This Enemy Town (13 page)

When I emerged from the locker room, Pete, who had taken over at reception, appeared to notice my empty hands. “Find everything you need?”

“Yeah, thanks, Pete. Jen must have taken everything with her.”

“Well, okay then. You take care, hear?”

I bowed my head theatrically and scuttled out the door.

“Nice outfit!” he called after me.

I was still smiling over the compliment when I jogged past a guy in a dark green Taurus reading a newspaper, a
FedEx delivery truck, and a moving van executing a three-point turn. Once inside my car, I grabbed my cell phone and dialed the 443 number. After three rings James Earl Jones cut it, telling me that my call had been forwarded to an automatic answering device and that somebody named Chris was not available to take my call. Would I care to leave a message after the tone? I certainly would—
Who the hell are you?
—but when I heard the beep, I chickened out and pressed End instead.

I tucked the pink slip of paper with Chris's phone number on it into my purse and headed out West Street toward Route 50. At the Rowe Boulevard exit I checked the rearview mirror for merging traffic and noticed a dark green Taurus dogging my tail. Was that the same car I'd seen outside of Merritt? Was I being followed?

Nonsense,
I told myself.
There are hundreds of dark green Tauri. Don't be paranoid, Hannah.

The Taurus stuck with me through the detour around the Spa Creek bridge construction, but when I turned left on Bladen Street, the driver continued straight on Northeast. I breathed a sigh of relief and headed home.

And just in time, too. The dough I'd left to rise had quadrupled in size, threatening to overwhelm the kitchen. I punched it down—thinking of Richard Knowles the whole time—then separated the dough into two loaves. By the time I'd had a cup of tea and shoved the loaves into the oven, I had formulated a plan to track down and have a word with the mysterious Chris.

When Paul returned from his meeting, the seductive
aroma of baking bread filled the house, and I was busily whipping up my famous turkey tetrazini casserole—turkey, mushrooms, heavy cream, gruyere and parmesan cheeses, linguini, and my secret ingredient, a dash of Marsala wine, not that paint thinner you get at the grocery store, but the real thing, Superiore Riserva, from Sicily.

I'd heard the front door slam, so it wasn't exactly a surprise when he crept up behind me, lifted my hair and kissed the nape of my neck. “Yum. You smell like cinnamon.”

“You are hallucinating,” I said.

“Faculty meetings can do that to you.” He inhaled noisily. “God, that smells good. Will the bread be ready in time for dinner?” He leaned over my shoulder, snitched a noodle from the casserole I was stirring and lowered it into his mouth. “Staying home appears to agree with you.”

I scowled. “That remark is so sexist that I'm not even going to dignify it with a response.” I whacked Paul's hand with the back of my wooden spoon, then attacked the turkey noodle mixture savagely with it. “On second thought, I want to make it clear that although
you
appear to be the beneficiary of my staying home—in a culinary and domestic sense, that is—it has not agreed with me,
Mr. Paul Everett Ives. I can't tell you how much I hate being cooped up.”

Paul's mischievous grin vanished. “Whenever you use all three of my names, I know I'm in trouble.”

I waved the spoon, gloppy with cheese sauce. “They might as well have clapped me into an electronic ankle bracelet.”

Paul eased the spoon out of my hand and laid it on the table, cupped my chin in his hand and tipped my face up to his. “Hannah, you must know that I was teasing.”

“I guess my sense of humor has gone AWOL along with everything else.”

He kissed my lower lip, which was protruding petulantly. “No need to ask what you've been doing all day, then.”

“No.”

I should have told him right then about my little expedition to Chesapeake Harbour, but I opened the fridge and pulled out a chilled bottle of Pinot Grigio instead. “Here,” I said, handing him the bottle. “Make yourself useful.”

While Paul coaxed the cork out of the bottle using a state-of-the-art corkscrew with ears like the Energizer Bunny, I popped my casserole into the oven, feeling more than a wee bit guilty. Paul and I had a relationship built on trust; I knew I should have consulted him before I went nosing about Goodall's apartment complex and her gym, but he would have been furious. I'd floated that balloon over the weekend, but he'd quickly shot it down. “Leave all that to Murray,” he had cautioned. “He has an investigator working on it.”

Paul had a point, I supposed. The last time I'd gone off half cocked, I'd ended up getting kidnapped, along with my eighty-something mystery writer friend, Nadine Gray, a.k.a. L. K. Bromley. But this time there were no high-speed chases, no broken bones, no harm done. I was home, safe and sound, Domestic Diva on Duty. No need to endure one of Paul's silent, wounded I-told-you-so looks.

