Honor

by Janet Dailey

  “Don’t forget about Randy Holt. She didn’t want to go public.”

  “Twelve.” His biceps bulged as he stayed up, swinging a little in midair. He thought he detected a flicker of interest in Kenzie’s eyes. About time. He was killing himself.

  She swung her arms to warm up. “Are you done showing off?”

  “Are you impressed yet?”

  Small smile. Okay, she had a lot on her mind. He wouldn’t push it. Then—Linc almost lost his grip when she walked over and put a hand on his chest.

  “Don’t forget to breathe,” she said mischievously.

  Linc gasped. He wasn’t sure whether to drop to the ground and take her in his arms, or lose the challenge.

  “Thirteen. Fourteen. And ... fifteen.” He dropped to the ground with bent knees, more winded than he expected. “Your turn.”

  Kenzie reached high to grab the bar before he could grab her and did several without breaking a sweat, her ankles crossed. Perfect form. In more ways than one.

  “I thought about Randy,” he said. “She’s the main reason I shelved it. Once the spin starts, it gets hard to control.”

  “Didn’t you tell me once that you know some big-deal reporter?” She breathed in rhythm with her efforts. “Hell. I forgot to count. What am I up to?”

  “More than me,” he said. “And yes. Not Gary Baum. Someone else. A friend of my older brother.”

  “Name?” She kept on doing pull-ups, her trim arms working hard. “He? She? Why are you being so cagey?”

  He thought about stalling her a little longer and decided against it. “She. The one and only Kelly Johns. If we ever need her, she can command a three-ring media circus.”

  Kenzie swung down. “Absolutely not. The stalker is still out there.”

  “We may be a little closer to him.” They walked over to the bench by the river where he’d sat with Mike Warren. He told her about the double set of tire tracks, the forensics reports, and the lieutenant’s new theory.

  “So now we’re waiting for fingerprint reports and envelope licks.”

  “Don’t forget microscopic mud analysis.”

  Kenzie nodded. “That’s interesting. Hadn’t thought about that when I went to look at my car.”

  “Warren is methodical. He has to start building a case before he can get a warrant.”

  “How is he going to get that with no name and nothing to go on?”

  “Perseverance. And luck.”

  She wasn’t buying it. “If the stalker never committed a crime, his prints and DNA aren’t going to pop up.”

  “The DNA, no. But lots of people have prints on file somewhere. Not in law enforcement databases, though,” he conceded.

  “I saw him. I wish there was a way to extract the memory from inside my brain. It must be in there. Right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Every time I think about it, there’s less to see. I know it’s a face, but it’s mostly a dark blur.”

  “Then don’t think about it.” He put an arm around her shoulders. “Your mind is protecting you.”

  “Screw that,” she said vehemently. “I want to be able to recognize him. Did you boost the pixels on the video? Is that the right term?”

  Linc inclined his head in a nod. “More or less. I’m not ready to have you look. It could be clearer.”

  Christine held the key. If she had pulled over before the accident, she would probably recall the other driver, even the conversation. Eventually.

  The accident, no. He knew from his long-ago motorcycle smashup that practically no one remembered being hit or careening off the road. He hadn’t. The detailed police report on the incident had seemed to be about someone else entirely.

  If the stalker really was someone Christine knew, then she very likely would remember him in time.

  He didn’t want to press the point. Kenzie was edgy enough, what with Christine moving out of the ICU to a rehabilitation center. He reminded himself to scope out the place.

  “You know, it wouldn’t hurt to talk to a police artist,” he suggested. The lieutenant had mentioned it in passing.

  “What’s that going to accomplish? His face was in shadow. I couldn’t say if his nose was long or short or even if he had a nose. Just that he was ordinary. Except for his eyes.”

  He rubbed her shoulder and she drew close to him under his arm. “Then start with those. Worth a try, Kenz.”

  “It’s a waste of time.”

