Kill and Run (A Thorny Rose Mystery Book 1) (17 page)

The oxygen that the EMTs gave Jessica revived strength to her body. As her breathing improved, so did her mind.

Now that the immediate crisis was over, she was embarrassed. Here she was, touting herself as a licensed private investigator and, when she gets into her first shootout, she froze … then passed out.

What a newbie!
She was no help to Murphy in solving his first official murder case or Cameron in finding out who had arranged Nick’s murder. Since Emily Dolan was now dead, so was their best lead to finding out the reason behind all these murders and learning who was behind it all.

Removing the oxygen mask, she reached over to turn off the tank.

“Did they say you could turn that off?” Cameron stepped over from where she had been talking to the deputy chief of Murphy’s staff and agents Susan Archer and Perry Latimore. She was carrying a blue t-shirt with POLICE emblazoned on the back. “Here.” She handed the shirt to Jessica and stepped into the back of the ambulance. “That coffee should be good and cold by now.”

Jessica looked down to notice that the front of her silk blouse was covered with the two lattes that went flying when Murphy charged in.

Cameron’s tone softened when she asked her, “Are you feeling better?”

“Are you talking physically or emotionally?” Jessica said with a pout. She took the offered shirt.

“Physically.” Cameron eased the rear door of the ambulance shut to allow Jessica privacy to change into the t-shirt. “We’re trying to find a killer who is responsible for the murder of eight people—that we know of. I love you, Jessica, but your feelings really aren’t at the top of my list. If you need a hug, I’ll go get Murphy. If you have a lead, then I’m here for you.”

“In other words, get a grip and suck it up.” Jessica pulled the blouse off over her head.

“Those are the words.”

“Did you know those men in fatigues were phonies?” Jessica said through the fabric of the t-shirt while pulling it on over her head.

“No,” Cameron said with a shake of her head. “But the guy in the suit sitting up toward the counter didn’t strike me as belonging.” She pushed open the rear door of the ambulance and climbed out.

Finger combing her hair, which had been messed during the wardrobe change, Jessica recalled, “Murphy said something about their shoes being dull.”

“They didn’t shine when they walked under the lamp post,” Murphy announced while coming around the side of the door. He held out his hand to help Jessica climb out of the ambulance.

“What does that have to do—”

“You make fun of how hard I work to make my boots and shoes shine,” Murphy grinned. “And you laugh when I say it’s regulation. But it’s true. When you’re in uniform, your shoes and boots, even combat boots, have to shine, unless you’re in a combat situation. When those two shooters walked under the lamppost and I saw that their boots were scuffed and dull, I knew.”

“I’ll never make fun of you shining your shoes again.” Jessica held onto him as if she never wanted to let him go. Fighting back tears, she murmured into his ear. “This is the second time you’ve saved my life. I just wish I could have been more help to you in there.”

“We’re working on identifying all of the assailants,” Boris stepped over to tell them. “Plus, all may not be lost. Since we were here on the scene and Emily Dolan was a material witness in the Baxter case, then we’ve got the lead in this case. Not only did you save Dolan’s laptop, but the accomplice missed her cell phone. The employees confirmed that Dolan was on that laptop all the time. So if she had anything, it will be there. I’ll get Latimore to take a look at it.”

“Speaking of Latimore,” Murphy said, “I told him to cover Dolan.” Seeing Perry Latimore coming into view, he turned to him. “You were right there. I called both you and Archer when I saw the shooters going in.”

“There were two already in there,” Perry said. “How were we supposed to—”

“Men walking into a coffee shop carrying weapons and we know that a possible target is in there,” Murphy said. “You should be ready and expect anything. Didn’t they teach you that at Quantico?”

“Yes, but maybe they didn’t teach it as well as they did at your Naval Academy,” Perry replied. “You pinned them as hit men before any of us did. You could have taken out the main shooter before he killed our witness, but instead, you saved your debutant wife and left the rest up to us.”

