CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Lieutenant Vincent “Bilbo” Malubay, twenty-nine, naval aviator, husband, and father, had gotten his call sign because of the weekly Dungeons and Dragons game he ran in the USS Truman’s rec room. Apparently no one in the Navy was actually called “Maverick” or “Iceman”—real call signs were embarrassing, ridiculous, or patently disgusting. “Stewbeef,” “Big Bird,” “Purge.” Logan’s was simply “Mouth” for reasons Veronica took to be obvious.
“Bilbo” had brought a sack full of twenty-sided dice and a Monster Manual from home, and every Sunday he and a handful of other proud geeks would colonize one of the long folding tables to play. Logan had even played once, half ironically. “I was a bard,” he told Veronica, smirking a little. “I spent the whole time writing limericks about the other characters.”
“I bet they loved that.” She squeezed his hand.
It was the following morning, and they were in line at the Delta ticket counter at the airport, waiting to check Logan into his flight for the funeral. Harried travelers moved in every direction, tired parents ushering their children toward security, college kids in hoodies and backpacks heading back to their campuses for the fall semester. Logan wore service khaki and a garrison cap that increased his already imposing height by two inches. People kept glancing at him out of the corners of their eyes as they passed along the busy concourse.
Late Thursday night, Bilbo had been on the return leg of a six-hour mission in the Persian Gulf. It was all routine. He’d made dozens of these nighttime landings, sometimes in fiercely pitching seas with the flight deck tilting back and forth beneath him. But this time something went wrong. Bilbo apparently miscalculated the angle of descent as he brought his Hornet in to land. He’d flown in too low and hit the ramp instead. The plane was turned into a white-hot mass of shredded metal, skidding violently across the flight deck.
Logan rubbed his eyes and kept them closed for a moment, and Veronica noticed how tired he looked. He’d barely slept since he’d gotten the call. When he reopened his eyes, they flashed with sudden anger. “It’s not fair. Bilbo made that landing hundreds of times. He could park his bug on a dime. And then one mistake. One mistake with no margin of error.”
It could have been you. It could just as easily have been you. The thought had an edge of giddy hysteria to it, the sense of a disaster narrowly averted. But she couldn’t tell him that. Couldn’t tell him that, in the six months he’d been gone, she’d looked up every fighter-class aircraft accident listed on Wikipedia. That she’d read, over and over, about G-LOC and midair collisions and the various malfunctions that could lead to a jet slamming to earth at four hundred miles an hour. She didn’t tell him that there was a perverse sense of gratitude mixed in with her sympathy and her sadness. If it was that easy for a skilled pilot to destroy himself in the blink of an eye, she’d enjoyed several months blissfully ignorant of how close she always was to losing Logan.
“I wish you’d be there tonight,” he said suddenly, opening his eyes. The words cut through her reverie. She squeezed his hand again.
“I just need one more day.”
“You can’t just make some calls from the hotel?”
“Lamb’s not taking my calls and I need him to get a search warrant for Bellamy’s computer and phone. I’ll be on the first flight to Seattle tomorrow morning, I promise.”
He didn’t answer. His fingers felt limp and heavy in her hand. She moved closer, putting her arms around his waist and trying to ignore the guilt tightening in her chest.
“Come on. You know you’ll be out drinking with your squadron tonight anyway. I’ll be there tomorrow in time for the funeral.”
“Veronica.”
She looked up at him. For a few seconds he stood in silence, his mouth parted slightly as if trying to find the right words.
Then: “They want me to go back.”
She frowned. “Go back where?”
“Aboard ship. They’re short now.” He ran one hand over his face. “You know, with Bilbo gone, they’re shorthanded.”
“Yeah, but…” Several people in the line looked her way. She realized her voice had gone shrill. When she spoke again, she concentrated on keeping it low. “Logan, you’re on shore duty. That’s supposed to last another five months, at least.”
“I know. But they need me, Veronica.”
“Wait.” Her heartbeat felt uneven. The world tilted around her, unsteady. “Are they telling you that you have to go back? Is it an order?”
“No, but…”
“So you could choose not to.”
“Veronica…”
“You could choose not to.” She realized several people were looking at her again. She didn’t care. “If you wanted, you could tell them no.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. “Look, I haven’t decided for sure what I’m going to do, okay? But you have to understand—this is what the job is. I trained for this, I worked my ass off for this. I chose this life. You of all people should understand that.”
She opened her mouth to answer. Before she could, the ticket agent called them forward. Logan stepped up to the counter, his ID outstretched.
He checked his bag, and they walked in strained, painful silence to the security checkpoint. When they got to the line, he hesitated for a second, his eyes meeting hers in what she realized was their first moment of real intimacy all day. She pressed her hand against his cheek; he took it in his and gently kissed it, holding it against his face for a moment before letting go.
“We’ll talk after the funeral, okay?”
Then Logan took Veronica in his arms and kissed her forehead, sweet and simple. She forced a smile. “Okay.”
—
Veronica arrived at the courthouse at eleven, her emotions frayed. A young female deputy sat at the front desk, her hair braided tightly behind her head. She gave Veronica a sour look when she came through the door. Her name tag said GANDIN.
Veronica stepped up to the desk. “I need to speak with the sheriff, if he’s available. It’s about a criminal investigation.”
One smooth, over-plucked eyebrow lifted skeptically.
“You can fill out a report and leave it with me,” said the deputy. “Or I can give you the CrimeStoppers tip line.”
Veronica feigned consideration. “The tip line, you say? Interesting. And who answers that tip line?”
“It routes to one of the deputies on duty.” The woman leaned on the counter. “Then they fill out a report, and leave it with me.”
