An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) (24 page)

“That’s right.”

“So why didn’t Major Anderson tell you about his therapy sessions?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Maybe he didn’t tell you because therapy evolved into something much more intimate.”

“There’s no proof of that,” she said.

“How would you feel if it could be proved?”

Betrayed and furious
. She stared down at her hands. “I loved my husband very much. We’d been through a lot.”

Okamoto tossed the legal pad onto the desk. A sheet of paper, probably belonging to Major Sims, blew to the floor behind the desk. An ink pen rolled to the edge and stopped.

“Captain Anderson, I’ve seen you on television under the heat of media pressure. I’ve read your name in the paper a dozen times or more...” He stopped. She felt her eyebrows lift as she prepared for a question. She knew where this was going. What was a nice girl like her doing in the Marines? If she had a dime for every time she’d been asked, she could have paid off the balance on her student loans. “Never mind,” he said, and rose from the chair. He walked behind hers to the other side of the desk. “Thank you for coming in today.”

She stood. “You’re welcome.”

She was turning to leave when he stopped her. “Captain,” he said, and put his hand out to shake hers. Chase pressed her hand into his. “I have a nephew over there.”

“Marine?” she asked.

He nodded. “Infantry. Nineteen years old.” He released her hand and leaned against Major Sims’s desk. “His mother—my sister—is worried sick.” He cleared his throat. “We all are.” With his arms out to his sides, both palms resting on the edge of the desk, she read the signal that he was open for reassurance. There was none she could give him. What she’d learned over there about instincts, timing, and luck wouldn’t help Okamoto calm his sister’s fears about her son. She was turning for the door when he added, “Captain Anderson … I’m not your enemy.”

She and Colonel Figueredo walked stoically out of Military Police headquarters. Once in the car, he pressed for details. “I don’t feel like talking, sir,” she said. To her surprise, he dropped it. Instead, he pulled into the parking lot of her office building and waited silently for her to unbuckle her seatbelt.

“Chase,” he said, when she was halfway out of the car, “you have to talk to someone, trust
someone
.”

She’d once trusted Stone. Now she trusted no one but Sergeant North. She felt her eyes stinging with emotion. “I loved my husband, and I’ve just learned in the past forty-eight hours that he was probably having an affair with his therapist.” Chase was choking with emotion. “And after my husband, this woman went after Kitty’s. What kind of therapist does this?”

“Look at me,” he said, and she obliged. “Your husband did not have an affair with Melanie Appleton. And Melanie didn’t sleep with Tony White, either. I told you
that
a week ago.”

“But how do you know this?”

“I just know it, Chase. There are some things about my job I can’t talk about.”

“Please don’t tell me that I don’t have a need to know. Anything that involves Stone, I have a need to know.”

He’d been leaning on the console as if to signal his alliance, but now he straightened and stiffened behind the wheel in a gesture that said, conversation over.

She startled him by climbing back in the Beemer. “I’m not leaving this car until you tell me what you know about Stone and how you know it.”

At first, she thought he might explode. He was, after all, senior to her, and she was over the line in subordination. What did she care at this point? For a while today, she’d actually been considered a suspect in the murder of her husband’s lover, for crying out loud. At least Shapiro had come to her aid.

Figueredo did finally respond. He leaned across Chase’s lap and opened the passenger door. “Out of my car, Skipper,” he said, and half-smiled. “And that’s an order.”

She was about to defy him, and started reaching for the door again, when he said, “Some things are better left unsaid. You’ll just have to trust me on this one.”

She let out a heavy sigh as she climbed out. “More secrets,” she said, “more fucking secrets.” She slammed the car door and stormed down the sidewalk.

In the office lobby, several young Marines from her staff had gathered to chat during an afternoon talk break. They scattered like field mice when she entered. Chase ignored them as she sprinted up the stairs. She and North collided as he was exiting her office. Both uttered apologies.

“I thought you’d already be at the hangar for practice,” she said, and hoped it hadn’t sounded as terse as it did in her head.

“On my way right now, ma’am,” he said, following behind her. “I was just putting phone messages on your desk.”

