"Good shot of Captain West."
"I think so."
Alex kept his face impassive as the detective lifted the frame and tilted the photo to the light filtering through the window.
"Was it taken by that photographer Stroder? The one who chased you off the road a few weeks ago?"
Alex had wondered when Ambruzzo would get around to Stroder. He permitted himself a small, tight smile.
"That particular picture was taken by the official White House photographer."
"Mmmm. And this is your wife?"
Despite the years, despite everything that had passed since those awful weeks before Katherine's death, a familiar pain gripped Alex's chest. "Yes, that's Katherine."
"Interesting that you keep photos of Joanna West and your dead wife side-by-side."
Suddenly, Alex tired of the game. It was time to cut to the chase. "What photos I choose to keep where is my business, Detective."
Hard brown eyes sliced to Alex. "Well, it's my business, too."
"How?"
Faced with that blunt challenge, Ambruzzo had no choice but to lay his cards on the table. He slid a hand into his suit pocket and produced a small piece of paper encased in plastic.
Alex recognized the spidery handwriting instantly. So they'd gotten their hands on Martin's notebook! It had been too much to believe the damned thing had been lost.
A cold lump of anger lodged in the pit of his stomach. That scrap of paper couldn't contain anything incriminating. If it had, the police would have pounced by now. Yet the idea that he'd have to go through it all again—the constant prying, the intrusive media, the speculation—infuriated him.
"Do you recognize the handwriting, Mr. Taylor?"
"Of course."
"Any idea what made Dr. Russ speculate about whether or not you killed your wife? And whether Captain West might be in danger too?"
Stevens jumped in. "You don't have to answer that!"
"I'm aware of that, Dan. I'm more than willing to do so, however."
He leaned forward, wanting Ambruzzo to feel the force of his anger.
"No, Detective, I have no idea what put those absurd notions into Martin Russ's head."
"Is it true you hated your wife?"
He dropped the question like a bomb. The ache in Alex's chest intensified. While he held his breath, waiting for it to pass, Stevens exploded.
"That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. Alex loved Katherine. He was devastated by her death. We all were."
Ambruzzo ignored him. Like Alex, he had fixed on the key player in their little drama.
"You told Captain West you hated your wife."
The hurt bladed into Alex, stabbing at him like a hundred vicious little daggers. He had to force air into his lungs.
"Joanna said that?"
"I believe her exact words were, 'He said he hated her as much as he loved her.'"
Cool and unmoving outside, Alex writhed inside.
"She also said you're harassing her," the detective continued, twisting the knives.
He loved Joanna! Didn't she understand? Didn't any of them understand? He loved her.
And he was coming to hate her.
"She's thinking about obtaining a restraining order."
He barely heard Ambruzzo's remark or Dan's acid retort. The awful pain buzzed in his ears. One thought, only one, forced its way through his agony.
She'd betrayed him.
Just like Katherine. Just like his mother. She'd betrayed him, and was now trying to desert him.
Chapter Twenty
For a few glorious days, Jo almost convinced herself it was over, that the message had finally sunk in and Alex wouldn't bother her anymore. As fall nipped the remaining leaves from the trees and the earth sparkled with morning frosts, she started to breathe easy again.
Deke put a recording device on his phone, but no threatening or harassing calls came in. A frustrated Detective Ambruzzo briefed them both on the results of his investigation, which had hit nothing but obstacles and roadblocks. He was still trying to convince the DA to petition for exhumation of Katherine Taylor's remains. Without hard evidence to support the petition, the DA wasn't willing to take on Taylor's batteries of lawyers. Even the media had been muzzled. Not a word had leaked that the police had searched Alex's residence and questioned him in regard to Martin Russ's death.
In the midst of it all, Jo and Deke had begun that slow slide into something closer than friendship, better than sex.
Not that the sex wasn't incredible! Jo had no idea she could survive that many explosive orgasms and still walk, much less fly. Every night she discovered a different facet of Deke's personality, and a new delight in his leather-smooth, rawhide-tough body.
