A Loaded Question Read online

  “Has there been any evidence that someone has been breaching their networks? Their building?”

  “Not that they have divulged, but there is something going on. Solomon expressed concern that there may very well be someone trying to run a copy code on their servers, as there has been information in the past which has now gotten into the wrong hands. I asked him if anything new had been leaked, and he didn’t believe so.”

  Troy made his way to the kitchen, took out a travel mug and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Which means that it isn’t a hacker issue... At least, I wouldn’t think so. If things are only going missing sporadically, this sounds like a personnel problem or someone from within their IT department—but you and I have talked about this before.”

  “Before the shooting, yes.” Zoey paused. “Which is part of the reason I thought I needed to call and talk to you. I just got a ping on our shooter. I don’t have a confirmed identity, but I worked the known cell phone signals in the area against the buyers and sellers of that make and model of rifle and rounds. Then I went through the information I pulled, and there is a short list of possibilities—three potential suspects. Two are still in the area.”

  “Who is the third?”

  “The third person on our list... Well, that’s the tricky part. I don’t think this person would have had anything to do with this. Not with their clearances.” There was the sound of a pen clicking in the background as Zoey spoke, her nervous tic.

  Whatever name she was about to give him—it was going to be good.

  “I know we are probably at a dead end with this one, but it’s a special agent named Aaron Peahen.”

  Troy spit out his coffee. “You have to be freaking kidding me. It really isn’t funny.”

  “What?” Zoey asked. “I’m not messing with you. Why would you think I was? You know this guy?”

  “Yeah, I saw him last night. You said he was the only one on your list who hasn’t been using the Missoula cell towers, but I know for a fact that he was here at least within the last twelve hours.”

  There was the click of key strikes. “According to what I’m seeing here, he appears to be in Salt Lake City.”

  “When?”

  There was more tapping. “He has been there ever since the shooting. At least according to his SIM card.”

  He shook his head. Peahen was a jerk, but he was still an agent. He’d gone through nine months of background checks before he’d even been able to go to Quantico to train to be an agent. This was not their shooter. He wouldn’t be a trigger puller, not in any sort of situation. He was closer to the kind of person who would be a computer jockey.

  “That probably has something to do with whatever is going on at the FBI.” His thoughts went straight to Kate. There were pieces missing in the puzzle, pieces that revolved around her, but he just couldn’t imagine what exactly locked these things together. “There is no way that Peahen is our guy. He’s an uptight dude who gets his jollies making people say ‘how high’ when he barks out ‘jump.’ Not the type to go haywire with a gun. Send me the info you have on the other two. I’ll get to work.”

  “Will do.” Zoey clicked away. “As for the other guys on my list, they are both current employees of ConFlux.”

  “And you didn’t think that they were more likely to be our shooters than a verified good guy?” Troy scoffed.

  “You and I both know that there is no such thing as good guys and bad guys. We are all human. We all screw up. We all hurt the people around us. We all occasionally make crappy decisions. It’s part of the gig.”

  “Yeah, but two employees of the company we are investigating? These are our bad guys. One of them, at least.”

  “It’s possible, thus why they are on my list. But these two, neither have any sort of record of violence or training with weapons.”

  “But you said that they had access to the right kind of ammunition and rifle. But neither shoots?” Nothing about this rang quite right.

  “One, Chris Michaels, is married to a woman who is a major in the army. She had bought a rifle similar to the one used. There was no serial number on the sniper’s weapon. But we’re having a team go over it to see if it was scratched out. Definitely could have been her gun. You look into it.”

  “On it. I’ll send Mike over to their address. As long as they don’t have an electronic lock gun safe, he should be able to make quick work of it and gain access to their guns and let us know if her new acquisition is missing—if it is, then it’s possible she or her husband is our sniper.” STEALTH operated without search warrants, and he knew his brother could get a look at that gun, if it was there, by staying just one millimeter over the right side of the law. He took a sip of his coffee as he tried to work through all their leads. “But we may be dealing with someone who had the armory skills to fabricate or build their own weapon. It would be what I would do if I was the one up there pulling the trigger, knowing I’d have to leave my weapon behind. I’d need to take a closer look at the weapon, though, and the FBI has it now.”

  He clicked on his email and scrolled until he found Zoey’s latest. He opened it up. There were three images of the photos of each of their possible suspects and three PDF files with all applicable background information. First, he opened the photo of Peahen, likely the one that was from the Bureau, and his badge. The second, Chris Michaels, looked like a man who could hold his own in a bar, Jack Reacher style.

  “And what about this third guy? Sal Baker?” The man staring back at him from his cell phone was in his midthirties, fit, and professional looking with a black pin-striped suit.

  “The possibility of him being involved in this is all low, but he is worth checking out.” Zoey paused, probably pulling something up as she talked to him. “From what I have, his nose is clean. No history of anything remarkable. Just a typical nine-to-fiver.”

  “With a penchant for high-powered sniper rifles?” he asked.

