“You getting anywhere?” asked Man One.
“I hate these new phones,” Man Two remarked. He held a smartphone in his hand. “The only contacts I can find are in recent text messages. The rest must be in the cloud somewhere, and we can’t even get cell coverage here.”
“What’s a cloud?” Man Three asked. “And how can you be sure those aren’t his only contacts?”
“Oh hell,” said the first man. “He was a reporter. He probably had hundreds of contacts.”
“No help to us,” said the third man. “Hundreds of contacts? How do we weed through that?”
“We look at only the ones around here,” said Man Two. “But I need his cloud access, and he’s got it protected. When he said he’d put a copy in a place we’d never find, he might have meant that. And breaking into the house of one of his poker buddies last night turned up zilch.”
“Clouds aren’t that safe,” the first man said. “Remember when that motion picture company got hacked? He probably wanted a copy he could reach that would be safe. Maybe an external hard drive or flash drive.”
“Or,” said the second man, “he might have kept notebooks and files. You know, old-fashioned paper. I dated a reporter a few years ago. She always kept her notes on paper. In those reporter notebooks, for one, and she had drawers full of files.”
The first man looked at him. “Any reason?”
“She said it was the best way to protect her sources. She said that too many people could get into her computer.”
If a breeze hadn’t been wending its way down the narrow gully, ruffling grasses and the just-grown leaves of spring, they might have heard a pin drop.
“Why didn’t you mention this before?” the third man demanded. “We didn’t know to look for that kind of stuff last night.”
The second man shrugged. “Who thinks of paper files these days? I sure as hell don’t. That just popped up from memory.”
Their search had just gotten bigger.
“We can’t break into that house again,” said the second man.
“Nope,” agreed the first man. “We may have screwed that up. But I’m still not sure about his poker buddies and other friends here. Did he know any of them well enough to turn over serious information to them? We don’t know.”
“There’s no way to find out,” said the second man. “Maybe the most important thing we can do is find out where he stashed the information.”
“There’s another team working on his contacts back in Baltimore,” the first man reminded him. “Maybe they’ll find out.”
“I hope so,” said Man Three. “Because I sure as hell don’t want to go back without finding something.”
The three exchanged looks.
“Why,” asked the second man, “do I feel like we’re Curly, Larry and Moe?”
“Because,” said the first man, “we weren’t given decent intel. We have to do that as well as find the stuff.”
They all fell silent again. Each of them was thinking of events in Afghanistan.
Then Man Three stirred. “Hey, One? Did you know Larry Duke?”
“Why?”
“Because when you were...interrogating him, I got the feeling you did.”
“Never met him,” came the clipped response from the first man.
The other two exchanged glances. Neither was quite sure they believed it. They knew they’d come for the money. What if Man One had a different agenda?
Chapter Two
Daniel Duke made his way to the town’s only motel, the La-Z-Rest. It didn’t take him long to recognize the place had probably been here since long before he was born, but it was clean. Compared to a lot of places he’d slept, he wouldn’t have complained regardless.
He doffed his uniform, putting it into a garment bag and hanging it in the closet. The shirt went into a laundry bag the motel provided. He’d chosen to wear the uniform for his arrival because it acted like a credential all on its own. Now he shed it so he wouldn’t stand out.
Then he pulled on regular clothes, jeans and a chambray shirt, pretty much what he wore at home. Blending in with the locals was something he’d needed to do at times during his career, and sometimes that blending had required clothes he wasn’t used to wearing. This was easy by comparison.
He felt he’d gotten a reasonable first concession from the sheriff. He hadn’t expected to take part in the official case, but he hadn’t wanted to be totally hampered, either. He might have a minder in Cat, and yet as annoyed as she was with the situation—he couldn’t blame her for that—she’d shown signs of coming down off her high horse.
Looking back over their initial meeting, in retrospect he saw that he had probably come across as critical of her department. He was a naturally blunt man because he needed things to be clear when managing his own troops. On the other hand, he knew how to play political games when required. Until recently he’d been on an accelerated path up the command ladder, probably destined for a star on his shoulder one day.
Not anymore.
The simmering anger over that tried to surge, but he battled it down. There was one thing and one thing only he wanted to focus on right now—finding Larry’s killer.
All right, he’d been impolitic. He needed to find a way to correct that so he and Cat Jansen could jolt along. He’d walked in and talked to her like one of his troops, making it perfectly clear what he expected, both of her office and of himself.
He’d looked down instead of up. The sheriff was like his superior officer in these circumstances. That meant Cat was, too.
Ah, hell. Talk about getting off on the wrong foot.
Her face swam before his eyes, and he felt the whisper of attraction once again. She was pretty, all right, with delicate features and those amazing blue eyes.
He brushed that feeling aside, too. Wrong time. Worse, he suspected Cat would be furious if she suspected she’d aroused his interest for that reason.
Judging by the few things Gage had indicated about her during their conversation, Cat must