After dinner, while Paul the Penitent cleaned up the kitchen, I carried my second glass of wine down to the basement office and powered up the computer. I checked my e-mail, but there was nothing but a Thinking of You e-card from Emily and the usual trash caught up in my spam filter.

After I emptied the trash, I clicked on Google, dug the While You Were Out slips out of my pocket and typed the 443 number that belonged to the caller named Chris on the query line. As I anticipated, there was no phonebook listing. If, as I suspected, the number was a cell phone, it wouldn't be listed in any telephone directory, AT&T, Google, or otherwise.

Surprisingly, however, Google found quite a few hits for the number on standard Web pages, some going back as far as three years. At one time the 443 number belonged to someone selling used cars on the Internet, but his name was Ed, not Chris. Maybe there had been a typo in the number; or perhaps the number had once belonged to Krazy Ed's Kleen Kars before it was reassigned to Chris. I moved on, paging through the truncated entries, clicking on each for details.

It's amazing what ends up on the Internet, I thought, as I Googled around. (I'd Googled myself once and found minutes of a meeting I'd attended years ago at Whitworth and Sullivan. In the year 3000, colonists on Mars, if they should care to do so, will be able to determine exactly how I felt about hiring a stress management consultant back on Earth in 1998.)

Chris's full name, I learned from Google, was Chris Donovan, and his 443 number showed up in the telephone lists of several church and gay rights organizations. If Google was correct, Chris Donovan attended St. George's Episcopal Church in Arlington, Virginia, served in a financial capacity on its fifteen member vestry, and in his spare time did volunteer work for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and Lambda Legal Defense Fund.

Well, well, well, I thought. Maybe in her position as SAVI officer, Jennifer Goodall had contacted this Chris Donovan for help in advising Emma Kirby about issues related to her sexual orientation; perhaps she'd even arranged for Emma to talk to Chris Donovan or someone at SLDN or Lambda Legal.

I jumped from my chair and ran to the foot of the stairs. “Paul! Come here a minute! There's something I want to show you.”

When Paul joined me, I filled him in briefly on Chris Donovan, telling him that I'd gotten Chris's name from one of Jennifer's neighbors, which was true, as far as it went.

“Marisa thought Chris might be a boyfriend,” I told my husband, “but now I think he's someone Jennifer consulted with.”

I pointed to the website for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. “It says here,” I read, “that SLDN is a ‘national, nonprofit legal services, watchdog, and policy organization dedicated to ending discrimination against and harassment of military personnel affected by Don't Ask, Don't Tell and related forms of intolerance.'”

“A noble endeavor,” Paul commented, “but what does SLDN have to do with you, unless there's something you've been meaning to tell me?”

“I'm thinking,” I said, backpedaling as fast as I could in an attempt to protect Emma's privacy, “that in her position as SAVI officer, Jennifer might have contacted this Chris person about one of her cases. If Jennifer had been advised to report someone up the chain of command for being homosexual, or for harassing a homosexual, that might have been a strong motive for that somebody to kill her. Other than me, I mean.”

“But DOD has an antiharassment action plan.” Paul flashed a crooked smile. “The faculty's had its consciousness raised several times about this plan since it first came out in 2000. As I recall, military chaplains and health care providers etcetera are given clear instructions
not to ‘out' service members who come to them for help.”

“Tell that to Marine Lance Corporal Blessing,” I said, tapping the monitor with my finger. “He was discharged for asking a military psychologist questions about sexual orientation. The psychologist, it says here somewhere, was just following the guidelines in the Navy's
General Medical Officer Manual
.”

“That's the Marine Corps, Hannah, not the Naval Academy.”

“I know that, but something
must
have been going on with Chris Donovan in relation to the Academy.” I clicked the back button a few times. “Here it is: Donovan's also associated with—at least electronically—a group called USNA Out. It's a Naval Academy alumni group—not sanctioned by the Academy, no surprise—whose mission is to mentor gay midshipmen still bound by Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

“And this, too.” I followed another link. “Someone named Chris Donovan is also loosely connected with an outfit called PlanetOut, which helps LGBT military personnel protect their online communications from Don't Ask, Don't Tell discharges.”

Paul frowned. “What's LGBT?”

“Lesbian, Gay Men, Bisexual, and Transgendered People.”

“Well, excepting for animal husbandry, that should about cover it.”

“Paul, do be serious!”

“Sorry.” He rested a hand lightly on my shoulder. “It's just that I can't tell you how much I don't care about someone's sexual orientation. It's simply not on my radar screen. And as for gays in the military, was it Barry Goldwater who said, ‘You don't have to be straight to shoot straight.'”

“Couldn't agree with you more,” I said. “Gay soldiers
are fighting and dying in Iraq right this minute, and keeping mum about their sexual orientation in order to do it.”

