Troublemaker

CHAPTER 23

TOWARD THE END OF JUNE, ANOTHER LETTER ARRIVED for Morgan. It came on a day when he’d gone to town with Bo, and while she dealt with things in the police station, he’d ridden patrol with Jesse. He’d become friendly with all her officers; she suspected it was some guy instinct, that they sensed that his level of expertise in weapons and explosives and hand-to-hand far exceeded theirs even though she knew he wouldn’t have talked about it, and they gravitated to him. After her refusal to sit on his back while he did push-ups, he’d started working out at the small gym in town, and whoever wasn’t on duty had begun working out with him. Her guys made an effort to stay in pretty good shape, but Morgan’s idea of “in shape” made theirs look like kids playing in the yard. Sometimes she marveled that they didn’t all choke on the testosterone levels, but they were trying to keep up with him.

He executed the U-turn and pulled up to her mailbox, retrieved the mail, then passed it all to her to sort while he wheeled into the driveway. Bo sifted through the catalogs and sales papers, extracting her lone credit card bill and the plain envelope without a return address that was for Morgan. Silently she held it up to catch his attention. He gave it a quick look. “Open it. It won’t say anything you can’t read. If there was any news, he’d have called your cell.”

She tore open the envelope and extracted the single sheet of paper, on which had been typed two whole words: No news. No one would ever accuse Axel of being chatty.

Morgan scowled in frustration. “Shit. It’s been over three months. I know Axel, know he’s been spreading word that I’m recovering my memory, but no one is moving. Whoever it is is playing a waiting game, but that’s dangerous.”

“Or they suspect a trap,” she pointed out.

“There is that. Anyone who knows Axel knows how devious he is.”

“In which case, they don’t really believe you’re recovering your memory-which you aren’t, given that you never lost it to begin with, but let’s not quibble.”

He reached over the console and patted her thigh. The familiarity of the gesture made her smile. They’d been sleeping together for a month now, and she didn’t know if she’d ever stop going off like a rocket every time he touched her. On the side of fairness, he seemed just as hot for her. She knew she was attractive, in a noncurvy kind of way, but she’d never felt sexy-until Morgan. She’d look up and find him watching her with an intensity so hot her skin felt seared. She didn’t even have to do anything, at least not anything special. As far as she could tell, just watching her load the dishwasher turned him on. She honestly thought he’d made love to her more often in a month than her ex-husband had in the almost-year they’d been married.

She was happy. She was peaceful. What they had was so great she thought it was worth the pain she’d feel if/when he eventually left. Every so often he’d mention something they could do in the future, but it was always near future, not long-distance future. She didn’t make any assumptions based on that, because assumptions led to expectations and expectations led to disappointment. She simply accepted, and lived-more joyously than she’d ever lived before.

When they got to the house, he tossed the envelope and letter into the trash with the rest of the junk mail. The weather was hot enough that they were waiting until closer to sundown to take Tricks on her last walk; she fed Tricks, then she and Morgan began throwing together a quick supper. He was quiet, and whenever she glanced at him she saw the narrow-eyed intensity of his expression, meaning he was mentally attacking his situation from every angle, trying to worry loose some detail he hadn’t noticed before. His work was dangerous but important, and until this situation was resolved, he couldn’t do it, couldn’t live under his own name, couldn’t drive his own vehicle or live in his own home. She was happy, but he was in limbo, his real life on hold.

Perhaps she was part of his real life now, but she’d never know for certain until he got his real life back. Her instinct was to let the issue lie untouched, to take what she could get of him while circumstances still favored her, but-was that fair to him? He’d built the life he wanted, put himself through inhuman training and lived on the knife edge of danger in order to do what he did. If he chose to walk away from it at some point, that was different-because it would be his choice. Being locked out would eat at him.

She knew that he had mentally gone over and over the details of the day he’d been shot, knew that he and Axel would have analyzed it all down to the nth degree, and come up with nothing. Going over it again likely wouldn’t accomplish anything, but she did have an orderly mind and could listen, and sometimes a little back and forth could knock something loose that he’d realize was significant.

“You want to do a rundown of that day, start to finish?” she asked, keeping her tone even so he wouldn’t be able to read how much she really didn’t want to do this.

He frowned down at the salad he was tossing. “I’ve gone over it until I want to punch the wall. It’s frustrating, knowing something is there but damn if I can see it. What the hell are these little green things?” he asked, poking at the salad.

