Honor (20 page)

“I can relate to that,” she said ruefully.

“Same kind of thing happens with the good old military chain of command. Put in a request or make a complaint, and nothing happens.”

“Randy said the same thing.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Later. Like I said.”

“Okay. When you’re ready I’d like you to look at some still frames from the video.” He glanced at her set profile. “Not the accident itself. Just the people who drove by, gawking.”

“Wouldn’t Mike Warren want to see that too?”

“Maybe,” Linc replied evenly. “I’m not done with it yet. You okay with that?”

“It’s up to you.” She was silent for a little while. “He’s all right. Doing his job, I guess. By the way, I picked up some brochures about SKC when I was there. Not to be rude, but he could probably answer some of his own questions if he read them.”

Linc smiled to himself. “Maybe so.”

“It’s a monster conglomerate,” she said absently. “Lots of subsidiaries. I didn’t get a chance to read the material myself.” She looked into her purse. “And I forgot to give him the brochures.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

She heaved a ragged sigh and clutched the purse, rolling the soft leather band that closed it nervously between her fingers. “What a day. I’m glad it’s almost over.”

“Do you feel better now that the Corellis know?”

“I wish I did. Maybe I will.”

“You did the right thing.”

“That’s what they said.” She sat up straighter. “I almost forgot to tell you. Christine opened her eyes today. Just for a few seconds, when I walked in—but I knew she recognized me.” Her voice was threaded with joy.

Linc could guess why she’d forgotten. The innocent bouquet of roses. It amounted to a second message from the stalker. He’d hit closer this time. Linc didn’t like it at all.

“You didn’t forget, Kenzie. You just needed the right time to remember, that’s all. That’s great news.”

Her mood brightened and she seemed a lot happier, talking to him about what Alf had said about it being the second time that day and how Christine was on the mend.

Linc turned the steering wheel to move the car into a parking space half a block away. He followed her into the building, scoping out the area. Nothing to see. His instincts told him their man was far away at the moment. Biding his time.

The same closed-in smell permeated Christine’s apartment, slightly stronger this time. Kenzie hesitated on the threshold, letting Linc go in ahead of her.

He strode through the rooms, banging doors and making noise. “No one here,” he called to her.

“Unless they’re deaf.”

Linc came out of the bedroom and stood in the middle of the living room. “Nice and neat. Except for that thing.”

He went to the hutch, looking down at the tumbled papers and files Kenzie had left behind twice. “Is this where the laptop was?”

“Yup. In the bottom cabinet, charging.”

Linc squatted on his haunches and used a stray piece of paper to move the doors. She’d left them both open. The second time, when she’d grabbed the laptop and cord, even more paper had tumbled out.

“Then maybe the other one is in here too.”

Kenzie walked over and bent down to look. Linc tsked and waved the protective paper at her. “My prints are all over everything in this place,” she told him. “There’s no point in my being careful.”

“Okay.” He smiled easily. “Then start going through this stuff. There might be something worth keeping.”

“Don’t you want to find the SKC laptop first?”

“Not necessarily.”

She sat down cross-legged and leafed through miscellaneous papers and files. “What a mess. She has her college essays in here.
The Dichotomy of Quotidian Experience.
What does that mean?”

Linc got up and began to look elsewhere. “Exactly nothing.” He let his gaze roam over shelves and tables and furniture, doing a purely visual sweep. He was trying to get a deeper sense of the place, guessing who might have come and gone, not really looking for the laptop. Kenzie could find it if it was here.

He heard her stuff the papers back into the hutch and the sound of a cardboard box being dragged out. It landed with a thump.

“Here it is,” she said. She kept the box flaps parted and looked down into it. “There’s the SKC logo right on the cover. Should I open it? Does it matter if I get my fingerprints on it?”

“Hard to say. Mike Warren isn’t going to return it right away.”

She looked at him quizzically. “How do you know that?”

“Because this is a stalking case and that’s a company computer and he has to check it. I think the police know how to do a little hacking.”

“But not at your level,” she said.

“Well, no,” he conceded.