I stared at the monitor for a moment, trying to organize the thoughts caroming around in my head. “But it's entirely possible that I'm barking up the wrong tree by pursuing the gay angle. Someone suggested to me that this fellow, Chris, is a friend or former colleague of Jennifer Goodall.”

Paul scowled. “Someone?”

“Never mind, just wait!” I typed
St. George
and
Arlington
into Google and instantly found myself back at the Web page for St. George's Episcopal Church. A few clicks later I sat back and pointed to the monitor in triumph. “There!”

Paul leaned forward. His ear brushed my cheek and his breath blew warm across my neck as he read aloud from the brief bio Chris had posted when he ran for his position on the St. George vestry. Then he whistled. “So, when he's not working with gay rights organizations, Chris is a civilian personnel specialist working at the Pentagon.”

“Interesting, no?”

“Very.”

“So if Chris Donovan is, or was, a civilian working at the Pentagon about the same time as Jennifer Goodall, he might have known her.”

“Hannah, the Pentagon is a huge place. I'll bet you twenty-five or twenty-six thousand people work there. That's bigger than half of the cities in America.”

“Yes, but if you read that bio carefully, Mr. Ives, you'll see that at one time or another, both Chris Donovan and Jennifer Goodall appear to have worked in the Navy's office of Weapons Acquisition and Management, the same department that's now headed up by a certain Admiral Theodore E. Hart. From the dates, I'd guess that their time in that office didn't overlap, but still, I think that's interesting, don't you?”

Paul pulled up a chair and sat down on it, hard. I had him completely on board. “Type this in,” he instructed. He gave me the URL for a Web page accessible to Academy staff and alumni only. I did as I was told and found myself at a page where I could type in the name and/or class year of any Naval Academy grad.

“We know Jennifer Goodall graduated with the class of 1999,” Paul said. “So, type in ‘Donovan.'”

My fingers flew over the keys, I hit Return, and in less than a second there he was, Lieutenant Chris Donovan, Class of 1999, near the bottom of a list of thirty-seven Donovans who had attended the Naval Academy since Robert Donovan graduated in 1877.

I fell back in my chair. “Holy moly! Jennifer Goodall and Chris Donovan were classmates!”

“Now that, I'd say, takes it completely out of the realm of coincidence,” Paul said. “We must call Murray.” He reached for the telephone.

“Do you have any connections at the Pentagon these days?” I forged on. “Someone I could talk to?”

“Hannah, as I told you this weekend, I think it's risky for you to go poking around.” He started punching numbers. “Please, let's just make sure to pass on to Murray any information you turn up and let him and his highly trained staff handle it.” He covered the mouthpiece of the receiver with his hand. “He's getting paid for this, remember.”

As if I could forget.
Our vacations for the next ten years were bankrolling Murray and his highly trained staff. Goodbye fifteenth century villas in the gently rolling hills of Tuscany. Hello to tours of Maryland's scenic Eastern Shore at the wheel of our Volvo.

“Good grief, Paul,” I chided. “Nobody could be more involved than me. It's
my
life that's on the line. If Chris Donovan is a spurned boyfriend who murdered Jennifer, asking him questions will only put him on his guard. Or, consider this,” I said as a new thought occurred to me.
“What if Chris Donovan is gay, and Jennifer was running true to form and threatened to ‘out' him?”

Paul shook his head. “Donovan's a civilian, remember? He must have served the five years he owed the Navy, then got out. The Pentagon doesn't discriminate against gays, as long as they have the good sense to remain civilians.”

“I'd still like to poke around and find out a little more about Donovan. I can ask Dorothy Hart about him, for one thing. If Chris Donovan worked for her husband, she might know something.”

“I can see that I'm not going to change your mind.” Paul reached out and squeezed my hand. “Talk to Dorothy, but for the love of God, Hannah, please, be careful.”

I kissed the tip of his nose. “Of course I will.”

While Paul left a message on Murray's home answering machine, I clicked the Print button and watched the printer spew out several pages of information about the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and USNA Out.

After Paul hung up, I said, “But you didn't answer my question. Do you have any connections at the Pentagon?”

Paul leaned back in the chair with his hands behind his head. “Jack Turley might still be there.”

“That gawky redhead who used to play basketball for Navy?”

Paul grinned. “‘That gawky redhead,' as you so eloquently put it, is now a captain in the United States Navy working for one of the Under Secretaries of the Navy for Something or Other. The last time I saw him was at Homecoming for his twentieth class reunion.”

I groaned. “That makes me feel positively ancient.”

Paul stood up and patted my head affectionately. “We
are
ancient, my dear.” He bent down and kissed my cheek. “Jack gave me his business card at the game. I have it at the office somewhere. I'll try to reach him in the morning. Coming to bed?”