She leaned over and looked. “Capers.”

He filched one out of the salad and tasted it. “What exactly is a caper?”

“Pickled flower buds.”

“Who the hell ever thought of pickling a flower bud?”

“Someone hungry.”

He laughed and popped another caper into his mouth. “Yeah, that’ll do it. I’ve eaten some weird shit a time or three because that’s all there was. Okay, let’s go over it; a fresh point of view can’t hurt.”

She braced herself to stay noncommittal, to just ask questions and let him sift through the details. “Start at the beginning. What did you do when you got up?”

“Called a teammate, asked him if he wanted to go fishing. He said no. He had companionship of the female variety, and that’ll outweigh fishing with him every time.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Only with him?”

He hooked his arm around her neck and pulled her over for a hard, hungry kiss, one that involved tongue, lingered, and ended with them both breathing a little harder. He lifted his head and wiped her mouth with his thumb. “I didn’t say that. If I had you naked in bed-yeah, I’d skip fishing, too.”

“Oh, thank you so much.” She slid her hand along his ribs, feeling the hard layers of muscle, then regretfully eased away in the interest of keeping up the conversation because if they kept kissing, then dinner would go on hold and they’d end up naked. That had already happened too many times for her to think otherwise. “Did he know where you were going?”

“No, but he knows where I live so he wouldn’t have had to hack any database to get my address.”

“That could have been to fake people off.”

“That’s what Axel said.”

Bo scowled at him because she didn’t like thinking she had anything in common with Axel the Asshole.

Morgan grinned and tapped her chin with his finger but continued, “I don’t see it, myself. Kodak is a friend, has been for a long time. If I got crossways with him during the mission we were on-and I didn’t-he had plenty of opportunity to take me out and make it look legit. I’ve trusted him with my life a lot of times, and vice versa. My gut says no.”

“Okay, I trust your gut. What happened next?”

“I went to the marina where I keep my boat. On the way I stopped for breakfast-drive-through fast food-but didn’t see or talk to anyone other than the kid in the window. At the marina I said hello to the marina owner. He made a phone call immediately afterward, but Axel checked that, and the call was to his wife. Nothing there.”

“Unless his wife is some kind of master spy and you saw something you shouldn’t have seen at the marina.”

She expected him to laugh again, but he said, “I checked out the marina, sure, like I always do. Everything looked normal. There weren’t any piece-of-shit boats with an expensive antenna array, no unusual license plates, and Brawley-the marina operator-has been there since before I started renting a boat slip. He doesn’t click for me.”

She blew out a breath, trying to get her head around the mindset and level of alertness required to check out a familiar place every single time he went there. It was mind-boggling. After a few seconds she gave up and shook it off. “Does anything click?”

“Not really. Next up: I saw a congresswoman and her husband on the river in their boat, went over to say hello. I know them both-not well, but their son was kidnapped and we got him back alive, so I’d say they’re both kindly disposed toward me.”

“I don’t remember anything in the news about a kidnapping involving a member of Congress,” she said as she took a pair of baking potatoes out of the microwave. Yes, it was heresy to zap potatoes instead of baking them, but so what; she was going for speed.

“It wasn’t in the news. The whole episode was kept dark.”

“Was anyone else on the boat with them?”

“Not that I saw.”

She had put pork chops in the slow cooker that morning; she got a platter and dished out the chops. “If you don’t know them well, how did you recognize their boat?”

“I didn’t. I recognized her hair. It was Joan Kingsley.”

“Oh,” Bo said, thinking hard. A face flashed into mind. “I know who she is! White hair. She’s big time.”

“Yep. She’s on the House Armed Services Committee.”

“Do you think she’s behind this whole thing?”

“In my experience, politicians are to blame for almost everything, so that’s what I default to. Her husband is a D.C. lawyer, which is almost as bad because in that town they’re all in bed with each other. But even with that tilt, I can’t make it work.” He took the salad to the table, then got the plates and silverware.

“You know what Sherlock Holmes said: eliminate the impossible, and what’s left is the truth no matter how improbable. Paraphrasing, of course.”

“All of it’s improbable. Every possible suspect.”

“Except for the one who isn’t. Okay, how far from the congresswoman’s boat were you when you spotted her? Did you know it was her?”

