Say Goodbye

by Karen Rose

  “No.”

  “And Fritz?”

  “He was the heart of us. Never forgot a birthday, always had a smile or a joke to lift our spirits when we were homesick. He was a good man. Such a good man.”

  Tom’s jaw clenched, ever so slightly. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d choose a bad man.” He pointed to the sketch she’d made of the tattoo she planned to get. “What happened to them?”

  Liza tilted her head, gesturing to the laptop screen, gone dark again. “That was taken the morning before the attack. We’d gone to a village to distribute supplies and meds. One of the villagers saw the cross on my uniform and begged me to help his wife. She was in labor and there was no doctor available.” She leaned into Pebbles, remembering the village, devastated and battle-torn. “They’d been bombed and there was very little left. Which was why we were there with supplies.”

  He squeezed the hand he still held. “Did you deliver the baby?”

  “Yes. It was a little boy. A healthy little boy with such a pair of lungs.” She sighed. “We were leaving the house and our spirits were a little high. Even the gruffest of the guys melted at the cry of a newborn baby. Plus, the villagers were so grateful. They’d congregated in the street to take the supplies we were giving out. Some sang and celebrated the new baby. They’d lost so many people and they had a tiny spark of something good. That kind of happiness is kind of contagious and we were distracted. Just a little, but it was enough. I looked up and saw a flash of light on the rooftop across the street.”

  “A sniper,” he murmured. “Like yesterday morning.”

  “Yes, but this wasn’t just one. There were three men on the roof, and they fired. A lot.”

  “But you weren’t hit,” he said, a hint of desperation in his voice.

  “Yes, I was, but it was only a graze. A few of us had seen them at the same time and screamed ‘gun,’ and then everything went sideways. There was chaos and so much gunfire.” She had to stop for a moment, her anxiety starting to spike. “And screaming.” So much screaming. “The village residents were running for cover, falling in the streets. Not getting up.”

  “But your unit fired back?”

  “Those of us who were still alive.” She looked down, concentrated on the big hand still holding hers. “Fritz wasn’t one of them. He’d thrown himself over me. To protect me. By the time I pushed him off me, he was already dead.”

  Tom hesitated. “I thought married couples weren’t allowed to serve together?”

  “They’re not. We’d gotten married a few weeks before that—we’d gotten two weeks of R&R stateside, and Fritz proposed. Took me home to meet his family. They wanted to be a part of the ceremony, so . . . I said yes.”

  “They were good people? Fritz’s family?”

  “Yes. Very good people.” Too good for a woman who’d only married their son because she couldn’t have the man she wanted. “I liked them very much.”

  “Have you seen them? Since Fritz was killed, I mean.”

  “Yes, as soon as I landed in the U.S. after my discharge. They live in Jersey City and I flew into Newark, so it was close by.” They’d held on to her as they’d all cried, and she’d cried with them. “And then I got on a plane to Chicago to see you all.”

  “Last Christmas,” he murmured.

  “Yes.” She’d arrived as the Hunters and the Buchanans—the family who’d taken her in after her sister’s murder—were sitting down to Christmas dinner. It was then that she’d learned Tom’s Tory was dead.

  “You didn’t say anything,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell us about Fritz then?”

  She turned her face into Pebbles’s soft muzzle, shaking her head.

  “What?” he demanded, his tone going sharp. “Why didn’t you?”

  The thinly veiled anger in his tone snapped the lid off her own temper. “Because someone would have asked to see his picture,” she spat. “And then they would have known the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  Yanking her hand free of his, she unlocked her cell phone and found Fritz’s official army photo. Dressed in a pressed uniform, his body ramrod straight, he’d been so handsome. So stern. But that hadn’t been him. Fritz had laughed and loved and was generous to a fault.

  She shoved her phone at Tom, who sucked in a harsh breath.

  “Oh.”

  She laughed bitterly. “Yeah. Oh.”