  His phone beeped with another call. Glancing down, he saw a restricted number pop up on his screen. “I got to go. I’ll let you know what I find.”

  “Roger that,” Zoey said, hanging up without another word.

  He liked that about her; she definitely didn’t waste a whole lot of time when it came to chitchat.

  “Hello?” he asked, pressing on the other call.

  “Come to your door.” Kate sounded strange, rigid.

  He walked out of his bedroom. The place was a mess, with clothes hanging over the back of a chair and work shoes pitched exactly where people had taken them off and flopped down in their chairs.

  As he walked toward the door, the ranch dog, Chuck, bounded out from the back bedroom. “Oh hey, buddy.” He gave the chocolate Lab a scratch behind the ear and was answered with a quick nibble of the fingers and a lick. “I see how it is, you snot. You don’t care about getting up with me in the morning, but as soon as a hot woman shows up at the door, you’re racing to go.”

  Chuck answered with a lolling tongue and a wag of the tail as he trotted to the door. There was a tap on the door and the dog started to prance from one foot to the other as he worked out excited circles.

  “Yep, all you care about is the chicks.” Troy laughed as he made the dog move back so he could open the door. “It’s okay, bud. I feel exactly the same way.”

  Kate was standing on the front porch, her back to the door as if only moments before she hadn’t knocked to remind him that she was still there. Was she as nervous to be here as he was to see her?

  “I would ask how you found me, but I think I know,” he said.

  She turned around and he expected to see her smiling at him, or even maybe mad, but he didn’t expect what he saw... Kate had been crying. Her eyes were red and bloodshot, and she looked like she hadn’t slept since the last time he had seen her.

  “What in the hell is going on? Are you okay?” His words came out in a rush.


  She nodded. “I’m fine.” Her voice was raspy and hoarse from what he assumed was a night spent crying. “I got some bad news a couple hours ago.”

  “Babe, what? What happened?”

  “It’s my father...” she said, the words sounding more like sobs than real words.

  He walked over to her and wrapped his arms around her, holding her against his chest. Her body rattled with sobs as she let herself escape into his embrace.

  “What happened?”

  Her words were muffled, but he understood them just as well as if she had shouted them. “Someone...shot him. In his office. They murdered him.”

  Chapter Eleven

  At her mother’s house a little while later, Kate learned her mom had been calling every relative in her phone since she had found out about her husband’s death. She told Kate she wanted to notify as many people as possible and to ask them not to speak to reporters or officials. But Kate knew the real reason for the busywork. It was so her mother could concentrate on a task instead of the pain that they were all feeling.

  Her sister was flying in from Denver on the afternoon flight and would be touching down tonight. She hadn’t taken the news well.

  But then she couldn’t blame her. She had gone to pieces when she learned about her father’s death. She shouldn’t have gone straight over to Troy’s residence, but it was the only thing she could think to do after she had gotten over her initial shock.

  She glanced over at Troy, who was busy making hot tea in the kitchen, complete with a tray of cream, sugar and lemon. She didn’t even know her mother had lemons in the house and yet Troy had somehow found them.

  Troy really was remarkable. He was unexpectedly chivalrous, kind and surprisingly open for a man who declared himself antisocial. If she hadn’t known better or he hadn’t told her, she would have actually thought he almost liked the general public. If she told him that, he would have some kind of snarky rebuttal.

  He made his way out of the kitchen to them carrying the tray of tea and set it on her mother’s marble end table. Her mother barely noticed.

  In the past, her mother had been overly protective of the Carrara marble table specially imported from Italy. It was one of her most prized possessions, and the fact that she didn’t seem to care now that someone put something on it that could potentially mar the gleaming white-and-gray surface was more shocking to Kate than her mother’s sudden manic need to reach out to family.

  “Troy, why don’t you set that over here,” she said, pointing toward the alabaster dining table in the adjoining room.

  He picked up the tea set and followed her out of the living room, like an obedient member of her mother’s household staff.

  “Are you sure she’s going to be okay?” Troy asked, motioning toward her mother.

  In all honesty, she wasn’t sure. Her mother had been through a lot with her breast cancer and forced retirement from the company, but she hadn’t had to face that alone. Everyone in the family had surrounded her with love and understanding. Kate had even made a point of driving her mom to each and every one of her chemo appointments. Her mother had never really thanked her, but she hadn’t expected her to.

  Once her mother’s cancer had gone into remission, Kate had assumed things would go back to normal and she would go back to work for the company, but she had become a woman who luncheoned.

  It was as if her mother had decided after her illness that she was no longer going to devote herself and her life to the family business. She could only imagine how poorly that would have gone with her father had her mother made her intentions clear. Instead of telling him anything, so far as Kate knew, her parents had never addressed her mother’s personality shift. It was as if her father had accepted it as part of the healing process.

  Though he had seemed unaffected by it, when she and her sister had both declined his offer of going to work for ConFlux, he had blown up at both of them. So much so that her sister had stopped coming for Christmas and all major holidays for two years. It wasn’t until she had gotten pregnant that she had finally come back to the family’s fold.

