“Actually, no, Admiral, it’s not obvious,” Tom said, with more of an edge to his voice than he intended. “Since I haven’t done anything wrong, it never crossed my mind that I might be in any kind of trouble. If I’m being arrested, sir, I deserve to know the charges being brought against me. What is it that I’ve allegedly done?”
“You’re not being arrested, Commander,” Tucker said. “At least not yet. You’re being brought in for questioning.”
Not yet. “If this is about the assassination attempt in Coronado six months ago, I’ve said everything I can say about that.”
“Well, goodness me,” Tucker said. “Look at that. Apparently you remember at least one incident in which you did something wrong. I wonder, Commander, if there could be others.”
Tom turned to Kelly. “I have to go in. I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “I’m going with you.”
“No,” he said. “I’ll be home in a few hours.” He turned to Tucker. “If you’ll excuse me, Admiral, Ensigns, I’m going to take a quick shower and put on my uniform.”
Tucker shook his head. “You’ll have to skip the shower, Commander. You’ve already kept us waiting long enough.”
“I’ll be out shortly,” Tom said curtly, purposely leaving off the sir, but when he went to shut the door, one of the ensigns put his shoulder against it.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to accompany you inside, sir.”
God damn. There was questioning and then there was questioning. What did they think? That he was going to run away?
“Do I need to call a lawyer?” he asked the kid, half in jest, as he led the way back to the bedroom, where his uniform was hanging in the closet.
“Well,” the ensign answered seriously, “you just might want to do that, sir.”
Mother of God. What exactly did they think he’d done?
Sam went around the back of the house, looking for the kitchen door and praying that he was wrong, praying that Janine, Mary Lou, and Haley had gone to visit Mary Lou’s mother in northern Florida, and that an animal—a raccoon or a skunk—had gotten into the house and, trapped there, had died.
But, Jesus, there were flies covering every window, even in the back of the house. Especially in the back. Whatever was dead in there was bigger than a skunk.
Sam knew he shouldn’t touch the doorknob in case there were fingerprints on it. He had to call the authorities.
Except he didn’t know for sure that anyone was dead.
Yet the fact that Mary Lou hadn’t returned his call for three weeks—three long weeks—suddenly seemed telling. He’d assumed that she wasn’t calling him back—not that she couldn’t.
Please, God, don’t let her be dead.
He lifted the clay flowerpot that sat on the back steps—Mary Lou’s favorite hiding place—and sure enough, there was a key beneath it.
The lock on the kitchen door was right on the knob, and he knew he could unlatch the door by inserting and then carefully turning the key. He didn’t need to touch the knob and therefore wouldn’t add to or subtract from any fingerprints that might be there.
The lock clicked as it unlatched, and he gagged. Jesus. Even just the inch or two that he’d opened the door was enough to make his eyes water from the unmistakable stench of death. Sam quickly pulled the collar of his T-shirt up and over his nose and mouth and swung the door open.
Oh, God, no.
Mary Lou lay facedown on the linoleum floor—although, Christ, she’d been lying there so long in this heat, she probably didn’t have much of a face left.
Sam couldn’t bring himself to look more closely.
He saw all he needed to see. She was undeniably dead, her brown hair matted with blood and brains and, shit, maggots. She’d taken what looked like a shotgun slug to the back of her head, probably while she was running away from whoever had come to the kitchen door.
Sam stumbled outside and puked up his lunch into the dusty grass.
FBI agent Alyssa Locke answered the phone in her partner’s office. “Jules Cassidy’s desk.”
There was a pause before a voice that sounded remarkably like Sam Starrett’s asked, “Where’s Jules?”
No, it didn’t sound remarkably like Sam. It sounded pathetically like him.
Because she was decidedly pathetic.
What in God’s name did she have to do to get that man out from under her skin for once and for all? She saw and heard him everywhere. She couldn’t so much as see a blue jeans ad in a magazine without thinking about his long legs and his—
“Who’s calling, please?” she said, scrambling to find a piece of paper and a pen on Jules’s black hole of a desk. Her fault for coming in here in search of a file, her fault for picking up the phone instead of letting Jules’s voice mail take the message.
