Javier nodded.
Hunter looked over at Darcangelo. “How’d you get here so fast?”
“I was setting up that solicitation sting down on Colfax when the call came in. What took you so long? Getting your nails buffed?”
“Hey, fuck you. It’s my day off.”
“Your day off? What is that shit? Why don’t you see what you can do to keep Corbray out of the limelight while we clean this mess up? Any minute now the media are going to show up and start taking photos of him again.”
What a clusterfuck!
The commander was going to love this.
LAURA MADE COFFEE for Deputy U.S. Marshal Childers, then retreated to her office, turning to her job to keep her mind off Klara. But that was impossible.
Safiya was lying, doing all she could to keep Klara, and there was little Laura could do about it. Once Erik had exhausted diplomatic options, she would have only the courts to turn to. And the courts would rule against her.
Despair welled up inside her, Erik’s words running through her mind. If it hadn’t been for Javier, she wasn’t sure how she’d have gotten any sleep last night. He’d held her, assured her everything would be all right. His confidence had seemed to lift some of the burden—and some of the worry—off her shoulders.
Determined to have a productive day, she slogged through transcribing her most recent interviews. She had worked only four full days over the past two weeks, the newspaper seeming distant, part of another life. If she didn’t produce something soon, Tom would lose patience with her, though his temper didn’t bother her the way it bothered other people.
Done with that, she began to run through her notes on the VA story, only to find that she still couldn’t concentrate. Her gaze fell on Ali Al Zahrani’s FBI file. She set her VA notes aside, reached for the file, and looked through the list of articles she’d written over the past few months to see whether any of them might have provoked Ali. But none of them had touched on any topic remotely related to the Middle East or terrorism. There were, however, a lot of articles
Could that be it? Could that coverage have persuaded him somehow to think of her as an enemy, a threat that needed to be eradicated? Could there be some connection between Al-Nassar and Ali or his family of which the FBI wasn’t aware?
If Laura had read this report without having met Ali’s family and without having spent so much time in the Middle East, she might have bought that story without a second thought. Page after page painted a damning picture—a young man who’d gone from model teenager to terrorist in a matter of months, turning his back on society to carry out one fatal act of violence. But nothing in the report explained how Ali might have become radicalized or who might have influenced him. Could he have spent his afternoons radicalizing himself in his own bedroom?
Laura’s reporter instincts, instincts she’d learned to trust, told her that something was off here.
Her heart gave a hard kick.
She grabbed her notes from her interview with Ali’s uncle together with a fistful of pages from Ali’s browser history and began to compare.
According to FBI’s interview notes and her own, Ali went from class to his uncle’s grocery store, where he worked every afternoon until the store closed. He got out of class at roughly two in the afternoon and then reported to work by three, usually getting home at about nine thirty at night. And yet all of the suspect Internet searches he’d made using his desktop computer and home IP address—
That made no sense.
Laura double– and triple-checked the documents, page by page, and confirmed it. The condemning Internet searches had all been made from Ali’s home during the hours he was supposed to have been at school or working at his uncle’s grocery store.
That could only mean one of two things. Either his uncle was lying about Ali’s whereabouts in the afternoon—or someone else had been using Ali’s computer.
Had FBI investigators noticed this?
Surely, they had. Then again . . .
Just to be cautious, she read through the browser history for a fourth time, noticing things she hadn’t before. His afternoon searches were strictly related to bomb making and terrorism. There wasn’t a single search for naked women, no clicks on news articles, no visits to chat rooms, no detours to iTunes. Also, he’d never done any Internet searches about her. In fact, there was nothing in his browsing history that involved her at all, not even articles about Al-Nassar’s trial. To make matters stranger, he’d visited some of the sites—many of them, in fact— for only a matter of minutes before clicking on the next link and the next.
“Ms. Nilsson?”
Laura gasped, startled. She looked up to see Childers standing in her office doorway, smartphone in hand.
“Sorry to startle you, but I just got word that Mr. Corbray has been shot.”
IT WAS LATE afternoon by the time Javier was discharged from the hospital and free to head back to Laura’s place. He’d been questioned first by Darcangelo and then by two homicide detectives while waiting for the doctor to appear and stitch the graze. He’d been about to stitch the damned thing himself when the doctor had finally walked in and gotten the job done, leaving nine stitches in all.
Now, all he wanted to do was get back to Laura.
She’d put his phone number to use and called him the moment she’d heard he’d been shot, panic in her voice. He’d reassured her he was fine, but he knew she wouldn’t believe that until she saw him.
He walked with Hunter, Darcangelo, and two officers to the hospital’s parking garage. The two men had offered to accompany him back to Laura’s flat even though it wasn’t really their job.
“Why don’t you ride with that loser?” Darcangelo pointed to Hunter with a jerk of his head. “He’s got tinted windows that might give you more privacy if we run into media on the way.”
Hunter grinned. “He’s just jealous.”
Javier recognized close male friendship when he saw it. He climbed into Hunter’s SUV and put on his seat belt. “How long you and Darcangelo been married?”
Hunter grinned. “We met about six years ago. I’d broken out of prison, and Darcangelo was the one who found me.”
“Prison?” Javier listened while Hunter told him how he’d been convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. He’d broken out of prison to save Megan and Emily, and Darcangelo had put the pieces together, first bringing him in and then helping him prove his innocence.
“If it had been anyone else, I’d probably still be in the joint—or dead.”
Javier understood that bond. That was what he had with Nate. Except that he’d been awfully hard on Nate when he’d been up at the Cimarron, keeping him at a distance, keeping things from him.
Maybe he should.
LAURA WAS ABOUT to go out of her mind by the time Javier finally got home. She met him at the door, took in the sight of him. He smiled when he saw her, but she could tell he was troubled. Was he in pain? “Thank God you’re okay!”
She wanted to wrap her arms around him but stopped herself. He was carrying two grocery bags, and she wasn’t sure where he’d been hit. She didn’t want to hurt him.
He set the bags down and drew her into his arms. “I told you not to worry,
