Girl Takes The Oath (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 5) (26 page)

“I think we’ve pretty well established that you have the skills to commit this crime,” she said. “The video captures you just as clearly—someone who looks just like you, your hair, your clothes, your skills, and your motive. And you have no alibi.”

“The guards at that Bowyer Road gate will have a record of me leaving and returning on the other end of campus,” Emily said, though as the words were leaving her mouth, she realized what would come next.

“You could easily have turned left instead of right outside the gate and returned along King George Street. There’s plenty of time, from your exit at Bowyer at oh-four-fifty-five to your return at oh-five-forty-seven hours, to have killed Bauer.”

“No. I didn’t kill him,” Emily said, her face now flushed. The case against her, circumstantial as it was, had fallen so neatly into place. Even she was alarmed.

“Look, honey,” Everett said, now suddenly turned friendly, and adopting the less threatening posture of someone about to offer sage counsel. “Why don’t you make this easier on yourself?” She reached across the table and slid Horton’s legal pad in front of Emily. With a click and a little flourish, she produced a pen and laid it on the pad. “Write out your side of it. Tell us all about how Bauer attacked you, and how you couldn’t take his harassment anymore. The judge will understand. Just don’t drag things out, ’cause there’s no sympathy that way.”

Emily took a deep breath and tried to gather her thoughts. The evidence wasn’t perfect. No blood spatter on her, and there’d have to be some blood, the way Bauer was slashed and stabbed. Her clothes were similar to what the woman on the wall wore, but they weren’t identical. Emily’s running suit had stripes on the legs and arms, and that woman’s didn’t. And the murder weapon, whatever it was—some long knife or a short sword, perhaps even a
wakizashi
—there’d been no mention of it. These quibbles wouldn’t be enough to persuade NCIS of her innocence, but they reminded
her
of it, and that’s all she really needed to avoid doing something really foolish, like signing any sort of statement.

Besides, she did have an alibi witness, three in fact. The weight of the accusation had driven them from her mind. But those old men on the bridge, the crabbers, they might remember her. They might not remember the time they saw her, but she didn’t need them to. The gate log would settle that, and if she’d run past them on the bridge a few minutes after oh-five-hundred, there’s no way she could have made it all the way back down King George Street in time to kill Bauer.

The expression on Everett’s face when she told her about the crabbers almost paid for all the indignities of the morning. Almost, but not quite. After all, as much of a fool and a bully as Bauer was, he didn’t deserve to die for it. And even if Gunderson wasn’t exactly a sympathetic soul, she probably didn’t deserve this much emotional turmoil. Most of all, her own friends were undoubtedly being put through the proverbial ringer, and she wished they could be spared that.

