Current Affairs (Tiara Investigations Mysteries) (20 page)

 
“We’re back to three suspects, James Goody, Kelly Taylor and Kerry Lee,” Tara said.

“We don’t know for sure that James Goody is connected to the case.
Oh, no!”
I screamed and jerked the steering wheel to the left. I had run over a squirrel. “I’m so sorry.” About ten seconds later we saw a hand come out of the window of the Ford Escort behind us and attach the flashing light to the roof of the car.
 
I pulled to the side of the road and lowered my window. “Oh, come on, it was a squirrel!” We watched Detective Kent through the rearview mirror saunter up to us.

“Bullwinkle is going to be very upset,” Victoria said from the passenger seat.

“I just hope he doesn’t press charges,” Tara said.

“Ladies.”
Kent nodded and looked at us one at a time. “Out giving someone a bad day, I presume.
Everything okay?
I saw you swerve and thought I’d better check on you.”

“I ran over a squirrel.” And I didn’t believe a word he was saying. “What a coincidence that you happened to be driving by.”

“I had hoped your run of bad luck was over.”

“The squirrel is the one with bad luck now.” Whatever he wanted, I wished he would spit it out.

“James Goody had a bad day, too. It started out well enough. He was visited by three very attractive docs that no one seemed to know.” Here he looked at Victoria. “Then this afternoon, he died.”

“How?
From the heart attack?”
I asked.

“That’s been known to happen now, hasn’t it?”
 

 
I heard someone say, “Nobody likes a smart ass.” Too late, I realized it was me.

“Or maybe something not so straightforward, we don’t know yet. Did he say anything about who hired him or about being in danger?”

“When we asked him who he was working for, he said it wasn’t worth his life to tell.” He was looking at Tara in the back seat. I was obviously boring the guy, so I trailed off. She wasn’t flirting with him, she wasn’t even smiling. She was examining him the way a researcher would an interesting, hitherto unknown specimen.

“Did you find out where he was on Friday night?” This was a cute little vignette, but it was not as important as the, what was it again? Oh, yeah, the
murder.

“He was in Birmingham until at least midnight on Saturday night.”

“Can we go now, Detective?” I was going to have to break up whatever was going on.

He looked back at me, “Uh, you know to be careful, right?”

“Right.”

“Have a nice evening.” He walked back to his car.

“What do you think is the real reason he follows us?” We were on our way, and Tara had rejoined us.

“At first it was to find a reason to have our license revoked. Then it was because the victim was a consultant for a defense contractor, and he didn’t want to lose control of the case. Do you think the reason has changed again?”

They were considering the question. Tara’s brow had nary a crease. “Maybe he thinks he’s protecting us.”

“No, thanks!”
Victoria yelled as she started laughing. “When there’s trouble, I’ll just stand right behind Leigh.”

“James Goody died, and he’s still on us like a mosquito on lip gloss. So it’s not him he’s protecting us from. It’s whoever hired him.” Tara was getting nervous.

 
I was about to give a smartass girl power answer,
natch
, but just then another possibility occurred to me. “Or using us? Maybe he’s finally figuring out how good we are. Not that he’s ready to nominate us for businesswomen of the year, but I bet his estimation of us has gone up.”

Victoria pursed her lips, and I knew she was about to come out with one of her quips. “Up is the only way his opinion of us could go, or have you forgotten, ‘untrained, ill equipped and incompetent’?”

We all three moaned. Nope, no one had forgotten.

Soon we were
back
home. I got out of the car and stretched like a cat. “I haven’t jogged since Saturday. It’s still light out. Do y’all have workout clothes with you?”

They both had the items needed for a run in gym bags in their cars. Fifteen minutes later we were pounding pavement.

“I think the most important question right now is, does this, let’s call it programming problem, apply only to Backpack UAVs? I mean, if another government can get access to Predator transmissions, it’s much more serious. Victoria, can you find out?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Mark my words, if anyone can, she can.
Who-
hoo
!”
Tara raised her fist.

“She’s our
wo
-man!” I patted Victoria’s back. I knew we were asking a lot of her, especially since she was dealing with some personal issues. Tara sensed it, too.

I brought up a subject other than work. “I want us all to train for the Atlanta Women’s Triathlon. How does that sound?” I had hoped they would be just as enthusiastic about the idea as I was, but the looks on their faces and the silence didn’t exactly say they were in.

Victoria was first to speak. “I’m not a very strong swimmer. Do they have a biathlon so we can run and bike?”

“That’s a
duathlon
.”

For the next half hour we talked about buying bikes and maybe hiring a swimming coach. When we completed the loop back to my house and the cool down, I walked them to their cars. That was when I saw the beige car hidden behind the Hummer. It had US Army written in block letters on the door.

