“Not exactly.” He put the bottle on the table and leaned back a bit. “There were apparently a few soldiers who were paid to eliminate certain Afghans. Contract killings. I don’t know if it was ever discovered who paid them, but I do know they were all charged with murder. Larry uncovered the whole thing, and witnesses were willing to testify. At least the ones not in uniform any longer.”
“My God,” she murmured. “That’s awful.”
“Absolutely. A stain on the uniform.”
“But why should that reflect on you? Did you know anything about it?”
“Not a thing until Larry’s story broke.” He leaned forward, and once again she caught a glimpse of the man who had walked into the office: hard as granite, angry. “If I had heard about it, I’d have done exactly what Larry did. Not in a newspaper, of course, but I wouldn’t have let it go until I cut the rot from the tree. Ugly. Disgraceful. Cold-blooded murder.”
Cat wasn’t sure what Duke might have done to get himself out of the line of fire, but she could certainly understand why he had felt betrayed. To have the story hit the press and not even be prepared for it?
But at the same time, she had no difficulty understanding why Larry had chosen not to say anything.
“Do you suppose Larry might have thought he was protecting you by not including you in any way? Given what happened to you, maybe if you’d been able to send out a warning that the story was coming, people might have wanted to know why you didn’t stop it.”
His gaze grew distant again, as if he was reviewing the past. “It’s possible,” he said. “I didn’t think of that at the time, but it’s possible. On the other hand, when we had our argument, he never once said he was trying to protect me.”
Well, cross that out, Cat thought. She needed to move, to mull this over.
“I need to change out of this uniform,” she announced. “If you want, head down to the basement for a workout. I’m sure it’s not what you’re used to, but if you don’t have to run in the rain, why do it?”
She heard a wind gust as she walked from the kitchen, rattling windows and flinging raindrops around. Not a great day to be outside unless you had to. Right now she didn’t have to.
After a hot shower, she changed into some warmer clothes, including a blue flannel shirt. The weather had made the day colder, and her house as well. Drafts crept everywhere, and she thought about closing curtains to settle them down. Nah. Whatever was left of the day’s light, she didn’t want to shut it out.
In the kitchen, she discovered that Duke had washed the coffee mugs. Courteous guy.
As the borrowed heat from her shower wore off, she still felt a bit chilled. She went to the living room, turned on a few lamps, then curled up beneath a knit blanket on one end of the couch. Her book still rested on the end table, and she picked it up.
This case, she thought, was sprouting potential complications. Tomorrow she’d go to the office and catch up on what they’d learned. Right now, however, it was time to relax.
She heard a clang from below that told her Duke was working with her free weights.
Peace for a little while.
OUT IN THE RAIN, wearing camouflaged ponchos, three men sat in their gully and watched the creek rise even higher. It was too wet for a fire, which meant they couldn’t even make coffee. Alcohol lamps could heat their rations a bit, but not make any decent coffee. Unless they wanted cups of instant.
They were used to the discomfort, but that didn’t mean they liked it. At least with the cover of rain, they could walk a little, stretch out the kinks from being cramped so long.
On the other hand, the dropping temperature and the dampness reminded them of abuse their bodies had suffered over the years, of old wounds and battered joints.
“Ah, hell,” said Man One. “We’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do next. This rain won’t last forever, and it’ll wear out as an excuse pretty quickly.”
“Who’s gonna know?” asked Man Three. “Seriously. This takes as long as it takes, and if they don’t get that, we need to refuse to go any further. It’s not like this is an enforceable order.”
The second guy spoke. “I like the money. Do you?”
“Hell, yeah,” said the third man. “But we’re operating under some pretty tight constraints here. And some pretty bad intel. We don’t know exactly what we’re looking for.”
“Any information he might have wanted to use in that book he was writing.”
The first man, who’d been listening, spoke. “But we don’t even know what it was about. Someone has a suspicion, obviously, but without telling us, we can’t know for sure if we’ve found it.”
The second man jumped in. “I suspect,” he said sarcastically, “that we’ll know because it mentions the Army somewhere.”
“Or some officers,” suggested Man Three.
They all nodded, agreeing on that.
The second man spoke again. “Here we are, sitting in the damned rain again, freezing our cojones off—”
Man One interjected. “Don’t exaggerate. We’ve been in worse.”
Man Two answered him. “Yeah, man. We have. But my point still stands. We’re not doing anything. We’re not even sure how to proceed. Staging a series of break-ins that look like some teenage fools did them is fine as far as it goes. But we wanted to do the jobs after dark when no one was home. We didn’t want anyone to be able to say they saw big masked men. Hell, we don’t want anyone to suspect these actions are anything except robbery.”
“So here we sit,” said Man Three. “I don’t like it, either.”
Man Two threw a pebble into the blackened firepit. “We already killed one man. Larry effing Duke. Do you really think they sent the body away because they didn’t suspect torture? We
