Page 50 of A Deeper Darkness
“Killed?”
“Yeah.” Susan reached to the picture, straightened it, though Sam hadn’t noticed it was crooked. “King was larger than life. Handsome, funny, the jokester of the crew. His wife, Karen, and I had our babies the same week. This was Vicky. Eddie and King came home together for the births. Those two were inseparable, crowing about the kids, smoking cigars in the hospital, getting in all sorts of trouble. Lord, that was a fun week. Then they went back over, and King was killed a month later. Eddie wouldn’t talk about it. Every time I brought it up, he got tears in his eyes and walked off. They were so close, it just about killed him.”
“Three dead,” Sam murmured. “What a shame.”
“Yeah. What a shame.”
“You said Eddie came back from his last tour different. Different how?”
Susan shrugged. “Angry. That’s really the only way to put it. He used to tell me things—nothing compromising, but the little details, the intimacies that he had with his men. He missed them. He was a good leader, well, you would have seen that, even back then. He missed having them around, the camaraderie, the responsibility. The adrenaline, too—being a Ranger was one thing, but being an officer in a war zone is pretty intense. Constant concern and worry for your men. But after King died in the field, it all changed. Eddie was angry with the government. He was sick of ‘nation building.’ He felt like they were treading water, and losing good men and women for no good reason. He almost seemed relieved to be away from them.”
“So something might have happened?”
“I’m sure a lot of things happened.”
“You know what I mean. Something was different on the last tour.”
Susan tapped her fingers against her closed lips, a nervous tick Sam had noticed her doing before.
“I just always assumed it was about the mission when they lost King. That he disapproved of what they were doing and lost his best friend at the same time. But Eddie would never say that. Hell, I may just be making it up. Looking back, I can read a thousand different things into a single gesture.”
“Looking back is dangerous, I know. But we’re going to have to. Two members of the same unit being murdered isn’t a coincidence. Did Fletcher ask about any of this?”
“All of it. I even printed him out a copy of the picture from our computer. He’s trying to find the rest of the guys, make sure they’re aware of what’s going on. Though Xander is going to be hard to find. That man’s been off the grid for a while now.”
“I’m glad Fletcher’s on top of this. He seems like a decent guy. All right. Where’s Donovan’s journal?”
Susan looked sheepish. “In the locked drawer. I put it back after I looked at it this morning. I’d never gone in there before now. It was his private place, and I respected that. But I knew the journal was there. He’d lock it up every time he wrote in it. The key was on the key chain found with his car. They gave it to me, after… Here.” Susan pulled the keys from her front pocket, went around the desk and unlocked the drawer on the left side.
“He has several more of these in his boot locker up in the attic. I just didn’t bother going through them. I figured if there was anything relevant, it would be in this year’s journal.”
The book Susan handed over was red leather, bound with a thin cord. Sam accepted the weight in her hands almost reverentially. She felt wrong about this, delving into the private world of her ex-lover. This was the kind of stuff her friend Taylor Jackson, a lieutenant with the Nashville homicide unit, did for the force. Sam didn’t investigate crimes, didn’t go digging in people’s private worlds. She wasn’t used to it, to seeing the most cherished personal moments laid bare for the scrutiny of strangers.
Well, how different can it be than seeing their heart? Or their brain? That’s where it all comes from, anyway. Stop dillydallying.
“You may be right. Let’s look through this, see if it tells us anything. We might want to get the ones from his last deployment, too, when King died. But I can start here.”
She opened the journal. Donovan’s distinct scrawl leaped out at her, the edges of the words dotted with ink. She choked out a laugh. “He still uses that leaky fountain pen?”
“Yeah. He’s had it for years. I can’t get him to give it up.”
Sam met Susan’s eyes. “I gave it to him.”
Susan bit her lip. “Oh.”
The tension crowded back into the room. Sam shouldn’t have said that, damn it. What was she doing?
She distracted herself with the opening page of the journal. It was dated I.I.MMXII. The first of January, 2012. All in the elegant scrawl, all in Latin. Sam sighed.
“Do you have a pad of paper I could use? And maybe something stronger than water? It’s going to be a long night.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Capitol Hill
Detective Darren Fletcher
There is a moment in every murder case when things begin to coalesce. Whether it’s within the first hour—when a witness spills their guts, the idiot criminal has been identified and you’re off to apprehend him—or twenty years later, when the piece of the puzzle that’s been missing for decades suddenly drops in your lap, there’s always a moment.