There was the sound of air being exhaled hard, then, “Alyssa, it’s Sam. Starrett. Can you please put Jules on the phone? Right now?”
Holy God, this time it really was Sam.
“Oh,” she said, temporarily startled into silence. Why on earth was Sam calling Jules?
“Look,” he said in that Texas drawl that she’d always found either infuriating or sexy as hell, depending on her state of mind. “I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but I’ve got a fucking bad situation here and I need to talk to Jules right fucking now. So put him on the fucking phone. Please.”
Whoa. A triple fucking. Even in the best of situations, Sam had a sewer mouth, but something definitely had him rattled to make him that profane.
“He’s not here,” Alyssa told him. “He’s out of the office and he won’t be back until Friday.”
“Fuck!”
“What’s happening?” she asked, sitting down behind Jules’s desk. Aha, there was a brand-new legal pad buried among his junk. She pulled it free. “Is this call business or . . . ?”
She uncapped a pen as Sam laughed. It was the laughter of a man who didn’t find anything particularly funny right now. “God damn it. Yes, it’s business.”
“Where are you?” And no, she refused to let her heart beat harder at the thought that he was here in D.C. That was just indigestion from drinking too much coffee on an empty stomach.
“Sarasota,” he said.
“Florida.”
“Yeah. I’m at Mary Lou’s sister’s house. Alyssa, I’m really sorry, but I need your help. I need you to call someone in the Sarasota Bureau office and have them get over here as quickly as possible.”
“What’s going on?”
Another loud exhale. “Mary Lou’s dead.”
It was a good thing she was sitting down. As it was, she had to hang on to the desk. “Oh, my God. Sam! How?”
“A shotgun slug to the head.”
Oh, dear Lord. Oh, Sam, no. Alyssa had suspected that things weren’t particularly good between Sam and his wife, but . . . “Was anyone else hurt?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I came outside to . . . Well, shit, you know me well enough. I got sick. Big surprise. But I . . . I have to go back in there to look for Haley and . . .” His voice broke. “Jesus, Lys. I’m pretty sure Haley’s in there.”
“Whoa,” Alyssa said. She leapt to her feet, pulling the phone as far as it would go as she went to the office door. “Wait. Just wait a second, okay, Sam? Don’t move.”
Laronda was in the hall. Alyssa covered the mouthpiece of the telephone. “Has Max left for lunch?”
“About an hour ago. He should be back in about fifteen minutes.”
“Shit.” Fifteen minutes wasn’t good enough. “Is Peggy in her office?”
“She’s gone, too.” Laronda was eyeing her with curiosity. “Everyone’s out but George. You want George Faulkner?”
George was still new to the team and had even less experience in this type of situation than Alyssa did. She shook her head. It was up to her to talk Sam down from whatever emotional ledge he was on. “Get me the head of the Florida office in Sarasota.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
&nb
sp; Alyssa went back to Jules’s desk, speaking into the phone. “Sam, are you still with me?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” she said. “Don’t go anywhere. Don’t go back inside. Just . . . just sit down, okay? Are you sitting down?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Where’s the shotgun?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It was so bad in there, I didn’t think to look—”
“Sam, I’m going to call and get you help, all right? But you cannot go back into that house. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, I do, but—”
“No buts. You sit still and you talk to me. I need you to make sure that you are nowhere near that weapon when the authorities arrive. Is that clear?”
On the other end of the phone, Sam was silent.
“Sam?”
Nothing. Oh, God, please don’t let him have put down the phone.
The intercom buzzed. “Manuel Conseco from Sarasota on line two,” Laronda’s voice said.
“Sam, you’re going to need to give me the street address.”
Sam laughed. “You think I killed her,” he said. “That’s really nice, Alyssa. Jesus.”
“Are you saying you didn’t . . . ?”
