The Final Mission

by Rachel Lee

  Putting in that laundry chute had been one of his smarter moves. The boys didn’t mind using it. In fact, they enjoyed it, so he rarely found dirty clothes lying around up there.

  “I’ll be up in a minute. I need to talk to Courtney for a second.”

  “Okay.” They disappeared.

  He found Courtney in his office, sitting at the boys’ computer. She had her chin in her hand, and from what he could tell she was looking at email.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Nope. I wasn’t expecting anything so soon. It’s a weekend. And my friend might not find anything anyway.”

  “What did you ask her to do?”

  “Just see if that face matched anything in our photo database.”

  “But you didn’t tell her why?”

  She lifted her head sharply and swiveled to look at him. “Of course not!”

  “Sorry. But I think we’ve been avoiding a certain possibility here. That if you’re right, you might be as much of a threat to someone as Mary was.”

  “I could be. If I could find anything. If I could build a case from it. At this point, that’s damned unlikely.”

  “Then why are you still pursuing it?”

  “Because I have to.”

  It suddenly struck him that they were practically fighting, and over nothing at all, really. Other than his sudden concern that she might be underestimating the risk to herself.

  “Talk to me,” he said after a moment. “What if that face comes back to you? What if you find out who it is?”

  “Then I have to go to work trying to put pieces together to establish that he could have been one of the rapists. That he had the opportunity and motive to kill Mary.”

  “After all this time?”

  “That’s what cold case work is all about. I have evidence. Oh, yes, I have evidence. But what I need most of all is to know who the perpetrator was. That’s going to be the hard part and I may never accomplish it. But I have to try.”

  “Even if it means risking your own neck?”

  “Mary wasn’t the only victim,” she said quietly.

  That drew him up short. His hands tightened into fists, then he forced them to relax. “No,” he said finally. “No, she wasn’t.”

  Then he turned and stomped upstairs to read to the boys, to talk to them until they fell asleep, which promised to be early after all the work they had done that day. To think about anything except his dead wife and the woman he was worried about now.

  Damn it, he’d tried not to care again. He’d been avoiding it like the plague.

  Now here he was, giving a damn about something besides his boys and the ranch. Worried again.

  So much for learning his lesson.

  Chapter 10

  Courtney sat at the desk in the small office, wondering what the hell had just happened. Dom had come in here looking all wound up, which was unusual from what she’d seen, but he was certainly wound up now.

  About her safety? Was that all it was? The episode had seemed to come out of nowhere after what had been a truly relaxed weekend and it seemed uncharacteristic. But then how well did she know him?

  Maybe she should change her mind about the upcoming weekend. It would be easy enough to come up with an excuse and leave this man what little peace he’d managed to find before she’d blithely waltzed into his life and changed it forever with a piece of news he clearly hadn’t wanted to know.

  She steepled her hands beneath her chin and closed her eyes, thinking. Solving this case was on the outer limits of possibility, but then, most cold cases were. She’d worked on them enough to know.

  Still, she had access to the evidence they’d managed to collect in Iraq, good evidence, enough to kick an investigation into high gear. A few more pieces, an identity or two, and she could probably pull it together enough to get a prosecution, if not a conviction.

  She needed that, for Mary, for those Iraqi women and for herself.

  Even if she never pulled together a prosecutable case, she would at least know she’d done everything, absolutely everything, she could for all those women. That mattered.

  And she was fairly certain that Dom was overestimating the risk to her, at least at present. If she went home and started the ball rolling, that might be something to worry about, although only a minor worry. If she opened a case against someone, they’d be the first suspect if anything untoward happened to her. That was protection in itself.

  She sighed, and wondered if she should just get out of here. Obviously something was working on Dom. Obviously they were both feeling an attraction that neither of them found comfortable. And obviously she’d stirred up Dom’s life, calm as he might seem about it.

  Maybe it would be better for Dom and his boys if she just hit the road. She could find if that face matched anyone of interest just as well on the road as she could here. It wasn’t like she couldn’t get email on her phone.

  Yes, there was still stuff of Mary’s to go through, but she doubted she’d find much more of any use. Mary had been talking and writing to her family, and she wouldn’t have said anything about her undercover role. Not a word, because she had absolutely no reason to. She wouldn’t want her family to know, she would have believed that she could pass information to Courtney soon enough.

  All in all, it had been the height of stupidity to come here. She could feel the corners of her mouth sag as she admitted to herself that she hadn’t really thought this through. Usually she calculated every step she took, but this time, acting on an impulse that had been bugging her for two years, she’d come out here and thrown a family into a turmoil on an unreasonable hope that she might find something useful.

  Ridiculous. She owed Dom one hell of an apology.

  Pushing back from the desk, she rose. She’d heard him come back downstairs and go out onto the front porch. Maybe he was walking off whatever had gotten to him.

  Grabbing her jacket, she went to look and found him sitting on the wide front porch, chair tipped back, one booted foot on the railing.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, shoving her hands into her pockets. Here the moonlight added only a faint glow, and clouds occasionally blacked out the night.