“Fine,” Everett snarled. “We’ll look into it. In the meantime, you are confined to the Yard until further notice.” She stormed out of the room with those words, leaving Horton to deal with Emily.

~~~~~~~

“I don’t see how we have any choice”—these words set Stacie off. Funderburk was discussing the latest events with a couple of the Firsties at one end of the tables reserved for the Twenty Eighth in King Hall at dinner. The meal hadn’t even been served when she lit into him.

“No choice, sir? With all due respect, what happened to loyalty and unit cohesion? When we needed her talents to win Iron Company last year, we heard all about that. Now that she’s in trouble, when she might actually need us, all I hear is ‘we have no choice’ but to keep our distance.”

“I’m not sure I like your tone, Carnot. It doesn’t sound like ‘all due respect’ to me.” Stacie sat back down at these words, and stared at a spot on the table in front of her. “But if you hadn’t noticed,” he continued, “I’m not proposing anything that Tenno hasn’t already put into effect on her side.”

‘On her side, sir?” Stacie said, wondering how provoked she should feel by the way Funderburk seemed ready to cut her friend loose.
What about CJ? Why didn’t she say anything?
Stacie glared at her, as if she expected the expression on her face to say all she meant to convey.

“What, Stace?” CJ said. “Funderburk’s right. She told us to keep our distance. What else can we do?”

She felt her face growing warmer, redder, until she couldn’t hold it in any longer. “What the hell kind of friend are you?” she demanded, now standing away from the table, her chair clattering on the floor behind her. “She did that to keep us safe. You know that. Maybe Funderburk and the rest of them don’t have to admit it. But you should.”

“Keep you safe from what?” Funderburk asked. “From an NCIS inquiry? Because if that’s what she had in mind, then to do otherwise, to get in the way of the inquiry would be a violation of the Honor Code.”

“Is that what you think?” she shrieked. “After what happened at Quantico, and… and,” she sputtered, “and on that bridge, do you really think it’s just about not running afoul of NCIS?”

“What is it about, then?” Funderburk asked. “If you know something, spill it.”

“All I know is she’s in real danger. That guy stuck a knife in her face. He was gonna kill her right there, in front of a hundred Marines. And nobody did a damn thing about it. We’re doing the same thing now. She pushed us all away to keep us safe. But we’re just going along with it to cover our asses, and we’re not doing anything to help her.”

“Stace,” CJ called to her in an urgent whisper.

“Has it occurred to you, Miss Carnot,” Funderburk said, now adopting a formal tone, “that Tenno’s troubles may be of her own making? She’s good with pugil sticks—she certainly proved that at Sea Trials—and apparently with a knife, too. Yeah, we probably wouldn’t have won last year without her. But that doesn’t mean we should pull her coals out of every fire, especially if she’s the one holding the matches.”

Before Stacie could unleash another fusillade at her superior, CJ rushed around the table, carrying Zaki and McDonough in her train, and pulled her friend away.

“You’ve said enough, Stace,” she said. “Maybe we all need to take a breath… outside.” She glanced at Funderburk, who nodded his approval as she said this, and Zaki and McDonough hustled Stacie out the doors that led to Gate One.

“Let me go,” she said, kicking and flailing her arms at McDonough, who by that point held her in a bear hug from behind. When he dropped her, she stumbled a few steps away and turned to glower at the three of them. “I don’t need your help.”

“No, Stace,” CJ said. “We’re her friends… and yours. We need to talk about this. If we’re gonna help her, we’re doing it together. But flying off the handle in the galley won’t accomplish anything.”

“I’m still hungry,” McDonough said.

“Me, too,” Zaki said. “We just left dinner on the table in there.”

The three of them had her moving toward downtown before she managed to get her opinion heard. At the corner of Randall and Prince George Streets, she dug in her heels and brought the whole group to a stop. Looking at their blank expressions, and remembering the last time she and CJ and Em were together, enjoying themselves with no sense of foreboding to spoil their fun, she said, “McGinty’s. Let’s go to the Raw Bar.”

At that hour, they had their pick of tables, and the open floor made it easy to see the pattern of tiles on the floor. Tiny, white octagons, interrupted by even smaller black squares, it looked enough like what you might find in a Roman villa to suggest baths more than a bathroom. McDonough ordered for everyone: little necks, oysters, and an assortment of fried creatures.

“Can we add a couple of salads,” CJ said before the waiter departed.

“Well,” Stacie, said expectantly. “What’s your idea for helping her? Don’t tell me there’s nothing we can do.”

“You need to take a step back,” McDonough said. “Yelling at everyone in the company won’t help her.”

“Fine. Enough telling me what won’t help. Now tell me what will. What exactly are you guys prepared to do?”

Of course, no suggestions were forthcoming, and Stacie saw in their faces what she suspected all along, that they only thought of deflecting her resolve, calming her and ultimately letting all their feelings about Em recede into oblivion. The suspicion wasn’t really fair, even she had to admit to herself; still, something about Em touched her more than the others.

