Hart came by a few minutes later. Arms bulging, neck now sweating. He had a hand on the Glock at his waist, an impenetrable look spread across his face.
Fletcher put up his hands.
“Don’t shoot, Occifer. I ain’t drunk.”
“You’re demented, that’s what you are,” Hart replied. “And cleared. All the field tests are negative. You’re fine, you’re out of isolation. All the brain rot is from natural causes.” He turned to Sam with a smile. “Good to see you, Doc. This loon roped you into another case?”
“Hey, I’m your commander—you can’t call me a loon.”
Hart rolled his eyes. “Doc, I ever tell you about the time me and Fletch were down in Loudon County on a domestic? Turns out this guy’d been doing it with his goat, and the wife caught him going at it in the barn, lost it, grabbed the closest weapon and pumped him full of bird shot. Dude dies with his, ahem, boots on, so to speak. Now, Fletch here, he’s trying to figure out how we save this poor goat, so he—”
Sam was already giggling, and Fletcher reached out like he was going to smack Hart’s arm, but thought better of touching him. “Don’t you dare say another word, or I’ll bump you back to uniform. Tell me what’s happening at the hospital. How’s Cattafi?”
Hart flashed him a grin, then got serious. “Dude lost a lot of blood. He’s not giving too many signs of waking up anytime soon. His family’s on a flight in from Michigan. They’ll be in—” he checked his watch “—by one or two. There are big storms in Chicago and their plane was delayed. Your dead chick has a sister. We’re trying to locate her to do notification now. There’s not a lot of info floating around about either one of them, and the vic lived overseas. We’re trying to track it all down. I figure you’re gonna want to talk to the families when we round them up, at the very least.”
“Kind of you to save them for me.”
“Yeah, yeah. The sacrifices I make.”
“Cattafi’s parents wrecked?”
“They’re as distraught as you can imagine. Claim the kid’s some sort of supergenius. Gonna cure cancer, all that.”
“I keep hearing that. Anything on the traffic cams? I noticed one on the corner.”
“We’re looking at everything between ten and two. And we’re going to recanvass the area. There’s a camera mounted a few doors down, but the folks weren’t home when we knocked.”
“Good. Anything we can get will help. Sam, you know his professors at Georgetown, right? Can you get us in to talk to them?”
She nodded. “Of course. I’ll go set something up right now.” She walked a little ways down the leafy green street, punching numbers in her cell phone.
Hart gave him the fish eye. “What are you doing, dragging her in here? She’s a civilian, Fletcher, albeit a talented one. You can’t keep involving her in our cases. It’s not seemly.”
“Now, now, don’t get your panties in a wad. She’s a legitimate part of the investigation. Apparently, our female vic was undercover FBI. Sam’s taking John Baldwin’s place for the time being while he deals with another case.”
“Whose idea was that?”
Fletcher smiled. “Lonnie, worry not, okay? I wouldn’t do anything to compromise this investigation. She’s got a knack for this—took her all of ten minutes to dig out the hidden refrigerator. Speaking of which, I trust you’ve told Robertson I’m gunning for him?” Mel Robertson was the head of the crime scene unit—it was his boys and girls who’d screwed the pooch.
“Robertson is quaking in his size-fourteen boots.” A few spatters of rain started, and Hart popped a baseball cap onto his bald pate.
Fletcher put the file he was holding over his own head as a shield. “I’m not kidding. If Robertson ain’t gonna take this seriously, I’ll let Armstrong go after him. What sort of bullshit is this, that we can’t trust our own crime scene techs to do their jobs?”
“You sound like a bureaucrat.” But Hart was smiling. He liked the idea of Robertson getting chewed out.
“I am a bureaucrat. Now.”
Sam was walking back toward them, a worried look on her face. When she reached them, Fletcher shared his file folder with her.
“What’s the matter?”
She bit her lip. “Thomas Cattafi isn’t a student at Georgetown anymore. He was kicked out two weeks ago. The dean says he can’t discuss it over the phone. We’ll have to go see him to find out more.”
Teterboro Airport New Jersey
XANDER WAS ONCE again standing with his hands behind his back, shifting his weight from foot to foot to alleviate the boredom. As predicted, when the New Jersey cops had rolled in, he’d been recuffed and brought to another interrogation room inside the Teterboro Airport, then left to cool his heels while the powers that be decided what to do with him. The room was a dingy white, a twin to the one he’d been in with Chalk and Denon, nothing more than a table, four chairs and a camera bolted high in the northeast corner. No windows, nothing to allow him to entertain himself.
Left to his own devices, he’d begun brooding about the shooting again. He’d done the right thing, he knew it, but the image of the shooter crumpling over the parapet replayed in his mind. He hadn’t killed anyone since he’d separated from the Army, taken his honorable discharge and walked away into the woods. For the first several weeks, he’d even done catch and release on the damn trout he landed, simply because he couldn’t stand the thought of harming anything else.
That ended. Of course it did. His sense returned. But he’d not taken a human life since that last firefight in Jalālābād, and he’d hoped he never would have to again.
If he was going to have a career in close protection, clearly he was going to have to realign his priorities.
The door opened, and a plainclothes officer he hadn’t seen before walked in. He uncuffed Xander, handed him a bottle of water, shook his hand.
“Arlen Grant. New Jersey State Police. Seems you’ve had yourself an interesting day.” Grant was tall and lanky, a solid jaw, just this side of forty, hair about to thin but not there yet, with a sleek gray suit and a chunky stainless-steel watch, a Fitbit trainer on the opposite wrist. He had the hungry look of a man who’d lost weight recently, and would do most anything to sink his teeth into a thick steak and fries instead of salad and veggies.
“You could say that.”
“Why don’t you tell me the story, top to bottom, then we’ll talk about your next steps.”
Xander assessed Grant openly. He seemed friendly enough. Almost too friendly. All of Xander’s warning bells went off.
“Am I under arrest?”
“No, no, nothing like that. I want to hear the story in your own words, man-to-man. That’s all.”
Xander wasn’t stupid. He saw where this was headed, heard something in Grant’s voice that made him go on alert. He didn’t trust the man.
He hated to do it, because in his capacity as a security agent he’d done his job—protected his principal—but he had to protect himself, too. The facts were indisputable. He’d killed a man, on American soil, in front of a dozen witnesses, with only James Denon and Chalk’s word for it that it wasn’t a well-planned hit. There was no choice, not anymore, not the way Grant was looking at him, like a bird who’s spied a juicy worm across a dew-wet lawn.
“I’ll need a lawyer present, and then I’m happy to tell you the whole story.”
Grant’s