  No doubt, Julie was feeling terrible now, thinking about all the time she had lost with their father because their life plans didn’t align.

  And now who was going to take over the company? Her mother was the largest stockholder after her father’s death. This would put her mother right back into the middle of the company’s affairs.

  “Here, have some tea. You need to focus on staying hydrated,” Troy said.

  It was quite the contradiction, this burly man handing her tea while he uttered the least manly thing he probably could have said.

  The thought made her smile, the first real one all day. That he could bring her cheer, even in a moment like this, had to mean something, didn’t it?

  Her mother finally hung up the phone and walked into the dining room. She was wearing a white Dior suit with a blue Armani shirt beneath. It all complemented her platinum gray hair perfectly and Kate doubted it was by accident.

  Perhaps her mother was already coming to accept that she was going to be a key player in ConFlux and had already started to dress the part.

  “Your aunt Coraline is going to be flying in on Friday. Of course, she’s going to bring her little dog, and if he pees on my floor again, she’s going to have to attend another funeral service,” her mother fumed.

  “Oh my goodness, Mom, don’t say things like that,” Kate said, peering over at Troy to see if he had heard her mother’s rant.

  He was pretending to fuss with the teapot, lifting the lid and peering inside like he wasn’t the one who had made the tea.

  She appreciated his attempt to appear unobtrusive and spatially unaware.

  “You know I was only kidding around. If we don’t joke around about these things, then they tend to get so emotional. The last thing your father would have wanted would have been for us to shut down, get morose and stop working.” Her mother’s voice was high-pitched, almost frantic, as if she were fighting a battle for control, and she waved Kate off, as if she was nothing more than a nuisance. “Right now, the best thing we can do to honor Solomon and his legacy is to push through the heartache.”

  Troy poured her a cup of tea with sugar and lemon and handed it to her. “Here, that should make you feel better.”

  Her mother looked at Troy, seeming to notice his presence for the first time since they had arrived. “Who are you?”

  “Mother, I already introduced you—”

  “It’s fine.” Troy stiffened and stood up tall and straight as he extended his hand. “Mrs. Scot, I’m Troy Spade, a friend of your daughter’s.”

  “A friend?” her mother asked, giving her a sidelong glance to gauge exactly the depth of her and Troy’s friendship as she shook his proffered hand.

  “Yes, Mom, my work colleague. He is helping me on a case and was there when I received the news.” She couldn’t help but fib slightly; if she didn’t, her mother would press for answers she didn’t want to give.

  “I appreciate your helping Katherine during this difficult time.” Her mother flashed her practiced corporate-wife smile. “I need to call the mortuary...and the medical examiner’s office to see when they will release the body. If you’d excuse me,” she said, looking to Troy and giving him an aloof nod before she made her way back to her cell phone in the living room.

  “I’m so sorry about her. She can be insufferable at the best of times, and I swear, when she’s stressed out, it gets a million times worse.”

  “Don’t worry. She just lost her husband to violence. She has a right to be upset, even insufferable.”

  He took her hand and led her out of the dining room and into the kitchen, closing the door behind them. There was the ting of the doorbell and her mother’s voice as more flowers were delivered. This was going to go on all day, this seesaw between incessant a
ction and torturous malaise. Kate needed quiet. She needed to be alone. She needed to process all this. Instead, she was a slave to her mother’s wishes.

  “What happened to your dad?” Troy asked. “I want to help you get through this. I do. But I have to understand what exactly is going on before I can. What have you learned?”

  Just the thought of what had happened to her father made a cold sweat rise on her skin. He didn’t deserve to die the way he had, and though she knew she needed to tell Troy what had happened, she couldn’t find the words. He’d let her remain silent on the ride here, not asking questions. She hadn’t been able to manage a word or she would have sobbed uncontrollably. She barely had a grip.

  “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.” Troy wrapped his arm around her shoulders, pulling her nearer to him.

  She loved the feel of him against her, and the warmth that radiated from him. Just his touch helped her relax and feel ready to open up, not that talking about the attack was ever going to be easy. She was still coming to terms with what her mother had told her had happened. “We don’t know everything yet, but according to Mom, he was found in his office this morning at 7:00 a.m. He had been shot once in the head and twice in the chest, and the initial responders noted stippling consistent with the shooter standing at a close range to the victim when they fired the gun.” She swallowed and blinked fast, getting her emotions under control.

  “So, then we know for sure that there was no sniper involved?” Troy asked. “It was up close and personal.”

  “The windows’ glass was intact, so there is definitely nothing that came from outside his office. I got this from the officers on scene. The ones who called.” Thinking about the logistics made some of the other things she was feeling dissipate. Maybe that was the best way to handle this. Keep emotions out of the way, be linear, be logical, and she would get through this. Better yet, they could find whoever it was who was responsible for her father’s death. As for what would come of the killer after she found them, only time would tell.