Betrayal (19 page)

“No,” Nolan said. “Should I?”

“He was a local businessman with ties to Iraq. He and his wife were killed last weekend.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, but I’ve been out of town. I haven’t heard about it.”

“Would Evan Scholler have known you were gone?”

Nolan shrugged. “If he knew where I lived, he could have just checked to see if my car was in the garage. If it is, I’m home.”

“Has he ever, to your knowledge, been up here?” Riggio asked.

“No. As I say, we’re not exactly pals anymore.” As though it had just occurred to him, Nolan added, “But he’s a cop. He could find out where I live easy enough, couldn’t he? That’s what it looks like he’s done.”

Freed picked it up. “So Sunday morning early you were with this same girlfriend that this Evan Scholler likes?”

“Tara,” Nolan said. “Tara Wheatley. And, yes, she’s the one. So what’s this all about?”

“Those pictures you couldn’t identify on your computer?” Riggio said. “They were pictures of Mr. Khalil’s house before somebody killed them and hit it with a fragmentation grenade, and before it burned down.”

“A frag grenade…” Nolan didn’t want to overplay his apparent naïveté. Both Freed and Riggio knew that he had seen combat, and they might even know more than that. This was about the moment in the interview that, against his own deep-seated reluctance to believe ill of a fellow soldier, he might finally come to accept the apparent truth. So he nodded somberly and met both of their gazes in turn. “He’s trying to set me up. Christ, he killed them, didn’t he?”

T
HE EARLY EVENING SUN BAKED
the parking lot and the landing outside Tara’s apartment. She could feel its warmth in her hand through the closed and locked front door as she stood behind it. “I told you, I won’t see you. I don’t want to talk to you.”

“I need to talk to you, though, T. Please. I need to explain.”

“There’s nothing you can say to me. Nothing I’d believe. I can’t believe you’d even come by here and try this. You
lied
to me, Ron. You’ve been living a lie for all these months.”

“No. I’ve been living the truth. And the truth is that I love you.”

“You don’t lie to someone you love.”

“You’re right. That was a mistake. I shouldn’t have done that. I am so sorry.”

“Sorry’s not enough. I don’t want to talk about this. I need you to go away now.”

“I can’t, T. I can’t leave it like this. Could you please open up? Just so I could see you.” When she didn’t answer, he went on, talking at the door. “Listen, I knew you were confused about Evan, especially the timing about how we started. I thought that if you heard he’d been wounded…that you’d feel sorry for him, or like you owed him another chance…and that whatever happened, somehow I’d lose you.”

“And now that’s what’s happened.”

“I can’t accept that, Tara. I didn’t think he was going to live. I didn’t think it would matter.”

“That’s not the question, Ron. You lied to me. Everything we did was false, don’t you understand that? If you couldn’t stand to have Evan in the picture on any level, even if he was dying, how were we—you and me—ever going to amount to anything anyway?”

“We did amount to something.”

“No, we didn’t. That’s the worst part. We supposedly trusted each other. Now that can’t ever happen again. Don’t you see that?”

“Because of one mistake?”

“You really don’t see it, do you?”

“I see somebody who was terrified he was going to lose the woman he loved, who wanted to make sure they had some time together without the distraction of a wounded ex-boyfriend, who might never be coming home alive anyway.”

“That’s all you thought Evan was to me, a distraction?” The chain lock rattled and the door opened the couple of inches that the chain allowed. “I’m not going to yell at you through the door anymore. I just need you to go. You’re actually scaring me now, all right?”

“How can I be scaring you, T? I’m here begging you just to listen to me, to give me another chance.” He shifted his weight. “Is it because of him?”

“Do I still love him, you mean? I don’t know about that. I lost track of who he was, and now I don’t know what I feel. But I know you’re scaring me now. And why? Because you lied. And lied and lied.”

“I lied once, T. Once to try to protect what we were starting to have, that’s all.”

“No, it isn’t, Ron. What about Masbah?”

“What about it?”

“You firing on that innocent family. I Googled you and read all about it. You started that whole thing.”

Ron hung his head, wiped his brow against the glaring heat. “I was trying to protect the convoy. I thought the car was on a suicide mission. You had to have been there, but I can’t apologize for what I did.”

“The report said they’d stopped way back.”

