Dallas grinned. The Marines’ appetites for food were every bit as ravenous as their appetites for action. “I think we’ll be okay.”
The galley was brightly lit, the chairs covered in navy blue fabric, the tables bearing the
O’Halloran
’s official seal, and it was filled with uniformed personnel lined up for their meal. Having eaten in his share of messes, Dallas took the controlled chaos in stride, although he was uncomfortable, and could sense Juls felt the same way, when the ensign insisted on moving them to the front of the line.
The galley tables were filled with sailors, most of whom seemed to have segregated themselves into groups by shirt color. Which, Dallas decided, made sense, given that, since they all had the same job, they’d have something in common to talk about.
Most looked impossibly young, earnest, and hungry. None looked like a murderer.
Then again, as his encounter with Mr. Not Taliban and that reporter’s camera had driven home, looks could be deceiving.
40
The CDO’s quarters were larger than that of the two female pilots, but a great deal smaller than the captain’s suite. There was one desk that was home to a laptop, two hard-backed chairs, and two bunks attached to the wall, one above the other.
“I guess he doesn’t have anything to hide,” Julianne decided after their ensign shadow had finally left them alone. At the moment, he was stationed outside the door, waiting for instructions on whom to fetch. “Or he wouldn’t have let us in by ourselves.”
“Or he could’ve set us up to land here,” Dallas said. “Maybe he’s got the place bugged.”
“Like the lodge at MCBH.” Julianne still shivered when she thought of her privacy being so breached.
“Officers get to lock their hatches, right?” Dallas asked.
“Right,” she agreed.
“And he said he’s been alone for the past three weeks.”
“That doesn’t mean he was using his quarters to shack up. Especially since Murphy was a lot more than two weeks along. Plus, it wouldn’t make any sense to kill her here. You’ve seen how crowded this boat is. Not to mention those cameras you pointed out. No way could he get away with carrying a body down two decks.”
“Good point. So for now we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and move on. Since you’re more accustomed to questioning witnesses, who do you want to start with?”
“Whoever loaded her bombs. We need to shoot down as many rumors as we can, and if her having written on her ordance isn’t true, we can probably take the Muslim community off our suspect list.”
“If you’re going to check out the rumors, we should probably get hold of whatever computer Lieutenant Murphy was using to e-mail her husband. See if there’s any mention of an impending divorce.”
“You’re back to him orchestrating her death all the way from Iraq?”
“Like I told the captain, I just want to cover all the bases. Because, more often than not, it’s what you miss that can get you killed.”
Julianne had been taking her laptop out of her bag. But his words, spoken so calmly, stopped her cold.
“Are you suggesting we’re in danger?”
“We’ve got one staged suicide. A commander who blew his brains out right after we’d talked with him about it. And yet another guy who was one of the last persons, if not the last, to see the dead pilot alive, falling overboard in the middle of the night, when his shift was over and he should’ve been in his rack. But instead, despite a recently discovered fear of heights, he decided to take a stroll on the flight deck during a storm?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t ring true. Which, connecting the dots, means that whoever is getting rid of people is still on this boat. And we’re undoubtedly not his or her favorite people at the moment.
“So, yeah, I’d say we could well be targets.”
A frisson of unwelcome fear at that idea shivered up Julianne’s spine. Even as she resolutely refused to acknowledge it, although it was entirely inappropriate, he skimmed the back of his knuckles down her cheek. “But here’s the deal, Juls. There’s no way in hell I’m going to let anything happen to you.”
“Ah.” She nodded. “I knew it was too good to last.”
“What?”
“Your treating me as an equal. Don’t look now, O’Halloran, but the caveman Spec Ops Neanderthal just showed up again.”
“It’s not chauvinistic to recognize your strengths. And weaknesses. I’ve spent the past years in places no one in their right mind would go. While you’ve been riding a desk.”
She welcomed the annoyance. The quick, hot flame of it burned off her earlier fear.
“Well, in case you’ve been too busy flexing your manly muscles, you may note that we’re behind a desk now. Which puts us on my territory.”