  His tone was level. “I don’t agree. But I can’t make you.”

  Kenzie fell silent for a few moments and gazed at the little river flowing by. “Look at that beautiful water,” she murmured. “I wish I could just jump in and float away.”

  She broke off, lost in thoughts she didn’t seem to want to share. Even so, she stayed where she was, warm against his side.

  It felt so good just to hold her. It felt right.

  Kenzie straightened away from him. An ache replaced her warmth. Linc leaned forward to ease his overworked muscles.

  She didn’t seem eager to leave the serene park, he thought. Her present accommodations at the Hamill shooting range probably had something to do with that.

  The medic would be the first one to tell her she had a touch of PTSD. Banging guns and muzzle flashes didn’t cure that.

  She changed the subject. “So what have you been up to? You never say.”

  “Slogging through every damn X-Ultra document on the SKC laptop.”

  “And you’re not finding anything.”

  “I’m finding too much. It’s like going through nine thousand filing cabinets. I thought about writing filtering software to process the docs and PDFs, but that would take two more weeks.”

  “Wish I could help.”

  “You can’t,” he said, raking a hand through his hair. “It’s an exercise in futility. I need actual X-Ultra vests, not schematics and spec sheets.”

  “More than one?”

  “A statistically significant sample would be best. Like a hundred.”

  “Why so many?”

  “Target practice.”

  Her eyes widened. “Let me make sure I have this straight. You want to blow holes in one hundred bulletproof army vests.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Where do you plan to do that?”

  He looked at her.

  “I’ll ask Norm,” Kenzie said.

  “If it’s not too much trouble. What if he tells you no?”

  Kenzie shook her head. “He’s ex-army.”

  “Should have known. He never shaved again,” Linc said.

  “Shut up. He’s a ZZ Top fan. Be glad he won’t mind. He might ask you not to be too conspicuous about it. There’s a smaller range off to the side. You haven’t seen it.”

  “If he has the right targets, I can pay him,” Linc offered.

  “You should see what’s in the basement. Everything from paper thugs to wooden dummies. I’ll borrow a gun from Norm. I want to get this done and over with.”

  Kenzie was military all the way, but he hadn’t noticed her having much interest in hardware. “Mind telling me why you’re so gung-ho?”

  “Because sooner or later I’m going to be the one to tell Christine that Frank Branigan died. And I don’t want her to think I had a chance to help find out why and did zip.”

  “Okay. I understand. But I’m the one who has to get the vests. You can’t do that. They know who you are.”

  She conceded the point with a nod.

  “How are you going to get in?” she wanted to know.

  “Right through the front gate.”

  Kenzie shot him a curious look. “Let me guess. You aren’t going to explain how you’re going to do that because you would have to reveal your secret identity.”

  He chuckled at her reply. “You’re not that far off.”

  “Thought so,” she said with satisfaction.

  “And,” he went on, sobering, “there is one more thing I have to do.”

  “Let’s
hear it.”

  “Mike Warren and I noticed that a lot of lines are starting to converge on SKC. While I’m inside, I want to take video.”

  “Of what?”

  “More like who. As in everyone I can get on microcam.”

  “How micro is it?”

  “About as big as a button.” He rose and stretched, rubbing his back. “Which is good. I may not be able to carry anything ever again.”

  “Tough workout?” she teased.

  “Let’s just say I had more fun watching yours.”

  Linc was back at the motel, showered and shaved. He was going through files on the clogged SKC laptop again. There had to be something in them, but he had no way of understanding the office codes on the documents relating to the X-Ultra vests.

  Some codes repeated frequently, some didn’t. He cut-and-pasted them for later sorting out. It was tedious work.

  His cell rang and he recognized Mike Warren’s number.

  Then he noticed the time. He’d been at the desk for three hours. His back hurt. One ring before the call went to voicemail, he snapped out of it and answered. “Mike? Where are you?”

  “In the motel parking lot. Ah, the memories.”

