Breakwater

21

Oliver Crawford stayed in Yorkville through the week, his presence ramping up the already intense atmosphere at Breakwater Security. When he left by helicopter late Friday afternoon, taking Travis Lubec and Nick Rochester with him, Huck noticed an immediate reduction in tension among those who remained behind. With a dozen trainees arriving in less than a month, there was still a lot of work to do. Courses were designed and the facilities almost finished, but Joe Riccardi had yet to hire all his instructors. According to Vern Glover, tapped as an instructor himself, Sharon had veto power over any of her husband’s picks. She was the one with Crawford’s total trust.

Vern didn’t approve, grumbling as he helped Huck carry a wooden crate to the walk-in gun vault at the back of the classroom building. “Either the guy can be trusted to do his job or he can’t.”

“I thought they were equals with separate responsibilities, and they each reported to Crawford.”

“In theory, not in practice. In practice, Joe reports to her.”

Sometimes, Vern was smarter and more observant than he let on. Huck had decided not to underestimate him.

They set the crate in front of the locked, alarmed metal door.

“That’s it,” Vern said. “I’ll take it from here.”

“I can help you-”

“Don’t need your help. You’re not authorized for access.” Vern was breathing hard from the exertion of hauling the crate from the parking area, where he and Huck had offloaded it from a van to the vault. “We’re on a need-to-know basis around here. You don’t need to know.”

“Locked doors always kick my curiosity into high gear.”

“Tough.”

Huck shrugged. “An open environment can build trust. You shut too much up tight, people will start filling in the blanks, and not necessarily in a way you’d want.”

“What kind of bullshit is that, Boone?”

McCabe, he thought. My name is McCabe. Reminding himself periodically helped him stay focused on who he was, what he had to do. “Maybe you have shoulder-fired missiles in there.”

Vern didn’t smile. “Think you’re funny, don’t you?”

“I wasn’t making a joke, Vern. Shoulder-fired missiles could come in handy in our work.”

He didn’t bite. “We’re a legitimate operation. You want to do well around here, you’ll learn to take orders and keep your mouth shut.”

“I was never good at clicking my heels together and saluting smartly.”

Joe Riccardi had come down the hall behind them. “We need independent thinkers.” He spoke in an even, measured tone. “I believe those were your words, weren’t they, Vern?”

Vern gave a small hiss through his teeth. “I just want to finish this job and get out of here. I have a date tonight.”

“In Yorkville?” Joe smiled. “Not much nightlife around here.”

“I make my own nightlife,” Vern said, grinning now.

Joe shifted his attention to Huck. “You can go. Why not get out of here, take yourself out to dinner? The crab cakes at the marina restaurant are the best in town. We’ve all had a hard week. A lot of work, a lot of emotion. Let’s take the weekend to regroup.” With a brief pause, he took a breath. “Alicia Miller drowned. That’s now official. Her death was almost certainly an accident. Despite her odd behavior over the weekend and on Monday, she didn’t leave a suicide note or specifically tell anyone she planned to kill herself, and, of course, there’s no evidence of foul play.”

“Toxicology results?” Huck asked.

“They screened for alcohol and drugs of abuse. She was clean.”

“What about medications-”

“She wasn’t on any medications.”

Huck nodded, somehow not satisfied. “I guess that ends it, then.”

“Yes.” Riccardi’s tone didn’t change. He gave Huck a flicker of a smile. “Crab cakes, Boone. Take the night off.”

Dismissed.

Huck returned to his room at the barn. Cully O’Dell had gone home to Fredericksburg for the weekend. Although he was just a kid, he was a whiz at all the techie stuff, working with Crawford’s tech gurus in Washington to set up systems at Breakwater. But what he wanted to do was bodyguard work. “I don’t want to be the loser in the van with the headphones.”

Nothing about O’Dell was hard-cover vigilante.

Lubec and Rochester were another matter.

Huck showered and put on clean jeans and a clean shirt, fancy enough for crab cakes in Yorkville, Virginia.

Since he was alone in the converted barn, he slipped up the hall to Lubec’s room-no complicated locks on the door. A credit card did the trick, and Huck was in, the room identical in setup to all the others and obsessively tidy, not so much as a wrinkle in the bunk. Moving quickly, Huck did a reasonably thorough search.

No photographs of the wife and kids or a girlfriend. No checkbook or credit cards in drawers, closet, pants pockets, on top of the dresser.

No rocket launchers under the bed.

No computer.

Lubec had ten one-hundred-dollar bills in a clip out in the open on his dresser. A cash-and-carry kind of guy.

Huck returned to his room. The search was a waste of his breaking-and-entering talents.

He took his Rover into town, driving past Quinn’s cottage. Her Saab wasn’t in the short driveway. Just as well she didn’t come down to Yorkville for the weekend. He parked at the dead end and got out, a cold wind gusting off the water. The tide was coming in, the sun low in the west, leaving behind a dull, almost eerie light on the bay. He could see Quinn’s osprey swooping toward its nest.

What are we missing?

What the hell are we all missing?

Getting into the gun vault and finding something incriminating in Travis Lubec’s room would be progress where there was none, but Huck was more interested in the big picture. So was the task force. Who were the key players in this vigilante network? What were their plans?

If Quinn’s neighbors, the retired couple, had drowned in the bay, that would be one thing. A tragedy, but it wouldn’t have raised the questions that Alicia Miller’s death did. She had been a DOJ attorney under Gerard Lattimore, who was friends with Oliver Crawford-an accomplished, self-controlled woman who’d sobbed to her friend about ospreys trying to kill her.