Murphy stepped forward to find Jessica’s hand on his chest.

“Stand down, Latimore!” Boris ordered. “That was out of line.”

“When did Thornton become our boss?” Perry asked Boris. Seeing no response, he turned to Susan whose face was void of emotion. “He’s the navy liaison. He’s the go between for NCIS and the military. Now that he’s Patterson’s golden boy and has decided he wants to play detective, we have to play along, but when he screws up and people get killed, we take the blame for it.”

“Why didn’t you cover Dolan?” Susan asked. “You were right there. The shooter had his back to you. You could have taken him down before he fired the shot.”

“So could you,” Perry said.

“I was following Thornton’s orders to cover the civilians.”

Stepping into Perry’s face, Murphy said, “During the firefight, when I asked where you were and you answered, you were behind me. If you had done as I had ordered, you would have immediately moved up toward the counter, which would have put you in front of all of us—close enough to take out the shooter as soon as he pulled his weapon.”

Perry backed away from his gaze. “I don’t take orders from you.” He turned to walk away, only to find Boris Hamilton’s hand on his arm.

“But you do from me,” Boris said. “I’ll be expecting a full report from you tomorrow.”

Perry’s lips curled. “You’ll get it.” He cast a glance back in Murphy’s direction. “And so will Chief Koch.”

Gritting his teeth, Murphy turned around. With his back to his team, he took a deep cleansing breath. It took all of his restraint to keep from punching the side of the ambulance with his fist.

Jessica grasped his arm in both of her hands. “None of this was your fault,” she said in a low voice.

Murphy’s eyes met hers. In spite of her words of encouragement, she saw guilt permeating from him.

“Excuse me, Thornton.” Susan had stepped away from the group to confide in a low voice, “Sorry about Latimore. He is my partner, but you should know, when the chips are down—it’s every man for himself in Latimore’s book.”

“I think I just found that out,” Murphy said.

“But you can count on me to have your back,” she said.

Boris clasped his hand on Murphy’s shoulder. “And me.”

“Thanks,” Murphy said.

“Okay, so where do we go from here?” Jessica asked. “Is it just a coincidence that Emily Dolan writes an anti-military blog and that the men who walked into the café to gun her down in front of customers were dressed in military uniforms?”

“The military did not do this,” Murphy said.

“I’m not saying that they did,” Jessica said, “but to the average customer, witness, who saw this go down, that’s what it looks like. Think about it. All over the Internet, Emily Dolan has been promising a big breaking story exposing a military conspiracy on her blog. Her sources were all murdered. And then, before she can reveal her story, four armed soldiers wearing military fatigues walk in and gun her down.”

“I have a feeling this is one military conspiracy story that’s not going to go away soon,” Boris said.

Looking around the edges of the parking lot, they saw that the media was already out in full force. On the other side of the crime scene tape, Murphy spotted the long white limousine. Bernie was strolling toward them. Excusing himself, Murphy broke away from his team to meet the bodyguard where the crime scene tape was stretched across the length of the parking lot.

“Does she want to see me?”

“No, Lieutenant,” Bernie said.
“They
want to see you for a debriefing. Nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Seventh floor. She wants a report about what happened here ASAP so that she can brief the Joint Chiefs before your meeting. Wear your service dress whites.”

Without another word, Bernie turned around and strode back to the limousine. Murphy watched him climb into the driver’s seat, start the car, and pull away.

With no sign or clue from his commanding officer, Murphy could only guess what the Joint Chiefs of Staff had planned for him on the top floor of the Pentagon the next morning.

Chapter Sixteen

“They certainly don’t blame you for what happened,” Jessica told Murphy.

He didn’t seem to hear her. Saying nothing, he stared up at the ceiling over their bed with his hands folded behind his head.

Any other night, she would have been aroused by the sight of his firm chest and toned stomach. She found it hard to resist stroking his chest with her fingertips, working her way down his stomach.