They exchanged a glance. She got to her feet and lifted up the box. “Let’s fire it up and see what you can find out.”

Linc used paper to lift the laptop up at a diagonal, keeping it in the box and looking underneath. “There’s the cord.” He stopped.

“Um, I think Christine keeps rubber gloves under the kitchen sink.”

He went to look and returned with a pair of hot pink, nubbly-fingered dishwashing gloves. “Better than nothing.” He drew them on one by one, stretching the rubber thinly over his large hands. “Actually, they’re not too bad. Not really my color, though.”

“How come you’re so careful about not getting your prints on things?”

He smiled as he flipped the laptop open. It was a solid machine, sheathed in matte black metal. “Sometimes it’s not a good idea. They’re not on record or anything. I’d like to keep it that way.”

Linc pushed a button and it started up. He took out the gizmo on his keychain and hummed as it did its thing, watching the changing screen.

“Lot of firewalls,” he commented. “Nothing special, though.” His tone was casual but his mind had switched into high gear. A giant military supplier wouldn’t let a laptop just walk out the door.

Icons began to pop onto the screen. Documents with titles enlarged themselves as he stacked them like index cards, alphabetically.

“Looks routine so far. Purchase orders, spec sheets, production runs.”

“Is it classified?”

“Not seeing the big black stamp.”

“What about Christine’s work e-mails?”

“Stored on SKC servers.” He sometimes forgot that Kenzie didn’t spend her workdays staring into a screen like everyone else. “But she did save some, I just caught a glimpse of that file. Hang on—I want to look at these.”

He meant the alphabetized documents.

Kenzie waited while he flipped through them. “And ... R. S. T. U. V. And ... X. Y. Z. That’s all.”

“Wait a minute. Go back to X. Put that one on top.”

Linc tapped.

Kenzie studied the document, not reading it but looking at the title. “X-Ultra. That’s what Randy was talking about. I didn’t know SKC owned the brand.”

She went to get her purse, searching for the brochures she’d forgotten to give to Mike Warren, opening two before she said, “Bingo. New product. There’s the logo.”

Linc glanced at it and enlarged the document even more. “It’s not on here. This is just text and half of a schematic. Care to enlighten me?”

She seemed as baffled as he was. “Frank Branigan was wearing X-Ultra body armor when he was shot. Randy said it failed.”

Interesting. And noted as an open circle on an important intersection of his mental grid. “Why?”

“She didn’t know. Some of the other medics in country confirmed other instances in the last few months. X-Ultra is a new product.” Kenzie stopped talking for a minute. “I think Frank was wearing it in a photo he posted. I thought there was something different about it.”

“You’ll have to show it to me. Not on this computer.”

She gave a brief nod. “Randy said the armor apparently does work sometimes. Just not all the time. Which means—”

“Bad design. Shoddy testing. A couple of extra dead soldiers here and there. But who’s counting?” he asked grimly.

Kenzie took a step back from the laptop. The room was growing darker and they hadn’t turned on any lights. It glowed, emitting a faint hum.

“She wanted me to help her find out why.”

“And why you and not someone else?”

“Because she thought I knew Frank better than I did.” Kenzie looked up at him with troubled green eyes. “And it seems that Donna sort of recommended me, if that’s the right word. I got the feeling no one knows the whole story, but Randy seemed sure of what she was saying. She’s keeping her head down, though.”

“So should you.” He turned the laptop on its side, looking at the bottom.

“Mind if I ask what you’re looking for?”

“Location transmitter.” He investigated the plastic feet. “Not in these, but there could be one inside the case. I’m going to make sure.”

Turning the laptop right side up again, he tapped into a program stored on the gizmo and started a bug scan. “Nothing,” he said a few minutes later. “SKC must really trust Christine. Or else they’re just lazy about security.”

Kenzie began to pace, then stopped when she came to the window, peering out through the gap between the side edge of the curtain and the frame. She turned to look at Linc. “Just checking. It’s getting to be a habit.”

“Good. We still don’t know what he looks like.”

They exchanged a long look. “Christine does,” she said after a while.

