Читать книгу Homefront Defenders - Lisa Phillips - Страница 13

FOUR

He watched her blow out a breath. “That is a very good question.” Alana unclipped her phone and made a call. After listening for a while, she glanced at the floor. “It’s me. Listen, I need to talk to you about something. Can you call me back...please?”

It almost hurt hearing so much longing in the soft alto of her voice. Did he even know what that felt like? Sure, he called his mom on Sundays, but he didn’t think he’d ever had that much feeling about someone. Even those closest to him. His sisters were so much older, it wasn’t like they’d played together.

Locke walked through the trailer again to give her a minute to gather herself. He stared at the half-eaten meal. Turned off the TV.

No pets. He trailed back to the bedroom. The gun safe in the closet was open, half the racks missing items. Brian had taken at least six weapons—handguns, rifles and a shotgun—assuming no one had looted it since he’d left. Plenty of boxes of shells remained. Clothes spilled out of the drawers, and a green duffel lay crumpled in the corner. With some people, it was hard to tell if they’d been burglarized or if that was just how messy they lived.

Alana said, “Anything?”

Locke glanced around. “He’s armed, but he didn’t use any of the weapons this morning when I saw him. He just drove.”

A loner ex-sniper takes his guns to act as the getaway driver for a yakuza killer? It hardly made sense.

“I called Joe Morton,” Alana said. “Get this. He knows this guy, said all the cops do. Apparently he disappears all the time, shows up all over the island drunk and usually raving about political pawns and corruption. All that antigovernment, ‘we should live free and not under their thumb’ stuff. Joe said they usually take him in for the night and then drive him home the next day.” She paused. “I told him you’re sure that he’s the getaway driver. He’s going to update the BOLO to include that information. He said not to worry, they’ll find Brian Wells.”

Locke motioned to the room around them. “Brian is a drunk, but he’s never broken protocol before. Not when he knows the president is coming. He’s supposed to be here for this visit, and he’s supposed to stay home while the president is in town. That’s the arrangement.” He shook his head. “Can’t put a detail on a man we can’t find.”

“I know.” Alana’s look turned dark. “And what’s with that half-eaten meal and the TV being on? Did he come back after this morning? The truck is gone, but why walk out in the middle of dinner?”

“We don’t have time to look for Brian before the president gets here.” Locke motioned to the food, his agent brain spinning with possibilities. “All this could be misdirection, getting us to spin our wheels trying to find him while he’s off getting up to no good. He could be plotting something for when the president shows up.”

She pressed her lips together.

Locke ran his hand over his head and then squeezed the back of his neck. “We need to reconvene with the team, see if anyone else has had any weird experiences this morning. Something fishy is going on here.”

Locke continued, “The only problem is, they don’t seem to be connected. There’s nothing here that links back to Beatrice’s death. He could simply have given the yakuza guy a ride this morning. That could be his only link to this.”

* * *

Alana turned her phone over and looked at the screen, but it hadn’t made a noise. Her sister hadn’t returned her call. She clipped her phone back on her belt and went to the couch, where a newspaper had been discarded. “This is dated four days ago. I wonder if he reads it regularly.” She glanced around. “I think it would smell more if this meal had been here that long, or there would be animals in here by now.”

She worked her mouth side to side as she thought, then flipped the newspaper over. “This has been circled.” She brought the paper to him. “It’s an ad, a flyer in his paper. There’s nothing on the back, but it must have caught his eye. I don’t think I even look at these inserts.”

“I thought all that stuff was online now,” Locke said. “But I guess he doesn’t have internet all the way out here, and there’s nothing about a cell phone in his file.” His eyes scanned the ad. “Cash for work at a gun shop.”

“Hang on.” Alana tapped the page, the phone number. “That callback number...” She swiped on her phone to a list of numbers. She’d seen that number before. Today, in fact. “Beatrice’s cell phone call logs. That number is on there. She called it, as well.”

Alana showed him the notes app on her phone, where she’d transcribed the same number on both the ad and her list. “How’s that for a connection.”

Locke nodded. “It certainly is one.”

“He circled this ad, and Beatrice called that number.” She read off the date and time. “Day before yesterday.”

Another way Beatrice, Brian Wells and the yakuza member were connected. But her sister as well? She couldn’t figure it out.

Locke said, “We don’t have time to run down this lead before the president gets here. We already need to get to the team at Hilo airport.”

“Get ready to bring the city to a standstill.” She sent him a wry smile. “I used to hate when the president came to town. All the roads closed, can’t get anywhere, late for everything. Such a pain.”

Locke smiled back at her, his look understanding more than amused. “And now we’re the ones causing the mayhem.”

“At least I’m not trying to get somewhere else, I guess.” She shrugged. “So what do we do about this?”

Locke made his way to the front door. They stepped outside, and he scanned the area while Alana shut the trailer door. “Huh.”

He turned back. “What is it?”

“This lock is broken. Maybe someone came in and abducted him. Took some guns,” she said. “It explains the food he left. And the clothes. Maybe it was after you saw him this morning. He could have returned home, and then it happened?”

Locke shrugged. “Or he had a visitor other than us.” His phone beeped. He read the message aloud. “‘Air Force One is four hours out.’ Let’s get over to Hilo.”

She nodded, and they walked to the truck. Alana’s phone started to ring, and she whipped it out. Then sighed.

“Not your sister?”

“Nope.” She shook her head. “My neighbor in DC. I’ll call her back later.”

When she was quiet for a while, he apparently decided he needed to get her to talk. Locke said, “So you surfed in competitions, isn’t that right?”

She nodded.

“What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?” She was sure he knew the story but he must have wanted to hear her tell it.

