He’d walked around to his side of the kitchen island as if to broker a truce. “Is there anything in this house to eat?”
She pointed to the refrigerator again. “There’s a spinach quiche Paige Abercrombie from next door brought over a little while ago. Samantha told her last night about the wreck. And there’s a fruit salad too. Samantha brought the plate of brownies that are over there on the counter.” Chase made a second mental note to write thank-yous. Paige would expect one.
“Do you need to go to the office this afternoon?” he asked. “I can drive you.”
“Yes, thanks,” she said. “Since I left early yesterday—” She stopped. Was she ready to discuss what she learned from her meeting with Paul Shapiro? She was eager for answers about Melanie Appleton and the dog tags and about White’s possible hard landing three weeks ago, not to mention how eager she was to call Samantha and quiz her about how she’d known about the wreck and about picking up Molly.
Meanwhile, Figueredo was making himself at home, slicing into the quiche, apparently oblivious to the fact that she’d stopped mid-sentence. She changed the subject. “What did the body shop tell you about the brakes?”
He joined her at the table with two plates, each heaped with large wedges of Paige’s quiche and a good helping of fresh fruit. “Nothing. The body shop isn’t the brake shop, you know.” He sampled the quiche, and nodded. “This is good, don’t you think?”
She took a small bite and nodded. After a moment of silence, she was ready to divulge her secret. If pressed, she probably couldn’t have provided a sound reason other than she needed to tell someone, someone with a reputation for keeping secrets, and who better than the base’s Intel officer. “Colonel, I met with Paul Shapiro yesterday.”
He stopped chewing.
“I really don’t know where to start,” she continued. “Did you see the article in yesterday’s Current about the woman who committed suicide by leaping from Diamond Head?”
“I did.”
“Look, I don’t want this information to get back to anyone, especially not back to Kitty White, Major White’s widow. Do you understand?” He set his fork across the plate and sat back in the chair as if readying himself for something unpleasant.
“I have reason to believe the woman—her name is, was, Dr. Melanie Appleton—was having an affair with Tony White. ”
He leaned forward now, elbows on the table, his chin resting on his hands. “What reason?”
She told him about the morning of the crash, about mistaking the woman for Kitty White because of the photograph she’d seen in White’s cockpit. She even told him about the dog tags and was unable to look him in the eye when she confessed to throwing them away in an effort to protect White’s widow from learning the truth about her husband. Fearful of the reproach she’d find in his face, she kept her eyes on the table as she told him about Shapiro’s call to the office demanding that she meet with him yesterday, and then she managed to face Figueredo again when she told him about Shapiro’s confession that Melanie Appleton was his twin sister and that her body had been discovered with White’s dog tags around her neck. She told Figueredo how shocked she’d been when Shapiro had produced White’s dog tags and dropped them on the table in front of her at the restaurant.
Figueredo leaned back and looked as if he were about to fold his arms across his chest, but he returned them to the table instead, this time shifting in his chair so that he could drape an arm over the back. She studied the rows and rows of ribbons on his chest, noticing for the first time the Purple Heart and Silver Star. She wasn’t sure she ever wanted to know what all this man had witnessed in combat.
He asked, “How did the dog tags get back to this woman?”
She shook her head. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out, sir. Don’t you see? All this just fuels Paul Shapiro’s theories of some sort of a conspiracy. According to his sister, Major White had a hard landing in his 81 three weeks before his crash. Apparently, he told Shapiro’s sister that the hard landing went unreported and that he threatened to report the information himself. My office never received information about a hard landing, and if there had been one, you and I both know the squadron would have been grounded and White would not have been flying last Saturday.” She paused to evaluate his reaction. He leaned back again. His face was as blank as a champion poker player’s. “Anyway,” she continued, “Shapiro’s convinced we’re burying the news of mechanical design flaws in the 81 in an effort to hold onto defense contracts. The fact that his sister was having an affair with Tony White—”
Figueredo suddenly rose from the table. “Tony White was not having an affair with that woman.”