“You can’t believe everything you read. It was a damn close call and if I waited another two seconds, we all could have been dead.”

“Most of you died anyway. How about that?”

“Not my fault. The point is that if I fired too soon, and I’m not saying I did, it was on the side of caution.”

“Ron. You killed an entire innocent family! Doesn’t that bother you at all?”

“It bothers me a lot, T. It makes me sick to think about it. But I can’t say, given the circumstances, that I wouldn’t do the same thing again. It was a split-second, life-or-death decision, and I decided I had to try to save my men.”

“That’s not what Evan says, Ron. And he was there too.”

“I guess he doesn’t mention the part about me pulling him out of the line of fire and getting him out of there alive.”

“So now you’re the hero?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying Evan’s memory maybe isn’t the most reliable thing in the universe right now. I’m also saying that he’s got a reason to make me look bad.”

“He didn’t make you lie.”

“How many times do I have to apologize for that? However many it takes, I’ll do it.”

“And what about the other lies?”

“What other lies? There were no other lies.”

“How about me ripping up that last letter that you delivered to me?”

“You didn’t rip it up.”

“Right. But you told Evan I did.”

“No, I didn’t. Did he tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“Then he’s lying.”

“I don’t believe that, Ron. And what about when you visited him at Walter Reed, when you told him I said he’d made his own bed and he could sleep in it?”

Nolan looked down and shook his head.

“What?” she asked him.

“That’s not true, either, T. Why would I say that? I went to see him to see how he was doing, if he was going to be all right. That’s all. He’s the one who didn’t want to hear anything about you.”

“That’s not what he told me.”

“No, I guess not. And why, do you think, would that be?”

Through the crack in the opening, he saw her close her eyes, lean her head up against the wall next to the door. He was wearing her down, getting to her. “Do you want to hear something else?” he asked. “Something truly scary, especially if you think your friend Evan is so innocent and so nice. You want to hear what he left in my house after he broke into it last weekend?

A
FTER
T
ARA WATCHED
Nolan finally drive away, she went into her living room, sat down, and put her feet up on the coffee table. Templing her fingers over her lips, she closed her eyes and tried to get herself to breathe deeply. A whirlwind of conflicting possibilities and emotions was literally causing her body to shake.

Ron Nolan had maintained a sustained falsehood, but did that mean that every word out of his mouth was a lie? She hadn’t expected him to show up here, or to own up to the lies upon which he’d based their relationship. Perhaps the truth was that he loved her and had made a mistake. A terrible mistake, yes, and one he sincerely regretted.

Just like killing the Iraqi family.

What was the truth in that story? Had he been justified shooting when he did? And in fact, had he pulled Evan to safety and saved his life? They’d been outnumbered and surrounded. If there had been a bomb in the car, none of them would have survived. Might she have made the same decision to fire under the same circumstances?

It struck her forcefully that maybe it was she who was being unfair. Ron Nolan had always treated her well, better than well. He’d literally saved her life that time in San Francisco. And surely his appearance today to beg her forgiveness—even while admitting he’d done the unforgivable—spoke to a depth of character she’d never given him credit for.

People grew, people changed, people learned from their mistakes. And if what Ron had told her about Evan were true? He might himself be in danger.

No. She could not believe that. That was more of Ron’s poison, trying to get inside her.

After seeing Evan in her classroom, and then the intimacy last night, she knew what she felt—not just the still-powerful physical bond, but a connection that went down to the bottom of her soul. It was irrational, chemical, fundamental, and she knew that she would never feel it with anyone else.

But now, according to Ron, Evan had lied to her too. A known liar accusing another of lying. It was like game theory, where “A” always told the truth, and “B” always lied, but you didn’t know which was the truth-teller and which the liar. Who did you believe?

Could Evan have made up the story about Ron saying she’d ripped up his letter? Or the Walter Reed moment? Evan admitted that his memory had been faulty, especially early on. Could he have lied to her and not even known he was lying? Finally, could Evan have broken into Ron’s house and tried to frame him for a murder? A murder that he himself had committed?

Tara could not believe any part of that. She knew who Evan was. Even after all this time and all of their problems, she knew his heart.

He was not a liar. He was not a murderer.

And this meant that Ron Nolan was lying to her again. And lying to the FBI. And possibly to the local police.