This night, she was more concerned with how quiet he had been since talking to the mountain of a man after the shooting. The only information she had been able to extract from Murphy was that he was being ordered to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the seventh floor for a debriefing first thing in the morning.

That was not good. Not good at all.

Murphy had been so distracted that he didn’t even notice that Tristan and Izzy had spent the evening pigging out on pizza and chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream while watching a
Scream
marathon with all of the critters, except for Monique, surrounding them. The tarantula preferred making people scream on her own.

As soon as they dragged themselves home, Murphy went straight up to their room and closed the door to write an incident report on the special secured laptop the Joint Chiefs had given him for his Phantom operations. After completing it, he sent it via their secured network to his commanding officer.

After responding to Izzy’s questions with vague answers, claiming that it was an open investigation, Jessica hurried upstairs to find Murphy already in bed.

Usually, the newlyweds slept in the nude, but with so many house guests, they had both opted to wear some clothes in case a situation called for them to be needed in a hurry. Murphy had slipped on a pair of sweat pants while Jessica wore panties under an oversized William and Mary t-shirt.

“They can’t blame you.” Slipping up against him to rest her head on his shoulder, Jessica wrapped her arms around him.
“You
didn’t go into the coffee bar and shoot it up.”

“They need a scapegoat,” Murphy said. “As soon as Emily Dolan’s name is released, then conspiracy theorists are going to point to the military. The media is bound to find out that the shooters were dressed in fatigues. Questions will be asked and Latimore will spin things around like he did tonight. I put saving my wife ahead of the lives of others, including an important material witness to a mass murder.”

“He’s jealous of you. Everyone can see that.” She looked up at him. “Why else did he bring up the academy and me?”

Murphy swallowed.

Laying her head down on his chest, she listened to the beating of his heart. “I should have listened to you. I never should have gone in there.”

“I should have handcuffed you to the bed,” Murphy agreed.

“I don’t understand how I froze,” she said. “I’ve taken gun classes and Dad sent me through a battery of self-defense classes when I was in school—”

“None of that prepares you for the real thing,” Murphy said. “Civilians and the media have no idea what happens—physically, emotionally—when real bullets start flying and someone is hell bent on killing you. That’s why they send me out at night for training—simulating real situations. In the past couple of years, I’ve been shot at hundreds of times. I’ve had knifes thrown at me. I’ve even been snatched off the street when I wasn’t expecting it and thrown off a bridge—all by members of my own team.”

“Talk about a tough job,” Jessica said. “They threw you off a bridge?”

“All to physically—and most importantly mentally—prepare me for when the real thing happens. So that when I do get into those types of situations, my reactions will be second nature.”

“Everything happened so fast,” Jessica said. “It was impossible for me to process. I kept thinking I should know—”

“But then you stepped up to bat to cover me while I went after their accomplice,” Murphy said. “You just needed time to get over the initial shock.”

“Then I fainted like a girl.”

“You are a girl,” he said with a chuckle.

“Cameron didn’t.”

“Cameron has a lot of experience under her belt,” he said.

“I want experience under my belt,” she said. “I don’t like being a wimp.”

“You’re not a wimp, Buttercup. Basically, what you need to do is learn how to press your bitch button.”

She lifted her head to look up at him. He was grinning down at her. “My bitch button?”

“Everyone has one.”

Looking him up and down, she arched an eyebrow. “You have a bitch button?”

“I have a bastard button,” Murphy said. “You have a bitch button.”

“No—”

“I’ve seen you when someone pressed it,” he said with a grin. “It can be quite effective when activated.”

“When have you seen my bitch button activated?”

“In the middle of the night when you beat the daylights out of me,” Murphy answered with a chuckle.

“That was an accident,” she said with a whine. “I was sound asleep.”