She let his words and his tone sink in. He was rinsing his dish, and she waited for him to turn off the water. “How do you know that?”
“I just know,” he said dryly. “Look, I need to get back. If you’re planning to go in this afternoon, I’ll drive you. Your Jeep won’t be ready for a while, but your insurance company has authorized a rental car.”
She was stunned by the shift in subject and tone. “I’m surprised anyone at the insurance company would even talk to you. Everyone these days is so security conscious.” She wished now she hadn’t told him anything.
He was standing beside her at the table, looking down at her plate of uneaten quiche. “Finished with this?”
She nodded. “Colonel, I need to know—”
“That’s just it, Captain Anderson, you don’t have a need to know what I know.” He’d returned to his usual state of arrogance.
“Then you’re causing me to believe Paul Shapiro could be on to something. If I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know how to properly respond to his questions, now do I, sir?” The pain medication she’d taken hours earlier was wearing thin, and so was her patience.
He set her plate inside the refrigerator and leaned against the sink, his arms defiantly folded across his chest. “I told you the other night you needed to let me know what was happening with Shapiro. Do you always have this much trouble recognizing a direct order?”
“I thought—”
“Next time you hear from Shapiro, I want to know about it. Roger that, Skipper?” There was nothing friendly about him this time.
“Aye-aye, sir.”
As they set out on the short drive through base housing to her office, neither spoke.
Overnight, or so it seemed, her neighbors had decorated their homes for Halloween. Skeletons hung from trees. Carved pumpkins decorated porches. She felt a stab of guilt. She hadn’t even taken Molly shopping for a costume.
At her office, an overly polite and concerned Figueredo helped her from the car and helped her navigate the stairs to her second floor office. She forced herself to thank him when they reached the top. “I can take it from here,” she said, but when she tried, she found she was in too much pain to walk without his help.
Cruise, Martinez, North, and the others had appeared with concerned expressions. North, on seeing Colonel Figueredo with Chase, flashed her a “what-the-fuck?” glance, and she flashed back a warning look that she could tell North deciphered as “We’ll talk about this later.”
“Whiplash,” Chase said, pointing to her stiff neck, as Figueredo helped her ease in the chair behind her desk.
“I’ll pick you up at five,” he said, and turned to North who was standing in the doorway of her office with his hands on his hips. “Call me if you catch her trying to overdo it.”
“Aye-aye, sir,” he said, and stepped aside for the colonel. North and the others closed ranks around her desk the minute Figueredo was safely out of earshot.
North was the first. “What happened, ma’am?”
“The brakes just went out,” she said, trying to reach for the mail in her inbox.
He jumped to help and was shaking his head. “You’re lucky it wasn’t worse.” He handed Chase a stack of pink message slips. She shuffled through them, noting Paul Shapiro’s and one from General Hickman. Was it m
erely a coincidence that both had called that morning? Had Hickman discovered her meeting with Shapiro?
“Who’s this Jimmie Benedict?” she said to North because his initials were at the bottom of the message.
North smiled. “Some kook who says he’s working third shift and can’t sleep because we’re flying helicopters all afternoon.”
“My response isn’t likely to make his day,” she said.
Martinez was heading back to the press room. “Some people just don’t want to pay the price for freedom.” North ran after him, offering a jab Chase couldn’t make out.
“Can I get you anything, ma’am?” Cruise asked. “A cup of coffee?”
“Yes, thanks. And water?” She rattled the bottle of pain pills. As the sergeant turned to leave, Chase asked, “Before you go,” willing herself not to give away too much in her tone, “how did you guys learn about my accident yesterday?”
