“Tough.”
Huck shrugged. “An open environment can build trust. You shut too much up tight, people will start filling in the blanks, and not necessarily in a way you’d want.”
“What kind of bullshit is that, Boone?”
McCabe, he thought. My name is McCabe. Reminding himself periodically helped him stay focused on who he was, what he had to do. “Maybe you have shoulder-fired missiles in there.”
Vern didn’t smile. “Think you’re funny, don’t you?”
“I wasn’t making a joke, Vern. Shoulder-fired missiles could come in handy in our work.”
He didn’t bite. “We’re a legitimate operation. You want to do well around here, you’ll learn to take orders and keep your mouth shut.”
“I was never good at clicking my heels together and saluting smartly.”
Joe Riccardi had come down the hall behind them. “We need independent thinkers.” He spoke in an even, measured tone. “I believe those were your words, weren’t they, Vern?”
Vern gave a small hiss through his teeth. “I just want to finish this job and get out of here. I have a date tonight.”
“In Yorkville?” Joe smiled. “Not much nightlife around here.”
“I make my own nightlife,” Vern said, grinning now.
Joe shifted his attention to Huck. “You can go. Why not get out of here, take yourself out to dinner? The crab cakes at the marina restaurant are the best in town. We’ve all had a hard week. A lot of work, a lot of emotion. Let’s take the weekend to regroup.” With a brief pause, he took a breath. “Alicia Miller drowned. That’s now official. Her death was almost certainly an accident. Despite her odd behavior over the weekend and on Monday, she didn’t leave a suicide note or specifically tell anyone she planned to kill herself, and, of course, there’s no evidence of foul play.”
“Toxicology results?” Huck asked.
“They screened for alcohol and drugs of abuse. She was clean.”
“What about medications-”
“She wasn’t on any medications.”
Huck nodded, somehow not satisfied. “I guess that ends it, then.”
“Yes.” Riccardi’s tone didn’t change. He gave Huck a flicker of a smile. “Crab cakes, Boone. Take the night off.”
Dismissed.
Huck returned to his room at the barn. Cully O’Dell had gone home to Fredericksburg for the weekend. Although he was just a kid, he was a whiz at all the techie stuff, working with Crawford’s tech gurus in Washington to set up systems at Breakwater. But what he wanted to do was bodyguard work. “I don’t want to be the loser in the van with the headphones.”
Nothing about O’Dell was hard-cover vigilante.
Lubec and Rochester were another matter.
Huck showered and put on clean jeans and a clean shirt, fancy enough for crab cakes in Yorkville, Virginia.
Since he was alone in the converted barn, he slipped up the hall to Lubec’s room-no complicated locks on the door. A credit card did the trick, and Huck was in, the room identical in setup to all the others and obsessively tidy, not so much as a wrinkle in the bunk. Moving quickly, Huck did a reasonably thorough search.
No photographs of the wife and kids or a girlfriend. No checkbook or credit cards in drawers, closet, pants pockets, on top of the dresser.
No rocket launchers under the bed.
No computer.
Lubec had ten one-hundred-dollar bills in a clip out in the open on his dresser. A cash-and-carry kind of guy.
Huck returned to his room. The search was a waste of his breaking-and-entering talents.
He took his Rover into town, driving past Quinn’s cottage. Her Saab wasn’t in the short driveway. Just as well she didn’t come down to Yorkville for the weekend. He parked at the dead end and got out, a cold wind gusting off the water. The tide was coming in, the sun low in the west, leaving behind a dull, almost eerie light on the bay. He could see Quinn’s osprey swooping toward its nest.
What are we missing?
What the hell are we all missing?
Getting into the gun vault and finding something incriminating in Travis Lubec’s room would be progress where there was none, but Huck was more interested in the big picture. So was the task force. Who were the key players in this vigilante network? What were their plans?
If Quinn’s neighbors, the retired couple, had drowned in the bay, that would be one thing. A tragedy, but it wouldn’t have raised the questions that Alicia Miller’s death did. She had been a DOJ attorney under Gerard Lattimore, who was friends with Oliver Crawford-an accomplished, self-controlled woman who’d sobbed to her friend about ospreys trying to kill her.