found recently in a remote camp in the Colombian Andes. They’d been tortured and executed.”

  “Who found them?”

  “A couple of emerald miners.” She tossed back her head, letting her hair curl down her back. “It looks as if the two thugs had enemies of their own.”

  “Why were they tortured?”

  “For information, I assume. Perhaps for the fun of it. Revenge. I don’t know.”

  “You think they deserve what they got?” Huck said.

  She raised her chin to him. “Yes, I do. Don’t you?”

  “Absolutely.” Huck could feel his crab cakes, fries and coleslaw heavy in his stomach, but he’d stayed away from alcohol. “I’m not saying you torture and execute people for no reason. If these guys had useful information, why screw around? If they’re guilty of kidnapping, murder, drug dealing—hell. I’d pull the trigger myself.”

  “Who would have to give the order?”

  “I’m not a lapdog. I think for myself. I base my decisions on the situation and the existing options.”

  Sharon Riccardi gave him a cool look. “What if the kidnappers had committed their crimes here, on U.S. soil?”

  From his briefings, Huck knew what to say. “Doesn’t make any difference.”

  “It’s not our job as private contractors to conduct interrogations and executions.”

  He fixed his gaze on hers. If she wasn’t one of the vigilantes, she would have good reason not to put her trust in him. If she was—he needed to find out. “Law enforcement doesn’t have the necessary latitude to do what has to be done. They have to answer to politicians and protocols that don’t necessarily make any sense. We don’t.”

  “We can’t break laws, of course,” she said, her tone difficult to read. As she adjusted her shawl, the V neck of her dress skewed to one side, exposing the soft curve of her breast. She smiled, touching the stem of her wineglass to her breast. “Oliver left us imported chocolate truffles. Care to indulge?”

  Huck debated how to react. What if Sharon Riccardi didn’t give a rat’s ass what he thought about anything and just wanted to flirt? Or more, he thought.

  But her husband walked out onto the porch. He was fully dressed and didn’t look at all as if he’d been sleeping. “Sharon? What’s going on here?”

  She didn’t so much as glance back at him. “We’ll have truffles another time, Mr. Boone. Enjoy the rest of your evening.”

  “Thanks. I will.” Huck addressed Joe Riccardi. “We were just chatting. I’ll see you both tomorrow.”

  When Huck got back to his room, he considered washing his mouth out with soap after all the nonsense he’d just spoken. His head pounded, and he dropped onto his back on his bunk, picturing ospreys and Quinn Harlowe’s quaint cottage and her pretty, hazel eyes, wondering what she was up to and why he didn’t think he and Diego had heard the last of her.

  22

  O n a bri
ght, warm Thursday ten days after Alicia had found her on the coffee-shop patio, Quinn took her espresso and almond biscotti out to the same table where she’d been sitting that beautiful afternoon. Returning was her way of signaling to herself that she was beginning to accept the reality of what had happened.

  Alicia was dead, drowned, the autopsy on her body completed.

  Her funeral had been two days ago in Chicago, a small, private affair. Alicia’s mother had all but asked Quinn not to attend, not out of any sense of animosity, she knew, but because they all would be tempted to rehash the last confused, troubled days.

  “We want to celebrate Alicia’s life and remember her as she was.”

  Nor, Quinn thought as she sank back in her chair in the warm sun, did anyone need to pretend that she and Alicia had remained all that close, the best of friends. The thaw that had started in March at Lattimore’s party had never had a chance to take hold. Now that the initial shock of Alicia’s death had eased, Quinn wondered how much borrowing the cottage had to do with her friend’s own ends and not with any conscious attempt to repair the strains in their friendship.

  Yet, when she was frightened and melting down, Alicia had come to her, counting on the bond between them to see her through the crisis.

  And I failed her.

  As far as she was concerned, there were still unanswered questions—questions that she knew but couldn’t accept might never get answers.

  Ivan, the coffee-shop owner, had told her that the mother and little boy hadn’t returned for their alphabet book. He said he’d heard about Alicia’s death and was sorry.

  Quinn sipped her espresso but couldn’t work up any appetite for her biscotti.

  The cherry blossoms had vanished, and the trees were leafed out, the shade welcome especially now as the temperatures climbed. With the afternoon temperature in the upper seventies, Quinn had worn sandals and a sundress—turquoise, another way to tell herself that she was better.