With her exotic eyes, black hair, and olive complexion, it wasn’t any wonder Cruise was constantly mistaken for an islander, that is until she spoke. She was a New Yorker with the Brooklyn accent to prove it. “I really don’t know, ma’am. It was a man who called. I remember that, but all I kept thinking was Oh my God, what about Molly? The man said I should contact Mrs. Abercrombie about picking up your daughter. And then I was really confused because I was thinking Molly had to already be with you since you had an appointment with her teacher, but I didn’t say so. I found Mrs. Abercrombie’s number in your Rolodex. Fortunately, she was home and said she’d drive over immediately for Molly.”
“Do you remember what time the call came in?”
Cruise looked at her watch. “Not exactly,” she said, looking up, “except it was late enough that I figured your appointment with Molly’s teacher would have been over already and that Molly should have been with you. About 1600?”
At 1600 the day before, Chase was just learning that Melanie Appleton was Paul’s twin sister. Nearly a half hour before she’d spun out of the Hungry Fisherman parking lot after discovering Major White’s dog tags had been found with Melanie’s body. It would have been at least another twenty minutes before she careened into the guardrail. By then, Cruise would have been on her way to Kaneohe to pick up Molly.
“You look a little pale, ma’am,” Cruise said. “Are you feeling worse? Should I call the colonel?” At colonel, Cruise lifted an eyebrow as if to suggest there were something more between the man and her boss.
“No-no, I’m fine. Just a headache.”
“Be right back with your water.” Cruise bolted from the office, her high heels clicking down the hallway toward the break room.
Chase reshuffled the message slips into a priority order that put Shapiro at the bottom. He had already reached her at home. Doubtful he was expecting a callback. Her head was pounding under the pressure of unanswered questions. Best to figure out what she did know at this point. She withdrew a yellow legal pad and a pen from the side drawer of her desk. In the middle of the page, she wrote Major White’s name and drew a circle around it. She stared at his name and wondered how Kitty White and her children were coping. She pictured the major the last time she’d seen him, the day he’d flown her and the media around Oahu, pointing out sights as if he were a paid helicopter tour guide.
With Major White in the center of the lined yellow page, she drew a line to the left of it, scrawled Melanie Appleton, and circled the woman’s name. The woman whose face she’d first seen in White’s cockpit, and later, on the day of the crash in the lobby of public affairs as the woman pushed White’s dog tags into Chase’s hand. The woman in black-and-white at White’s memorial service who looked frightened enough when she saw Chase approaching to leap off the cliff. The woman who had leapt from Diamond Head with Major White’s dog tags around her neck.
From Melanie, she drew another line and a circle that she filled with Paul Shapiro. This part of the puzzle seemed complete as far as she knew it. And what about Colonel Figueredo? Where did he fit in all of this? She wrote his name on the page and circled it.
She also circled 81 crash and hard landing. When she saw that she’d have to draw connector lines from the crash to everyone on the page but Figueredo, she realized the crash was most likely the focus point, not Major White, as she’d initially thought. So what did this mean? Was Paul Shapiro right after all? Was there some sort of conspiracy to cover up problems with the 81?
What was she missing? She studied the page and forced herself to keep going. She could connect 464 to White, the crash, and Melanie. But where did she, herself, fit into all of this? She connected her name to Paul’s and Melanie’s since she’d had two physical encounters with the woman before her suicidal leap and connected herself to the crash and of course to White, since she’d flown with him. She held the legal pad at arm’s length for a different perspective. Nothing. There was Figueredo’s name and, reluctantly, she connected his name to hers. Still, nothing leaped out at her. And yesterday’s accident in the Jeep? Where to figure that on this page? She penned Jeep wreck, circled it, and considered who she could connect to it. Herself, of course. And Shapiro, justifying it thinking she wouldn’t have been on the H-3 in a steep descent if not for her meeting with him. And Molly. She wrote her daughter’s name into a circle. There was still that question about the caller and the timing of the call to Cruise. She penned Samantha’s name to the page and connected Samantha to the wreck, to Molly, and to herself. Then she remembered Figueredo’s comment about helping Samantha the night before. Samantha would have been the only one who could have allowed the man in the house. She connected Samantha to Figueredo. This was maddening.