“Don’t be too sure of that,” Linc pointed out. “She may never remember who hit her or anything else about the accident.”

“What if she knew him before it happened? Christine and I were super close, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have a few secrets.”

She was finally thinking in shades of gray. Linc suppressed a smile. It didn’t come naturally to her.

“That was always a possibility, and he could work at SKC. But keep in mind that the X-Ultra problem isn’t necessarily linked to what happened to her.”

“I wonder if Frank contacted her on that.”

“He wasn’t a whistleblower, he was a soldier—lived by it, died by it. Sounds like only a few medics were aware of problems with the armor.”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” she said with a trace of heat.

“One way or another, we have to have proof.”

He clicked out of the files and shut the laptop down, removing the gizmo from the USB port and reattaching it to his key ring. “You can carry it to the car. I’d have to keep the gloves on, and I don’t want to be conspicuous.”

He began to peel them off.

“Are you going to keep it?” she asked.

“For now.”

“But what about—”

“The lieutenant can wait. It’ll take me several days to copy and analyze everything on it—files, drives, hidden stuff.”

“Is that legal?”

He went into the kitchen to put the gloves back.

“SKC doesn’t know where it is and Mike Warren doesn’t have to know,” Linc said when he came back.

“What if he asks me about it?”

“Stall. Say you couldn’t find it. He can’t confirm that. The Corellis have a lot of other things to worry about, and he’s not going to ask them to retrieve it.”

“So he asked us. On behalf of Melvin Brody, who is not a nice guy,” she warned him.

“Warren is making nice. He has to go to SKC to question her coworkers—that’s routine. Returning this thing would give him a reason to be there.”

“Just so long as it gets returned, Linc.” Kenzie hoisted the box.

He only shrugged.

“Tell me one thing. Are you going to hack into SKC servers with this?”

“It’s an option.”

“You could go to jail for that.”

He smiled. “They would have to catch me.”

“And that would never happen,” she said with a dash of scorn.

“I don’t make too many mistakes, Kenzie.”

“Sometimes I wish you would,” she sighed. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Back to Hamill’s,” she answered curtly. “I have to talk to Norm and Carol. Then I’m going to grab Beebee and go for a long walk.”

“Is that smart?”

“I can’t stay cooped up. I’m going nuts as it is. He’s good protection. Don’t forget that I trained him.”

“Right. You mentioned it.” He looked around the empty apartment. “Are we done here?”

“I hope so,” Kenzie said, heading for the door with the box cradled in her arms.

C
HAPTER
9

A week later ...

L
inc heard a vehicle pull into the parking lot of the motel and waited for the sound of a car door opening and closing.

Nothing.

Mildly curious—and bored with wading through the technical files on the SKC laptop—he got up for a stretch and moved to the side of the window to look out without being seen himself.

A sport ute. Vaguely familiar.

He was surprised to see Mike Warren finally get out and head for the motel office.

No call, no contact. Why was he here?

He picked up the phone by the unmade bed when it rang.

“Hello,” said the woman at the front desk. “There’s someone here to see you. Mike Warren.”

“I’ll be right down.” Linc didn’t feel like inviting the lieutenant in or cleaning up. He looked at himself in the mirror and frowned. He had a habit of running a hand into his hair when he was concentrating hard, which made it spike. Right now he resembled a pissed-off cockatoo.

Linc couldn’t find a comb. No time to shave.

The room was too warm and he hadn’t added anything to the jeans he’d thrown on first thing. He was bare-chested and barefooted. He grabbed yesterday’s polo shirt and yanked it over his head, then located his sneakers.

Good enough. The process of making himself presentable was irritating. Even though he’d been forcing himself to keep reading the endless files, he still didn’t like being interrupted.

Warren turned as Linc came into the lobby area. “There you are,” he said pleasantly.

No apology for showing up unannounced. Linc didn’t extend a hand for a shake. “What’s up?”

“Nothing much. Just wanted to talk.”

The woman behind the desk got busy with whatever it was she’d been doing.

Linc nodded toward the door. “We can go somewhere.”

“Lead the way.”