Chase tossed her hat into a chair and walked around her desk. She opened the top drawer, found her wedding band where she’d left it among the paper clips, and was about to slip it onto her finger when she changed her mind, tossing it back into the drawer. North was standing in the doorway. “Anything here pressing?” she asked.

“Just one. A real fruit loop wants us to stop flying every afternoon because he’s working third shift.”

“You’re kidding.” She read North’s message, found the man’s name: Jimmie Arnold.

“He’s called twice and says he won’t quit unless you call him back.”

It was 1445, and she and North were already due at the hangar for participation in the Marine Corps Ball Anniversary Ceremony. She sighed. “I’ll meet you at the hangar in fifteen.” North disappeared down the hallway. She could hear the others in the pressroom, could make out the faint tapping of computer keyboards. Instead of music, those in the pressroom wrote their feature articles for the next edition of the base newspaper to the background cacophony of CNN headline news.

She dialed the telephone number. On the fourth ring, a man, breathless, answered with “Arnold.”

“This is Captain Anderson of Marine Corps Base …”

“Skipper, you sure don’t make it easy for a guy like me to reach you.”

For a second, she was stirred with indignation. How dare this fruitcake who believed the Marine Corps should cease all flying operations so he could sleep in the middle of the day call her
Skipper
. But there was something about his voice that gave him a right to be so familiar. She knew the voice. Her mind began stretching and collapsing to place voice with name and face. Then, “No …” she whispered. “It can’t be …”

There was a light chuckle from the other end.

“
You’re
Jimmie Arnold?”

“As in … distant relative to Benedict?” he said. “That’s what they’ll call me, you know.”

“So …
you’re
the one who’s been calling Paul …”

“Careful … watch what you say.”

“But how?” Her mind was leaping through the logic of what this meant. She couldn’t find her voice. “I thought … we all thought you were …”

“What … crazy?”

Major O'Donnell, who everyone believed under psychiatric care of Navy doctors at the base hospital for two weeks, was Paul Shapiro’s mystery source. Chase was still trying to grasp this as she sat in her office with the telephone pressed to her ear. His breathing had become more controlled.

“Where are you?” she asked. “You sound as if you’ve been running.”

“I’ve been at this payphone … waiting for you to call. I had just stepped away, about to give up on you again, when the phone rang.”

Maybe it was because she was late to the Marine Corps Ball practice and was nervously picturing North making excuses for her with Hickman that kept her mind from thinking as clearly as she would have liked. One thing was resonating, however. Major O'Donnell wasn’t in the psyche ward of the base hospital without good reason.

“When were you released?”

“I haven’t been, Chase,” he said. “That’s why I’m at a payphone.”

“I see … at the hospital …”

“I can’t say exactly … except I’m on the base.”

She couldn’t dismiss how good it was to hear his voice. She’d always liked Major O'Donnell, had always respected him for his quiet confidence. Those early months during terse meetings with Hickman, when it seemed she could do nothing to win him to her side, she’d found O'Donnell loitering in the hallway, waiting for her, always with an excuse for whisking her into his office two doors away so that she could compose herself after a lashing half the building had heard. O'Donnell was just like that. Not just with her because they’d worked together in the Middle East, but with all of Hickman’s staff officers.

“Sir, please tell me what’s going on.”

“You have to help us stall the reporter from the
Honolulu Current
, Chase.” The tone of desperation reminded her that she was talking to a man who was suffering from some sort of mental malady.

“What is it you think I can do, Major?”

“He’s about to mess up everything. Listen, you’ll know what to do and who to contact when the time’s right.” Sure she would, she thought. She was almost tempted to slam the phone into the cradle.

“Chase, I’m not crazy … despite what you’ve heard, I didn’t try to kill myself. I signed
myself
into the hospital, with a little help from Dr. Appleton.”

There was a tap on her door. Cruise was pointing to her watch. Chase nodded. “Major …”

“Careful …” he interrupted, “I’m Jimmie Arnold, remember?”

“May I call you back? I’m late for an appointment.”