“Point taken.” His jaw, which had been stiff and jutted forward far enough to land one of those F-18s on, softened. Just a bit. “The deal is, we’re teammates. Which means we watch each other’s sixes.”
Although the various branches of the military didn’t always use the same terminology, this—meaning “watch your back”—both had in common.
“And believe me, darlin’, watching yours is becoming my favorite thing to do,” he tacked on.
“I give up.” Julianne threw up her hands. “You’re impossible to argue with.”
“That’s only because I’m an agreeable kind of guy.”
As the dimples flashed, she thought of what he’d told her about the years of learning to charm his way into a new family, like an abandoned pound mutt, and the last of her annoyance faded.
“We’d better get to work,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Despite the seriousness of their situation, his snappy salute had her smiling.
After working their way through the medical officers Roberts had sent them and learning nothing other than what they’d already figured out—that gossip traveled at the speed of sound around the carrier—they instructed the ensign to contact whoever was in charge of the ordnance guys.
Within three minutes a red-shirted sailor, who didn’t look old enough to have a driver’s license, let alone be loading bombs onto planes, entered the small room.
After a brief introduction about who they were and why they’d been sent on board, Julianne got down to business.
“How was Lieutenant Murphy to work with?”
“She was okay.” The sailor shrugged. “She got hot under the collar if she thought preps were taking too long. And she definitely didn’t like being waved off. But she didn’t swagger and act like her shit don’t stink. Like a lot of the pilots do. And she actually made a point of learning people’s real names.”
“Real names?” Dallas asked.
“Aboard ship people tend to get called by their jobs. Like the chief engineer is called ChEng. The boatswain’s mate is Boats. The chief, is well, Chief. The chaplain’s usually Padre, even if he isn’t a Catholic. Though this tour he is.” He shrugged again. “Like that.”
“Did you witness the altercation with LSO Manning?”
“Sure. She was hotter than a hornet. For a minute I thought she was going to slug the guy.”
“But she didn’t.”
“LT Murphy was a good pilot. A smart pilot. Even with her temper, she wasn’t dumb enough to do that. At least, not with an entire deck filled with witnesses.”
“I heard that sometimes pilots write something on their bombs,” Dallas said.
Leading a witness, Julianne thought, even as she remained silent.
“Some do. Sometimes.” This time the shrug was verbal. But his eyes shifted nervously toward the hatch, as if he were wishing he could escape to anywhere but here.
“Did the LT ever write anything?” Julianne followed up.
There was a long silence. “Is this gonna go in her record? Because, like I said, she was always good to the shirts. Gave us respect, you know.”
“I understand. Which is why, if there’s anything you know that might help us find her killer, she’d want you to share it with us.”
“So she really didn’t off herself?”
He didn’t sound nearly as surprised as the captain had been.
“You don’t sound all that surprised,” Dallas observed, echoing Julianne’s thoughts.
“There’s been some scuttlebutt.” He paused. “It’s kinda weird, thinking that we’ve spent all these months supposedly fighting the bad guys, when one might be on board with us. Eating with us. In the shower.” He shook his head. “Creeps me out.”
“You’re not alone there, sailor,” Dallas assured him. “So, getting back to the LT sending a message.”
“Her brother was killed. In Iraq. By an IED.”
“So we learned,” Julianne said. “I come from a military family. I have two brothers in the military. One’s currently on the
Nimitz
. The other’s in Afghanistan. Even understanding the risk, if anything happened to either of them, I’d be devastated. And mad as hell.”
The personal information seemed to relax the red shirt. Slightly.
“I don’t really blame her,” he said. “But yeah. She wrote something on one of the bombs about a week before that last flight.”
Both Dallas and Julianne waited.
“ ‘Take that, you fucking ragheads. Courtesy of Uncle Sam.’ ”
Julianne and Dallas exchanged another look. It was the same thing Lieutenant Harley Ford had told them.
“Did you tell anyone about that?” she asked.