Liars deal in lies.

Suddenly she opened her eyes and sat up.

She needed to get to Evan. She needed to warn him.

T
HOUGH IT WASN’T
really a hangout for cops, the Old Town Traven wasn’t far from the police station downtown, and it served a decent-tasting though nutritionally suspect happy-hour spread of chicken wings, peanuts in the shell, tiny meatballs in gravy, and popcorn. Even though happy hour had officially ended more than two hours before, there was still plenty of food available. The Traven didn’t exactly pack ’em in, and now Evan, who’d changed out of his uniform at the station, and his bowling partner Stan Paganini, also in street clothes, held down one end of the bar all by themselves.

Between his low-watt nervousness over the envelope he’d mailed to the FBI and his need to keep himself occupied so that he wouldn’t do something stupid and try to get in touch with Tara until she’d dumped Nolan, if she actually was going to dump him after all, Evan felt that a drink or ten wouldn’t be amiss. Pass the difficult night in a haze and see what tomorrow brings.

Now it was half past nine and he and Paganini were on to the name of the place. Due either to the marginal intelligence of its owners, a drunken mistake, a simple typo, or all of the above, the neon sign above the door read “Old Town Traven.” The place’s business cards also had
tavern
spelled incorrectly, so Evan decided it was probably that the proprietors just weren’t too bright and certainly had not been the San Mateo County Spelling Bee champions, as he had been when he’d been in eighth grade.

“No, you weren’t.” Paganini stabbed the last meatball on his plate with a toothpick and washed it down with a good swig of his gin and tonic.

“Was too. I won on
hygiene,
which is almost unfair, it’s such an easy word.”

“Wait! Don’t tell me.” Paganini took in a little more of his drink. “H, Y,” he began.

“Good so far.”

“G.” He paused, glanced at Evan.

“I before E.” Evan tipped his vodka rocks all the way up. “Except after C.”

“Don’t tell me!”

“I just did. ‘Or when sounded like
a
as in
neighbor
or
weigh
.’”

“Okay, trying the old head-fake double reverse. I get it. But I’m on to you, boy. So here goes, again. H, Y, G, E…”

“
Buzz!
You’re out.” Evan shook his head. “I just told you,
i
before
e,
Stan. I told you the whole damn poem. You think I was making that up?”

“I thought you were trying to trick me. And then
g
is close to
c
sound-wise, so it was the exception.”

“Nope. It’s the rule.” Evan spelled the word out.

“That doesn’t sound right. I’m going to look it up at home.”

“You want to bet?”

“No, I don’t want to bet. But you’re right, that’s a pretty simple word to win the whole county spelling bee on.”

“Well, harder than
tavern,
anyway. And they got that one wrong here. Twice. Three times? Who knows, maybe more. They might have it on the matchbooks.”

“Yeah, well…” Paganini shifted his bulk and cried out. “Hey!”

“What?”

“Sat on something.” Paganini slid himself off his stool and was digging in his pants pockets. Plopping down a large set of keys in the bar’s gutter, he reached in again and produced a heavy item that he plunked onto the bar. “Knucks,” he said.

At one of their bowling league nights, the cops had gotten into a discussion about various common enhancements to a man’s natural defensive arsenal. Brass knuckles had featured large in Paganini’s experience, and Evan said he’d never actually encountered them.

Now he picked up the hunk of fitted metal. “Heavy sucker.”

“Get hit with it, you’re clocked,” Paganini said. “Although who fights with their fists anymore, huh? Nowadays, you know you’re going to be in a fight, you pack heat, am I right?”

“Maybe you don’t want to kill who you’re fighting?”

Paganini chuckled. “Yeah, like that happens anymore. Go ahead, put ’em on. Keep ’em if you want. I collect the ones I get off perps. I got a half dozen like these at home.”

As Evan was pocketing the brass knuckles, the bartender, a midthirties slacker with a wispy effort at a beard, suddenly appeared in front of them. Paganini looked down at his glass. “We empty again?”

“Seem to be,” Evan said. “Let’s double us up here, would you, Jeff?”

Jeff looked from one of them to the other. “You guys walking home from here? You pull a DUI, they can come back and get us.”