She didn't even object very strenuously after she learned he'd arranged to fly with her whenever possible. When confronted, he merely shrugged and said he'd done it for his own peace of mind, not hers.
The more they flew together—on and off the ground—the more his companionship and easy competence as an aviator killed Jo's old worries about competition. He was, as he informed her with a grin when she reversed positions and climbed atop his naked, sweat-slicked body, a laid-back kind of guy.
The fragile cocoon they'd woven around themselves shattered early Thursday morning, not long after Deke left for a check-flight and Jo wandered into the bathroom to treat herself to a long, leisurely shower. She flipped on the lights, twisted the tap, and hummed to herself as she slipped out of the terry-cloth robe she'd confiscated from Deke. The thick white material held his scent, now mixed with the musky fragrance of their love-making.
Smiling, she draped the robe on the hook next to the shower door and stepped into the blue-tiled stall. Hot water pelted down, easing the aches of a long, strenuous night.
Then, without warning, the bathroom blew up.
A sudden flash of light blazed through the window. Jo saw it in the periphery of her vision, a sword of white slashing through the shower's steamy vapor. A single heartbeat later, the frosted glass blocks in the window shattered. The shower door splintered into a thousand tiny shards. Ceramic tiles exploded only inches from her face.
She didn't have time to think, to drop or roll into a defensive ball. Didn't have time to do anything except twist violently to one side and throw up her arms to protect her head from the sharp, deadly projectiles.
Needles of pain lanced into her hip, her breast, the underside of her arm. Her ears filled with a deafening roar of fear. Of drumming water. Of bits of glass and tile crashing to the floor.
As suddenly as it began, the terror ended.
A suffocating silence descended, broken only by the pulsing water and Jo's choking gasps. Even then she huddled in the corner, her arms over her head, too stunned to comprehend what had just happened, too afraid to move in case it happened again.
At the sound of a glass shard breaking loose to tinkle to the floor, every muscle in her body contracted. Whimpering, she tried to press herself through the wall, tried to escape the explosion she was sure would follow.
A gas main! her mind screamed. The hot water heater! One of them must have gone. The whole place could still blow.
The thought galvanized her into action. Whirling, she reached through the shattered shower door, grabbed a towel, and threw it down on the carpet of broken glass and tile shards. The pieces jabbed through the towel at the soles of her feet. Ignoring the pain, she snatched up the thick terry robe and hit the bathroom door on the run.
"Muscle Four, this is Muscle Control."
The radio call came through Deke's headphones at the precise moment his aircraft went into total engine failure.
A sudden, startling silence screamed in the cockpit. Everything went quiet, then the Huey assumed the glide path of a homesick brick. The tachometer needle jerked from 6600 rpm and kept falling.
Deke's reaction was instant and instinctive. Jaw clamped tight, he brought the collective down to alter the pitch of the rotors and fought th
e urge to stomp the right pedal to the floor. He had to keep the Huey's nose pointed forward, had to maintain a minimum of 364 rpm as the reverse flow of air through the altered angle of the rotors forced the blades to keep turning.
The Huey wanted to go down. Fought to drop like an express elevator on a nonstop trip to the basement. Just as tenaciously, Deke fought to keep it in the sky. Under his flight suit, sweat pooled at the small of his back. As many times as he'd practiced this emergency maneuver, it could still put a kink in his gut.
Conditioned by hundreds of hours in the cockpit and repeated training for just this kind of emergency, Deke scanned the countryside ahead for a landing site. In a real engine failure, he knew damned well he wouldn't have many options. The site would be the one he saw between the chin bubble and his feet.
The Huey continued its rapid loss of altitude, less precipitous now as it reached six hundred feet, five hundred, four.
"Power recovery," the pilot administering the check ride instructed at one hundred feet above the ground.