Stacie came to the Academy looking for adventure, for action, and her roommates were hardly impressive specimens, a coltish blonde from Philadelphia and a reclusive Asian girl from rural Virginia, both utterly unprepossessing. Sure, Em showed flashes of toughness, and she occasionally came to karate team workouts, but she remained aloof no matter how much coaxing Coach Parker did. Even though she did more morning PT than anyone, she didn’t lift, and she had no ‘guns’ to speak of.

A fan massaged the lazy air above their heads, and Stacie gazed at Zaki’s broad shoulders. He and McDonough had launched Em to the top of Herndon at the end of their Plebe year—
that
caught Stacie’s attention. In their Youngster year, an impromptu sparring session with the women on the team before the Quantico tournament opened Stacie’s eyes. Em sparred with everyone, one after another and never even broke a sweat. When Stacie’s turn came around, she couldn’t even touch her, no matter how hard she tried, as if Em could read her mind, or her body, or something. The magnitude of her skills was on display that day, but at Sea Trials, Stacie saw the full intensity of her spirit as she dominated in the pugil sticks, even taking on several opponents at a time, intimidating everyone with the fire in her eyes. This was who Stacie wanted to be, what she’d come to the Academy to become, and yet she saw clear as day that Em had arrived fully formed as a warrior.

The waiter brought over two salads and the first of the fried platters McDonough had ordered. An ice cube slipped down in her glass and the others filled the now vacant space. Zaki said something about not making matters worse for Em by creating a disturbance, and she pictured once more the incident on the bridge, and her heart raced. CJ’s reluctance to discuss it at the time only stoked her envy, and even resentment.
She
should have been there, having Em’s back, facing danger and risking it all with another warrior spirit. At the time, there was no way she could hear what CJ had tried to tell her, that their friend was not exactly what they’d thought, that the terrible fire in her eyes could hardly be reconciled with the warmth of her friendship. But when she attended the next tournament at Quantico, and saw her friend in mortal peril, she began to appreciate the isolation of the warrior. When Em turned the tables on her assailant and stripped his life away in a shower of blood, leaving a hundred Marines stunned and speechless, she recognized for the first time just how horrendous the life she’d fantasized about really was.

Looking across the table at her friends, she began to be willing to understand them again. CJ was no warrior. She joined up for a career in administration, and yet she’d protected their friend on the bridge. Sure, Zaki and McDonough lifted with her, but they weren’t warriors either and they’d never appreciate her spirit, much less Em’s. Even if CJ was right about Em—and she’d begun to lean in that direction—it only hardened her resolve to be of use to her.

“What do you think, Stace?” CJ asked, nudging her foot under the table. She hadn’t been following the conversation and stared blankly across the table. The light outside seemed to shift—streetlights flickered on, and the sky darkened suddenly. Perhaps the sun had just dipped below the horizon.

“Earth to Stacie,” McDonough said.

She opened her mouth to snark back at him, and maybe demonstrate that she’d recovered her good humor, when she spied Kathy Gunderson watching them through the front window of the restaurant. “I’m gonna hit the head,” she said, and pushed back from the table.”

“You want company?” CJ asked.

“Nah, I’ll just be a minute.”

McDonough buried his face in a plate of fried clams, and Zaki leaned over one of the salads. With a glance over her shoulder to check that CJ wasn’t following, Stacie turned right instead of left at the end of the bar and headed straight out the front door.

“What are you looking at?” Gunderson growled in the falling darkness.

Stacie wanted to hurl some contempt at an enemy—that’s why she’d slipped out of McGinty’s. But as noxious a person as she’d been, Stacie couldn’t help seeing that Gunderson had lost something, too.

“You’re all the same,” Gunderson said. “You and Tenno and Tanahill, you think you’re so superior. But now you’re finally getting what you deserve. All of you.”

“We had nothing to do with what happened to Casey. You know it as well as I do, and you still made that stupid scene for the benefit of NCIS.”

Gunderson stared at her, lower lip trembling, and opened her mouth… but nothing came out. She turned and ran away turning up Cornhill Street, and Stacie ran after her, though she didn’t quite know why. She’d left McGinty’s to confront a nemesis, maybe spit abuse into her face, but now she felt something more like concern for her well-being.

On Cornhill, she saw Gunderson in the dim distance stop and look back, then duck into an alley. When she heard what sounded like a muffled shriek, she sprinted after her, and turned into the alley, where she saw several large men struggling to put a dark hood over Gunderson’s head. A woman’s voice hissed out some sort of command in a language she did not understand.