Gone Too Far (35 page)

Apparently, while she was employed there, Mary Lou showed up, did her job, kept to herself, read a book during her breaks, and went home. She was responsible and reliable. She always showed up on time. Until the day that she didn’t show up at all.

Sam looked exhausted. He was standing and staring at a community bulletin board, at a brightly colored sign advertising a church nursery-school fun fair. It was right next to a help wanted poster for a nanny. A live-in position, the sign said. Room and board plus a generous monthly salary. Single mothers welcome to apply.

Sam interrupted the store manager midsentence. “That sign been up there for very long?”

The man blinked at him and then at the poster. “I doubt it. Anything that’s been up for more than two weeks automatically gets taken down.”

“Too bad,” Sam said. “Because if I were Mary Lou . . .” He pointed to the poster.

And it was then that her phone rang.

“Thank you for your time,” Alyssa said to the manager.

Sam went from completely exhausted to completely wired in the space of a heartbeat, and all of that intense energy was suddenly focused on Alyssa and her phone.

She went out into the early evening heat and started for the car as she checked her caller ID. “It’s Jules,” she told Sam, and pressed the Talk button. “Locke.”

Sam caught her around the waist, pulling her close and lowering his head so that his ear was next to hers, so that he could hear, too.

“Yo, it’s me,” Jules said. “I’ve got thirty seconds to tell you some really bad news. I know you’re going to have questions, but I swear, I’m telling you everything I know, and I’ll call you again as soon as I hear anything else.”

Sam’s arm tightened around her waist, and Alyssa spoke for him. “Just tell, uh, me.” She’d almost said us. Sam wasn’t the only one who was exhausted.

“There’s been a car bombing in San Diego.” Jules gave it to them point blank. “Someone parked a car in Don DaCosta’s—you know, Sam’s neighbor’s—driveway, ran like hell, and the thing blew.”

“Oh, fuck,” Sam said. “Is Donny okay?”

“I’m really sorry,
Alyssa,
but I don’t think so, although the reports coming in are still pretty garbled.” Jules didn’t seem fazed by the sound of Sam’s voice, but his message made it clear that she shouldn’t start broadcasting the fact that the SEAL was in her company. “We’ve gotten conflicting casualty reports, although Don seems to be on both of them. Apparently he refused to leave his house, and the fire that started was too intense and . . . Okay, yeah, I’m getting something new here that . . . Thanks, George. Yeah, God damn it, it’s bad news. I’m sorry, we’ve confirmed DaCosta’s death. One of the agents and at least one firefighter died, too, trying to save him.”

Sam had his eyes closed and the muscles in his jaw were jumping. Don DaCosta had been a friend of his.

Alyssa put her arm around him, but he kept his eyes tightly shut.

But Jules wasn’t done. “That’s not all of it, I’m afraid. Kelly Paoletti and Cosmo Richter were apparently there, too, when that bomb went off.”

“What?” Alyssa said. Sam’s eyes opened. “Why? What were they doing there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was take tea with the town lunatic day.”

“Show a little respect for the dead,” Sam growled. “He was a good guy.”

Jules was instantly contrite. “Forgive me. That was insensitive. I didn’t realize you knew him that well—”

“I didn’t know
they
knew DaCosta,” Alyssa interrupted. She couldn’t figure out what Lt. Commander Tom Paoletti’s perky little blond cheerleader of a wife and Cosmo Richter, a quiet man with freaky-colored eyes and the whispered reputation on the Spec Op grapevine of being a remorseless killing machine when the need arose, were doing together, let alone with DaCosta.

“I didn’t either, but I guess they did,” Jules said. “I don’t know their status. One list has them wounded, another has them down as dead. I don’t know details. I don’t know dick. This just happened—we’re still in chaos mode. Again, I apologize for my inappropriate—”

“It’s all right,” Sam said. “I know what it’s like. It’s so fucking awful, you try to find whatever humor in the situation that you possibly can, with no disrespect intended.”

“Thank you, sweetie. That’s very generous of you to say.” Jules cleared his throat. “I’ll call, I promise, as soon as I find out anything else.”