  “Shut up and come up.”

  A minute later there was a knock. Linc closed the file he was in, not wanting Mike to know everything he was up to. They weren’t exactly in the same patrol car or on the same page. He went to the door.

  “Come on in,” he said to Warren. “Wish I could offer you something, but I’m out of snack-packs and the vending machine is busted.”

  “Got any ice? I’ll have water.”

  “You don’t want what the ice machine spits out, believe me. Besides, it’s in the lobby.”

  Mike laughed. “Skip it. I’m not staying long. How’s Kenzie?”

  “Did I tell you I was meeting her?”

  “No. I just didn’t think you’d spend a beautiful day with an ugly laptop.” Mike had known for a while that Linc had the SKC machine and wasn’t ready to return it.

  Linc took a few seconds to shut it down all the way. “I’m sick of staring into the thing. Also, I’m getting nowhere. So why are you here?”

  The lieutenant found a chair. “Got some updates for you.”

  “That was fast.”

  “Slow week otherwise for forensics.”

  He took out a small notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and flipped through its pages, then looked up at Linc.

  “You know something? It’s going to take us an hour to get through all this,” Mike said cheerfully.

  Linc knew he’d been had. “Okay. Get started.”

  “The vase and the roses,” Mike began. “We powdered like girls at the prom.”

  “What?”

  Mike held the notebook open with his thumb as he gestured with it. “There were no prints on either. Not so much as a smudge.”

  “Really? Seems hard to believe,” Linc said.

  “It’s an expensive shop,” Mike explained. “I know the owner. His employees wear white gloves when they do up a bouquet and deliver it. Everything has to be sparkling for the prices they charge.”

  “Other people touched it. A nurse, one of the Corellis, maybe.”

  “Mrs. Corelli told me she wiped off the vase because water spilled out. Too bad she’s so neat, huh?”

  “What about the little card?”

  “The assistant wrote it out. The order came over the phone and the customer used a credit card number. Which the florist was nice enough to give me—I buy flowers there all the time for my wife.”

  Linc hoped he wasn’t going off on another tangent.

  “We traced it to an online racket,” Mike continued. “They sell numbers before the original owner even knows they’re stolen. So that was a bust.”

  “Moving right along. The greeting card that was sent to the Corellis?”

  “Nothing on that, either. And we checked the envelope flap for saliva. Not a trace.”

  “I’m going to guess that Christine’s ID was completely clean.”

  “Yup. Like it was just laminated.”

  “All right,” Linc said, disappointed. “Well, I’m working on other things.” He explained briefly about the codes on the documents.

  Mike Warren nodded. “You never know what’s going to help.” He snapped his fingers. “Almost forgot. A call came into the station from someone who used to work at this motel.”

  “As a—”

  “Not a housekeeper. Same profession as a couple of women who disappeared from here a year ago.”

  Linc got the idea. “Do I need to know their names?”

  “Jill and Jane. How’s that? The one who called today is, uh, Jeri.”

  “Good enough.”

  “Anyway,” Mike went on, “back then Jill and Jane were one step away from moving their business to the street corner. They could barely afford the hourly rate at this joint.”

  Linc cast a glance at the bed. And he’d let Kenzie fall asleep on it. Once. Never again.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Mike said. “Don’t worry. They preferred the ground-floor rooms.”

  “Good to know.”

  The lieutenant dialed down the smile. “Tough way to make a living, but they kept at it. Then one night someone decided they were better off dead.”

  “Who found them?”

  “I did. Not here, in a ditch by the highway. In pieces. For some reason that doesn’t scare the public until a cheerleader gets whacked.”

  “So I hear. But what does it have to do with—”

  “I’m getting to that. This woman who just called, Jeri, told one of my detectives that they’d been soliciting clients using the online lists.”

  He paused and patted his jacket pocket, as if he was feeling for a cigarette box. “Hell’s bells. Forgot to bring the nicotine gum.”

