Gone Too Far (4 page)

“We should probably make sure the phone’s working,” he managed to say as the doorbell rang yet again and again. She didn’t argue, so he picked her up, her legs around his waist, and carried her over to the telephone. She lifted the handset.

There was a definite dial tone.

She dropped it back into the receiver so she could use both of her hands to brace herself along that part of the counter.

She was moments from climaxing. She was making all those sexy little noises that he loved—those gasps and moans of sheer pleasure that made him teeter on the edge of his own release.

Whoever had been outside had finally stopped leaning on the doorbell, thank God.

If it had been important, they’d come back.

In fact, he’d nearly dismissed them completely from his mind as he focused on the beautiful, brilliant, gorgeous, sexy-as-hell woman he was making love to—this woman he was going to talk into marrying him right after he made her come.

Wham! Wham! Wham!

Whoever had been ringing the bell in the front had come around to the back and was knocking right on the sliding door.

It startled the hell out of Tom, and Kelly’s eyes opened as he started to pull back from her. “Did I even lock that door?”

“I did.” She locked her legs around him, pushing him even more deeply inside of her.

Wham! Wham! Wham!

And she was coming. She was laughing, but there was no doubt about it—she’d gone over the edge in a major way.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Damn it, now someone else was pounding on the front door, too,
and
ringing the bell.

Kelly knew him as well as he knew her. She knew just how to touch him to make him come crashing into her—in spite of the crazy soundtrack that was completely freaking him out.

Bang! Wham! Ding-dong!
“Jesus, Kelly!”

The rush of pleasure, so fiercely, privately intense, was such a wild contrast to the kitchen’s current Grand Central Station atmosphere.

But then whoever was out front started shouting. “Lieutenant Commander Thomas Paoletti, please open the door!”

Tom started to laugh, and this time as he pulled back, Kelly let him go. She was still laughing, too. As he used the kitchen hand towel to clean himself up, she wiped a piece of fruit from his chin.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he told her as he fastened his shorts. “I’ve got plans for you today.” He smoothed down his hair as he headed for the front door. A quick glimpse of himself in the mirror in the hall revealed that there was no question about it. He looked as if he’d just been having sex with his incredibly hot wife-to-be in his kitchen.

Wife. Man, he loved that word. Today was the day he was going to talk her into getting this thing done.

He opened the door. “What seems to be the problem, gentlemen?”

Damn, it was the shore patrol, the Navy’s version of military police. The two ensigns who stood there were impossibly young and incredibly grim-looking.

“Lieutenant Commander Thomas Paoletti?”

“Yes. Who’s in trouble?” Tom asked. Most of Team Sixteen had gone out of the country. But Sam Starrett had taken a few days of leave in order to finalize his divorce and visit his daughter in Florida. Petty Officer Danny Gillman had stayed behind after spraining his ankle yesterday during a routine jump. And Petty Officer Cosmo Richter was also in town, studying for his chief’s exam.

Out of those three, Tom would bet his money that Gillman was in trouble. Nicknamed Gilligan, he was even younger than these ensigns and still prone to moments of complete boneheaded idiocy.

“Sir, we’ve been ordered to escort you to the naval base,” the ensign on the left informed him. “Please come with us.”

Ordered
to . . . ? “What’s this about?”

“We’re not at liberty to say, sir,” the ensign on the right said.

“Well, see, here’s the thing,
Ensigns
.” Tom stressed their significantly lower rank, but still kept his voice even and easygoing. “I’ve got something very important planned for this afternoon, so unless you can be specific about why I’m needed on base today—where I haven’t exactly been needed in the past six months—I’m going to have to decline your invitation.”

“It’s not an invitation, Paoletti. It’s an order.”

Tom looked up to see none other than Rear Admiral Larry Tucker, the base commander and the bane of his existence, coming around the side of his house. No doubt Tucker had been the door banger in the back. And it had taken him long enough to return to the front. Tom would bet big money that the sleezebag had found a crack in the vertical blinds and had hung back in order to watch Kelly get dressed. Son of a bitch.

She was standing now, in her nightgown, her hair back up in a ponytail, at the end of the hall, where only Tom could see her.

“What’s going on?” she whispered.

He met her eyes briefly, slightly shaking his head before turning to Tucker, forcing his mouth into a smile. “What’s the problem, Admiral?”

“You’re needed on base,” Tucker told him.

