“Seven live ones. But you had an eighth that you threw out.”
“Because he was dead! KIA!”
“I want to see the details in his file, Penny.”
“He’s dead and I’m tired.”
“Penny….”
Capt. Walker fell silent for a moment.
“Penny, I need it. I need you to get it for me. I’m tired, too. I’m pissed off. You’re only twenty minutes away and I have to find this guy. Please!”
“Okay, okay. You still carrying your Treo?”
“Yes.”
“Then sit tight.”
“About how long?”
“Roarke, you just got me out of bed at home. You do remember where that bed is.” There was a seductive edge to her comment. Then she got sharper. “And it’s not in the Pentagon! I’ll e-mail you with anything I can find. Hometown, parents, who he took to the prom. Whatever I can dig up. Now leave me alone!”
Walker hung up, and Roarke turned to Davis. “We’re on.”
“How soon?” he asked. “And where to?”
“Dunno. She’ll let us know where.” The bigger question was who? Would she find anyone who might be able to lead them to a dead soldier?
By the time they returned the car to the airport drop-off, it was too late to get a plane out. The last of the night’s outgoing flights to the Washington or Baltimore area left at 10:40. Roarke and Davis opted for two rooms at the Marriott, located on the property a few minutes away. Roarke sent Shannon to bed, warning him to be ready to roll at 0500. Once in his room, Roarke ordered a club sandwich from room service and waited.
Sixty minutes passed. Roarke was tempted to call Walker at her office, but he resisted. Don’t bug her. At 0030, an hour later for Capt. Walker in Virginia, the e-mail arrived on his phone. Roarke pushed his half-eaten sandwich to the side and read the full file. There wasn’t much. He finished it in three minutes. However, another e-mail followed with more…then another. Penny Walker was going much further than he expected.
At 0112, after e-mailing Penny a thank you, Roarke logged onto Orbitz. He booked two tickets to Columbus, Ohio. He called the front desk for a 4:30 wake-up call. The last thing he remembered was willing himself to sleep.
“Rise and shine,” Roarke said over the phone. “We’re out at oh seven fifteen on Delta to Columbus. We get into Cincinnati at 12:01.”
“Got it,” a tired Shannon Davis replied. Roarke heard a big yawn. “And then?”
“I’ll fill you in on the way. You ready?”
“Yup. Your guy’s still dead, right?”
“We’ll find out.”
Chapter 54
Roarke spoke from memory just above the din of the jet engines. His notes were in his attaché case. Davis leaned into him and sipped a virgin Bloody Mary. Roarke was in mid-thought.
“High school in Cincinnati. College in Chicago. ROTC. Then a distinguished service record. Army Rangers. He was sent to Iraq. While on a patrol, his squad was lured into an apartment building. They thought they were freeing hostages. It was a trap. Once they were inside, terrorists remotely detonated a bomb. Everyone was lost.”
“Jesus.” Davis remembered reading about the deadly attack. “So he’s dead.”
“On paper,” Roarke observed. “We’re going to talk to his parents about his life.”
They drove up a beautiful, tree-lined street in the Cincinnati suburb of West Chester Township, roughly twenty miles from downtown. West Chester was emerging as one of the fastest-growing and most desirable communities in the U.S. The homes ranged in value from under $200,000 to a half-million and up.
“Just ahead,” Davis said, acting as navigator in their latest rental car, ironically, a blue Kia sedan.
They rolled up to a custom-built, three-story brick and wood colonial on Hidden Oaks Road. “Nice digs,” Roarke observed. He wrapped up a half-eaten club sandwich and took the last swig of to-go coffee.
“You bet.” The house definitely appeared to be on the high-end of the homes in the area.
The lawn was immaculate, with seasonal flowers outlining a walkway through the quarter-acre front lawn. The entrance, faced with warm white shale, welcomed the two unannounced visitors. “This place takes real money to keep up,” Davis concluded.
But another feeling came to Roarke. “I have a strange sense of déjà vu,” Roarke volunteered as they got out of the car.
“Meaning?”
“That I feel his touch here.”
“How so?” asked Davis, coming around the car.
“Hard to describe.” Roarke continued to stare at the striking home. “It’s not the house that’s similar, not at all. It’s the feeling. It reminds me when I visited a woman in Massachusetts last year. Her place was simple. She was the mother of Teddy Lodge’s high school girlfriend. She died in a hit-and-run accident. The killer wasn’t found.” Roarke stopped and completed the thought directly to Davis. “Imagine that.”
“The work of your infamous Mr. Depp?” Davis asked.
“Not impossible.”
“Well, then, let’s meet Bill and Gloria Cooper and see what happens to that feeling.”
The humidity hit them halfway to the house. But both men couldn’t take their jackets off. Visible guns, even holstered, were not a good way to say hello.
Roarke rang the doorbell. “Coming,” they heard from inside. A beautiful inlaid wooden door opened a few moments later.
“Hello,” said a rather formal, almost stiff woman. She looked to be in her early seventies.
“Mrs. Cooper?” Roarke asked.
She sized up the visitors and didn’t like what she saw. “Yes,” she said coldly.
“My name is Scott Roarke.” He turned to Davis to do the rest of the introductions, which deftly spared him from actually saying where he worked.
“And I’m Shannon Davis, from the Federal Bureau of Investigations.” He produced his ID.
This reinforced her instant dislike. She barred the door.
“Mrs. Cooper, we’d like to talk to you.”
“Why?”
Davis looked behind him and down the street, a move which suggested the conversation really should move inside. “It’s about your son.”
“Considering you’re from the government, Mr. Davis, you know full well he died years ago in Iraq. There’s nothing more to talk about.” Her voice cracked. Tears were just behind her bitterness.
“Yes, we know that. We’d just like to learn more about him, what he was like as a boy, what his aspirations were.”
“Why?”
They knew this question would come, and they had rehearsed the answer. Davis continued to take the lead.
“Leadership characteristics, Mrs. Cooper. He had such special talent, from football to theater. And he gave his life for his country.”
“You took his life.”
“We know what happened, Mrs. Cooper. We’d like to talk about it,” Roarke tendered.
After a long thought, where Davis was certain she would close the door on them, she finally stepped aside. “Come in, I’ll get my husband.”
Michael O’Connell walked into his editor’s office, dumped his backpack on the floor, and parked a rolling Travelpro suitcase against Andrea Weaver’s wall.
The city desk editor looked up and smiled. “I don’t suppose you have a story yet?”
He’d called two hours earlier from customs. He didn’t get into anything at that time. “No.”
“Any chance you’ll be coming up with one soon?” Weaver asked quite seriously.
“Not unless you’d be interested in a one-word story.”
“What do you mean?”