Page 36 of Fatal Vision
“But the Navy is covering something up.”
“You’re worse than Salisbury with bacon. Where are you going with this?”
“I want the truth about what happened to Bard,”—she tapped the folder under her hand—“and these other men.”
Colton cocked his chin at the folder. “Who else?”
The next paper she drew out and slid across to him had dozens of notes in her tidy handwriting. “A few weeks after Bard’s death, I worked a missing person case and came across a similar death. Wyatt Evers. Former Navy, found shot in an abandoned building in Tulsa. The body had also been burned in a fire, doing extensive damage to the corpse. He was ID’d by his dog tags.”
Colton’s gut clenched. Wyatt Evers? No fucking way.
Shelby, oblivious, continued. “He was declared missing by his wife last year. The Navy showed up shortly after the medical examiner put his dog tags in the system, declared custody and absconded with the body. His wife claims she wasn’t notified about his death or that the Navy had claimed his body until after he’d been fully cremated and his remains arrived on her doorstep, courtesy of two officers who refused to answer her questions. I was going to interview Lori and then…”
Her voice faded off and her gaze went a bit fuzzy as she stared over his left shoulder. She grabbed both sides of her head and grimaced.
“Shelby?”
She blinked and was suddenly back, hands falling to the table once more. “What?”
“Are you all right? Where’d you just go?”
A heaviness hung in the air and she shook her head. “I was trying to remember that day, when I texted you. I think I had planned to interview Lori Evers and something happened. I just can’t remember what. My head… Every time I think of that day, I get a pain behind my eye.”
“Should we call the doc?”
She shook her head and twisted her braid. “He said I’d have some of these symptoms as my memories start to come back. It’s nothing.”
Colton had done a lot of research on brain injuries and comas while Shelby had been unconscious. Every brain and injury was unique. There was no one recovery formula.
He skimmed her notes. “Says here the MO is the same: a single bullet wound to the head killed him. The ME suspected murder, stating the entry, exit, and—oh, yum—brain matter fragmentation appeared similar to sniper wounds he’d seen while in the Army. No bullet, casing, or murder weapon found at the scene.”
“Exactly. Same for Bard. The backgrounds, places of death, and fatal wounds are all eerily similar, although I can’t confirm cause of death because the Navy refuses to let me see the autopsy reports. Also, the cremation of both men seems too coincidental to ignore.”
She was enjoying this, he could see it in her body posture, in her eagerness to share the case with him. “Third guy?”
Shuffling of pages. “J.J. Edmonds. Retired Navy medical doctor who ran a nonprofit center for vets, helping them find jobs.”
“Wait.” Colton snatched the paper from her hand. “Doc Edmonds?”
“You knew him, I take it?”
“Don’t you remember? He was part of the medical team that administered to Connor once we got him out of the compound. He was also on the team that saved my life after my last mission.”
“Right.” She touched her braid and nodded, but he could see she didn’t actually remember. “That leg of Connor’s rescue wasn’t part of my mission, so I didn’t really know the players involved.”
Okay,thatwasn’t true. She’d done her homework and researched every member of the taskforce from front to back before they’d even started practicing for the rescue, but it didn’t matter at the moment. “What happened to the doctor?”
She ticked off the facts. “Divorced, no kids, and didn’t show up for a meeting with one of his biggest funders in Oklahoma City in February. Body was discovered nine days later in a vacant building that had previously been a hotel. Lot of vagrants and transients use the hotel as a homeless shelter. Some of the residents are vets. It’s possible one of them killed Edmonds, but there was no weapon or trace evidence that could be linked to any of those in the area at the time the body was discovered.”
“Same MO as your other two?”
She nodded. “One bullet to the head, NCIS claimed the body from the local ME, there was no family to turn the remains over to, and the only thing the Navy would tell me was that Edmonds had been cremated and his ashes interred at Rose Hill in Oklahoma City.”
Colton felt the bricks stacking up one by one, building the conspiracy wall Shelby thought was there. “Anything besides their military backgrounds that linked them?”
“Yeah,” she said, her face going pensive. She took the paper from his hand and stacked it with the rest, bumping a rebel corner into line. “I believe there was.”
Colton had the feeling he didn’t really want to know the answer, but he asked anyway. “What?”
