An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) (11 page)

“You left yesterday before I could tell you that Melanie called me a week ago, frightened out of her mind. She said someone in a dark sedan had nearly run her off the road.” His voice choked with emotion. “I didn’t take it seriously. Told her it was just probably somebody in a hurry or some drunk on the road after the football game. You know? If only— anyway, did you notice anything unusual yesterday on your way up the H-3, or on the way down?”

“No, Paul. No dark sedan. The only crazy driver on the H-3 yesterday was me when the brakes went out.”

“You’ve got to admit that it’s more than a little coincidental that—”

“Paul, stop.” She couldn’t let him draw her into his conspiracy theories. She was sorry he had lost his sister, but she would be making a mistake to see him as anything other than a reporter, a reporter on the hunt for a story. She couldn’t afford her name to be tangled in yellow journalism. Even if she could tell him more about the 81, which she couldn’t, if he quoted her as a “reliable government source,” Hickman would assume it was her. The guilt by association would end her career.

“Don’t you see? Melanie knew about the problems with the 81 from Major White. She said White was furious when his hard landing wasn’t reported. According to Melanie, White threatened to go over his CO’s head if somebody—”

“Paul,” she shouted above his escalating
ramble, “whatever information you think you have is most certainly unreliable. I don’t want to talk to you outside my office. Send your request in writing.” She ended the call and slammed the phone to the nightstand.

The phone rang again. “Paul, I said—”

“You let reporters call you at home, Captain Anderson?”

“Who is this?”

“The man who put you to bed last night.”

“What?” She tried to sit up and winced, easing back across the bed.

“Don’t worry. Samantha Harold was a proper chaperone. This is Colonel Fig.”

“You were here last night?” Why did he always make her feel as if she were handicapped around him? She couldn’t recall
anything of the night before beyond Samantha’s driving her and Molly home from the hospital.

“By Paul,” he was asking, “do you mean Paul Shapiro with the
Current
?”

Her mind was spinning, her head throbbing with pain. “Paul said he heard about the wreck. I guess he read a police report about it, or someone from my office—” She took a deep breath. The pain caused her to exhale short breaths. “Colonel, I’m hurting. I think it’s whiplash. I need to go. Did you call for something specific?” She wasn’t sure he even heard her because she’d detected the muffled footsteps of someone entering his office and of someone rustling through paperwork.

“I’ll call you back,” he said.

But he didn’t. Instead, he showed up around eleven. Chase, after soaking in a hot bath, had developed enough freedom of motion through her neck and back to dress in a fresh uniform. She was sitting at the dinette, sipping coffee, nibbling on toast when the doorbell rang.

“Colonel, what are you doing here?”

He stuffed his keys in a pocket and smiled. “Glad to see you’re up,” he said. “Anything cold to drink?”
Could he be any more arrogant,
she thought?

She led the way toward the kitchen and pointed toward the refrigerator before easing in a chair at the dinette. “Help yourself.”

He pulled a Diet Coke from the refrigerator and after a long drink set the can on the kitchen island. “I called the body shop for you. Found the insurance information in
your glove box.”

“Thanks, but—”

“Hungry?” He was standing in front of the open refrigerator door, gazing inside at the contents.

“No. And excuse me, sir, but are you always this rude?” She couldn’t hold back anymore. He’d pushed her too far—showing up two nights earlier and demanding to grill her dinner, his warning her about Shapiro, the phone call just hours earlier, and now this.

He closed the refrigerator and leaned on the kitchen island. “Are you always this hardheaded or just ungrateful when someone’s trying to help you?”

They stared each other down for several moments, and then Chase burst into tears. Damn him, she thought, and dropped her aching head into her hands and sobbed. He
moved quickly to her side and placed a hand on her shoulder. Then he knelt eye-level. “Here,” he said, pushing a napkin at her. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said in a tone so apologetic, she cried even harder. The dam was finally bursting, and she was crying for everything—for the fact that she could have been killed in a car wreck but was thankfully saved. Stone would have been so disappointed if she’d left Molly all alone, even if she, Chase, felt the most alone in this moment than she had since Stone’s death.