“I understand that, sir,” Tom said easily. “My question is why now? As I was telling the ensigns here, I’m a little busy today and—”

“You’re in trouble, Commander. Isn’t that obvious enough?”

Kelly moved closer.

Tom laughed, but on the inside, his stomach had gone into an instant knot. No. This couldn’t be happening. Not today . . .

But why not today? And, of course, Admiral Tucker would choose to be present at this humiliation. From the moment Tom had been assigned to command SEAL Team Sixteen, Tucker had had it in for him.

Hauling the shore patrol out here to escort Tom onto the base . . . It was so unnecessary. A phone call would have brought him in.

“Actually, no, Admiral, it’s not obvious,” Tom said, with more of an edge to his voice than he intended. “Since I haven’t done anything wrong, it never crossed my mind that I might be in any kind of trouble. If I’m being arrested, sir, I deserve to know the charges being brought against me. What is it that I’ve allegedly done?”

“You’re not being arrested, Commander,” Tucker said. “At least not yet. You’re being brought in for questioning.”

Not
yet
. “If this is about the assassination attempt in Coronado six months ago, I’ve said everything I can say about that.”

“Well, goodness me,” Tucker said. “Look at that. Apparently you remember at least one incident in which you did something wrong. I wonder, Commander, if there could be others.”

Tom turned to Kelly. “I have to go in. I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “I’m going with you.”

“No,” he said. “I’ll be home in a few hours.” He turned to Tucker. “If you’ll excuse me, Admiral, Ensigns, I’m going to take a quick shower and put on my uniform.”

Tucker shook his head. “You’ll have to skip the shower, Commander. You’ve already kept us waiting long enough.”

“I’ll be out shortly,” Tom said curtly, purposely leaving off the
sir
, but when he went to shut the door, one of the ensigns put his shoulder against it.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to accompany you inside, sir.”

God
damn
. There was questioning and then there was
questioning
. What did they think? That he was going to run away?

“Do I need to call a lawyer?” he asked the kid, half in jest, as he led the way back to the bedroom, where his uniform was hanging in the closet.

“Well,” the ensign answered seriously, “you just might want to do that, sir.”

Mother of God. What exactly did they think he’d done?

Sam knew he shouldn’t touch the doorknob in case there were fingerprints on it. He had to call the authorities.

Except he didn’t know for sure that anyone was dead.

Yet the fact that Mary Lou hadn’t returned his call for three weeks—three
long
weeks—suddenly seemed telling. He’d assumed that she
wasn’t
calling him back—not that she
couldn’t
.

Please, God, don’t let her be dead.

He lifted the clay flowerpot that sat on the back steps—Mary Lou’s favorite hiding place—and sure enough, there was a key beneath it.

The lock on the kitchen door was right on the knob, and he knew he could unlatch the door by inserting and then carefully turning the key. He didn’t need to touch the knob and therefore wouldn’t add to or subtract from any fingerprints that might be there.

The lock clicked as it unlatched, and he gagged.
Jesus.
Even just the inch or two that he’d opened the door was enough to make his eyes water from the unmistakable stench of death. Sam quickly pulled the collar of his T-shirt up and over his nose and mouth and swung the door open.

Oh, God,
no.

Mary Lou lay facedown on the linoleum floor—although, Christ, she’d been lying there so long in this heat, she probably didn’t have much of a face left.

Sam couldn’t bring himself to look more closely.

He saw all he needed to see. She was undeniably dead, her brown hair matted with blood and brains and, shit, maggots. She’d taken what looked like a shotgun slug to the back of her head, probably while she was running away from whoever had come to the kitchen door.

Sam stumbled outside and puked up his lunch into the dusty grass.

No, it didn’t sound remarkably like Sam. It sounded pathetically like him.

Because
she
was decidedly pathetic.

What in God’s name did she have to do to get that man out from under her skin for once and for all? She saw and heard him everywhere. She couldn’t so much as see a blue jeans ad in a magazine without thinking about his long legs and his—

“Who’s calling, please?” she said, scrambling to find a piece of paper and a pen on Jules’s black hole of a desk. Her fault for coming in here in search of a file, her fault for picking up the phone instead of letting Jules’s voice mail take the message.

There was the sound of air being exhaled hard, then, “Alyssa, it’s Sam. Starrett. Can you please put Jules on the phone? Right now?”

Holy God, this time it really
was
Sam.

“Oh,” she said, temporarily startled into silence. Why on earth was Sam calling
Jules
?