“Maybe I do mind.” In the couple of seconds he took his eyes off the road in front of him, he probably saw the flash of pain in her eyes. She wasn’t going to hide it. “What are you doing, Locke? Why the personal question all of a sudden?”

He shrugged one shoulder and flicked his wrist so his watch was straight again. “Just making conversation, getting to know someone I work with better.”

“I was so good I was getting approached by swimwear companies, board shops that franchise all the way to New Jersey. Then, bam, I get hit by a swell and my knee kisses the bottom of the ocean while my leg is twisted...” She shook her head. “There was something down there. I still don’t know if it was an old board or wreckage from something. All I know is the pain was so bad I wanted them to cut my leg off. I’m pretty sure I screamed at everyone on that beach and cried uncontrollably until they all walked away in embarrassment, even my sister. I was so out of it with pain I don’t remember.

“She made sure I knew, though. Told me all about how I screamed in her face to get away from me. I was in the hospital nearly a week, and she didn’t come to see me. Then when I got out, she was gone for days, busy studying. When I did see her, she’d barely talk to me.” Alana took a breath. “We were never the same after that.”

* * *

Locke hardly knew what to say. “She didn’t know it was the pain talking, not you?”

Alana shrugged.

“And now you’re back home?”

“Now I’m back.”

Neither of them said much on the drive to the airport, though Locke made a few calls on the car’s speakerphone. Alana made notes on her phone for him and sent emails to update their team.

In a break of quiet, her phone rang. “Your neighbor?”

“Nope.”

“Your sister?”

“Nope.” She answered it. “Mikio Adachi. How are you?” Alana sent Locke a smile as she spoke. They were a good team.

Secret Service work was a team effort, and not just those standing between the president and whatever lone gunman wanted to kill him this week. Their biggest nightmare was a threat that originated with a group. Multiple points of attack, an IED or some other split-second attack that cared nothing for collateral damage.

It was a dangerous world they lived in, and the Secret Service was in the thick of it. Not like frontline soldiers who were shot at every day, but the threat to their lives was very real. Like a police officer who left for work not knowing if today was the day he might not come home.

“Thanks, Mikio. I’ll find out what the boss wants to do and get back to you.” She hung up. “Okay, so that was interesting. Mikio Adachi was in my graduating class in high school. Everyone knew his dad and his uncle were yakuza. Guess it runs in the family. He said he’s the boss now, just volunteered it up like it’s no big deal.”

“Does he know you’re Secret Service?”

“Yes. Though I don’t know how.” She frowned. “It was like two old friends chatting. I’m not sure why he’d be like that with me. It was a little weird.”

The guy probably thought he had a shot at a relationship with her. Like that would make him more powerful, getting a Secret Service agent in his pocket—and his life. “And the yakuza guy we saw at Beatrice’s house?”

“That was where things went downhill. Mikio said he couldn’t be sure which of his men it was, even though I gave him a pretty good description.” She made a face as Locke pulled into the airport and passed through security.

The staff knew Locke’s face, so he only had to flash his badge ID and up went the gate. He drove around the building. “Once we look at mug shots and identify the guy, we’ll be able to visit this Mikio and get a lot more specific.”

“He did say he hadn’t heard of anything going on regarding the president’s visit. Though he mentioned he had enough problems with his guys. He wasn’t surprised we saw one at a murder scene, but he hasn’t been all that attentive to whispers circling outside his people.”

“So if there is a plot, this guy hasn’t heard about it.”

“I can talk to him again, find out if there’s anyone else on this island worth talking to.”

Locke parked beside their other vehicles and pulled the team in for one last briefing. Alana wasn’t the only woman on Secret Service protection detail, but he knew she didn’t know the other—much older—female agent all that well. He talked them through what had happened and got their reports on every person they had seen. Each pair had emailed him after their visits, but Locke never discounted the personal telling of an experience. He saw things in the inflections and their emotions that he never saw in the body of an email. The two could hardly be compared.

“Okay, you all know where you’re supposed to be.”

Each team member had a position for the president’s arrival. They all hooked up earpieces to their belt radios and checked that communications were working. It was a complicated setup that took all the time from when they arrived at the airport until the plane arrived, and they were each only a piece of the puzzle.

Alana walked beside him as they left the group. “Do you think it’s weird no one else on our team had problems with their visits while we found a dead woman and a missing man?”

“Sure, it’s weird, but whether it means anything is another matter. There’s nothing we can do about it this minute. We run the president’s arrival just like we do everything else. By the book. Stick to what you know. Remember your training, and if something happens, we’ll all deal with it. All of us, together.”

Alana nodded.

“When you get a minute later on, call Officer Morton. Find out if the cops discovered what that call in Beatrice’s history relates to. Maybe they’ll know whose number it is, because I certainly don’t believe she’s answering an ad for work at a gun shop like Brian Wells. It’s a solid link between them, and the police have the jurisdiction to look it up. If we prove there’s a link, then it’ll help us when they find Brian Wells.”

“Okay, I can do that.” She looked relieved, probably because he hadn’t asked her to call Ray.

“And don’t worry. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

They walked toward the tarmac as the plane came into view. The sleek lines of Air Force One gleamed in the setting sun as the plane’s brakes engaged and the president’s aircraft descended to the tarmac. It was a textbook landing, the arrival of the president signaling Locke’s team’s switch from preparation to action as they aided in guarding POTUS on his vacation.

Locke prayed as the plane slowed to a stop. For the whole trip, for all the personnel, for his team. He prayed for their investigation into Beatrice’s murder, and for the missing marine—that he wasn’t hurt or planning to hurt anyone.

Locke keyed his radio. “Air Force One is on the ground.”