She was still mad he’d told her to stay out of his investigation.
“I agree, ma’am. I was only giving you a possible reason for their aggression toward your father.”
“But why target Dad out of all the businessmen in the U.S. who have non-Caucasian business partners?” She frowned in fierce thought. “That’s too flimsy a connection. Besides, we know at least one of them was a student. It has to be something to do with the school itself.”
“What type of training camp did he attend?” the detective asked.
Josie looked through the papers Daniel had left on the table and pulled one out, then handed it to the officer. “One that focused on high-level explosives and the more sophisticated forms of warfare. The particulars are here.”
He took the paper and looked at it, his expression freezing into disapproval. “This is just the type of information we don’t need domestic terrorists getting their hands on.”
“Dad is very particular about what students he takes on. If their background checks link them to domestic or foreign terrorist groups even remotely, he refuses their applications.”
The detective looked unimpressed. “You can fake a background. There’s no way your dad can guarantee the character of the men and women he chooses to train.”
Her gaze shot to Daniel’s, and they shared a moment of perfect understanding, both remembering their discussion along a similar vein earlier. But then she turned back to the officer, deliberately breaking the link. “Neither can the army, but no one has proposed shutting its doors down.”
Stone’s lips quirked. “You have a point, but the fact is, your dad obviously did train some domestic terrorists, and I’m guessing they aren’t wild about there being any record of them learning this stuff.” He waved the paper at Josie.
“You think they blew up an entire compound, tried to kill my father and broke in to my house all just to stop other people from knowing what type of specialized knowledge and training they had?” Josie asked incredulously.
The detective shrugged, looking resigned and weary with the knowledge he had of human nature. “We’re talking about fanatics here. The kind of men who would blow up an elementary school if it was in the way of their agenda.”
Josie was still reeling at the thought of her father unknowingly training domestic terrorists and being attacked because of it when Hotwire left to pick up Claire from her classes. The local police had gotten rid of the reporters, but the more stalwart had returned and were making a nuisance of themselves on the sidewalk.
They’d come into the yard again, but moved to the sidewalk after Daniel went outside and made his presence felt with silent, but palpable anger emanating from his every pore. He was back inside now, going over the records she’d printed earlier despite the detective’s injunction to leave that part of the investigation to the authorities.
He’d taken her jump drive, but had no authority to require her to delete the records she’d already transferred to Hotwire’s hard drive. Not that she’d mentioned them to him.
She was still trying to track down her father’s possible aliases. It required meticulous research and reading through a lot of records that ended up having no information of use, but she’d read the phone book for every major county in the U.S. if it meant finding her dad.
Checking her e-mail, she opened up an automated reply from one of the databases she had sent a query to. It listed the purchase five years ago of a piece of property in the Nevada desert under the name of one of her father’s Vietnam buddies, Andrew Taylor. The man had been dead for almost a decade. Excited at the breakthrough, she narrowed her search on that name to the area surrounding the property and came up with some other interesting pieces of information.
She wrote it all down, her heart lighter than it had been since her father walked out of his hospital room, his ability to remember still in question.
“I’m thirty-two.”
She was so focused on what she was doing that the sound of Daniel’s voice from behind her made her jump. She spun around in her task chair, her heartbeat accelerated. “What?”
He leaned against the doorjamb, his arms crossed, black hair framing his taciturn features. “I’m thirty- two.”
“I’m twenty-six. Is there supposed to be something significant about that?”
“Everyone else thinks I’m thirty-four.”
“Everyone?”
“Everyone but Master Sergeant Cordell.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what I told them.”
“Oh.” Was she losing her mind, or was it him? Most people lied about being younger than they were, not older.
“I joined the army when I was sixteen, and I had to lie about my age to do it. I’m much better at prevaricating than you are. I’ve got a lot of practice.”
She wasn’t sure how she felt knowing that. “But your birth certificate…”
“Faked.”
“I feel like you’re trying to tell me something, but I don’t know what it is.”
Subtle tension seeped into his features. “I ran away from home when I was sixteen because when my dad lost his temper, he hit. Drinking made him more susceptible to anger, and he’d begun drinking more and more.”
Daniel had said his mother was dead. Maybe his dad drank to forget her. Some men did. “Was your mom gone then?”
“No. She was the reason I left.”
Josie felt her stomach twisting in a tight knot of apprehension. “How so?”
“They fought about me most of the time. She wanted me to go to school, to make something of myself. It made him furious. He accused her of thinking he was less of a man because he wasn’t educated.” Daniel pushed away from the door and came into the room, his tension more pronounced. “Thunder was raised on the reservation. He was an artist, following the old ways, but in order to live, he sold his work in a gallery that catered to tourists.”
“Your mom had a problem with this?”
Daniel’s face contorted for a second before all expression smoothed from it. “Not really, but she grew up off the reservation until she was sixteen. Her parents died in a sailing accident that year, and she went to live with my great-grandfather.”
“Is that how she and your father met?”
“Yes. She never complained about her life with my father, but she wanted me to experience life beyond the reservation. She believed that a person’s life should not be limited by their birth.”
That was something Josie was trying to prove. Being born a soldier didn’t make her a soldier. “Smart lady.”
“Not smart enough to leave my father. He said she wanted me to deny my heritage and leave the reservation because our way of life wasn’t good enough for her. When he drank, he did more than accuse.”
“He beat her?”
“Sometimes he only yelled; sometimes he would yell until he totally lost his cool, and then he’d hit her. He had a violent temper, but I knew it was mostly my fault, that without me to fight about, he wouldn’t get so mad at her.”
Josie made a sound of distress, her heart constricting at Daniel’s belief he was responsible for his dad’s lack of self-control, or his mother’s choice to tolerate it.
His eyes reflected pain she wished she could assuage. “The worst of it was that I never wanted my mom’s dream for me. I wanted to be a soldier, had wanted it since I was a little kid. I wanted to know how to fight and how to win, how to stop my dad from hurting me and my mom.”
“What happened?”
“After my first tour of duty, my mom begged me to get out of the army, to come home to the reservation and take care of my father. He was drinking more then and was finding it hard to keep a job.”