I just turned and sprinted away, as fast as I could go, back the way we had come. First Tara and Victoria caught me by my arms, and then another pair of hands on my shoulders turned me around. I jumped up into my husband’s arms, and we kissed. There he was in all his towering, burly glory. The rest of the agency and any thoughts of Tiara Investigations dissolved away while the Major General and I walked back to the house.

From the corner of my eye I saw the driver trying to start a conversation with my co-workers. That was a nonstarter, and he got in the car and left. The General grabbed me up in his arms, and I wrapped my legs around him. It didn’t occur to him to lock the door. Yep, he is just that tough.

Fifteen

C
ontinuation of statement by Leigh Reed.
There have been times when I’ve been wearing a dress and we haven’t made it upstairs, but that day I had on running shorts, so we did. Right away, I could tell there was something he wanted other than the obvious, which he was in the process of getting. He wanted to know where I had been the last few nights.

“Shopping, spa-
ing
, doing the M.O.G.”

“That had better be the Mall of Georgia,” because doing the M.O.G. was a slogan American soldiers used, meaning being deployed in Mogadishu, Somalia.

“
Yes,
and playing golf.” I was doing fine until the last one.
Golf at night?

“Is.
There.
Someone.
Else.”

“No.” I slapped him. That’s when things got wild.
Naaahh
, I made that up. Sometime during the night we got up, and I made nachos.
 

“Do you have any meat to put on this?”

“Sorry.” I hesitated before I answered, just enjoying his sonorous voice.

“It’s okay. Hey, I haven’t had avocado in a long time. Remember when I proposed to you?”

“I remember every word.”
 
That weekend had been the most romantic of my life. We had rented a sailboat and sailed on the
Intercoastal
Waterway and the Kiawah River. He had proposed at midnight. It was a clear night, and his tan glowed in the moonlight. He is so handsome. His prematurely gray hair was set off by his tan, and I can still feel how his finely chiseled cheekbones felt to my fingers. Remembering his face, my breath caught, just like it had that night. I had answered, “Everyone asks me to marry them.” He was dumbstruck.

“I’ve dreamed of falling in love like this and proposing, and that’s what you say to me? Aren’t I any different from the others who have proposed to you?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your answer?”

“That’s my answer. Yes.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to marry you now.”

“Oh, please …”

“I’m thinking.”

“Look, if you’ll marry me I will speak French to you and close my eyes when we slow dance and wear cowboy boots. Now that is my final offer.”

He picked me up and swung me around, the boat rocking like crazy. “We’re getting married!” he had yelled.

“We’re getting married!” I had said, imitating him.

“We’re okay now, right?” I had closed my eyes, remembering, and I jerked back to the present, because it was a serious question.

“Oh, yeah.”
I meant it, and he knew I meant it.

“You really scared me when you told me you were leaving on the next thing
smokin
’.”

I reached up and wrapped my arms around his neck and laid my head on his chest. “I had to do it.”

“I understand. I think. But you have to understand, you keep me from being a machine.”

“I needed a home.”

“Wherever you are is my home. Is it this house that has made you less restless and happier this year?”

I closed my eyes, caught in midair between two worlds. “Having friends again has made all the difference.”

“A-l-l-l-l the difference.”
Have you ever noticed there are some people who can mimic you and not be annoying? “It’s good to be back where people talk like me. I was thinking the other day about how with a Southern accent you can make anything rhyme. Like, ‘she was standing there wearing nothing but a tile and a smile.’ A Northerner would say ‘a towel and a smile’. Loses something, doesn’t it?”

I knew he didn’t talk to anyone else this easily, and I loved him for that. I wanted never to hurt him again.

 
“Let’s look at the stars.” He opened the door to the deck. He didn’t go
out,
he just reached a hand out for me to join him. “Whoa! Are you sure everything is okay?”

“Yes.”

“Then how do you explain this tropical jungle? And this is something you have in common with your mother, but her front and back yards are filled with flowers.
Whereas our front yard looks like everyone else’s.
This back here is a little over the top, don’t you think?”

“It just looks like that because you’ve been looking at a desert for too long.”

 
“It’s what you do when you’re extremely happy or extremely worried. So, which is it?” I didn’t have a ready answer. He closed the door. “Remember when you threw that bike? I couldn’t believe you would be so violent with a piece of athletic equipment.”

I did remember. I had put my bike on the back of our Land Rover, and I couldn’t get it tight enough on the rack to feel secure. I had already taken off my belt and used it as a tie on and I asked him for his. “This is part of my uniform!” he had exclaimed.

“Tell you what, we’ll salute it. Would that make you happy?” And when I said the word
happy
, I broke down. I detached the bike and threw it. Then I walked away.