“Look,” he said in that Texas drawl that she’d always found either infuriating or sexy as hell, depending on her state of mind. “I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but I’ve got a fucking bad situation here and I need to talk to Jules right fucking now. So put him on the fucking phone. Please.”

Whoa. A triple
fucking
. Even in the best of situations, Sam had a sewer mouth, but something definitely had him rattled to make him
that
profane.

“He’s not here,” Alyssa told him. “He’s out of the office and he won’t be back until Friday.”

“Fuck!”

“What’s happening?” she asked, sitting down behind Jules’s desk. Aha, there was a brand-new legal pad buried among his junk. She pulled it free. “Is this call business or . . . ?”

She uncapped a pen as Sam laughed. It was the laughter of a man who didn’t find anything particularly funny right now. “God
damn
it. Yes, it’s business.”

“Where are you?” And no, she refused to let her heart beat harder at the thought that he was here in D.C. That was just indigestion from drinking too much coffee on an empty stomach.

“Sarasota,” he said.

“Florida.”

“Yeah. I’m at Mary Lou’s sister’s house. Alyssa, I’m really sorry, but I need your help. I need you to call someone in the Sarasota Bureau office and have them get over here as quickly as possible.”

“What’s going on?”

Another loud exhale. “Mary Lou’s dead.”

It was a good thing she was sitting down. As it was, she had to hang on to the desk. “Oh, my God.
Sam!
How?”

“A shotgun slug to the head.”

Oh, dear Lord. Oh, Sam,
no.
Alyssa had suspected that things weren’t particularly good between Sam and his wife, but . . . “Was anyone else hurt?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I came outside to . . . Well, shit, you know me well enough. I got sick. Big surprise. But I . . . I have to go back in there to look for Haley and . . .” His voice broke. “Jesus, Lys. I’m pretty sure Haley’s in there.”

“Whoa,” Alyssa said. She leapt to her feet, pulling the phone as far as it would go as she went to the office door. “Wait. Just wait a second, okay, Sam? Don’t move.”

Laronda was in the hall. Alyssa covered the mouthpiece of the telephone. “Has Max left for lunch?”

“About an hour ago. He should be back in about fifteen minutes.”

“Shit.”
Fifteen minutes wasn’t good enough. “Is Peggy in her office?”

“She’s gone, too.” Laronda was eyeing her with curiosity. “Everyone’s out but George. You want George Faulkner?”

George was still new to the team and had even less experience in this type of situation than Alyssa did. She shook her head. It was up to her to talk Sam down from whatever emotional ledge he was on. “Get me the head of the Florida office in Sarasota.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Alyssa went back to Jules’s desk, speaking into the phone. “Sam, are you still with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” she said. “Don’t go anywhere. Don’t go back inside. Just . . . just sit down, okay? Are you sitting down?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Where’s the shotgun?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It was so bad in there, I didn’t think to look—”

“Sam, I’m going to call and get you help, all right? But you
cannot
go back into that house. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, I do, but—”

“No buts. You sit still and you talk to me. I need you to make sure that you are nowhere near that weapon when the authorities arrive. Is that clear?”

On the other end of the phone, Sam was silent.

“Sam?”

Nothing. Oh, God, please don’t let him have put down the phone.

The intercom buzzed. “Manuel Conseco from Sarasota on line two,” Laronda’s voice said.

“Sam, you’re going to need to give me the street address.”

Sam laughed. “You think
I
killed her,” he said. “That’s really nice, Alyssa. Jesus.”

“Are you saying you didn’t . . . ?”

“Fuck, no. What kind of asshole do you take me for?” He laughed again in disgust. “Apparently the kind who would shoot his soon-to-be ex-wife and leave her dead in the kitchen. Thank you
so
very much.”

Soon-to-be
ex-wife
. . . ? “I thought it was an accident.”

“With a fucking
shot
gun?”

“Well, I’m sorry, but you said—”

“It’s 462 Camilia Street,” Sam said flatly. “Sara-fucking-sota. Mary Lou didn’t return my phone calls for three weeks so I finally came out to see her—to finalize our divorce. I’m pretty sure she’s been dead all that time, and I haven’t searched the rest of the house, so I haven’t found Haley’s body yet. Call whoever you need to call so that the feds get here first. I don’t want the local police fucking up the investigation.”

“Sam,” Alyssa said, but he’d already cut the connection.