The Homecoming (41 page)

On a positive note, Cait did hope to have the tests back on the shell casing from the shot that had killed Kara’s father within the next couple of weeks.

Now that he was out of school for the summer, Trey spent most days at Bon Temps. Every evening over dinner—most times cooked by Sax—he’d regale Kara with tales of how he’d painted a wall, sanded woodwork, or helped the men lay the wooden floor. After a trip with Sax to Corvallis to pick out plumbing fixtures for the kitchen and restrooms, he returned as excited as if they’d spent the day at Disney World.

Although they hadn’t quite officially moved in together yet, they each kept clothes at each other’s places, and even as her son bloomed before her eyes, Kara could feel herself opening up as well as Sax began to teach her the pleasures of “passing a good time.”

On a day trip to Lincoln Beach with Sax and Trey, she blew her own glass fishing net float, which now sat in a place of honor in the cliff house. They took a night tour of the Shelter Bay lighthouse, and while the ninety-four-foot climb up the spiral stairs made her a little light-headed, Sax was there to steady her, and, as Trey pointed out, the “way cool” view of the town lights from so high up was definitely worth a little dizziness.

They dug for razor clams on the beach, rode bikes and ate chewy saltwater taffy on Seaside’s famous promenade, took Cole’s boat out for a day on the water, and visited the aquarium in Newport, where the walk through acrylic tunnels surrounded by several feet of seawater was like taking a stroll in the open ocean, a sensation enhanced by the waves surging against the tunnels.

As much as Trey enjoyed coming face-to-face with sharks, rockfish, and bat rays swimming above and below them, the “coolest” things, in his opinion, were the enormous suspended whale skeleton and the shipwreck at the bottom of the aquarium, which immediately had him declaring that he wanted to be an undersea explorer when he grew up.

Even when Sax wasn’t dragging them out on coastal field trips, every day proved an adventure. Kara and Sax, by necessity, became experts at the five-minute quickie, which Kara found one of the most fun ways to pass a good time.

As each day went by, they grew closer as a unit, and Kara realized that they’d become a family when, wanting to keep flying his kite on the beach instead of coming in for dinner, Trey actually talked back to Sax, instead of treating him like a walking, talking superhero.

One night, after Kara’s mother and John had taken Trey up to John’s fishing cabin at Rainbow Lake for the weekend, Sax finally told Kara about his last mission, the one that had earned him those medals and the hero designation he hadn’t ever wanted to claim.

They were sitting out on the porch at the cliff house, and it was as if a dam had broken inside him. The words flooded out: about the initial ambush, how each of his teammates had continued to fight while gravely wounded, of the days spent alone in the mountains, wounded himself, sometimes delirious, not sure whether he was dead or alive.

He told her about his capture, his imprisonment, being locked in a windowless room with a dirt floor. The degradation. Blessedly, he skimmed over the details of his torture, but the scars she’d discovered on his body while making love bore silent witness to all he’d suffered.

Even as horrible as all that had been, most heart-wrenching was how he’d spent the months after being released from the naval hospital, visiting his dead teammates’ families, telling the story over and over again, making sure each person knew that their son or husband or fiancé had died bravely. Honorably. Fighting for his country. And that
they
were the true heroes.

Which finally led to him admitting to the painful, deep-seated guilt he’d originally denied. And his ghosts. Who, he realized as he told her about them, hadn’t been showing up lately.

She remained silent as he’d talked for hours, the sky changing from black to deep purple to a silvery tint as the last of the stars faded and the sun prepared to make its appearance.

By the time he finished, dawn had painted the sky a brilliant rose, and, as if from a trance, he’d looked around, seeming stunned to discover he’d talked all night.

Having already taken a personal day off work with plans for a romantic weekend just for two, Kara took him to bed—not for sex, but to comfort him; she wrapped her arms around him, spooning against his hard frame.

For the first time, he seemed free of the nightmares that had caused him to sweat, twist and turn, mumble, once even shout in his sleep. When she’d brought it up after the first night, he’d shrugged it off.