“Hell, no. Ma’am,” he said. “It’s not my job to pass stuff like that along. The day a pilot can’t trust me is the day we’re both in a world of hurt.”
“But the word got around?” Dallas coaxed.
“Only because she was talking about doing it beforehand. And bragged about it afterward. Especially after she took out a building where some bad guys were supposed to be hanging out.”
His lips, badly chapped from his spending so many days out in the sun on the flight deck, curved. “Since the aviators spend a lot of their time acting as air support, they don’t always get to drop that much ordnance. So she was really stoked about it.”
Once again, it wasn’t pretty. But Julianne could empathize.
“Is there anything else you can think of that might aid our investigation?” she asked.
“No. Maybe if the LSO hadn’t gone overboard, you could’ve talked to him. Because they definitely had some serious vibes going on.”
“Good vibes?” Dallas asked with far more casualness than Julianne suspected he was feeling.
“Nah. She hated the guy’s guts. Even before he waved her off. Which . . .”
He slammed his mouth shut.
“You were about to say?” Julianne asked.
“Look, she might have been a female, which a lot of guys, especially the old-timers belowdecks, don’t think belong flying fighters, but she was, from what I could tell—and I’ve seen a lot of cat shots and traps—one of the best pilots on the boat. But that last night, she was just, well, off.
“So, whatever people are saying about them having some sort of lovers’ spat, or him being against women, maybe those things are true. But, the way I see it, he was right to wave her off. Because if she crashed, a lot of us on deck could’ve been toast. And if there was a fire . . . Well, shit. I might not be an officer, or the smartest bomb in the box, but even I know that a pilot’s ego is never worth risking that.”
“Well.” Julianne blew out a breath. “Thank you. We appreciate your cooperation.”
“It’s not like I had a choice,” he pointed out.
Then his face turned hard, and in it Julianne saw the warrior who, although obviously too young to legally buy liquor back home, had been given the responsibility of massive tons of weapons that could, if mishandled, blow the boat to kingdom come. “But if it helps you catch whatever son of a bitch offed the LT, then it was worth it.”
“Well,” Dallas said after the red shirt had left the quarters. “Seems we’ve got a bit of a difference of opinion. Lieutenant Ford said, and I quote, ‘Mav was all about Mav.’ Yet according to that young man, she went out of her way to connect with the rest of the crew.”
“It’s not necessarily a discrepancy. My dad always said that if you’re good to the shirts, they’ll be good to you. The more a crew respects and even likes you, the harder they’re going to work.”
“Which makes for more successful cruises. Which, in turn, greases the wheels toward promotions.”
“Exactly.”
“At least we now know the story about her writing on the bomb wasn’t a carrier version of an urban legend.”
“True.” Julianne sighed. Glanced down at her leather-banded watch. “You realize that, unless someone gets racked with guilt and up and confesses within the next few hours, like in those movies you liked to watch with your mom, we’re not going to make our Pearl deadline.”
“Probably not. But since there’s no way we’re going to be able to conduct interviews when all those civilians are boarding tomorrow, if you don’t get your Perry Mason confession moment, we may as well take advantage of the opportunity to do what a lot of other sailors probably do on shore leave.”
“Get drunk?”
“Actually, although it’s going to cost me my rep for smooth talking, I was going to come right out and suggest we skip past the luau I was hoping for and just get a room.”
“Well, that was, indeed, blunt.”
“I like to think of it as being outspoken. Like I said, under normal conditions, I’d love nothing more than to do the wine-and-dine thing—which we could’ve done at the del Coronado if you hadn’t treated me like Jack the Ripper,” he reminded her.
“I’d prefer to take things nice and slow,” he continued. “But we’re up against a clock here, darlin’, and I gotta admit that it’s getting more and more difficult to keep my mind on the mission when all I can think about is getting you naked.”
Julianne felt the telltale color rise in her cheeks. Tamping down a slight regret that she hadn’t been a little more open to his obvious interest at the del Coronado, she decided that it wouldn’t hurt to make him work a little harder before he got what they both knew each wanted.
“I’ll take it under advisement,” she said mildly.