“You gave me a black eye on our honeymoon,” Murphy said. “So I know for a fact that you know how to throw a punch. You just need to wake up the bitch buried deep inside you … the one who seems to only come out at night.”

Still embarrassed by the recent events of their honeymoon and the discovery that she was a sleep “fighter,” Jessica covered her face, which had turned bright pink, with both hands while Murphy continued laughing at her nighttime antics.

More than once since their marriage, Jessica woke up to find bruises on Murphy’s arms, legs, or back. Three days into their marriage, Murphy woke up yelling. His nose was bleeding and he had a black eye—both resulted from a single punch swung by his new bride. Two nights after that, he landed on the floor after she had pressed both of her feet to his back and kicked him out of the bed. Some nights he would wake up to her knee making a forceful contact with his groin.

One night, he woke Jessica up while she was twisting his hand so hard that he thought she was going to break his wrist. She had such a grip on his hand that he had to pinch a pressure point on her arm to make her release him.

So far, the only source to which they had been able to trace her violent actions during the night was a recurring nightmare during which she was surrounded by menacing figures wearing black robes and white masks.

“Let’s not release my inner bitch.” Sparks came to Jessica’s violet eyes.

“See?” he laughed. “You just pressed it again. You need to condition yourself to the point that when you get into a life and death situation that you can move beyond the shock, which is what paralyzes most people, to press your bitch button, which puts you on the offense.”

“Why not defense?”

“You want to be on the offense when it comes to survival,” Murphy said. “When I press my bastard button, all niceties, all manners go out the window. When it comes to life and death, there are no rules.
They
don’t play by any rules, so neither do I. You shouldn’t either.” He wrapped his arms around her. “Then, when it is all over, you can go back to being my sweet Buttercup.”

He kissed her. Resting her head on his shoulder, she gazed up at him while brushing her fingertips across his bare chest. “Seeing you in action tonight, I hope I never press your bastard button.”

Thinking of his meeting the next morning, she said for a third time, “They can’t blame you for them killing Emily Dolan.”

“I’m a Phantom, Jessie,” Murphy said. “No one is more highly trained than I am. Phantoms receive the most specialized training available—even SEALS and Black Ops. I was best equipped to save Dolan, who was our only lead in this case and the only possible lead that Cameron had in finding out who ordered Nick’s murder …” He sucked in a deep breath. “I could have saved her, but chose instead to push that responsibility onto someone else in order to save you myself. That was a mistake. I screwed up.”

Together, they stared up at the ceiling in silence.

Jessica could anticipate his reaction before the words came from her mouth, but she was desperate to help him. “Maybe I could call Natalie—”

Murphy sprung up off the pillows. “Admiral Patterson’s wife! No!”

“Sure, the whole idea of it not being ‘who you know’ but ‘what you know’ is ideal,” Jessica argued, “but the fact is, it
is
who you know that matters. Natalie and I have become friends. Why, just yesterday, we spent a few hours here drinking a couple of pitchers of margaritas—”

In his exhausted state, overwhelmed with all the information he had thrown at him during the day, Murphy had to shake his head. “Admiral Patterson’s wife? Nata—margaritas? What are you talking about?”

“Her and Paige Graham showed up asking me to go to lunch with them,” Jessica said. “They were going to the marina for lunch and Natalie knew I lived right here, so they stopped by. But we ended up not going.”

“Why not?” Curious about where this conversation was taking them, Murphy laid back down on his side beside her.

Seeing that she was succeeding in taking his mind off the next morning’s meeting, Jessica rolled over onto her side to face him. “After meeting Paige Graham, the last thing I wanted to do was spend an hour or so down at the marina with that snooty bitch. Luckily, she remembered a meeting with some council and left.”

“Who is Paige Graham?”

“Sebastian Graham’s wife?
General
Graham.” she replied. “Don’t tell me that with everything going on that you have forgotten about General Sebastian Graham and the President nominating him to fill General Johnston’s slot as Chief of Staff of the United States Army.”

