Troublemaker by Linda Howard
“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 hi
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.
CHAPTER 24
AT FIVE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING, BO’S CELL PHONE chimed the arrival of a text. The sound woke her out of a deep sleep, and she raised her head to growl, “What the hell!” If there had been an emergency in town she would have been called, not texted.
Morgan snapped on the lamp and reached across her to snag her phone off the bedside table. “It’s from Axel,” he muttered, squinting at the partial text showing on the lock screen. He swiped his thumb across the screen and tapped in her passcode, then went to the full text.
Bo yawned and stretched, reveling in the feel of his naked body stretched across hers. She hadn’t realized he knew her passcode, but she wasn’t surprised—or concerned. He’d seen her use it often enough to know the pattern. “What does it say?”
“He’s sent some photos for me for me to look at,” Morgan replied absently. She knew that tone, and her heart leaped the way it always did. He was looking at her bare breasts as if she were a gazelle and he was a starving tiger. He dropped the ph
Even after a month, things still went fast between them, as if neither of them wanted to wait. She knew he wasn’t going to leave her behind, and her response to him was fierce enough that he’d have to hurry if he did. The way he fit inside her, big enough for her to feel stretched, long enough to feel deeply penetrated, sent her over the edge. It was perfect, as if their bodies had been made to be together. Logically she knew that was impossible, but when they were making love, logic flew out the window, because “perfect” was how it felt.
“He’ll call any minute now,” she said breathlessly as Morgan settled on top of her. She stroked his ribs, his shoulders, opened her legs to him and latched them around his hips. His entry was careful, but as soon as the head of his penis was inside her he stroked deep the way she liked.
“Won’t be the first time I’ve ignored him.” He rested his weight on his elbows and cupped her face as he moved inside her, watching her with that eagle gaze as if he wanted to catch every flicker of expression. He did that a lot, his focus locked on her as if nothing else was going on in the world.
She was self-conscious enough of her bed head and general early-morning scruffiness that she put her hand across her face. “You’re watching me.”
“Yeah.” His voice was low and rough. His rhythm inside her was slow and steady. “I want to know if I do anything that hurts you, or that you don’t like. Or if I do something you really like, so I can do it again.”
She pretty much liked everything they did, so she had no protests. On the other hand, she did like to return the favor; she put her hands against his chest and said, “I want on top.”
He wrapped an arm around her hips, anchoring her in place as he rolled to the side. She sat up, feeling him push so deep inside there was a pleasant ache. Sighing in pleasure, she absorbed the sensation, moved her hips searching for more.