“Any word on the bodies in the trunk?” Alyssa asked. She wasn’t sure whether to hope that there was or that there wasn’t. The news they’d just received was bad enough. And yet not knowing whether his ex-wife and daughter were dead was taking its toll on Sam.

“I’m not expecting the preliminary forensics report until the morning,” Jules told her. “But, unofficially, I have to tell you that it doesn’t look good. Cause of death is gunshot, not burning. Both bodies have a bullet in the back of their heads.”

Just like Mary Lou’s sister. Alyssa didn’t dare glance at Sam.

“I’ll call you later—I’ve got to go,” Jules told her. And he was gone.

Sam was, too. He was already getting into the car. “Let’s hit the library,” he said. “See if anyone there knew Mary Lou. At the same time we can get the information we need about the AA meetings in this area. Actually, maybe we should do that first, since most meetings are in the evening—they’ll be starting pretty soon. We can always talk to the librarians in the morning and—”

“Sam.”

He wouldn’t look up at her, instead flipping through the pad of notes they’d made during the drive down from Gainesville. “I’d also like to pay a visit to Haley’s day care provider.”

“Sam.”

He glanced at her, but only briefly. He was terribly upset by the news they’d just received. Alyssa crouched next to the open car door.

“Maybe we should take a break,” she said as gently as she could. “We’re both tired, and you’ve just found out that some good friends are dead.”

“We don’t know that Kelly and Cosmo are—”

“You’re right,” she said. “We don’t. But even if it’s just Donny, that’s bad enough. Why don’t we find a motel so we can sleep for a few hours and . . .”

And be more prepared, at least physically if not emotionally, to receive the bad news that was surely coming from that forensics report in the morning.

But Sam was shaking his head. “If Mary Lou and Haley are still alive—” He broke off, and the expression on his face made her want to cry. “I can’t believe I said
if
.”

Alyssa took his hand. “Maybe that’s a good thing. You know, to be prepared for the worst case scenario.”

“No.” He shook his head, tightly gripping her hand. “There’s no preparing for that. Jules is going to call, and you’re going to say
oh, no,
and then you’re going to have to look me in the eye and tell me that my daughter was murdered by some
fuck
who I’m then going to find and kill.” He finally looked at her, finally held her gaze, and she knew he wasn’t kidding. If someone had killed Haley, Sam was going to rip him to pieces.

“But until then, I’m not going to live in the land of
if
,” he continued. “I can’t do that, Lys. Haley’s alive until she’s dead—no
if
, no
maybe
. And since I haven’t heard you say she’s dead, I’m going with she’s alive. And since she’s alive, the same people who killed Janine and Donny DaCosta and maybe Cosmo and Kelly—Jesus God! Tom must be going nuts! You think that was a coincidence she was at Donny’s when that bomb went off? Think about it. She and Don both knew Ihbraham Rahman—who also knew Mary Lou. This son of a bitch and the rest of his cell are cleaning up after themselves. This guy is removing anyone who can ID him from the playing field, and if—” He caught himself. “
Since
Mary Lou and Haley are still alive, he’s going to be coming after them next. I have to find them first.”

Alyssa nodded. “Okay. Let’s hit some of those AA meetings. But you know it’s a long shot, right? Everywhere else she goes, Mary Lou keeps to herself. And if she
was
paying attention to what you told her about changing habits to stay hidden . . .”

“I know,” Sam said. “But we’ve got to try.”

She understood. “After that, we’re going to have some down time.” Alyssa told him this. She didn’t ask. “I mean, unless we get an obvious lead.” She didn’t think that was going to happen. She thought Mary Lou and Haley were in the forensics lab right now, having autopsies done on their dead bodies. “I know we’ll both be able to think a little more clearly if we get some sleep. If you don’t want to get a room, we can park somewhere and just shut our eyes for a few hours.”

“
A
room?” Sam asked, but it was obvious that he had to try very hard to be his usual obnoxious self.

“Yeah.” She tried hard to pretend, too, that this was business as usual between them. “As in you get
a
room and I get
a
room.”