  “Chew your nails.”

  Mike returned to his story. “Anyway, Jeri suddenly wanted to tell us Jill said she was being stalked.”

  “After a year?”

  “There’s a reason she waited. Don’t distract me.”

  “Sorry.”

  Mike collected his thoughts. “Jill told her the guy had, quote unquote, evil eyes. He liked to talk dirty online, keep his face out of the light. His big thrill was to come in close and make her jump. Then he’d show up in person for, you know, the finale. Last video chat happened a week before Jill’s body turned up.”

  Evil eyes. Kenzie’s exact words.

  “Seems that the guy recently contacted Jeri, mentioned Jill. You following this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jeri thought it over, made the call to us, and the detective who took it remembered that I worked the case. Didn’t Kenzie say the same thing about the guy who scared her?”

  Linc felt cold in the stuffy room. “Evil eyes, yeah. Could be a coincidence, though.”

  Mike Warren nodded. “Just figured you’d want to know.”

  Linc thought about it for a few moments. “So Jeri spoke to him? I guess she didn’t get a screen grab.”

  “She didn’t mention it or the detective didn’t write it down. Take your pick.”

  “Did she leave a number?”

  The lieutenant gave a resigned shrug. “Caller ID pegged it as a pay phone. She didn’t want to get that close.”

  “Hmm. So we can’t follow up. Sounds like a long shot anyway.”

  “Agreed,” Mike said. “But it’s interesting. Sometimes you get a random thing like that and isolated facts hook up, boom. You can get warrants, make arrests, charge someone. Build the kind of case that a prosecutor likes.”

  “How close are we?” Linc asked.

  “Not very. Right now this is still tagged as a hit-and-run. You’re the one who sees a connection—” Mike held up his hands when Linc opened his mouth to protest. “Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m inclined to agree with you. But I can’t prove a damn thing yet.”

  Linc fell silent.

  “Ther
e’s only one witness to that accident besides the perp,” Mike went on. “Christine. The victim. And she can’t tell us anything yet.”

  “She worked at SKC. There are X-Ultra files on this machine.” Linc rapped his knuckles on the black metal cover.

  “Which reminds me—it is now officially a stolen laptop. Reported to us, serial number and all.”

  Was that the real reason Mike was here? Linc didn’t ask.

  “By, um ...” The lieutenant flipped through his notebook. “Melvin Brody. Christine’s boss.”

  “Give him my regards.”

  Mike ignored that and pretended to read other pages.

  “I’m keeping it,” Linc said. “Kenzie and I heard from a reliable source that there are problems with their armored vests. Serious problems. Christine had to have known.”

  “That’s a guess.”

  “There has to be a connection,” Linc insisted.

  Mike groaned. “Pretend you’re me and you’re talking to the DA,” he said. “There’s a bad accident, looks like a hit-and-run. A woman who works for SKC, the biggest employer in the county, was in the car. You believe that an SKC subsidiary is making defective gear and wants to shut up anyone who says so.”

  “That about sums it up, yeah.”

  “Conjecture. Not evidence.”

  “I’m looking for more of that. So are you. So is Kenzie—I mean, she’s going to check out photos and video footage, try to ID the guy she saw. What I have so far isn’t as clear as it could be. And we’re going to test the vests.”

  “Go ahead. You can do things I can’t and you have connections I don’t. But stay on the right side of the law.”

  Linc shot him a questioning look.

  “No hacking into SKC servers,” Mike clarified. “Unreasonable search will get the case thrown out of court.”

  “If you’re so worried about that, why not just give the laptop back to Christine’s boss?” Linc asked.

  “Ah, Melvin Brody wasn’t too polite to me. And I’m pretty sure you can get into their system without it anyway.”

  Linc grinned. “You’re right.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I heard you, Mike.”

  “Just trying to do my job, pal. I can’t decide if you’re my secret weapon or my worst nightmare.”