“Hell,” he’d said, “who doesn’t have nightmares from time to time?”

Understanding that healing had to come in its own time, she hadn’t pressured him, willing to wait until he was ready to open up.

It was early afternoon when they finally woke.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to dump all that on you.”

“I’m glad you did.” She framed his face between her palms. “Because I love you, Sax. And what hurts you, hurts me.” She touched her lips to his roughened cheek, his forehead, skimmed them over his mouth. “And hopefully it helped you to get it out.”

It had. “Do you have any idea how remarkable you are?” he asked.

“I’m in love with you,” she said simply, repeating those amazing words he’d never thought he’d ever hear. Never thought he’d deserve to hear. “Is there anything else you’d like to get off your chest?”

“Nothing important.”

“Well, then, sailor, hold on to your hat. Because you are about to get very, very lucky.”

Rolling over on top of him, Kara spent a long love-and laughter- filled afternoon showing Sax exactly how remarkable she could be. How remarkable they could be together.

Five days before Cole and Kelli’s wedding, Sax showed up at her office, looking outrageously hot in faded jeans, a T-shirt, well-worn boots, and a tool belt. As sexy as she’d always found a man in uniform, Kara was discovering that there was definitely a lot to be said about a hot guy wearing a tool belt.

“There’s been something bugging me about your dad’s shooting,” he announced.

“Well, that makes two of us.” So far Cait’s lab still hadn’t come up with any prints from the spent cartridge.

“No. I mean it’s been one of those things where this thought’s been hovering right on the edge of my mind, but I haven’t been able to grab hold of it.”

“And now you have?”

“Yeah. I had this dream last night about being back in the Kush with McKade.”

“Another nightmare?” How could she not have noticed?

“No. Thanks to you, those are gone,” he assured her.

“You were ready to move on. I was just there.”

“Ah, but I wouldn’t have been
ready
to move on if you hadn’t been there,” he countered. “But getting back to why I’m here . . . This was just a dream, sort of like I was watching a movie, but not emotionally involved, you know?”

“I’ve had those.”

“Okay, so McKade and I were in our ghillie suits—”

“Wait.” She held up a hand. “I’m trying to picture this, but I don’t know what that is.”

“They’re these suits SEALs wear to help us blend into the surroundings. If you’re in a jungle, you’ll put leaves and other nature-type junk on them. McKade and I made ours by tearing up some clothes we found in an abandoned village. They were those white shirts and pants the locals wear, so we blended in with the snow.”

“I’ve always thought of Afghanistan as a dusty, barren place.”

“It is. But those mountains are really high, and we were in near whiteout conditions fighting our way up the mountain into Pakistan.”

The idea was chilling: both the thought of fighting a battle in a blizzard, and imagining the two men out there all on their own, undoubtedly outnumbered by the entrenched forces trying to kill them.

But she had to ask. “Wasn’t that illegal?”

“Yeah, technically it was against the rules of engagement at the time. But we’d been in this copter crash, and that team pilot I told you about needed medical care. It’s a long story, and we’ve all moved on, and don’t worry. I’m not dwelling on it. Which is, in a way, too bad. Because if I
had
been thinking more about it, the idea would’ve clicked sooner.”

“What idea?”

“John never found the bullet that killed your father, right?”

“No. Just the casing.”

“Maybe because he wasn’t looking in the right place.”

“He was there,” she argued. “Where my father’s body was found. Where else would it be? Unless the shooter picked it up and took it with him.” Which would definitely point to murder. “The coroner’s report showed that the bullet exited the body,” Kara said thoughtfully. Which made not being able to find it all the more frustrating. “That’s why we couldn’t recover it for forensics.”

“Okay, here’s how it works. Although I’m trained as a sniper, on that team McKade was the sniper, and I was his spotter. What a spotter does is exactly what it sounds like: You detect, observe, assign targets, and afterwards, watch for the result of the shot.”

“To make sure the bad guy’s been hit.”

“Right. You also have a spotting scope, which you use to read the wind. There’re a lot of formulas for that, but basically you’re making calculations for distance, slant range—”

“You just lost me again.”