She studied the effects of her puzzle that looked as if she’d been doodling an elaborate spider web. Then it was suddenly clear, as if she’d been staring at one of those pixilated diagrams that after a while of staring eventually revealed the hidden picture. She hadn’t connected lines from Figueredo to Melanie and White, and she’d have to since he seemed so clear about knowing the two had not been lovers. Now every road, so to speak, led back to Figueredo. He was the single connection to everyone and everything, even to Paul Shapiro, Melanie’s brother.
Seeing Molly’s name on the list created a sense of urgency in Chase to reach out to her daughter. She glanced at her watch. Molly would soon be clamoring aboard the school van with her little friends for the short ride through Kaneohe to the aftercare program. Chase wished she could be there when Molly’s van pulled up. But since she was without transportation, the best she could do was ask Mrs. Kamaka to have Molly call when she arrived. Chase was reaching for the phone when Cruise returned.
“Here you go.” She set down the coffee and a Styrofoam cup of water. “You know,” she said, glancing down at the notepad, “I do remember something about the man who called yesterday.”
Chase gulped a pain pill, then slid her forearm across the notepad, hoping the move appeared casual enough. She motioned for a nonplussed Cruise to take a chair. “What do you remember?”
“His voice was so familiar that I remember thinking I was expected to know who he was and that I’d only embarrass both of us by asking. Guess I still haven’t figured out who it was, though it’ll probably come to me in the middle of the night.”
“Things like that happen to me all the time.” She blew the steam from her coffee, and took a sip. “Let me know if the name comes to you. I’d like to thank whoever it was for being so thoughtful.”
“Can I get you anything else, ma’am? You look a little pale.”
“I’d like to see yesterday’s Current and the clips, and today’s clips, please. And ask North to bring me everything we have on the 81.”
As soon as Cruise was out of the office, Chase phoned Mrs. Kamaka at Molly’s aftercare. When the woman came to the phone with her lilting Aloha!, Chase explained she wanted Molly to call when she arrived.
“We were all so upset to hear about your wreck yesterday,” the woman said. For nearly thirty years, Mrs. Kamaka had been running the d
ay care that provided the after-care program for Kaneohe Elementary. She was proud of her Hawaiian heritage and insisted on sharing the folklore with the children. Every week, Molly came home with new words and a deeper appreciation of the Hawaiian stories behind Sacred Falls, the island’s mountains, and volcanoes. “It wasn’t too serious, I hope.”
“The Jeep’s in much worse shape than I am.”
“Cars are replaceable.”
Cruise walked in, set the Honolulu Current, the stack of clips, and a heavy binder of 81 information on the corner of the desk, and left. “So you’ll have Molly call as soon as she arrives?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Kamaka said. Chase was about to hang up when the woman asked, “Is anything wrong, Mrs. Anderson?” Mrs. Anderson. Chase hadn’t been called that in a year. Even before Stone’s death, she could probably have counted on one hand the number of people who had called her this. Mrs. Kamaka, for one. The base electrician shortly after they’d moved into the house, for two. He’d asked Mrs. Anderson, despite the fact she was standing before him in a military uniform, for Major Anderson’s work telephone number so the two could discuss the estimate. The military world certainly had its misogynistic tendencies. She had taken Stone’s last name because they agreed this was the thing to do since they hoped to have children and sensed the same last name would grant them eternal family cohesiveness. At OCS years before she’d met Stone, she’d been just a last name, Morris, her maiden name. Since marrying Stone, she’d been called Anderson or Captain Anderson or just Skipper. Even at the officer’s club on a Friday night—those Friday nights spent there with Stone before his deployment—during a round of introductions that had included Stone, Chase was Captain Anderson, the major’s wife.
“Everything’s fine, Mrs. Kamaka,” she said, hearing the falter in her own voice as she worried about Molly’s safety.
“I understand, Mrs. Anderson. Nothing like a wreck to wake us up to how fast life can change.”
An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) Page 9