Doesn’t add up.

If the events of the past few days didn’t add up for him, they didn’t add up for Quinn Harlowe, either. What had she been up to this week? But Huck stopped himself from going any further. His curiosity wasn’t just professional-it was personal. If she’d been at her cottage, he’d have whisked her off for crab cakes, and he didn’t need to be doing that. He’d been nearby when she yelled for help after finding the body of her friend. Otherwise, they’d have no reason even to know each other.

Not that Quinn did know him. As far as she was concerned, his name was Boone and he worked for a startup private security company and a man she didn’t really like.

He took the loop road past Clemente’s dump of a motel and saw him out on the dock having a cigarette with the crotchety owner.

Huck bit back his impatience. Diego Clemente and Huck McCabe, two of the U.S. Marshals Service’s finest, and here they were, smoking cigarettes and off to eat crab cakes.

Sharon Riccardi, sitting on the porch steps of the main house at the Crawford compound, called to Huck as he headed up the brick walk after his dinner out, the night black under an overcast sky. Several lights were on in the house, but as he approached Sharon, he saw that she was drinking wine in the dark, wearing a long black, filmy sleeveless dress with a shawl and no jewelry. She tilted her head back and raised her glass at him. “I’ll bet the mosquitoes don’t dare to bite you.”

“I don’t know about that, Mrs. Riccardi.”

“You’re very fit, aren’t you?” She rose, somewhat unsteady on her feet; she wasn’t wearing shoes, although the night temperature was cold to go barefoot. “I like fit men.”

“Mrs. Riccardi-”

“ Sharon.” She sipped her wine, her black shawl falling into the crooks of her elbows. Her gaze drifted over him. “All that hard muscle. You’ll be an inspiration to the new men when they arrive.”

“Where’s your husband?”

“Inside, asleep.” She gestured toward a second-story window. “We get to live here in luxury. Don’t you think we’re lucky?”

“It’s a nice house.”

“Joe doesn’t even seem to notice. I think he’d be happiest living in a foxhole. All I’d need to do is drop in once in a while.” Her eyes raised to his. “Conjugal visits.”

Huck wondered how many glasses of wine she’d had and decided to keep asking questions. “He ever see combat?”

“I have no idea. I don’t know him that well.” She laughed at her own comment. “An odd thing to say, isn’t it? He’s a very private man. He was wounded by his first wife. Now he’s more careful about what he reveals.”

“You two seem to have a good thing going here with Breakwater.”

She gave a dismissive shrug. “Oliver always has something new for me to do. He’s had a rough time since he was kidnapped.” This time, she took a bigger drink of wine. “I remember those terrible days.”

“Did you ever lose hope?”

“No, I didn’t. He says he didn’t, but I don’t know. The kidnapping still haunts him. I believe it will until the day he dies. All he can hope for now is to see justice done.”

“The kidnappers-”

“Strange how fate works. We heard just this week that two of them were found recently in a remote camp in the Colombian Andes. They’d been tortured and executed.”

“Who found them?”

“A couple of emerald miners.” She tossed back her head, letting her hair curl down her back. “It looks as if the two thugs had enemies of their own.”

“Why were they tortured?”

“For information, I assume. Perhaps for the fun of it. Revenge. I don’t know.”

“You think they deserve what they got?” Huck said.

She raised her chin to him. “Yes, I do. Don’t you?”

“Absolutely.” Huck could feel his crab cakes, fries and coleslaw heavy in his stomach, but he’d stayed away from alcohol. “I’m not saying you torture and execute people for no reason. If these guys had useful information, why screw around? If they’re guilty of kidnapping, murder, drug dealing-hell. I’d pull the trigger myself.”

“Who would have to give the order?”

“I’m not a lapdog. I think for myself. I base my decisions on the situation and the existing options.”

Sharon Riccardi gave him a cool look. “What if the kidnappers had committed their crimes here, on U.S. soil?”

From his briefings, Huck knew what to say. “Doesn’t make any difference.”

“It’s not our job as private contractors to conduct interrogations and executions.”

He fixed his gaze on hers. If she wasn’t one of the vigilantes, she would have good reason not to put her trust in him. If she was-he needed to find out. “Law enforcement doesn’t have the necessary latitude to do what has to be done. They have to answer to politicians and protocols that don’t necessarily make any sense. We don’t.”

“We can’t break laws, of course,” she said, her tone difficult to read. As she adjusted her shawl, the V neck of her dress skewed to one side, exposing the soft curve of her breast. She smiled, touching the stem of her wineglass to her breast. “Oliver left us imported chocolate truffles. Care to indulge?”

Huck debated how to react. What if Sharon Riccardi didn’t give a rat’s ass what he thought about anything and just wanted to flirt? Or more, he thought.

But her husband walked out onto the porch. He was fully dressed and didn’t look at all as if he’d been sleeping. “ Sharon? What’s going on here?”

She didn’t so much as glance back at him. “We’ll have truffles another time, Mr. Boone. Enjoy the rest of your evening.”

“Thanks. I will.” Huck addressed Joe Riccardi. “We were just chatting. I’ll see you both tomorrow.”

When Huck got back to his room, he considered washing his mouth out with soap after all the nonsense he’d just spoken. His head pounded, and he dropped onto his back on his bunk, picturing ospreys and Quinn Harlowe’s quaint cottage and her pretty, hazel eyes, wondering what she was up to and why he didn’t think he and Diego had heard the last of her.