“That’s the angle of the shot. You correct for atmospheric conditions, like weather, wind, and even mirages from the heat on the ground. Then you figure out the lead for any moving targets.”

At first she was wondering why Sax was going into so much detail, as impressive as it was. Then comprehension dawned.

“Which means, if there’s anyone who knows where a bullet’s going, or has gone, it’s a sniper spotter.”

He knuckle-bumped her. “Got it in one.”

“Following that train of thought, if you know what the weather was that day, and where the shooter was standing—which, by the way, we suspect we do from the way the ground was tamped down—and where my father’s body was found—”

“There’s an outside chance I might be able to figure out where the bullet ended up.”

“Wow. I have no words for how impressed I am by your awesomeness.”

“Why don’t you wait until we try it out?” he suggested.

She was already out of her chair.

“I assume you brought your spotter stuff with you?”

“Roger that.”

“Well, then.” She took her pistol from her desk drawer, deciding she could go online and do an Internet search for the weather on that tragic day from her phone on the way out to the woods where her father had been killed.

“Let’s go.”

 

Kara had known Sax was smart. But she hadn’t realized exactly how intelligent he was until she’d spent an hour with him tramping through the woods, watching him shooting spots with his scope, skimming through the pages of his spiral-bound olive drab sniper journal, which he’d told her was one of the few things he’d kept from his SEAL days.

The journal, he explained, had plotting pages for cold bore (the first shot out of the rifle, before the barrel had heated up), range cards, data on stationary and moving targets, rifle data, elevation tables, wind correction tables, yet more tables for determining what a bullet would do under various atmospheric conditions, and records of not just every shot he’d ever fired on missions, but on the practice field as well.

“Police snipers keep journals,” she said. “But I’ve never seen any this detailed.” He was like the Einstein of snipers.

“Police snipers don’t, as a rule, have to worry about being killed if they miss a shot,” he pointed out as he scribbled some numbers onto one of the blank pages, then looked through the scope again.

“If I wanted to make sure I really hammered a guy with a deer rifle, which is what we’ve got to assume the shooter was using, since he wouldn’t want to stand out if he ran into anyone arriving or leaving the scene, I’d go with a two-hundred-and-twenty-grain bullet because it’d do more damage, tear through more organs, and penetrate the target deeper and farther.”

She couldn’t help the sound of distress that escaped her lips.

He glanced up from the scope. And looked miserable. “Hell, I’m sorry, Kara. I got so caught up in the logistics, I forgot for a minute it’s your dad we’re talking about.”

She took a deep breath. Cleared her head and willed her stomach not to toss up the bagel she’d picked up that morning from the Grateful Bread.

“I’m okay. Really,” she said when he studied her with continued concern. “Just help me catch his damn killer.”

“You went a little pale. Like during the lighthouse climb. You sure you don’t want to go back and wait in the cruiser?”

“Not on your life.”

“Okay, then. The downside of two-twenties in a thirty-aught-six is the bullet drop. At three hundred yards, which is the distance the shooter seemed to be from your dad—which, by the way, indicates we’re not looking for a pro—you’re going to be dealing with six or seven inches of drop.”

He did some more figuring. Climbed the three hundred yards up the hill again. Looked through the scope. Then he finally nodded his head, appearing satisfied.

Kara watched, with building anticipation, as he came back down the hill for the umpteenth time to where her father’s body was found.

Looking as confident as she’d ever seen him, he pulled on a pair of gloves, went over to a towering Douglas fir tree that looked to be several centuries old, unclipped a knife from his belt, and, as she watched with fascination, dug into the bark.

“Bingo.”

He turned toward her, a silver-tipped Winchester two-twenty bullet in the palm of his glove.

“Oh, wow. I know you hate hearing it, Sax, but I’ve really got to say it.”

“Oh, God, please don’t.”

“Sorry.” She placed her crossed hands over her heart and said in the same breathless, feminine, adoring way Lois Lane might have said to Superman, “My hero.”