  Because Fritz Pohlmann and Tom Hunter could have been brothers. Same body type, same size, same chiseled jaw, same blond hair. Fritz’s eyes had been brown, though. At least when she’d looked into his eyes, she’d seen Fritz. Not Tom.

  “He looks like . . .” He trailed off, staring at the screen.

  She took her phone from his hand and turned it off. “You. He looks like you.”

  Tom lifted his gaze to hers, searching for what, she wasn’t sure. “Why did you marry him?”

  She swallowed hard, shame forming like a boulder in her chest. “I shouldn’t have. But . . .” She sighed. “You’d met Tory. You’d popped the question and she’d said yes.”

  He flinched. “When did you get married?”

  “February first would have been our first anniversary. He was dead by March first.” She’d gone to New Jersey on the anniversary of his death, to grieve with his family. It had nearly torn her apart. Meeting Mercy and the Sokolovs a month later had pulled her out of a dark place.

  “Tory died on March fifth,” he whispered. “I told you that she was pregnant around the end of January. Is that why you married him?”

  “No.” And that was true. “I’d already let you go by then. It was a wake-up call, though. You were living your life. I wanted to live mine. Fritz wanted me.” Which couldn’t have sounded more pathetic if she’d tried.

  His expression went carefully blank. “I’m sorry, Liza. I didn’t know how you felt.”

  He was sorry. That hurt more than anything. “Didn’t matter. You didn’t feel the same way.”

  “No,” he said simply. “I didn’t.”

  She recoiled, his words a physical blow. She’d thought it couldn’t hurt worse, but she’d been very wrong. “I know.”

  His very audible swallow was followed by a less than graceful escape. He lurched to his feet, backing from her room. When he cleared the door, he bolted and ran down the stairs.

  She heard the kitchen door close and the house was silent once more.

  She stared at the place where he had been for a minute, shocked by his sudden departure, shocked by the bluntness of his words.

  He’d run. From me. He’d been disgusted and he’d run. Her vision blurred, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever been so weary. I can’t keep doing this. Something had to change.

  She cleared the laptop and notebook from her bed and straightened the blankets as best she could with a one-hundred-twenty-pound Great Dane sprawled over them. “I can’t stay here,” she told Pebbles, who got up, turned in a circle, and flopped down beside her, big doggy head on the other pillow. “I’ll find a new place to live and come back to see you when I can.”

  But she knew deep down that wasn’t going to happen. She needed to cut Tom Hunter out of her life completely and move on. Again.

  ROCKLIN, CALIFORNIA

  THURSDAY, MAY 25, 5:30 A.M.

  Tom stared at the image that filled his computer screen. Friedrich Pohlmann, known as Fritz to his family and friends. It was his official army photo.

  It was also his obituary.

  Fritz Pohlmann was the beloved son of Marian and Kristofer Pohlmann and was survived by two brothers and two sisters. And by his wife, Liza.

  Liza had been married. To a man who looked like me.

  Tom didn’t know what to think. How to feel. It was . . . shocking. Numbing. But below that was a current of hurt. Maybe even betrayal.

  She hadn’t told him about Fr
itz.

  He wondered if she’d told Fritz about him.

  He studied Fritz’s face, stoic and unsmiling in his uniform. It wasn’t like they could have been twins. But the resemblance was obvious at a glance. Same jaw, same hair. Same build.

  Different eyes. Fritz’s were brown and, in the more personal family photos attached to the online obit, appeared joyful. His smile was broad.

  Especially in the photo taken the day he and Liza had married. The man looked too damn happy as he stared adoringly at his wife.

  Wife.

  It was too much, and Tom had to click away from their wedding photo. He wasn’t even sure why. Because she’d been married at all? Because she’d married someone else?

  No, that wasn’t it. Tom was sure of that. Mostly sure.

  It was, he decided, because she’d never told anyone. Or had she? Had she told Dana and Ethan Buchanan? She hadn’t at Christmas. She’d said so. But later?

