The Final Mission

Tonight was one of those nights. The paperwork was all up to date, the horses had been taken care of, the dogs fed, the dishes done. He didn’t even need to clean, since he’d already washed down the tub and bathroom after bathing the boys.

And maybe the real thing that troubled him was the fear that if he sat down with Courtney he might learn that she had discovered something today, something that supported her theory that Mary had been murdered.

Right now he wasn’t sure he could handle that.

Courtney sat in the living room on the sofa where he’d left her, cup of coffee on the table at her elbow. She appeared wan, he realized, as if she wasn’t any less tired or any more happy about this situation than he was.

That made him uncomfortable, and it took him a minute to realize what was going on: he liked having her here. He liked the distraction, the awareness that he was still a man.

Mentally he swore some words he would never speak in the presence of the boys, and wondered if he was going off his rocker or something.

The only thing that should be concerning him was whether Courtney had found out something.

The words escaped his mouth before he knew they were coming. “Did you find out anything?”

“No.”

“Much more to look at?”

She sighed, and he saw a glimmer of his own grief in her face. “Yes. Unfortunately. If it won’t kill you to have me around another day.”

“Won’t kill me.” Hardly that. Maybe having her around for a few days would make him face up to some stuff it suddenly occurred to him that he’d been avoiding. Stuff like maybe he needed to get on with a life apart from horses and the boys, just like Mary had told him.

Maybe his hermitage was comfortable for him, but judging by the way Kyle and Todd chattered at Courtney, it wasn’t enough for them. Heck, they’d even wanted her to read them a bedtime story, a request he’d nipped upstairs because he wasn’t sure he wanted them to have that intimacy with her. After all, she was moving on.

And maybe he was being terribly unfair to his sons. That caused a shaft of guilt to hit him in the gut. Here he thought he was protecting them and caring for them, when maybe he was cutting them off from things they just naturally needed.

He wouldn’t do that to his horses. Was he doing that to his sons?

Slowly he settled into the easy chair facing her and tried to think of how to deal with all of this. Find a way, any way, into a conversation that might help him, or his kids, or her. Anybody.

“What exactly are you looking for?” he asked her.

“Names. Maybe faces in videos. Somebody had to be close enough to figure out that she’d found something.”

“If she found something.”

“If,” Courtney agreed. “But I can’t think of any other reason she wanted to meet with me. Once she started working for us, we pretty much stayed apart unless we came together in the usual course of things.”

“So you’re not like a secret agent or something.”

“I’m not undercover, no. Not usually. And I knew Mary for a while before this issue ever came up. No reason to be unnecessarily covert. We’d already established a friendship that a number of people knew about.”

He nodded slowly, taking in the information, trying to imagine how things must have been for Mary. He’d probably always wonder. She never talked much about Iraq, not about the ugly stuff anyway. Like she was protecting him.

“Once,” he said slowly, “I tried to get her to talk about what it was like over there. She told me that when she came home on leave she wanted to recharge, not relive.”

Courtney nodded. “I can hear her saying that. She had a gift, didn’t she, for looking forward.”

“Yup. How did you two meet?”

“Oh, I was at her hospital. There’d been an accusation from someone in supply that medical stuff was disappearing and unaccounted for. And since the Marine Corps, and by extension the navy, supplied the hospital, I was one of the people tasked to look into it.”

“I thought she was at an army hospital.”

“Not exactly. Units from different branches of service share the same bases and use the same facilities a lot. Everybody’s got their own share of the job to do, but redundancy is expensive. Especially in hospitals. So, yes, her Guard unit was stationed there, but the hospital was being shared by everyone, and staffed by everyone. Anyway, when it came time to ask her about procedures and if she was aware of anyone stealing supplies, she gave me both barrels.”

Dom chuckled. “She would do that.”

“She asked me if I was an insurance company, wanting them to account for every roll of gauze, every bandage, every aspirin.”

Another chuckle escaped Dom. He could actually hear Mary speaking those words.

“Anyway,” Courtney continued, “she told us in no uncertain terms that everything was being used in treatment, that sometimes they gave supplies to Iraqi medical people who were desperate, and that if we wanted to know where all that stuff was going, we needed to be there when they brought in the next load of casualties.”

“Were you?”

“Yes. Sadly. And we didn’t have to come back to do it. We were still there investigating when it happened. After what we saw, we went back and reported that nothing was being stolen, everything was being used. And it was, Dom. I don’t know what annoyed that supply guy into making a complaint. All he had to do was leave his office and walk next door to the trauma center. The place was chaos, medical supplies were being used and discarded in huge quantities just to stabilize the patients. I don’t know.”

Her smoky blue gaze grew distant. “Maybe it griped him that they were treating civilians, too. If there were a lot of casualties, after they took care of their own patients, they’d grab supplies and head out to nearby Iraqi hospitals to help. It was humanitarian work, and we put in our report that in this instance they needed to call off the bean counters. Winning hearts and minds. That was part of the mission. And Mary was … well, Mary was a pure humanitarian.”

“Sometimes,” Dom said, hating to even admit it, “I’m glad she won’t have to live with those memories.”

“You should be glad,” Courtney said. “If there’s one blessing in any of this, it’s that she won’t have to live with that past. As good as she was, as kind as she was, she’d still have to live with the nightmare. I didn’t see nearly as much of it as she did, and I still have nightmares.”

He fixed his attention on her, realizing that she wasn’t just some cop who had known Mary, a cop trying to do a job he wasn’t yet sure he wanted her to do. In her own way, she was a vet, too. And she was a vet on a mission, whether he liked it or not. He had to respect that.

Damned if he didn’t feel she needed some time to wind down. Coming out here like this had been a desperate act, he realized. Not knowing how she would be received, risking her career if it became known what she was doing, all because she couldn’t let a desert ghost rest.

And that desert ghost had been his wife.

He sighed, struggling again against a torrent of emotions he’d tried to put in some isolated part of his heart simply because he had to get on with things, had to take care of two boys, couldn’t afford to give in or give up.

She was stirring all that up because she couldn’t lock it away as he had.

“You got any family?” he asked.

“Just my mother. We get together once or twice a year.”

Maybe that explained a lot, especially about her job, which was driving her into a dangerous place. Not necessarily physically. He couldn’t see any reason she should be in physical danger … unless those folks who’d been telling her to drop it might feel she was a threat.

For an instant his heart almost stopped. Had it occurred to her that whoever had killed Mary might come after her, too, if she seemed like a threat?

But then he dismissed the thought. She surely must have considered the possibility, and she’d said she was out here without telling anyone. No reason anyone should care where she took her vacation.

And whatever had happened had happened two years ago, just another atrocity among thousands and thousands of atrocities caused by war. However much dust and dirt she kicked up, she was up against powers she couldn’t fight solo. What did seem likely to him was that she would merely put her own neck in a career noose and make him a whole lot less comfortable with what had happened to Mary.

He’d been through hell since her death but the picture Courtney wanted to paint of what had happened presented a new version of hell. One he didn’t know if he could live with.