“We’re not going to get any DUI,” Paganini said. He reached around into the back of his pants and pulled out his wallet, opened it to the badge. “Pour us a couple more, would you, please, and I won’t report the obvious health violation keeping those meatballs out so long. Awesome meatballs, by the way. Remind me of my mom’s.” He cocked his head over toward Evan. “I believe the gentleman requested a couple of doubles.”

Jeff took a beat, nodded, and then turned to get fresh glasses and ice.

Evan lowered his voice, leaned into Stan. “Am I slurring?”

“Nope. You’re as eloquent as Cicero. How about me?”

“How about you what?”

“Am I slurring?”

“No.”

“You keeping track of where we are?”

“The Traven,” Paganini replied.

“Drinkwise, Stan. Drinkwise. I know where we physically are.”

“Four, I think, maybe. Couple of doubles is six, and we’ve been here”—he checked his watch—“three hours. So I figure we’re blowing point oh five, six, max, which means we’re totally cool to drive and will be for the foreseeable future.”

But Evan—all too familiar with the average cop’s rationalization genius when drinking—was doing his own math. He was fairly certain they’d had more than four drinks already, maybe as many as six or seven, and if they had a couple of doubles on top of that, two doubles each, that would take him up to eleven generous pours. He was just about to say that maybe he’d better stick with singles to give them a better chance to metabolize off, when the bar’s door opened. Glancing up at the mirror behind the bar, he put a hand on Paganini’s arm and without a word stood up and turned around.

“Y
OUR MOM SAID
this was where she might look for you.” From their table in the back, where they couldn’t be heard by anyone else, Tara looked around the seedy bar. “Nice place. You come here often?”

“Sometimes. Nights get long, and I go crazy at home. Some nights I bowl. Or read or something. Two days ago I was at Mom and Dad’s. I’ve got a life.”

“Of course you do. I didn’t mean that.”

“Yeah, you do.” He sat back and folded his arms. “You disapprove of me being here.” He looked at her, flat affect. “You come down here to bust my chops?”

“No,” she said. “No. I don’t mean to do that. I came down here to…well, just to talk to you again.”

Jeff showed up with two drinks and put them down at their table. “And for the lady?”

“Maybe I’ll just have one of his. And some cranberry juice.”

When Jeff left, Tara pulled her chair up, reached out across the table, and touched Evan’s hand. “I’m really not here to criticize you, Evan. It’s just that the other night you said you’d been drinking too much and were trying to slow down a little.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I’m not succeeding tonight. What’s that look? You don’t think a couple of drinks is a good idea?”

“I didn’t say that. If you need it, you need it.” She pulled his hand from his glass and covered it with hers. “Look,” she whispered, “I don’t know even any small part of what you’ve been through. You’re the one who said it would be better if you didn’t need so much alcohol.”

“That would be better. I agree.” Defiantly, he picked up his glass and took a long drink. “But that doesn’t seem to be what I’m doing right now, which is trying to keep things together.”

“What things?”

“My job, for one. What happened with my guys in Iraq. Why I’m still alive. Anger. Guilt. You name it.” He brought his eyes up, unfocused, heavy-lidded. “And all those are before we even get to you.”

Jeff showed up with Tara’s cranberry juice, placed it on the table in front of her, turned, and left. A silence settled. Evan again lifted his glass, then put it back down. “You want to tell me about you and Ron?”

“There isn’t any me and Ron. Not anymore. How can you even ask that after…?” She swallowed. “I called him after I saw you at school on Monday. It’s over.” Sighing, she went on. “But then this afternoon he came by.”

“Didn’t take the hint, huh? How did that go?”

“I never let him in. He told me he never said I’d ripped up your letter.”

Evan took that in with a solemn nod. “The guy’s a congenital liar.”

“Evan, look at me.” Her eyes bored into his. “You’re swearing to me that he said that? You didn’t make that up to make him look bad? I know it’s awful of me to ask, but I’ve got to ask you straight out. I’ve got to know for absolute certain.”

Evan covered Tara’s hand with both of his. “I swear to God,” he said. “I swear on the memory of the lives of my men, I have never lied to you.”

Tara let out a long, shuddering breath, as though something that had been squeezing her had suddenly let go. “He also denied what he told you I said in the hospital, about making your own bed and you could lie in it.”