With a grunt of relief, Deke gently twisted the throttle at the head of the cyclic, applying the power that had been deliberately shut off only moments before. The engine rpm increased slowly.
In a smooth coordination of arms and legs, he worked the pedals and the controls to keep the Huey in trim while the engine revved up to 6400 rpm. At that power, the bird started to fly again.
The major in the left seat jotted a note on the clipboard strapped to his knee, then gave him a thumbs up.
"Nice recovery, Elliot."
"Thanks."
Only then did Deke answer the call that had come in over his earphones just as the Huey had gone into its imitation of a dead mallard nose-diving out of the sky. Keying in his throat mike, he contacted the 1st Helo Squadron operations center.
"Muscle Control, this is Muscle Four acknowledging your earlier transmission."
"Roger, Muscle Four. Request you return to base immediately."
"Repeat, please."
"Return to base immediately."
"What's up?"
"Sorry, Captain, I don't have all the details. Just that there's been an accident, an explosion or something, at your place."
Deke's Blazer screamed to a stop just inches from one of the yellow barriers that cordoned off his apartment building. Emergency vehicles formed a solid phalanx around the high-rise. Lights flashing, radio crackling, the vehicles swarmed with police and fire- fighters in slickers and rubber boots. Hoses snaked like vipers from the pumpers to various hydrants.
Deke's gaze whipped to the high-rise, searching the building for signs of damage. At the sight of a shattered window four stories up, ice formed in his veins. He was through the barriers and racing around the corner to the entrance of the building before anyone could stop him.
The men gathered just outside the glass door spun around at his pounding approach.
"What the hell...?"
Anger flashed across the face of a grizzled civilian with on-scene commander stenciled across his blue and white helmet. Sidestepping, he blocked Deke's charge.
"You don't have any business here, Captain."
"The hell I don't."
"Get back behind the barriers."
"Not until I know what happened and find out if the woman staying in my apartment is all right."
The commander's glance darted to the name patch attached to Deke's flight suit.
"You're Elliot? Deke Elliot? Apartment four-ten?"
"I'm Elliot," he ground out. "What happened?"
"We're not sure yet. The initial 911 call reported a possible gas main leak and resulting explosion, but we haven't found any evidence of that yet. We're still—"
"Jo West," he cut in savagely. "Captain Jo West. She was in that apartment. Is she all right?"
"She's in one piece," the disaster coordinator replied grimly. "The flying glass and debris cut her up pretty bad, though. The paramedics had stopped most of the bleeding when I talked to her, but they said she'll need stitches."
An admiring glint lightened his grim expression. "That's some lady you've got there, Captain. After the explosion, she dashed next door and called 911, then helped clear the building and get everyone to a safe distance until we arrived to take charge of the scene."
"Where is she?"
The civilian scanned the emergency vehicles and nodded to a cluster of ambulances parked some yards away. "The medics wanted to transport her to the hospital, but she insisted on waiting for you. She should be over there, in one of those..."
Deke didn't wait to hear more. Spinning on one heel, he aimed for the nearest ambulance.
"Hey!" the on-scene commander yelled. "I need to talk to you."
"Later!"
He didn't drag in a whole breath until he found Jo. She was huddled in the back of the ambulance, wrapped in a gray blanket. Wet hair straggled down her neck as she stared through the opened rear doors at the gaping hole that was once a glass-block bathroom window.
He slowed his step, forcing air into his lungs and the hard lump of fear from his throat.
"Jo. Sweetheart, are you okay?"
Her head swung around. At the sight of a thick bandage taped to her cheek, the air he'd just sucked in slammed out of his lungs.
"Deke!"
Before he could stop her, she scrambled out of the ambulance. The blanket parted with her jerky movement. Even forewarned, he wasn't ready for the red splotches staining the front of his white robe.
His arms opened instinctively. Just as spontaneously, she fell into them. He ached to crush her to his chest, but those red stains haunted him. He settled for holding her loosely and breathing in her scent, a wrenching mixture of shampoo and plaster dust.