“Not for certain, but that hair’s distinctive. I was about a hundred yards away, give or take. Their boat was anchored in a fairly open stretch of water, though it was a long way down the river toward the bay.” He paused, thinking. “Where the boat was positioned, no one could come up to them from any direction without being seen from some distance away. That’s good safety strategy.”

They took the food to the table, sat down, and began serving themselves. Bo ate quietly for a minute, thinking about what he’d already told her but also taking the time to savor the fork-tenderness of the pork chop. God bless the inventor of the slow cooker, was all she could say.

“Would she need to be so safety conscious?” she asked, when their immediate hunger had been satisfied.

“She isn’t the speaker, but she’s important in D.C. Plus her son had been kidnapped, could have been killed. I’d say the answer is yes.”

“So the position of the boat wasn’t suspicious?”

“No. If I’d anchored, I’d have done the same.”

“What did you see as you drove toward her?”

“She was standing at the railing, waving. Her husband was on the deck with her, but he went below.”

She put her fork down, tilted her head at him. “How do you know it was her husband, if you weren’t close enough to know for certain it was her?”

Morgan paused, thinking, his gaze absent as he looked into the past. “I didn’t, not from that distance, but he was wearing a blue shirt and when he came back on deck he was still wearing it-Fuck!”

“What?” Bo asked, so startled by his verbal explosion that she dropped her fork; it hit the plate with a clatter. She grabbed for the fork to keep it from bouncing to the floor.

“He was buttoning the shirt when he came back up.” Morgan’s tone was grim, as rough as ground glass. “Over a white tee shirt. But I didn’t see any white when he went below.”

“What’s wrong with-Oh. I see. Why was he buttoning it if he’d already had it on?”

“Exactly.” He sat silently, mentally tearing the details apart. “The man who went below deck had gray hair, as far as I could tell. Dexter Kingsley’s hair isn’t gray. I couldn’t swear to that, because the angle of the sun can mess with hair color, but… yeah.” This was resonating with him, the way something did when you knew instinctively it was right.

“Then there was someone on the boat they didn’t want you to see. She’s a politician, so I have to say that isn’t completely unexpected. What happened then?”

“I pulled up close to their boat, shut mine down. We chatted. She asked me to come aboard for a drink.”

“Well, that doesn’t make sense. Why would she ask you to come aboard if she didn’t want you to see who was on the boat with them?”

He flashed her a look that chilled her; his eyes were blue ice, his jaw so hard she knew his teeth were clenched. “To kill me,” he said flatly. “Even though they pulled a switch, they couldn’t be sure I’d bought it. If I’d been someone else, maybe, but she didn’t know who was coming toward them until I got my boat closer. I work in counterterrorism, I’m supposed to notice every detail, but I missed that one. They couldn’t know that, though, so they had to take care of me.”

This time she didn’t drop her fork; she put it down carefully, all appetite gone. She’d thought dragging out every detail for examination might help, but she’d kind of hoped it wouldn’t. Now she had to deal with the fallout; everything would change fast, and whatever happened, she had to focus on how this would help Morgan. Her emotions were secondary, and something she would simply have to handle, though it was hard to get around the reality that someone had so coldly planned to kill him.

“But couldn’t you have already reported it? What good would killing you do?”

“Reported suspicious behavior, yes, but she knew that I couldn’t have recognized the other man any sooner than she recognized me-not as soon, actually. I was driving a boat, concentrating on where I was going and what I was doing; traffic on the river was heavy that day, with a lot of boats crisscrossing. Besides, thinking something is suspicious isn’t the same as knowing something bad is going down.”

“But you didn’t know,” Bo insisted. “Even if you’d reported something suspicious and questions were asked, all they had to do was deny anyone else was onboard. There was no proof.”

“My best guess? Because of what I do, even if I hadn’t seen the other man well enough to recognize him, I have the resources to do some digging. There are cameras everywhere in the D.C. area, plus a lot of places have private security cameras; they wouldn’t be sure they were completely under the radar. If they showed up anywhere on camera with the other guy, Axel could likely find it if he simply knew the direction to start looking.”

“Then Axel would be able to identify the other man.”

“Possibly. That would depend on whether or not he’s in any of our databases, or if we could get a license plate or credit card receipt that would tell us.” Then he shrugged and said, “Yeah, the odds are we’d find something. As it was, even if I had noticed something, I couldn’t have started looking while I was on the water. My boat is just an old fishing boat, not set up for anything like that. If I’d wanted to do some digging, it would have had to wait until I went back ashore. They got my boat registration numbers and set things in motion. Probably they couldn’t find which marina I used, so instead of waiting for me there, they had to get my home address and set up an ambush.”