Veronica smiled tightly, leaning on the counter as well so she and the deputy were facing off. “The thing is, Deputy Gandin, my information is time sensitive. I don’t have the luxury to wait for whatever elaborate filing scheme you use to move paper around this place. So if you wouldn’t mind…”
“Veronica?”
She looked up to see Deputy Norris Clayton. He’d come in behind her from the lobby, a powerfully built man with a long, serious face. His uniform was snug across his chest, clean and pressed with almost military precision.
Veronica smiled. It still startled her a little to see Norris—one-time bully and reformed trench coat mafia don—in uniform.
“Hey, Deputy. How’s the crime-and-punishment gig treating you?”
“Another day, another donut.” Norris glanced at the woman behind the desk and only then seemed to sense the tension in the air. He looked back at Veronica. “What’s up?”
“Oh, you know. Crime solving.”
A lopsided grin snuck in at the corners of Norris’s mouth. Spotting the look on Gandin’s face, he pressed his lips together to hide it.
“Come on back. I’ll see if I can help.”
Veronica gave Gandin a cool nod as she followed Norris through the gate.
“Don’t mind her,” he said as soon as they were out of earshot. “Brittany’s a good cop. But Lamb has her stuck at that desk all day every day, filing paperwork and making coffee. County policy says he has to hire a few women, but that doesn’t mean he has to let them in the field. She’s in a pretty constant state of fuck you.”
Veronica’s smile faded. She glanced back at the woman at the desk with a grudging sense of sympathy. “I guess I can’t blame her for that.”
“Yeah. Anyway, what’s going on?”
She looked toward Lamb’s closed office door. “Well, I need a search warrant and unfortunately Lamb is the only one who can get it for me. What are the chances he’ll see me?”
Norris snorted. “You? Right now I’d say slim to none. His ass has been glowing red since that lawsuit was announced.”
“That’s all Weevil,” Veronica protested. “I certainly didn’t feed him that ‘take the bastard down’ quote.”
He grimaced. “It doesn’t matter. He sees you in here, I guarantee you he’ll decide it’s time for an early lunch.”
“Norris, this guy I’m looking into—he’s bad. Really bad,” she said soberly.
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he heaved a sigh. “I can’t make any promises, Veronica. He’s probably gonna get a long running start and boot you out the door.”
“That’s fine. You can make a show of dragging me out if you have to.”
Norris gave her another long look, and then, as if he couldn’t help himself, shook his head and grinned.
A few minutes later, she stood in the hallway behind Lamb’s door as Norris knocked.
“Yeah?” Lamb’s voice was muffled from inside the office.
“Hey, Sheriff, I just got a tip on a case I think you ought to look at.” For a moment there wasn’t a sound. Veronica met Norris’s eyes, questioning, and he shrugged.
“The Neptune Grand assault? From back in March?” he tried.
“Come in.”
Norris pushed the door open and stepped through. Veronica held back for a moment, listening.
“Sorry to interrupt you, Sheriff. I’ve got some lady here who says she knows who did it.”
“What the hell are you waiting for, Clayton? Send her in.”
Veronica stepped into the doorway, jazz hands held aloft. “Ta-da!”
Instantly, a dark flush moved through Lamb’s cheeks, his lips twisting into the kind of sneer most people reserved for shit on their shoes.
“You,” he said, his voice low and venomous. It was with great self-control that she refrained from answering, “Me!”
“Look, Lamb…”
“Get. Her. Out,” he spat, biting down on each word as though he was ripping the sentence apart with his teeth.
“Listen to me for just a second!” She put her hands on his desk. “I have information on an open case. A big one.”
“Like I’m going to trust Little Miss Frivolous Lawsuit.” He turned to Norris. “She’s a snake in the grass, Clayton. Anything she gives us is going to be poison. Get her out of here, and if she comes back, slap her with a false-reporting charge.”
Norris hesitated. “You want me to take her report before I throw her out, Sheriff?”
“Fine.” Veronica took a step back from Norris, holding up her hands in surrender. “I’ll go. But do yourself a favor and run a luminol test in room 3031 in the Neptune Grand. I guarantee you, you’ll find blood evidence there.”
She turned to the door and made to leave. Lamb’s voice came in a short, sharp bark behind her.
“Wait.”
She stopped in her tracks, forcing the cynical smile off her face. When she turned, Lamb was leaning forward on one forearm, listening.
“I thought we already had DNA evidence in that case,” he said.
“We do. And it’s a match with my suspect. But he’s claiming the sex was consensual.” She hesitated. He’ll find out sooner or later anyway. “The victim’s a call girl. The San Diego PD took the guy in for questioning, but his lawyer had him out in less than an hour. He’s saying she was fine when she left his room, that someone else attacked her after he’d already had consensual sex with her. Everyone knows he’s lying but San Diego’s not looking any deeper. Now, of course, the crime’s in your jurisdiction, so you could prove the crime occurred in his room and get a warrant for his phone, his computer…”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Lamb shook his head. “You’re out of your mind if you think I’m biting on that. A prostitute?”
“Who was raped,” she said. “And strangled. And beaten so violently she had a two-week hospital stay.”
A slow, ugly smile spread over Lamb’s face.
“Yeah, but, I mean, if she’s a prostitute, it’s not rape so much as shoplifting, right?”
Norris stiffened beside her. For a moment Veronica couldn’t draw a breath. She stared across the desk, her vision sharpening to a single point: Lamb’s sneering face.
“A girl almost died, Lamb. And you know as well as I do that sexual predators don’t stop until they’re caught. When this guy ends up killing someone you consider worthy of justice—because he will—I’m going to make sure everyone knows you refused to investigate him.”
She turned and walked out of his office, slamming the door behind her.