Paul returned my greeting from the living room, where I found him reading the latest Robert Parker crime novel. He’d propped his stocking feet up on an ottoman and aimed them at a fire that flickered in the fireplace, more for ambience than for warmth. He closed the book and let it drop from his fingers to the carpet, then patted the arm of his chair, inviting me to join him. “Successful day?”
I crossed the room, kicking off my shoes as I went. I perched on the chair next to him, kissed the top of his head. “You won’t believe it when I tell you.”
“Try me.”
“Chris Donovan tells me that Jennifer was blackmailing the admiral. She’d discovered some gross irregularities in the contracts coming out of his office and she was using that information to get money out of him. But then, he discovered-how, I don’t know, Chris didn’t say-that Jennifer Goodall is, or was, gay, so there went Jennifer’s leverage.”
Paul’s eyebrows shot up. “Gay? Now that’s a surprise.”
“I got it straight from Chris Donovan, and she had no reason to lie about it. At one time she and Jennifer were lovers.”
“I never would have guessed, not with the way she came on to me.” Paul captured my hand in both of his and squeezed it reassuringly. “I wasn’t the only faculty member she singled out for special attention, of course.”
“That’s because you’re so devilishly handsome,” I quipped. After a moment of silence, I added, “Of course, it’s perfectly possible that Jennifer swung both ways.”
An equal opportunity sexual predator, I thought maliciously.
“We need to call Murray.” Paul reached for the portable phone sitting on the end table.
I took the receiver from his hand. “No need, he already knows. Chris said he’d interviewed her about it.”
Paul’s eyes narrowed. “Funny he didn’t mention it.”
“My thoughts exactly,” I said. “But then I ran into Special Agent Crisp at the Metro.”
Paul turned in the chair to face me. “Ran into? As in ‘What a coincidence seeing you here, Special Agent Crisp?’”
He had such a goofy grin on his face that I had to laugh. “More like, ‘Agent Crisp, we can’t go on meeting this way.’” Skipping the part about my embarrassing karate demonstration, I forged on. “That phantom Taurus we’ve been seeing lately? I think it’s for real. The FBI has been keeping tabs on me, it seems, and Crisp wanted to rap my knuckles for messing about in her investigation.”
“If you won’t listen to me, Hannah, and you won’t listen to your lawyer, I don’t know why she thinks you’ll listen to the FBI.”
“But Paul, that’s just it! It’s not my case she’s afraid I’m messing with. The FBI is part of some multiagency sting operation that’s focused on Admiral Hart.”
“Damn!”
“And it gets better. In warning me off, Crisp practically admitted that she doesn’t think I had anything to do with Jennifer Goodall’s murder.”
“Now we definitely call Murray.”
I handed him the phone. “You dial,” I said.
We got Murray out of the bath. After Paul had passed on what I’d told him about the sting operation, he handed the phone to me. “Agent Crisp is right, Hannah, you need to stay out of it. Let me and my staff do the work.”
I asked Murray why he hadn’t told us about his interview with Chris Donovan, but he brushed me off with a simple, “I’m interviewing dozens of people, Hannah. When I know what’s important and what’s not, then I tell you. That’s what you pay me for.”
On the other end of the phone, I heard water running and realized that Murray must still be in the tub. No wonder he was being crabby. “And leave the government watchdogs alone,” he was saying. “It could very well turn out that Hart’s activities are directly related to whomever killed Jennifer Goodall. If so, the last thing we need is for you to stick your nose in and blow the case they’re carefully building against him. Let the feds do their job.”
I scowled into the phone. “If we leave it to the feds, Murray, I might never have my name cleared. Bureaucracies move with the speed of a glacier.”
But as I handed the phone back to Paul, I had to admit there was logic in what he was telling me, so I decided that like B’rer Fox, I’d lay low.
Sunday night I slept more soundly than I had in weeks. Paul awoke early. While he puttered quietly around our bedroom dressing for his Monday morning class and humming off-tune, I lay absolutely still, with my eyes closed, thinking how much I loved him.
After he left, I fell into an uneasy sleep. I dreamed I was riding on a merry-go-round with Agents Crisp and Taylor seated on the horses just behind. Next to me, Paul rode a swan-up and down, up and down-turning to grin at me from time to time as he leaned out, hand extended, to snag one ring, then two, then three. Ted Hart was there, too. Framed by lightbulbs that flashed in sequence like a Times Square marquee, the admiral stood at the carousel’s center, dazzling in his dress whites, one hand on the stick, pushing it forward, laughing, as we revolved. I looked around, calling frantically, “Dorothy, Dorothy,” knowing she must be there, but not seeing her anywhere. Faster and faster we whirled, until the scenery became a blur. Faster still, with Hart pushing on the stick, laughing maniacally, until I spun off my horse and went flying, flying over the bumper cars, over the Ferris wheel… and awoke, heart racing and out of breath.
I lay in bed with the covers up to my chin, quietly fuming. I certainly didn’t need Sigmund Freud to tell me the meaning of that.
Even after two cups of coffee I was still steaming. Something about the database search I had begun the previous day at the Arlington Library was nagging at me. I trotted down to the basement and powered up the computer.
I was back at Defenselink, engrossed in a complicated Boolean search strategy, when a voice from the top of the stairs called, “Hannah?”
I got up from my chair and stuck my head around the door frame. Emma Kirby stood there, neat, fresh-faced, and cheerful, each crease in her black uniform pants and long-sleeve shirt perfectly aligned.
“Emma! Come on down.”
She clumped down the stairs, her black shoes so well-polished that they flashed even in the subdued lighting of my basement hallway. She was carrying a small bag that I recognized. It contained her dirty laundry. “Sorry to bother you, Hannah. I rang and rang but nobody answered, so I just let myself in. I put the key back.”
“Thanks, Emma.” All my midshipmen knew where we kept the spare house key, in a secret compartment in a fairly convincing plastic rock that I’d tucked into the flower bed to the left of our front stoop.
Emma dropped her laundry bag in the hallway, then made a pit stop at the basement refrigerator, where she helped herself to a Diet Coke. “I just came over to see how you were doing,” she called over the pfssssst of the tab being popped.
“I’m fine, more or less. Thanks.”
Emma wandered into my office, swigging from the soda as she came. She leaned over my shoulder and studied the monitor. “Government contracts. Ugh! I thought I’d find you relaxing. Reading or watching TV or something.”
“I’m still trying to recover from last week,” I told her.
Emma plopped down on a tufted bean bag chair that had once been in our daughter Emily’s room. “Nobody believes you killed Lieutenant Goodall, Hannah. Nobody!” She split the word into two syllables-No Body-and I had to smile.
“That’s reassuring, Emma, my dear, but I may be a very old woman before the FBI calls to tell me they’ve made a terrible mistake.” I pointed at the computer. “That’s what I’m working on here. I’m looking for people other than me who might have wanted to make Jennifer disappear permanently.”
“But why government contracts?” Emma wanted to know.
“My husband and I talked to a former mid, one of his students, who used to know Jennifer.” I was purposely vague, not wanting to mention Kevin’s father. “This guy told us that before Goodall came to the Academy, she was working at the Pentagon in an office that handles big Navy contracts. I’m probably just spinning my wheels,” I continued, “but I thought if I could connect the particular office she worked in with contracts-particularly large ones-that were awarded disproportionately to one company over another-”