“Fuck, no. What kind of asshole do you take me for?” He laughed again in disgust. “Apparently the kind who would shoot his soon-to-be ex-wife and leave her dead in the kitchen. Thank you so very much.”
Soon-to-be ex-wife . . . ? “I thought it was an accident.”
“With a fucking shotgun?”
“Well, I’m sorry, but you said—”
“It’s 462 Camilia Street,” Sam said flatly. “Sara-fucking-sota. Mary Lou didn’t return my phone calls for three weeks so I finally came out to see her—to finalize our divorce. I’m pretty sure she’s been dead all that time, and I haven’t searched the rest of the house, so I haven’t found Haley’s body yet. Call whoever you need to call so that the feds get here first. I don’t want the local police fucking up the investigation.”
“Sam,” Alyssa said, but he’d already cut the connection.
CHAPTER TWO
Claire knocked on Noah’s office door as she came into the room. “Ready?”
“Hey,” he said. “Can you give me fifteen more minutes, baby?” He looked up into his wife’s face. “Five,” he amended. “Five more minutes?”
“You sure you have time for this?” She sat down on the couch across from his desk and crossed a pair of legs that were still just as fine as they’d been when she’d caught his attention back in tenth grade.
She’d gotten dressed up. Skirt, silk blouse, heels. Heels. She was wearing makeup, too. She always wore a little, but today she had more than gloss on her lips. She was actually wearing mascara.
And high heels.
Noah was a little crunched today, timewise. But he was crunched every day. And with two jobs, two kids—one a teenager, God help them—they hadn’t managed to schedule a date night for four months. Claire had suggested lunch and he’d actually put it onto his schedule.
But now he realized that this wasn’t just lunch. This was lunch. As in, he was gonna get lunched.
“Yes,” he said absolutely. “I have time for this.”
His intercom buzzed, but Noah hit the Talk button. “Maddy, hold my calls. Claire and I are taking a long, long lunch today and we’re leaving in approximately four and one-half minutes.”
Claire started smiling when he said that second long, and he knew he wouldn’t be back in the office until three thirty, when she had to go pick up Dora and Devin from day camp.
“This one sounds important,” Maddy’s voice came back. “It’s someone named Sam or Roger or Ringo—he wasn’t too clear on which one it was—and he says to tell you it’s an emergency, that Mary Lou’s dead?”
“Oh, dear God!” Claire sat forward, her hand on her heart. She gestured toward the phone. “Speaker phone! Speaker phone!”
Noah pushed the button. “Hey—”
“Ringo, it’s Claire.” She spoke right over him. “I’m here, too. What on earth happened?”
“I’m not sure.” Roger Starrett’s—he’d been calling himself Sam since he’d joined the SEALs—voice was clipped and tight. “Mary Lou and Haley came here to Sarasota about six months ago, to stay with her sister. We’ve been, um, separated. We were waiting on a divorce.”
Divorce? Noah met Claire’s eyes.
Did you know about this? she mouthed.
He shook his head. Noah hadn’t had more than a “Hi, I can’t talk right now” conversation with Sam in far more than six months.
“I lost touch with her about three weeks ago,” Sam continued, “and came out to see what was up and . . .” He cleared his throat. “I found her body in the kitchen of her sister’s house. I’m pretty sure she’s been there for just about the full three weeks.”
“Where’s Haley?” Noah asked.
Sam cleared his throat again. “I’m, uh, getting ready to go back in there to look for her.”
“Oh, dear sweet baby Jesus,” Claire breathed, tears in her eyes. “Do you really think . . . ?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Look, I’ve called the feds—the FBI—and they’re on their way, but I was wondering . . . well . . .”
Ah, Ringo, Ringo, Ringo. Apparently it was still harder than hell for him to ask for help. Even with a dead wife on the kitchen floor. “Where are you?” Noah asked, hoping he could make it easier.
Sam rattled off an address not too far from Noah’s office.
“Hang on,” Noah said. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Max.” Alyssa Locke came out of her office in obvious intercept mode.