  She thought he looked at her. “For what?”

  “For barging in, for stirring all this up. Clearly I didn’t think it through. I was just driven.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not okay. And something is obviously bugging you. I’ll be out of here in the morning.”

  He didn’t move. Not a muscle that she could tell. “Now why would you do that? Decided you don’t want to see the migration?”

  “It’s not that.” Not exactly. But going camping overnight with a man who was obviously troubled by her presence here wasn’t exactly appealing. Especially when she found him so appealing. “But I feel like I’m standing on train tracks,” she said finally.

  “Why?”

  “Because whatever is happening between us is something neither of us seems to want.” There, it was out. Part of her wanted to turn and walk away before he could say a word, partly out of embarrassment for being so direct, partly because she feared what he might say. When had she gotten so involved that she cared? Being an investigator had toughened her. Rarely did she care what anyone thought of her as long as she knew she was doing her job correctly.

  But somehow this wasn’t just a job anymore. That frightened her as much as anything.

  “Don’t go,” he said. “I’m dealing with my own crap, and it’s not anything you brought with you.”

  “But I woke it up.”

  “Maybe. Yes. It happens. The crap you don’t deal with stays stuck to your boot heels for life, so now’s as good a time as any to scrape it off.”

  She hesitated. “I guess that depends on whether you can scrape it off. It’s not like I’m not having any issues. I’m actually feeling pretty stupid for coming out here unannounced, so focused on my need to solve this case that I never gave a thought to what pain I m
ight cause you.”

  “It’s an old pain, not a new one. Sometimes you just have to look at things and sort them out.”

  “Should I ask? Or not.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not clear myself about what’s happening. I just know I need to think some things through.” He dropped his booted foot to the floor and patted the chair beside him.

  She sat, perching almost on the edge of the chair.

  “The things I’m feeling,” he said slowly, staring into the night, “are things I’m not sure I want to feel.”

  “This attraction?”

  He gave a short laugh. “Yeah. Where does that lead? Nowhere that I can see. Your life is in Georgia, not here. And I’m wondering why I don’t have the sense to just shut it down. But what’s even harder is that I’m looking at my relationship with Mary in a different way. Thinking that I probably can’t do that again.”

  “Do what again?”

  “Get involved with someone who won’t be here.”

  He had a point. “We’re far from involved. And I’ll hop in my car in the morning if that’ll make it easier.”

  “You keep saying that. But it doesn’t help me deal with the past. And that’s what I need to deal with. Choices I made, and the consequences. I guess I still need to make peace with some things, because if I don’t I’ll never move on.”

  “Was it so hard?”

  “From time to time.” He sighed and tipped back again, propping one foot against the porch rail. “I loved her, Courtney. And I know lots of families make the same sacrifices. I guess I just didn’t realize how much having to do that changed me.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Can you?”

  “I may not have any direct experience, but I’ve talked to enough widows. It’s inevitable when you deal with as many military and their families as I do. You meet people who say goodbye to someone they love, over and over again. And you meet those who’ve just learned that their spouse will never return. It’s hard.”

  “It is,” he agreed.

  “Are you having regrets?”

  “Hell, no. I’ll never regret loving Mary. But I’m kind of figuring out that I was angrier than I realized.”

  “About her going to Iraq?”

  “Yes. Logically I get it. She had a higher calling. She couldn’t walk away from her unit. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about loyalty to your unit. You probably understand it better than I do.

  “I understand it,” she agreed.

  “Well, I get it in my own way. It’d be like me not taking care of my horses. So Mary had a higher calling really. Higher than mine. Me, I’m just a fancy wrangler. She was a nurse. She took care of people. She did important work.”

  “Very important,” Courtney agreed. “She saved lives.”

  “And I get that. But I guess what I didn’t get back then, or wouldn’t even let myself think about, was how angry it made me that she left her boys behind.”

  A ripple of genuine concern passed through Courtney, and she wasn’t sure what to say, except, “I’ve known plenty of parents who feel the same. Maybe it’s easier when it’s the mom who stays home and the man who goes.”

  “Are you accusing me of sexism?”

  “Not really. But I think it so permeates us as a species that dads go off to do things, and moms stay home with the kids, well…” She hesitated, not wanting to make him angry. Maybe she shouldn’t say it at all. He didn’t give her the chance.

  “You might be right,” he said. “You might be right.”

  “In what way?” Caution had gripped her, making her feel her way carefully.

  “Well, I hadn’t rearranged the picture in my mind, but I think you’re right. I mean, men go off to war, off to oil rigs, off to wherever to do their jobs. But something seems wrong about a woman doing it.”

  “Especially when she has young children.”

  “Yup.” He almost bit the word off.

  Courtney waited silently, knowing this was one of the times she had to let the other person guide the conversation.

  “Well, damn,” he finally said quietly.

  “Damn?”

  “I’m an idiot.”