“But you had a cell phone, didn’t you? Why couldn’t you have called whoever you would have called, and gotten the ball rolling before then?”

“I can only guess that they had no means of taking a long shot at me, plus the shooter would have to be a trained sniper to hit someone in a moving boat. I was heading down river, instead of back toward D.C., so likely they assumed I wasn’t immediately suspicious. If I started thinking about it and called in before they could get to me-nothing they could do unless they wanted to chase me down on the river and have a gunfight there, with potentially hundreds of witnesses. They played the odds that I hadn’t noticed anything, and they were right. If they’d left it like that, I’d never have given that meeting a second thought.”

Bo got to her feet and took her plate to the kitchen. She was a logical person, but this was taking strategic thinking to a degree that was foreign to her; her head was actually aching a little from trying to think of all the possibilities, probabilities, ins and outs, and angles. “But they tried to kill you and failed. So now you have them arrested-crap. You can’t. You have no proof they did anything.”

He got to his feet too. “Now I call Axel and get the ball rolling. The first step is trying to identify the other man on the boat. At least now we don’t have to wait for them to trigger an electronic trap by trying to hack the system again to find out where I am.”

“And then what? You still have nothing.”

“We have a string to pull. Eventually the ball of yarn will unravel-one way or another.”

Bo watched him bound up the stairs to get his burner cell phone to call Axel, almost afraid to consider what that “one way or another” would entail. No, she was definitely afraid because the only clear way she could think of to draw them out and force them to commit some act that would get them arrested was to stick with some version of the original plan, which was to use Morgan as bait.

Morgan pulled out the burner cell-not a smartphone, just a simple phone that didn’t have GPS-and called Axel. When he heard the familiar voice, he said, “I got it. Call when you can.” Meaning use a burner on that end too, or get to a phone away from any agency network that could be hacked. However he made contact was up to Axel, depending on how paranoid he was feeling that day. Morgan didn’t bother leaving his name because not only had they been making phone calls to each other for years, on the off chance Axel hadn’t recognized his voice, he would still recognize the burner number. The bastard was crazy good at things like that.

Axel must have been either in a meeting or feeling very paranoid because it was over half an hour before he called back. By then Morgan and Bo were sitting on the couch watching TV, waiting for the sun to get farther down in the sky before they took Tricks for a walk.

“Who was it?” Axel asked in his usual brusque tone.

“Congresswoman Kingsley. There was someone else on the boat with them, a man. When they saw me coming toward them, he went below and when Dexter Kingsley came up, he was buttoning up the other guy’s shirt.”

“And you’re just remembering this now because-?”

Fuck you, Morgan thought without heat. If he took offense at everything Axel said, he’d have beat the shit out of him a long time ago. Because it amused him, he looked at Bo and said, “Axel wants to know why I’m just now remembering this.”

As he’d halfway expected her to, she snatched the phone out of his hand. “Because I had the sense to ask questions about the details when he wasn’t fighting for his life and loopy on painkillers,” she snarled.

Good girl. He couldn’t think of anything he could have said that would have gotten Axel’s goat the way he knew Bo just had. He gave her a thumbs-up and took the phone back.

Axel was still sputtering curses, then he broke them off to say, “If you’re so smart, why did you wait two damn months to start asking those questions, huh?”

“I’m back,” Morgan said, grinning because he’d never before seen Axel knocked off balance.

“Was that Bo? It had better be Bo. You wouldn’t have told anyone else. What did you tell her?”

“Everything.”

“Everything everything, or a sanitized version?”

Knowing what he was asking, Morgan said, “Everything everything. God, Mac, when did you turn into a teenage girl?”

“Fuck you too. Listen, are you certain?”

“Absolutely. Start a database search. The guy could be domestic, but I think the shooter is a link. He was Russian, so I’d start looking at Russian operatives first. They’d have the contacts with the Russian mob to find the guy. Who was in the country at that time? Who has gray hair? Weight-” He thought back, measuring his memory of that figure heading below with that of Dexter Kingsley as he came up on deck-“one eighty-five to two hundred, height five eight to five ten. If you can come up with some possibles, we might be able to find a withdrawal for twenty K if it came from a domestic bank.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” Axel growled. “Okay, got it. What else?”