“Not now,” he said, even though he took a deep breath as she came close to him. She always smelled impossibly good. “I’ve got fifteen calls that need to be returned two minutes ago.”
Lieut. Comdr. Tom Paoletti, the former CO of SEAL Team Sixteen, who was a colleague—no, a friend—had just been brought in for some serious questioning related to last year’s Coronado presidential assassination attempt/terrorism case—a case that was extremely high priority for Max’s superiors.
They wanted it solved. No kidding. Max wanted it solved, too. But not badly enough to start tossing around some ridiculous conspiracy theory that would implicate a fine, upstanding, and completely patriotic naval officer with an otherwise impeccable record.
With the breaking news about the al-Qaeda tapes—the confirmed knowledge that there were still terrorist cells with the ability to do a crapload of damage all around the world—this was definitely not the right time to start pointing fingers and pulling one of the best Spec War commanders in the Navy out of the game.
But no. Why be smart when you can make newspaper headlines and maybe gain some public recognition points? Election day, after all, was coming.
And so the word had come down to Max that Tom Paoletti had been brought in for questioning regarding those weapons the terrorists had used, the ones everyone assumed had been smuggled onto the Navy base at least several days in advance of the assassination attempt. Because of the seriousness of the potential charges against him, Tom was going to be held under guard for an undetermined amount of time.
If the theory proved true and Tom did have terrorist connections, they didn’t want him out and about. Of course, when the theory was proven to be just more senseless crap, they would have taken away the freedom of an innocent man for weeks, maybe even months, and completely destroyed his career.
The thought of it made Max’s teeth hurt. This was America, for God’s sake, not Nazi Germany. Still, terrorism created fear. And fear could bring out the collaborator in even the most liberal politicians.
“I heard about Tom,” Alyssa said.
“Then you know why I can’t talk to you right now.” Max put his briefcase down beside his desk and bumped his mouse so that his computer’s screensaver would disappear. “I have to make those phone calls.”
Seven new emails. Six of them marked “Urgent.” He glanced up at Alyssa. “Close the door behind you on your way out.”
She closed the door, but when he glanced up again, she was still in his office. If this were a porno flick, she’d lock it, too, flash that smile that always gave him a cardiovascular workout, and start taking off that designer suit she was wearing in a slow striptease. They’d have sex, right on his desk.
Yeah, right. Real life was never as good as the movies.
Instead, she folded her arms across her chest and announced, “Sam Starrett called about ten minutes ago.”
Fuck.
Funny how U.S. Navy SEAL Lt. Sam Starrett’s favorite word was the first thing to pop into Max’s head whenever the man was so much as mentioned.
First things first. “Are you okay?” he asked Alyssa.
He managed to keep his voice even and matter-of-fact. And not sounding at all as if his blood pressure had just gotten high enough to make it possible for him to orbit the moon should he so much as pass gas.
“Yes.” She looked okay. She seemed as calm, cool, and collected as she always did. Which of course meant nothing because she was as good a liar as he was. “He called because—”
But that yes was all Max needed to hear. “Nine o’clock,” he said, then amended it as he looked at the pile of files Laronda had put on his desk. “Make it ten. Your place. I’ll bring the pizza and beer. We’ll talk about it then, okay?”
“Someone killed his wife.”
Oh, fuck indeed. “Someone,” Max repeated.
She knew where he was going. “Not Starrett.”
He had to laugh even though none of this was even remotely funny. “Yeah, you’re impartial.”
“I thought the same thing at first. But it wasn’t Starrett.” She was convinced.
Whatever Sam Starrett had said to her had been effective. God damn it. Max didn’t need this right now. Tom Paoletti didn’t need this right now.
“Mary Lou—his wife—has been living in Florida,” Alyssa continued. “In Sarasota. He went to see her and found the body. He said she was shot, right in her kitchen.”
In her kitchen, in Sarasota. Which was right down the Gulf coast of Florida from Tampa. Which was the last place on earth Max should go and the one place he was dying to be.
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