“When was the last time you ate?” Figueredo asked.

She pointed at the toast, and then blew her nose into the napkin.

“Wow, that’s attractive,” he chuckled.
She looked up at him through a film of tears. He was smiling, and suddenly the ridiculousness of her crying and blowing her nose in front of him seemed hilarious to her too. Now they were both laughing, and she was clutching her bruised ribs and begging him to stop.

Finally, she eked out, “I don’t think I like you very much.”

“I’ll try not to lose sleep over it.” His bluntness caused her to laugh again. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed so hard. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed at all.

He’d walked around to his side of the kitchen island as if to broker a truce. “Is there anything in this house to eat?”

She pointed to the refrigerator again. “There’s a spinach quiche Paige Abercrombie
from next door brought over a little while ago. Samantha told her last night about the wreck. And there’s a fruit salad too. Samantha brought the plate of brownies that are over there on the counter.” Chase made a second mental note to write thank-yous. Paige would expect one.

“Do you need to go to the office this afternoon?” he asked. “I can drive you.”

“Yes, thanks,” she said. “Since I left early yesterday—” She stopped. Was she ready to discuss what she learned from her meeting with Paul Shapiro? She was eager for answers about Melanie Appleton and the dog tags and about White’s possible hard landing three weeks ago, not to mention how eager she was to call Samantha and quiz her about how she’d known about the wreck and about picking up Molly.

Meanwhile, Figueredo was making himself at home, slicing into the quiche, apparently oblivious to the fact that she’d stopped mid-sentence. She changed the subject. “What did the body shop tell you about the brakes?”

He joined her at the table with two plates, each heaped with large wedges of Paige’s quiche and a good helping of fresh fruit. “Nothing. The body shop isn’t the brake shop, you know.” He sampled the quiche, and nodded. “This is good, don’t you think?”

She took a small bite and nodded. After a moment of silence, she was ready to divulge her secret. If pressed, she probably couldn’t have provided a sound reason other than she needed to tell someone, someone with a reputation for keeping secrets, and who
better than the base’s Intel officer. “Colonel, I met with Paul Shapiro yesterday.”

He stopped chewing.

“I really don’t know where to start,” she continued. “Did you see the article in yesterday’s
Current
about the woman who committed suicide by leaping from Diamond Head?”

“I did.”

“Look, I don’t want this information to get back to anyone, especially not back to Kitty White, Major White’s widow. Do you understand?” He set his fork across the plate and sat back in the chair as if readying himself for something unpleasant.

“I have reason to believe the woman—her name is, was, Dr. Melanie Appleton—was having an affair with Tony
White. ”

He leaned forward now, elbows on the table, his chin resting on his hands. “What reason?”

She told him about the morning of the crash, about mistaking the woman for Kitty White because of the photograph she’d seen in White’s cockpit. She even told him about the dog tags and was unable to look him in the eye when she confessed to throwing them away in an effort to protect White’s widow from learning the truth about her husband. Fearful of the reproach she’d find in his face, she kept her eyes on the table as she told him about Shapiro’s call to the office demanding that she meet with him yesterday, and then she managed to face Figueredo again when she told him about Shapiro’s confession that Melanie Appleton was his twin sister and that
her body had been discovered with White’s dog tags around her neck. She told Figueredo how shocked she’d been when Shapiro had produced White’s dog tags and dropped them on the table in front of her at the restaurant.

Figueredo leaned back and looked as if he were about to fold his arms across his chest, but he returned them to the table instead, this time shifting in his chair so that he could drape an arm over the back. She studied the rows and rows of ribbons on his chest, noticing for the first time the Purple Heart and Silver Star. She wasn’t sure she ever wanted to know what all this man had witnessed in combat.

He asked, “How did the dog tags get back to this woman?”