  Tom had a hard time believing that she had, because he hadn’t heard it through the family grapevine. Dana Buchanan was his mother’s best friend. If Dana knew, his mother knew.

  If his mother knew, she would have sounded different when they’d spoken on the phone the evening before. At one time, back when they were hiding from his biological father, his mother had been the master of controlling her emotions. All these years later, not so much. Thirteen years of living with Max Hunter had given her the freedom to be herself without fear.

  But Dana was cagey. She’d run a women’s shelter for years, protecting her clients’ secrets. Now she operated a halfway house for victims of sexual assault. She kept their secrets.

  Maybe she’d kept Liza’s, too. Suddenly knowing if Liza had told her Chicago family was more important than anything else.

  He glanced at the clock. It was seven thirty in Chicago. Dana would be awake. His fingers were typing out a text before he realized his own intention, but this wasn’t anyone else’s business. Only Liza’s. Not even mine. I don’t have the right.

  Because he’d hurt her.

  You didn’t feel the same way.

  No. I didn’t.

  I know.

  He hadn’t been able to stop the words at that moment. Because he hadn’t felt that way, and letting her believe otherwise was cruel.

  Except . . . that wasn’t entirely true. He had felt that way once. He’d almost told her on her eighteenth birthday, but she’d shocked him with the news that she was joining the army. He’d stopped himself that night, too stunned, too hurt to bare his soul.

  Tom stared at his screen, at the photo of the man who’d been there when she’d needed someone. “I’m sorry you died,” he whispered to Fritz. “But I’m not sorry you saved her life. Thank you for that.”

  Then he closed both the browser tab and the compartment in his heart. He had work to do.

  He’d gotten into Sunnyside Oaks’s network and it was so easy, it was scary. He bet their system administrator believed he’d constructed a hackproof network. That admin would be wrong. A nurse working the night shift had clicked on a link he’d embedded in an e-mail to the staff in general with a bogus offer of free samples from a nonexistent pharmaceutical company.

  He’d sent his message to two dozen different accounts, all with names he’d simply guessed at based on work he’d done with other medical facilities. One had worked.

  Tom was violating the most basic of privacy laws at the moment, sifting through the facility’s patient database, looking for anyone who might be tied to Eden. So far, he’d found evidence of medical procedures done on movie stars and mob bosses, but nothing that resembled any of the Eden bigwigs. The facility hadn’t had a new arrival in more than five days.

  Tom put an alert on the database so that he’d know when they added any new patients and closed that tab as well. He needed to get a few hours’ sleep or he’d be of no use to Croft in the morning. He stood, starting to call for Pebbles, but remembered he’d left her next door.

  She’d be fine with Liza for a few more hours. He wasn’t going to bother Liza again tonight.

  Because you are the biggest coward ever.

  It was true. He didn’t want to face her again. His emotions were too raw and too unclear.

  What was clear, though, was his need to see her safe. He’d go over in the morning before he went to work. He’d make her promise to stay home. To stay safe.

  SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA

  THURSDAY, MAY 25, 7:00 A.M.

  “He’s awake. DJ, he’s awake. Come—”

  DJ jolted to consciousness, his hands halfway to Coleen’s throat before he realized where he was. “God.” He shook himself, trying to dispel the sudden surge of adrenaline that was too much to handle on so little sleep. He felt like he had nodded off just minutes ago.

  Fuck. He searched frantically for his phone, finding it on the chair beside him. It must have slipped from his hand. The screen was dark, so no one had seen what he’d been looking at.

  After Kowalski’s revelation that Ephraim had murdered his old doctor, DJ had spent most of the hours of Pastor’s surgery reading articles about Ephraim Burton’s recent tangle with the law. He’d learned that Ephraim had killed a buttload of people, dropping clues along with every corpse. He’d also noticed that Eden hadn’t been mentioned once in any of the articles.