Evan shook his head, almost in admiration. “Old Ron was on a roll.” Lifting his glass, he finished his drink, reached across, and took the second one from in front of Tara. “He said it, all right.”

“He said something else today too.”

“I can’t wait to hear it. What? Did I kill somebody now?”

But Tara had straightened up. “God, Evan, why do you say that?”

“What?”

“That you’d killed somebody.”

“I didn’t. I was kidding. What?”

She started to talk and stopped herself, then started again. “Ron told me you broke into his house last weekend and left stuff that you’d somehow smuggled out of Iraq to make it look like Ron had killed this man and his wife, when in fact it was you who’d killed them.”

Evan’s shoulders sagged. He slumped in his chair. He lifted his drink and put himself on the outside of it in one gulp.

“Evan?”

“That fucker. That
motherfucker
.”

She went on. “He said you’d brought over hand grenades and guns to his place that you’d smuggled out of Iraq. And planted incriminating pictures on his computer.”

Evan’s body molded itself back into his hard chair. He spoke slowly, with great caution lest his thick tongue betray him. “This guy who got killed, Khalil. He was Iraqi. Think about it. Think about Ron’s real job over here…”

“What do you mean? Ron’s a recruiter mostly. He’s…”

“No, listen. He’s a mercenary mostly. Those were his weapons, his grenades, his pictures.”

Tara sat back and crossed her arms. “You mean you
do
know about this? How could you know about this? Or about Ron?”

He just looked at her, opened his mouth, closed it again.

She came forward now. “Are you telling me he wasn’t lying about you breaking into his house? Did you do that, Evan? Tell me you didn’t do that.”

“No, I…” Evan shook his head, hard, trying to clear away the fog of alcohol. “I mean, okay, I went in.”

“You broke into Ron’s house? And did what?”

“Nothing. I didn’t do anything. No,” he said, “that’s not true. I got on his computer and got pictures of this guy’s house before it burned down.”

“Why did you do that?”

“’Cause Ron’s a murderer, Tara. He killed this guy and this was the evidence…”

“So what did you do with it?”

“Mailed it to somebody.”

“The FBI, you mean?” She hit the table with her palm. “Did you send your diskette to the FBI, Evan? Because Ron had the FBI over at his house today, and he told them you’d planted all that stuff there. And now you tell me you were actually inside, so they’ll find your hair or fingerprints or something, don’t you see that? He’s trying to have you framed for this.” She ran both of her hands through her hair, over her scalp, down to her neck. “God, God, God, how can this be happening? They may be at your apartment right now, wanting to talk to you, do you realize that? And then what are you going to do? What are you going to tell them?”

He stared blankly at her for a long minute, then brought his hand up and chewed at the knuckle of his index finger. “Enough of this shit.” His words starting to slur.

“Evan.” She gripped at his hands. “He’s already got the FBI in on it, don’t you understand? It’s already happening.”

“Can’t be. I’ve got to stop him.”

“No. Don’t you do anything. Get a lawyer or talk to one of your bosses. Maybe they can deliver a message, get something through to Ron. But you stay out of it personally. Ron’s dangerous, Evan. And he’s out to get you. You’ve got to be smart. Get sober and get a plan.”

Evan slammed a heavy hand on the table. “What do you mean, get sober? Is that what everything’s about, whether I’m sober or not? I’m sober right now, enough for fucking Ron Nolan.”

“Evan,” she pleaded, “you’re not. Listen to yourself. You don’t swear when you’re sober. You don’t slur when you’re sober.” She stood up, reached out and touched his arm. “Look, why don’t you come home now with me. I could drive us.”

“And then what?” Evan’s thick voice trembled with rage. “And then the FBI finds me there? Or at work tomorrow? What do I do then?”

“Come home with me. We can talk about it and work something out.” She let her arm fall along his sleeve and took his hand. “Come on. Really.”

“No!” He pulled his hand from hers, turned away. His shoulders rose and fell and then he turned back to her. “I am not fucking dealing with him anymore! This has got to end. It can’t go on.”

“You’re right, but it can’t end tonight, Evan.”

“Yes, it damn well can.”

Tara kept her voice low, conciliatory, restrained. “Evan, come on. There’s no way you can do anything the way you are now, so don’t be crazy. You’re just really mad—”