Cruise smiled and entered the office, gathering Chase’s hat and purse from the chair in the corner and handing them to over to Chase in an effort to rush her boss out the door.

Chase was about to hang up on Major O'Donnell when he blurted, “Tell Colonel Fig I called, Chase. Make Joe Figueredo tell you everything.”

Chase slumped back in her chair. “Sir?”

But he was gone.

CHAPTER 15

C
hase stepped up to the microphone. When she spoke, her voice boomed through the nearly empty aircraft hangar, but she continued, reading from a script she’d read so many times at so many Marine Corps Ball practices and ceremonies in years past that she was able to look up often from the page. North was off to her left, talking to two Marines whom she could guess by the disparity of their ages granted them the ceremonial roles as the oldest and youngest Marines. North would be explaining how the two were to be paraded before everyone, behind the enormous cake that would be wheeled down an aisle lined with Marine officers at attention with swords. Of course the older Marine, a sergeant major, would have attended dozens of these by now, but this one probably his first as oldest, and he stood with his arms crossed against his chest, glancing from the hangar floor then back to the baby-faced Marine who was leaning toward North to catch every word.

In front of her, two lines of Marine officers who had been plucked for ceremonial duty stood at attention with their swords. Today they were dressed in cammies—although it would be dress blues for the actual event—but in cammies they reminded her of the tree-lined drive that led to her parents’ home in Virginia.

Funny, how the mind was capable of simultaneous thoughts and tasks. She could hear her voice broadcasting throughout the hangar, yet her mind had drifted to childhood and whether it might snow in Virginia this Christmas, then back to the telephone call just minutes earlier with Major O'Donnell.
Ask Joe Figueredo
, he’d said. There was a lot she’d like to ask him, beginning with what he knew about White and Melanie Appleton….

Two Marine figures, backlit with sunlight streaming into the hangar’s wide doorway, were entering ghostlike. There was no mistaking the taller Marine. She knew of no one on the base taller than Major Sims, and as he walked, he hunched a little forward and sideways to better hear the man to his side. A few feet closer and she recognized that Sims was walking beside and replying with head nods and short answers to General Hickman. When Hickman stopped walking, Sims did, as well. She realized Hickman had stopped to listen. She was, thankfully, nearing the end of the fifteen-minute script. She tried to dismiss Hickman’s aggressive hands-on-hips stance. Sims kept crossing and uncrossing his arms.

Over her right shoulder, she sensed the movement from the musicians. They too knew she was nearing the end. When she finished and stepped back from the microphone, the band blasted the hangar with military music that was to precede the playing of the Marine Hymn. She walked over to where North was standing, having sent on the detail of Marines who were pretending to escort a cake—they were wheeling in a box on a cart—down the middle of the two lines of Marine officers in their cammies and swords. Following close behind the fake cake were the oldest and youngest Marines who were then handed a pretend plate of cake that they pretended to taste as the ceremonial first bite, and then they were led off with the cart to a designated location that had been marked on the hangar deck with blue masking tape in the shape of an
x
.

Marines love their traditions. Despite’s Stone grumbling over the tightness of the neck collar on his dress blues, he would have stood as proudly as any other on this night. She’d always loved to see him in blues, loved it so much she’d asked for a military wedding, just so he would have to wear his blues and not a meaningless tuxedo. But there had been something primordial, too, about a military wedding. The walking under an archway of crossed swords between two rows of sharply dressed men the way brides of warriors had done for centuries, then the sword whack on her behind, courtesy of the last Marine she passed under the archway, and though she’d known to expect a whack on her behind, in all the pomp and circumstance, in the anticipation of greeting friends and parents, she’d forgotten about what was to come, and so had gasped when she was paddled in front of everyone. The roar of the crowd caused her to laugh. There had been Stone’s huge laughter. A photograph in their wedding album captures her gaping mouth and her wide eyes filled with embarrassment.

Remembering Hickman and Sims, she glanced to where the two had stopped. They were now approaching her. Hickman’s jaw appeared firm. The look of complacency on Sims’ face caused heat to rush into her face. She forced a smile as Hickman closed in.