Murphy sighed. Conversation with her had relaxed him enough that he allowed himself to stroke her bare thigh with his fingertips. “What did she do that got her on your bad side?”

“It wasn’t so much what she did as it was her complete attitude,” she said. “Yes, I know she’s in charge of the Army Officers’ Spouses Club, but she seems to think that makes her queen of everything. The only reason she’s their leader is because her husband is General Graham and General Johnston’s wife doesn’t participate.” On a roll, she giggled. “She so reminds me of girls I knew in high school who attached their self-worth directly to their boyfriends’ status.”

“I thought that went away,” Murphy said.

“We would like to think so, but it hasn’t totally,” Jessica said. “Think about it. Paige Graham is really into this club and being chair on all these charity boards—all because her husband is a big war hero and on the fast track to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He
makes her Queen Bee. I bet you she would flip out if the current army’s chief of staff, General Johnston’s wife, decided to start being active in the club.”

“She’s too busy doing heart transplants at Johns Hopkins,” Murphy said. “Some of these officers’ wives take the club very seriously.”

“Did your mother?”

Murphy stretched out his hand and shook it in a gesture of somewhat. “It’s true that it isn’t just the husband, or the wife, who joins the military. It’s the whole family. These groups weren’t intended to be social clubs with high school hierarchy attached to them.”

“It’s impossible to get a bunch of women together without that happening,” Jessica said.

“I think it depends on the women,” Murphy said. “They’re meant to offer a support system to each other.”

“How involved was your mother in the navy officers’ wives club?” Jessica asked. “Did she attach her worth to your father’s rank?”

“No, she attached her self-worth to her children’s grades,” he replied with a laugh. “There were five of us. She would be involved, but really, not as involved as it sounds like Paige Graham is.”

“Maybe because the Grahams don’t have any kids,” Jessica said. “And she doesn’t have her own career separate from her husband.”

“Don’t some women consider their family to be their careers?” Murphy asked. “Mom’s whole life revolved around Dad and us kids.”

“Did your mom go to Yale on an academic scholarship?”

“My mother’s folks owned a roadside diner out toward Kitty Hawk,” he said with a laugh. “She waited tables all through high school. She was on her way to a glamourous career of being a short order cook when Dad stopped in for breakfast on his way to the Outer Banks with some friends. He had been at the naval academy only a few weeks.” With a grin, he cocked his head at her. “Dad says it was love at first sight. They dated long distance while he attended the academy. The day after he graduated, they got married. J.J. and I were born ten months later.”

She brushed her fingers across his bare chest. “Sounds familiar—except for the twins coming along ten months later.”

“Guess it runs in the family.” He brought her hand to his lips and softly kissed her palm.

Her eyebrows furrowed and she narrowed her violet eyes while peering at him.

“What?” he asked.

“Why would someone like Paige Graham work so hard to get an academic scholarship to Yale University, graduate, and then settle for being an officer’s wife?”

“Most military people don’t live in the same area very long,” Murphy said. “Maybe they’ve had to move so often because of his career that she isn’t settled in any one spot long enough to develop a professional career. So she gave up. We moved four times before I was sixteen. Nowadays, most military wives who want a career do it on the Internet because that’s the only way they can.”

“I know,” she said with a tired sigh. “I have a suspicious mind.”

“We both have suspicious minds.” He rolled over onto his back. “It helps with what we do. What are you suspicious about?”

He didn’t need to say anything else to encourage her. She stretched out onto her stomach next to him. Folding her arms on his chest, she gazed into his face while telling him about how the two officer wives, both leaders of their respective officer spouse clubs, had arrived unannounced and unexpectantly. After getting the evil eye from Paige Graham for her less than modest attire, Jessica offered them a pitcher of margaritas for a quick cocktail and conversation with the intention of begging off lunch and sending them on their way.

“That was when the conversation got interesting,” Jessica said.