“Oh, yeah.
I definitely remember that.” I hesitated, unsure how much old stuff I wanted to excavate, and he waited for me. I loved it when he did that. “I had had a dream the night before that disturbed me. I didn’t remember all the
details, just that
I wasn’t in it. I had a dream, and I wasn’t in it.”

He rubbed the back of my head. Then he ran his fingers through my hair and pushed it back from my face. “Your hair was about this long when we were dating.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then you cut it short. Why?”

“I guess I thought that was what a wife did. You know, how a wife was supposed to look.”

“Maybe that’s how other wives look, I really don’t know, but you’re not like other wives.”

You have no idea,
I thought. And just like that I unintentionally broke the spell. I went somewhere else, and he felt it.
“Ready to go back to bed?”
 
What was I doing? Was I choosing the agency over my marriage? No, I felt certain I could have both, but in what should have been a rare time of intimacy with my husband, I was being more loyal to Tara and Victoria than to him. Why did I have to figure this out at this stage of my life?

He took my hand, and we walked upstairs, Abby lumbering behind us. Somebody, don’t know who, once said, “Nothing makes us
so
lonely as our secrets.”
Amen.

Then we slept, curled together like puppies. The newspaper was still downstairs. I never did find out what happened in the world that day. As I drifted off I thought about his comment about other wives. I was just doing the best I could, and so were they.

On Wednesday morning one of his cell phones rang, and I rolled over while he answered it. He was wide awake and up in a half-second, out in the hallway. After what could only have been a few minutes, my own cell phone rang. It was two minutes after seven, so I answered, “Good morning, Victoria,” without checking the screen.

I got up with every intention of closing the door all the way rather than listening in, I swear on a stack of Bibles. “I’ve been getting more information on what David Taylor was up to before he was killed.”

“UAVs,” said The General into his phone. I knew I had heard the word in stereo. I just knew it. After all, I am a detective.

“Leigh, are you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“I was able to access the hidden files on that disk. They were three layers deep. They’re videos of IED explosions. Tara asked what killed the man yesterday when we were logged on. Well, it was the IED he was burying.”

“It looked like he was startled when he saw the Backpack UAV. Did he accidentally detonate it himself?”

“There are over twenty cases of the same thing on this disc, so I doubt that would happen on all of them.”

“You’re right, that’s unlikely. Was there anything in there about China?”

“Not that I’ve found.”

“So we still don’t know what this has to do with China, if anything. Didn’t you say sometimes he wrote CINA instead? Does that mean anything?”

“He named the hard copies, the folder on his computer and the removable disk China. It’s got to have something to do with the Chinese, but I’ll try to find out if CINA means anything other than he was writing fast. I called to ask you what radio frequency a Backpack UAV uses.”

“Are you asking if the frequency used by a Backpack UAV could detonate an IED?”

“Yes.” Victoria was still whispering.

“No idea.”

“What’s that in the background?”

“My husband is talking about UAVs on his cell. He’s talking about data transmission, too.”

I held the phone up for her to hear him saying, “I was about to tell you I’m on my private phone, but I see we’ve moved to a low-side mission. Just a sec, I’ll need to increase my situational awareness.”
 
His joking tone was downright delicious, and it wasn’t easy, but I got hold of myself and moved away from the crack in the door.

“Great. What’s he saying now?”

“Nothing, he’s not talking. Wait, now he is. Something about, ‘Just a second and I’ll ask my wife.’ My wife!
Holy shit.”
I jumped back into bed and pushed my cell phone under the covers.

“Sweetheart, are you awake?”

“Un-huh.”

“General
Kosloski’s
wife wants to have lunch with you. Do you have her number?” He was rolling his eyes.

“I don’t think so. Can he e-mail it to you?”

He went back into the hall. I pulled Victoria out from under the duvet, in a manner of speaking. “I’ve got to go. I’ll find out what I can.”

“See what you can …” Her voice was cutting in and out. “Wait, that’s Tara calling. I’ll conference her in.”

“Hi, Tara.
I was going to ask Victoria if she had heard from you. Victoria, why are you whispering?”

“If I wake Shorty up, he might want sex.”

“So?” Tara asked.

“So that would waste
a good two or three minutes
.”

 
Tara started singing “Sixty Minute Man,” substituting the words “sixty second man.” I recognized the tune and joined in. Victoria either didn’t appreciate us serenading her, or she was afraid she would start laughing and huffed into the phone.

“Vic, tell Tara what you told me about the IED detonating when the Backpack UAV approached.”

After being quickly brought into the loop, Tara hmmm-d.
“Sort of like a premature ejaculation?”

“Call me later. Bye.” Victoria hung up.

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

I realized that while I loved my husband so much it hurt, I could not say with any certainty that my marriage was the most important relationship in my life. Nor could Victoria about hers or Tara about
her whatever
with Paul. I felt as torn and twisted as our covers, which I slid back down into a few minutes later when my husband came back in the room.