As Winter went through the story detail by detail, the young ensign scribbled notes. Although Winter had just been trying to keep Sean alive, he had wanted nothing worse than to escape the killers. Killing the men in black had been necessary. He didn't tell Reed this. Instead, he told him how he had hidden Sean in the storage cabinet, climbed up onto the girders in the radio shack from the ruined console, dropped down and broken the assailant's neck, then taken his clothes. He didn't mention the fact that the man under the tarp had called him by name. Neither of those facts was relevant to Reed's investigation.
Reed turned to his assistant. “You get all that?”
“Yes, sir.” The SP closed the notebook and slipped it into his breast pocket.
“Best get you two back over to the house,” Reed said, smiling for the first time. “Sounds to me like you've earned yourself a rest, Massey.”
Winter knew that Reed's smile, which looked genuine, was designed to make Winter confident that Reed was giving up on pumping him further, which was crap. The officer was going to keep right on trying to slip around the classified wall Winter was standing behind. For Reed, and men like him, the ability to classify information was the sole providence of the armed forces.
Winter figured the contest between them, as long as it was allowed to continue, would be an entertaining one. And anything that took his mind off the gruesome event was welcome.
“One more thing,” Reed said, like it was an afterthought. “I'd like for you to take a good look at your attackers without their masks. In case you do know who they are.”
“I'd be happy to,” Winter replied.
“You, too,” Reed added, nodding at Sean.
The two killers' corpses, along with the radio operator's, were laid out under the awning of the radio shack, covered by opaque plastic sheets. Sean stood beside Reed, across the three bodies from Winter, shivering under the blanket.
When Reed motioned, the sheet was pulled off the first one. Sean looked away. The body belonged to the man whose neck Winter had broken in the radio shack. He was naked-how Winter had left him-and his hands were at his sides. His head was cocked so that it appeared he was looking at something high over his left shoulder. “No,” Winter said.
“Have you ever seen this man before, Ms. Devlin? Could you look at his face?”
Sean glanced down momentarily and shook her head.
The technician replaced the sheet, moved to the second corpse, and lifted the covering away.
Sean shut her eyes, took a deep breath, and shook her head. “No.”
Winter studied the man he had shot point-blank with the MP5 as Sean had lain on the ground beneath him. The muzzle blast had scored and burned the skin around the entrance wounds in the upper rear quadrant of his skull. The hydrostatic pressure had caused the eye to bulge from its socket. Where the three-shot burst of 9-mm bullets had exited, the now one-eyed head looked like a poorly scraped out jack-o'-lantern. The missing brain matter and bone fragments had been placed inside a plastic bag, which rested beside the corpse's neck.
“Him?” Reed asked, staring at Winter.
“No.”
Winter felt for Sean. For most, violence was something that happened to unlucky people in some place made fictional by being on their television screens. Winter had never envied that virginal ignorance more than now.
“According to where your empty brass was, you shot the one at the house from a good thirty feet away,” Reed told Winter.
“About that,” Winter agreed.
“All three in the head. Quite a shot, considering you just saw your partner go down.”
“Your point being?” Winter asked.
“Under those conditions, most people would have been lucky to have hit the guy with a shotgun, that's all. You went for the head, not the torso.”
“He was wearing armor.” Winter could not explain how he was able to put his bullets exactly where he wanted them to go. It was an ability that he had discovered while training at Glynco. He didn't know how he did it, he was just glad he could.
“The men have no identification on them. Their weapons aren't available outside our Special Forces.”
“Maybe they got them from wherever they got that Navy chopper they flew here in. They look like soldiers to me.”
“This stinks,” Reed said. “You outwit and kill four men with superior weapons, obviously professionals, without breaking a sweat-”
“Hey!” Sean yelled, startling the men, who turned to her. Color rose in her cheeks. “I have nothing to add to what Deputy Massey has already said, and I am getting sick of watching you men bump chests.” She pointed a finger at Reed. “Unless you have some new torture to subject me to, I am going to walk back to the house, take a hot shower, and change into some dry clothes.”
And with that she whirled and strode off toward the trees.
“She's not accustomed to this,” Winter said, watching her go.
“Neither am I,” Reed said sourly.
Winter followed Sean.
“Marshal!” Reed called out. “I need that suit you're wearing. It's evidence.”
Winter caught up with Sean. “God in heaven,” she muttered.
Winter couldn't think of anything to say, so they walked to the safe house together in silence.
37
Winter stood for ten minutes in the shower and let the hot water pound him. Then he cut the heat and stood in a chilled stream. Reed and his partner had already opened Winter's drawers and searched everything before he and Sean had reentered the house. The only thing he had come to the assignment with that he cared about taking out again was his life.
He dressed and went to the kitchen, where Reed was seated at the table reading what appeared to be the preliminary report of the SEAL commander. The younger shore patrolman was standing at the counter reading through his notebook.
“Feel better?” Reed asked, without looking up.
“Much,” Winter said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
“The men didn't come in on that helicopter. Appears it was for their escape.”
“Sorry?”
“We found three chutes near the radio shack, so three of them parachuted in. According to a trace I ran, that chopper was turned into a spare-parts donor due to questionable airworthiness.”
“Obviously the record is wrong.”
“A King Air passed by at twenty-five thousand feet,” Reed told him. “The trio jumped from it and sailed four miles using membranes, wings stretched between their ankles and wrists.”
“HALO jumpers.”
“The helicopter probably came in below radar after the radio shack was knocked out. The drop plane is in the Caribbean at the moment, on auto pilot. F14s are flying alongside waiting for it to run dry.
“Massey, we both know those assailants were here because of whatever you people were doing here. You and Martinez, Ms. Devlin, or maybe one of the people who left earlier was their main target.”
Winter sipped the coffee and grimaced remembering it was stale. “In your place, I would contact Attorney General Katlin to get the information I can't give you without his authorization. You have the guys' fingerprints. The NCIS can find out who they were in a few hours. I can't tell you anything that would be of any help.”
“Won't tell me.”
“Won't because I can't. I can't tell the NCIS, either, without the AG's permission.”
“This was a WITSEC operation.”
“If you say so.”
“There's six dead kids whose families are going to ask who killed them, why, and what we're doing about it.”
“I understand.”
“Why did Jet Washington leave this morning?”
“Her cat died,” Sean said from the doorway.
Sean's eyes met Winter's, and he tried to communicate that she had said the wrong thing. It was a small thing, a throwaway piece of information, but it was from before Martinez was shot and opened a line of questioning.