"I'm sorry," she muttered against his chest. "Really sorry."
"For blowing up my apartment?" He nuzzled her wet hair. "Don't sweat the small stuff, West. I can live without getting back my deposit."
What he couldn't live without was this woman. He'd suspected it for weeks. Known for sure the first time she'd welcomed him into her arms and her body. Now probably wasn't the best time to tell her, though. Especially when she braced both hands on his arms and pushed unsteadily away from his chest.
"I didn't cause the explosion."
His heart twisted. She must be in shock not to realize he'd been kidding.
"I know," he said gently. "You'd better—"
"But someone did!"
"What?"
"Someone caused the explosion." Her fingers dug into his arms. "Your apartment was the only one that took a hit, Deke. The only one!"
A second, maybe two, passed in utter silence. Not believing—not wanting to believe—the incredible thought that leaped into his mind, he shot another glance at the gaping hole that was once his bathroom window.
An icy fist reached into his chest and squeezed. Jo was right. Even from this distance, the hit looked surgically precise, as though one of the Air Force's hightech laser-guided missiles had targeted that precise spot and augered straight in.
"Jesus!"
"It was Alex." Under the thick gauze pad taped to her cheek, her face had gone paper white. "I know it was."
His first instinct was to say no way! His second, to jump in the Blazer, tear across town, and murder the bastard.
"I don't know how he did it." Jo's fingers clawed into Deke's flesh. "A high-intensity laser, maybe. I saw a flash of light right before the window shattered."
It was possible. More than possible. A man with Taylor's millions no doubt had access to technology the whiz kids at the Pentagon would salivate over.
Hard on the heels of that thought came another. If it was Taylor, if he'd gone so far off the deep end as to arrange something like this display of fireworks, he could as easily have arranged a more devastating detonation. One that would kill instead of just maim and terrorize.
This was a warning.
Or a prelude to the final act.
"We'd better talk to Ambruzzo," he sa
id through jaws clamped tight with sudden, savage fury. "As soon as we get you to a hospital."
"The paramedics patched me up. I don't need to—"
"You're going."
Grimly, he bundled the blanket around her and steered her back into the ambulance. He'd never for- give himself for leaving her alone and unprotected this morning, or for taking the threat too lightly. He wouldn't make that mistake again.
The call came into their room at the Visiting Officers' Quarters a little past nine that night.
Jo had just slipped into a light doze, exhausted by a long day of questions with no answers and foggy from the painkillers Deke had insisted she gobble down earlier. She jerked awake, confused for a moment by the shrilling phone and the unfamiliar surroundings. Blinking, she frowned at the framed prints on the bland, cream-colored walls.
The VOQ. She was stretched out atop a bed in the VOQ at Andrews. Deke had arranged for rooms for them both. Connecting rooms, she remembered now, her frown encompassing the open door a few feet away. From the other room she heard the soft beat of a country ballad and the drum of a shower.
Oh, God! Just the patter of cascading water made her skin crawl. She'd never step into another tiled shower enclosure without cringing and waiting for the wall to blow up right beside her face.
And she'd never answer another phone without feeling the hairs on the back of her neck rise. She gritted her teeth through another long ring.
It could be her folks. Or one of her brothers. They'd all called, several times, since Deke had phoned them from the hospital where a physician's assistant had stitched the worst of Jo's cuts.
The awful fear that the caller was Alex kept her hunched in the bed, her stomach knotted.
Finally, the recording device attached to the phone blinked red. A second later, the answering machine kicked on. Deke's terse instruction to leave a message echoed through the speaker.
The machine beeped. A silence blanked out the shower, the ballad, even the hammer of Jo's pulse.
"Hello, Joanna."
The words sounded so strange, so dragged out and electronically altered, that she didn't recognize her own name for several seconds, let alone the caller.
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