  “Now that’s one thing I don’t believe for a minute.”

  Even in the faint light as another cloud scudded over the moon, she could see him shake his head.

  “No, I’m an idiot,” he said again. “We had a role reversal in this family, and I thought I accepted it, but I never really thought about the underlying assumptions I had. I spend my time with horses.”

  “And?”

  “And the mares take care of the young. The stallions pretty much ignore the foals and colts unless there’s a threat. Then they might step in, but the mares run the show, take care of the young. Stallions are, for the most part, sperm donors and little else.”

  Courtney couldn’t help it. A quiet giggle escaped her.

  He turned toward her. “Are you laughing at me?”

  “No, at your description. I know a lot of guys who would take umbrage.”

  “Well, I won’t. So here I am, looking at the natural order of things, and realizing I was mad at Mary because she didn’t follow the natural order the way I had it figured out. That’s idiocy. The kids had two parents. One of them went away on her job. That should be the end of it.”

  “Maybe that’s logical, but not necessarily emotionally true.” She hesitated, then said, “One of the subjects I studied in college was anthropology. I kind of got the feeling after a while that women actually ran things, made sure families were fed, all that important stuff. That man-the-hunter was rarely as successful at feeding the tribe as the women who gathered or grew the food. So I had the feeling that maybe women were actually sending men off to do things that would wear them out. Get them out of the camp so they couldn’t make trouble.”

  He surprised her by laughing. “Now there’s a view I’ve never heard before.”

  “Well, I’m probably wrong. But it seemed like the men in most pre-literate cultures had things to do that pretty much kept them away from agriculture, or gathering, or taking care of kids except for brief periods.”

  “So you think it’s deep-rooted? The idea of women as nurturers and men as being off doing other stuff?”

  “Maybe. Regardless, I think even now it’s socially more acceptable for a man to leave his family to go fight or work, and that’s got to make it harder when it’s the woman who goes and the man who stays home. A very old social contract is broken.”

  “Hmm.”

  He fell silent and she let him think. It was growing chilly, so she stuffed her hands deeper into her pockets, staring out into the night. Waiting. Hoping she hadn’t made a sore spot sorer.

  “That’s it,” he said finally.

  “What?”

  “I was doing the modern-man thing, but in reality somewhere inside there was a caveman. I was blaming her for abandoning her kids long before she died, and I didn’t even know it.”

  “She didn’t abandon them.”

  “No, she didn’t. No more than a sailor who’s gone to sea.”

  “Exactly.”

  “She had competing imperatives. Two callings. Motherhood and nursing.”

  “And evidently she felt you were a good enough dad for her to follow her second calling.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “Well, you should. She paid you a high compliment. She didn’t abandon her kids. She entrusted them to your care while she had to be away. That’s a very different thing.”

  He sighed. “Yeah. It is. How’d my head get so screwed up?”

  “You’re asking me? I don’t think you’re screwed up. I just think you didn’t have much of a social support system for doing things differently.” She hesitated. “I imagine things around here are more traditional, usually.”

  “Mostly, yes.”

  “But you bucked tradition and let Mary do what she needed to do. You’re a remarkable man.”
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br />   “That’s debatable.” He shifted on his chair and it creaked a bit. “Well, that skewed my head around.”

  “Hidden assumptions can do that. It was one of the things they hit most heavily on in our training. Hidden assumptions can make you blind and frustrate an entire investigation. Which is not to say I never run into any of my own.”

  “I guess we all have them.”

  “More than we’ll ever know, probably.” She was still sitting on the edge of her chair, wondering if she should go inside now, up to bed, or just wait in case he had more he wanted to talk about.

  He’d certainly made it clear he didn’t want to get involved with someone who was heading back to Georgia. And he was right. She didn’t want to get involved with someone who was so firmly rooted to soil thousands of miles from where her life was.

  So the smart thing to do… She stopped the thought. Clearly she wasn’t doing the smart thing, hadn’t been doing it since she’d decided to make this trip. What made her think she was going to start now?

  No, she would stay out the week, enjoy life on the ranch and pay the price later.

  There was always a price. Leaving tomorrow or leaving later didn’t seem to make much difference now. She’d stirred up the hornet’s nest, she tasted an attraction she was unwilling to just walk away from. Forbidden fruit.

  She was already in too deep. She might as well just enjoy the next week. Besides, once she got back into the swing of things at home, this time would seem like a dream. God knew, she’d experienced that often enough in her travels.

  Dom surprised her by asking, “How come you’re not married?”

  “I’ve never really looked for that. Anyway, I think I intimidate men.”

  “You must be meeting the wrong men.”

  She laughed. “No. I know I’m pushy and even bossy. I don’t take crap from anybody, and I like to take charge. You just haven’t seen that part of me yet.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I’d dislike it. Might lead to some rows, though.”

  “I can guarantee it would.”

  “So you don’t fit the stereotypes in your world, either?”

  “Apparently not. It’s a very macho world.”

  “So’s this one.”