“That’s it.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

Morgan ended the call and tossed the phone onto the couch.

“How long will it take him to get some photos for you to look at?” Bo asked.

He shrugged to indicate there was no way to tell. “Could be an hour or so, could be days. There’ll be a lot of gray-haired Russian guys, but he can neck it down by the height and weight, then he’ll have to start pinpointing their known locations for the time frame. For that he’ll have to check records, human intelligence, cell phone grids, traffic cameras-and that’s just off the top of my head. The ones who are left, the ones he can’t definitely say were somewhere else that day, are the possibilities. And there’s no way I can make a positive ID, just a probable one that will help him narrow his focus even more.”

“And unless they do something else, such as hack the agency files again, you have nothing on them,” she pointed out-again. And she was just as correct this time as she had been the first time she said it. He leaned back and hooked his hands behind his head, smiling as he studied her.

“What’s so funny?” she asked, looking down to see if she had spilled something on herself.

“Nothing’s funny. I like looking at you.” And he did. He liked her sense of humor, but he also liked the seriousness that was such an important part of her makeup. Those big dark eyes were so solemn when she was concentrating on something, such as when she’d been asking every question she could think of to prod more details out of his memory-and son of a bitch if it hadn’t worked.

He was relieved that he’d finally pinpointed the detail that really mattered, relieved to the point that he felt like laughing. A burden had been lifted, and a new purpose had been born. Not knowing why had eaten at him, knowing there was an enemy out there but not knowing who. He couldn’t defend against someone he didn’t know was coming after him. But now at least he knew who, though the why of it still had to be discovered.

For the first time, he could foresee an end to the situation. Until things were settled he’d been hamstrung with Bo, not knowing what he could or couldn’t do, how long the current state of affairs would hold, if he’d ever be tracked down to Hamrickville. Now he didn’t have to wait. They could take the offensive, get this thing settled.

He grabbed her and pulled her across his lap, ignoring her startled yelp to catch her chin and kiss her with all the fire he felt whenever she was in his arms. “You did it,” he murmured, trailing his mouth down her neck to her fragile collarbone. He knew she wasn’t really fragile, but everything about her felt fragile to him; her bone structure was so fine that his wrists were twice as thick as hers. He’d almost been anxious about crawling on top of her-almost, and definitely not enough to stop him. But she always met him with such enthusiasm that in the heat of the moment he’d forget, and the next thing he knew they’d be locked in the down and dirty and she’d be wringing him out. God, it was great.

He loved the honesty of her. There were no games being played, no pretense, just an open giving and taking. He thought she loved him, though getting her to ever admit it to him could take some doing. Given that, and knowing she didn’t expect a future with him despite how she felt, she had still done what she thought was best for him rather than herself when she’d decided to undertake that direction of questioning. Sure, it had been a long shot, but she’d taken that chance.

“I don’t know what was different about how you were asking the questions because Axel asked for every detail too, but you pulled out the one thing I needed.”

“I told him,” she said absently, her fingers moving to the back of his neck. Her tone said she was concentrating on touch, not the conversation. “I asked when you weren’t doped up.”

“Good theory, but I haven’t been doped up for a couple of months now, and I still hadn’t hit on the significance of that shirt. I’ve gone over and over that day plenty of times too. I just missed it.”

He was annoyed, but hell, shit happened. Even if he’d remembered about the shirt on the day he first regained consciousness, as Bo had twice pointed out, they would still have nothing on the congresswoman. Even when they eventually identified the mystery man-and he had no doubt they would-proving something illegal was going on was going to be a bitch. The guy could be the head of Russia’s SVR, but meeting with him on a boat to talk wasn’t a crime-suspicious, but not a crime.

Axel would be looking though. Now that he had a name, he’d be turning over every rock Joan Kingsley had ever stepped on.

But how long would that take? Whatever was going on, they’d already had three months to cover their tracks. Morgan wasn’t inclined to wait.

An idea began turning over in his head, one that would bypass finding any elusive evidence about whatever had been going on that day and provide a whole different crime with which the Kingsleys could be charged. Once investigators had a foot in the door, so to speak, the evidence for the other crime could well turn up.

He’d have to think about it, work out the angles. A lot of things could go wrong, but the advantage of the plan was that he wouldn’t be a sitting duck waiting in Hamrickville and possibly endangering Bo and his other friends.