“Okay, I trust your gut. What happened next?”
“I went to the marina where I keep my boat. On the way I stopped for breakfast-drive-through fast food-but didn’t see or talk to anyone other than the kid in the window. At the marina I said hello to the marina owner. He made a phone call immediately afterward, but Axel checked that, and the call was to his wife. Nothing there.”
“Unless his wife is some kind of master spy and you saw something you shouldn’t have seen at the marina.”
She expected him to laugh again, but he said, “I checked out the marina, sure, like I always do. Everything looked normal. There weren’t any piece-of-shit boats with an expensive antenna array, no unusual license plates, and Brawley-the marina operator-has been there since before I started renting a boat slip. He doesn’t click for me.”
She blew out a breath, trying to get her head around the mindset and level of alertness required to check out a familiar place every single time he went there. It was mind-boggling. After a few seconds she gave up and shook it off. “Does anything click?”
“Not really. Next up: I saw a congresswoman and her husband on the river in their boat, went over to say hello. I know them both-not well, but their son was kidnapped and we got him back alive, so I’d say they’re both kindly disposed toward me.”
“I don’t remember anything in the news about a kidnapping involving a member of Congress,” she said as she took a pair of baking potatoes out of the microwave. Yes, it was heresy to zap potatoes instead of baking them, but so what; she was going for speed.
“It wasn’t in the news. The whole episode was kept dark.”
“Was anyone else on the boat with them?”
“Not that I saw.”
She had put pork chops in the slow cooker that morning; she got a platter and dished out the chops. “If you don’t know them well, how did you recognize their boat?”
“I didn’t. I recognized her hair. It was Joan Kingsley.”
“Oh,” Bo said, thinking hard. A face flashed into mind. “I know who she is! White hair. She’s big time.”
“Yep. She’s on the House Armed Services Committee.”
“Do you think she’s behind this whole thing?”
“In my experience, politicians are to blame for almost everything, so that’s what I default to. Her husband is a D.C. lawyer, which is almost as bad because in that town they’re all in bed with each other. But even with that tilt, I can’t make it work.” He took the salad to the table, then got the plates and silverware.
“You know what Sherlock Holmes said: eliminate the impossible, and what’s left is the truth no matter how improbable. Paraphrasing, of course.”
“All of it’s improbable. Every possible suspect.”
“Except for the one who isn’t. Okay, how far from the congresswoman’s boat were you when you spotted her? Did you know it was her?”
“Not for certain, but that hair’s distinctive. I was about a hundred yards away, give or take. Their boat was anchored in a fairly open stretch of water, though it was a long way down the river toward the bay.” He paused, thinking. “Where the boat was positioned, no one could come up to them from any direction without being seen from some distance away. That’s good safety strategy.”
They took the food to the table, sat down, and began serving themselves. Bo ate quietly for a minute, thinking about what he’d already told her but also taking the time to savor the fork-tenderness of the pork chop. God bless the inventor of the slow cooker, was all she could say.
“Would she need to be so safety conscious?” she asked, when their immediate hunger had been satisfied.
“She isn’t the speaker, but she’s important in D.C. Plus her son had been kidnapped, could have been killed. I’d say the answer is yes.”
“So the position of the boat wasn’t suspicious?”
“No. If I’d anchored, I’d have done the same.”
“What did you see as you drove toward her?”
“She was standing at the railing, waving. Her husband was on the deck with her, but he went below.”
She put her fork down, tilted her head at him. “How do you know it was her husband, if you weren’t close enough to know for certain it was her?”
Morgan paused, thinking, his gaze absent as he looked into the past. “I didn’t, not from that distance, but he was wearing a blue shirt and when he came back on deck he was still wearing it-Fuck!”
“What?” Bo asked, so startled by his verbal explosion that she dropped her fork; it hit the plate with a clatter. She grabbed for the fork to keep it from bouncing to the floor.
“He was buttoning the shirt when he came back up.” Morgan’s tone was grim, as rough as ground glass. “Over a white tee shirt. But I didn’t see any white when he went below.”
“What’s wrong with-Oh. I see. Why was he buttoning it if he’d already had it on?”
“Exactly.” He sat silently, mentally tearing the details apart. “The man who went below deck had gray hair, as far as I could tell. Dexter Kingsley’s hair isn’t gray. I couldn’t swear to that, because the angle of the sun can mess with hair color, but… yeah.” This was resonating with him, the way something did when you knew instinctively it was right.
“Then there was someone on the boat they didn’t want you to see. She’s a politician, so I have to say that isn’t completely unexpected. What happened then?”
“I pulled up close to their boat, shut mine down. We chatted. She asked me to come aboard for a drink.”
“Well, that doesn’t make sense. Why would she ask you to come aboard if she didn’t want you to see who was on the boat with them?”
He flashed her a look that chilled her; his eyes were blue ice, his jaw so hard she knew his teeth were clenched. “To kill me,” he said flatly. “Even though they pulled a switch, they couldn’t be sure I’d bought it. If I’d been someone else, maybe, but she didn’t know who was coming toward them until I got my boat closer. I work in counterterrorism, I’m supposed to notice every detail, but I missed that one. They couldn’t know that, though, so they had to take care of me.”
This time she didn’t drop her fork; she put it down carefully, all appetite gone. She’d thought dragging out every detail for examination might help, but she’d kind of hoped it wouldn’t. Now she had to deal with the fallout; everything would change fast, and whatever happened, she had to focus on how this would help Morgan. Her emotions were secondary, and something she would simply have to handle, though it was hard to get around the reality that someone had so coldly planned to kill him.
“But couldn’t you have already reported it? What good would killing you do?”
“Reported suspicious behavior, yes, but she knew that I couldn’t have recognized the other man any sooner than she recognized me-not as soon, actually. I was driving a boat, concentrating on where I was going and what I was doing; traffic on the river was heavy that day, with a lot of boats crisscrossing. Besides, thinking something is suspicious isn’t the same as knowing something bad is going down.”
“But you didn’t know,” Bo insisted. “Even if you’d reported something suspicious and questions were asked, all they had to do was deny anyone else was onboard. There was no proof.”
“My best guess? Because of what I do, even if I hadn’t seen the other man well enough to recognize him, I have the resources to do some digging. There are cameras everywhere in the D.C. area, plus a lot of places have private security cameras; they wouldn’t be sure they were completely under the radar. If they showed up anywhere on camera with the other guy, Axel could likely find it if he simply knew the direction to start looking.”