She shook her head. “That’s what I’m
trying to figure out, sir. Don’t you see? All this just fuels Paul Shapiro’s theories of some sort of a conspiracy. According to his sister, Major White had a hard landing in his 81 three weeks before his crash. Apparently, he told Shapiro’s sister that the hard landing went unreported and that he threatened to report the information himself. My office never received information about a hard landing, and if there had been one, you and I both know the squadron would have been grounded and White would not have been flying last Saturday.” She paused to evaluate his reaction. He leaned back again. His face was as blank as a champion poker player’s. “Anyway,” she continued, “Shapiro’s convinced we’re burying the news of mechanical design flaws in the 81 in an effort
to hold onto defense contracts. The fact that his sister was having an affair with Tony White—”

Figueredo suddenly rose from the table. “Tony White was not having an affair with that woman.”

She let his words and his tone sink in. He was rinsing his dish, and she waited for him to turn off the water. “How do you know that?”

“I just know,” he said dryly. “Look, I need to get back. If you’re planning to go in this afternoon, I’ll drive you. Your Jeep won’t be ready for a while, but your insurance company has authorized a rental car.”

She was stunned by the shift in subject and tone. “I’m surprised anyone at the insurance company would even talk to you. Everyone these days is so security conscious.”
She wished now she hadn’t told him anything.

He was standing beside her at the table, looking down at her plate of uneaten quiche. “Finished with this?”

She nodded. “Colonel, I need to know—”

“That’s just it, Captain Anderson, you don’t have a need to know what I know.” He’d returned to his usual state of arrogance.

“Then you’re causing me to believe Paul Shapiro could be on to something. If I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know how to properly respond to his questions, now do I, sir?” The pain medication she’d taken hours earlier was wearing thin, and so was her patience.

He set her plate inside the refrigerator and leaned against the sink, his arms defiantly
folded across his chest. “I told you the other night you needed to let me know what was happening with Shapiro. Do you always have this much trouble recognizing a direct order?”

“I thought—”

“Next time you hear from Shapiro, I want to know about it. Roger that, Skipper?” There was nothing friendly about him this time.

“Aye-aye, sir.”

As they set out on the short drive through base housing to her office, neither spoke.

Overnight, or so it seemed, her neighbors had decorated their homes for Halloween. Skeletons hung from trees. Carved pumpkins decorated porches. She felt
a stab of guilt. She hadn’t even taken Molly shopping for a costume.

At her office, an overly polite and concerned Figueredo helped her from the car and helped her navigate the stairs to her second floor office. She forced herself to thank him when they reached the top. “I can take it from here,” she said, but when she tried, she found she was in too much pain to walk without his help.

Cruise, Martinez, North, and the others had appeared with concerned expressions. North, on seeing Colonel Figueredo with Chase, flashed her a “what-the-fuck?” glance, and she flashed back a warning look that she could tell North deciphered as “We’ll talk about this later.”

“Whiplash,” Chase said, pointing to her
stiff neck, as Figueredo helped her ease in the chair behind her desk.

“I’ll pick you up at five,” he said, and turned to North who was standing in the doorway of her office with his hands on his hips. “Call me if you catch her trying to overdo it.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” he said, and stepped aside for the colonel. North and the others closed ranks around her desk the minute Figueredo was safely out of earshot.

North was the first. “What
happened
, ma’am?”

“The brakes just went out,” she said, trying to reach for the mail in her inbox.

He jumped to help and was shaking his head. “You’re lucky it wasn’t worse.” He handed Chase a stack of pink message slips.
She shuffled through them, noting Paul Shapiro’s and one from General Hickman. Was it merely a coincidence that both had called that morning? Had Hickman discovered her meeting with Shapiro?

“Who’s this Jimmie Benedict?” she said to North because his initials were at the bottom of the message.

North smiled. “Some kook who says he’s working third shift and can’t sleep because we’re flying helicopters all afternoon.”

“My response isn’t likely to make his day,” she said.

Martinez was heading back to the press room. “Some people just don’t want to pay the price for freedom.” North ran after him, offering a jab Chase couldn’t make out.

“Can I get you anything, ma’am?” Cruise asked. “A cup of coffee?”

“Yes, thanks. And water?” She rattled the bottle of pain pills. As the sergeant turned to leave, Chase asked, “Before you go,” willing herself not to give away too much in her tone, “how did you guys learn about my accident yesterday?”