He drew her hand up to his mouth and kissed her fingers. “Rats. And here I thought my luck was going to change.” He smiled at her, but it was clear that his heart wasn’t in it.

Because he had to know that luck didn’t play a part in whether or not those bodies belonged to his ex-wife and daughter. It had to do with Mary Lou getting involved, more than six months ago, in something deadly with someone dangerous who she never should have trusted. And it was already too late for luck to play any part in that.

The door swung open to reveal a squad of SEALs from Team Sixteen. Nearly all of them were wearing BDUs—battle dress uniforms—which was nothing new. It was the way they dressed most of their time on base.

There was nothing unusual about them at all—except for the fact that Duke Jefferson and Izzy Zanella were down on the deck, just finishing tying knots in the ropes that bound the wrists and ankles of the two guards who’d been posted in front of Tom’s door.

“Oh, come on,” Tom said. This couldn’t happen.

Jay Lopez and Billy Silverman helped Duke and Izzy carry the guards into Tom’s room, as Ensigns MacInnough and Collins—both resplendent in summer whites—shouldered the former guards’ weapons and took their places at the door.

“Time to go, sir,” Chief Karmody told Tom. Figures Karmody—also known as WildCard—would be part of something like this.

Tom sighed as Lopez, who was carrying his medical kit, put several syringes in a container marked “Sharps—Biohazard,” and removed a pair of latex gloves from his hands with a snap.

Whatever Lopez had given the guards—and Tom really didn’t want to know—had knocked them out.

Izzy arranged one of the guards on Tom’s bunk, positioning the man so that his back was to the door. He covered him with a blanket. “Sleep tight.”

The other guard had been safely stashed in the bathroom.

“I appreciate the effort, men,” Tom said, “but I’m not going anywhere.”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” apologized Ensign MacInnough—a monster of a young man who’d been appropriately nicknamed Big Mac. “But we’re under direct orders from Lieutenant Jacquette to test base security. Our assignment is to take you off the base and to deliver you to an as-yet-undisclosed location. Our orders, sir, are to do this with or without your cooperation.”

This was a hell of a time for Jazz Jacquette to be war-gaming. But the look in Big Mac’s eyes was unmistakable. Tom could say no. He could refuse to leave. And Mac would give Lopez a nod, Tom would get a needle of his own in his ass, and they’d end up carrying him out of here.

Tom sighed again as he looked around at his men. His
former
men. They were deadly serious, to the point of downright grim. No one so much as cracked a smile. Was this really what they were like these days on an op? “I’d like you all to know that I’m leaving under protest.”

“Duly noted, sir,” said Ens. Joel Collins—Tom still thought of him as “the new guy.” He’d joined the team just a few weeks before Tom had been relieved of his command.

Petty Officer First Class Mark Jenkins was standing watch at the top of the stairs. “Sir.” He nodded a greeting, then led the way down, leaving Big Mac and Collins in place.

If anyone came onto the floor, they’d never know that Tom wasn’t securely in his room.

“If your plan is to just walk me out the door—which, by the way is brilliant,” Tom pointed out as they moved in a group down the stairs, “you might want to consider the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever seen you guys walking around the base dead silent like this. Karmody, don’t you have any bad jokes to share?”

“Sorry, Tommy, I’m not quite in the mood today.”

“Have you guys had a chance to talk to Cosmo or Gilligan?” Tom asked.

“Yes, sir,” Duke said.

“So aren’t you going to congratulate me?” Tom asked. “Kelly finally married me. If I’d known it would do the trick, I’d’ve gotten myself locked up a long time ago.”

No one laughed, probably because it wasn’t very funny.

“Congratulations, Commander,” Silverman said. But he wouldn’t meet Tom’s eyes.

“Congratulations, sir,” the other men echoed. But Zanella and Duke, too, seemed fascinated by the tiles on the floor.

And Jenk and Lopez exchanged what was definitely a worried look.

Tom was pretty sure he knew why. “Hell of a time to get married, huh?”

“Come on, sir,” WildCard Karmody said, with something that looked a lot like sympathy in his eyes. “We really do need to hurry.”