  That was good. But also bad. It was good that Eden wasn’t on anyone’s radar, so if Pastor muttered it in his sleep, the rehab staff wouldn’t know what it meant. However, the Feds knew about Eden. Gideon, Mercy, and Amos had to have told them. That they were holding the knowledge from the press didn’t bode well at all. The only reference to Eden that he’d seen had been a picture of one of the lockets. The locket had come up in another case, having belonged to a victim of a serial killer who’d killed one of Ephraim’s former wives.

  The wife that Ephraim had claimed died while trying to escape. The wife whose “body” he’d brought back, too decomposed to identify. In other words, he’d lied. Like they all did.

  DJ would have loved for Pastor to hear about Ephraim’s lies, to keep him angry about Ephraim and not angry at DJ, but that same news story had featured photos of Mercy Callahan. It would be like shooting himself in the face.

  He looked up to see that Coleen had jumped back at least three feet, her palm pressed to her chest, which rose and fell rapidly. “You scared me to death.”

  “Don’t sneak up on me,” he warned.

  “I was trying to wake you up.”

  “Do not sneak up on me,” he repeated slowly. “For any reason.” He’d learned to defend himself the hard way. “The last guy who did that didn’t survive.” He’d been a drug dealer who’d snuck up on DJ, trying to attack while he’d been asleep.

  Coleen looked shaken. “He’s awake and asking for you.”

  DJ slowly got to his feet, rolling his head until his neck cracked. “On my way.” To His Majesty, he added silently, still furious over Pastor’s little code word stunt the night before. Get my hopes up and then laugh at me? Fucker’s going down.

  He’d known for years that Pastor had memorized the access codes. It was the old man’s way of ensuring he never typed a password into the computer. Normally, he went off by himself to call his banker, only using the computer to research stock trades. His banker handled that, too.

  There had to be a way to get access to that account.

  DJ entered the recovery room, where Pastor was lying on a bed, hooked up to several machines. A cannula provided oxygen into his nose. He was breathing on his own, though. His skin was pale, but not nearly as bad as it had been.

  “You look better.”

  “I feel like shit,” Pastor muttered. “Did you talk to the doctor?”

  “No. He might have spoken to Coleen. Why?” Was there more wrong? Was Pastor dying of something else? One can only hope, he thought dryly.


  “I’m not dying,” Pastor snapped.

  DJ wondered if his expression was that transparent. “I’m glad.”

  “I wonder if you are.” Pastor gestured at him. “Come closer. I don’t want to yell.”

  As if you could. The old man’s breaths were too labored to do much more than whisper.

  “I’m going to be in the rehab facility for six weeks.”

  DJ blinked, shocked. “What?”

  No. No fucking way. A week he could have handled. He could have kept Pastor off the TV and online news for a week. Six weeks? Hell no.

  “That’s what the doctor said. Six weeks. I have a broken arm and a few broken ribs. My knee is toast and I have a concussion. My femur is broken in two places. I’m going to have to learn to walk again. So six weeks.”

  DJ opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Wow” was all he could muster.

  “I want you back in Eden. Get the people to a better location. The caves are killing them.”

  “What about Coleen?”

  “She’s going to stay with me, at least until I’m comfortable with this rehabilitation center the doctor was going on about. I want you to make sure the members stay calm. You stay put once you’ve moved them.”

  “All right,” DJ said quietly. He had no intention of going back to Eden until he’d eliminated Mercy Callahan. He also had no intention of telling this to Pastor.

  “I want you to bring Joshua in,” Pastor added, then coughed.

  DJ held a cup of water so that the old man could sip from a straw. “In where?” he asked, being deliberately obtuse.

  Pastor glared at him out of watery eyes. “Idiot,” he wheezed. “You know what I mean.”

  “And if he objects on moral grounds?” It was unlikely, but one never knew. Joshua was a pompous prick who’d taken well to keeping multiple wives who satisfied his every whim. He’d probably have no issue with any of the truth.

  “Tell him there’s money in it for him. That’ll level his moral ground. I want you to make a video of him swearing his loyalty and his silence with that phone of yours. Then bring it to me and prove that you’ve done as I ask.”