Honor (7 page)

Would they even receive the folded flag that had covered his coffin? Didn’t that go to the widow too?

Kenzie felt a flash of guilt that she knew was irrational. She’d never had to risk her life—her skill at training K9 handlers had simply been too valuable to the army for her to deploy to the front lines. Frank, who was older than her by at least seven years, had been one of her best students. He learned fast and he’d gone away without saying good-bye.

Donna hadn’t mentioned the dog he’d trained with, a female shepherd mix, but then Kenzie didn’t remember if she’d told Donna about Chili.

She knew that the dog would continue working, rather than get sent back stateside. Their training cost a fortune and the animals were in high demand. The army program at Lackland in San Antonio only graduated a hundred dogs a year, though private contractors like her boss added more.

Chili would go right back on bomb-sniffing patrol once she adapted to a new handler. There wasn’t time to grieve on the front.

She thought about contacting Frank’s parents. They didn’t know her. She didn’t know too much about their son.

I was so sorry to hear ... if there’s anything I can do ...

The routine words of condolence had an empty ring.

Her gaze moved to the wall of the memorial page. Slowly, Kenzie began to read the poignant comments and brief tributes to a man who’d been a brave soldier and a true friend to people she’d never met.

Then a new post appeared. With her name in it. Her eyes widened as she read the blunt words.

Hello to all. Randy Holt here. Not a friend exactly—I was one of the flight medics on the Kandahar evac for Frank.

The one Donna knew? The nurse hadn’t given a name. Kenzie would have to ask. She read the rest.

Wish he’d made it. We did our best. Am looking for Kenzie or Kenzy. He said her name.

A pause. No one replied or commented. Kenzie didn’t either. Was she the only one on the page? It was possible. The medic posted again.

Maybe I spelled it wrong.

Kenzie bit her lip. Randy Holt had been with Frank in his last hour of life. Why was the medic looking for her?

Anyone know her?

She typed a response.

Hello. I’m Kenzie. Can we e-mail later today, not on FB? Let me know.

She wasn’t going to post her schedule for all to see. She hoped Randy would say yes. The medic answered swiftly.

Here you go.

A contact e-mail address appeared on the wall and she copied it. Then it disappeared, deleted by Randy or so she assumed. She figured the medic was taking it on faith that she actually was Kenzie. Clicking out of Facebook and opening up her e-mail, she typed in the medic’s address and sent her phone number for good measure.

Somewhere else, someone else copied the e-mail address too. Then he leaned back in his swivel chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and put his feet up on his desk.

Tough luck for Branigan, whoever he was.

There’d been reports of sporadic problems with X-Ultra body armor. He’d picked up e-mail on it using a tracking worm he’d slipped into a Department of Defense server account reserved for military suppliers. No one had noticed.

It was a useful, unobtrusive worm that didn’t take down systems or make itself known in any way, unless an experienced IT person was tipped off and went after it. That hadn’t happened.

All it did was follow things. He’d programmed it to locate mentions of X-Ultra, mine data, and report what it found. So far, not much. A few conscientious procurement sergeants had filed reports on X-Ultra here and there, classified but not top secret. A few negative comments from medics had been scraped from the web. Only a few. The consensus, if there was one: The new type of armor worked well most of the time.

Just not all of the time. Failures in the field noted. No fatalities until now.

Luck of the draw, he thought idly. But not for Frank Branigan. No big deal. The guy was only a private. Expendable, basically. But he’d still been monitoring the guy’s Facebook posts and the separate memorial page. The photo of the battlefield cross was over the top.

Give it a rest, patriots, he thought, loosening the knot in his silk tie. Soldiers died every damn day of the week. Branigan was a statistic, nothing more. But he was one that didn’t make X-Ultra look good.

He’d monitored all the heartfelt posts from Branigan’s friends—boo hoo hoo. Did they think combat was a walk in the park? Not one asked questions about the soldier’s body armor.

Then that smarty-pants medic popped up. Posting daily, asking if anyone knew a girl named Kenzie—and then deleting the posts when no one answered right away. What was Randy Holt afraid of?

He swung his feet off the desk and leaned forward over his keyboard, jabbing at the keys until his favorite photo of Kenzie filled his screen. He’d tracked her down easily enough. The name wasn’t common, and the Facebook connection was easy to make. Practically no one seemed to know that a whole lot of the photos they posted had hidden geotags.

He didn’t need a worm to follow hot women without them knowing it, and Kenzie qualified as very hot.

Good thing her pal Christine hadn’t bothered with the most stringent privacy settings on Facebook—a lot of people didn’t even know how to use them since the rules had changed. Plus the new face recognition software on the site made it super hard for anyone to hide.

He’d lurked on her page, visited links to her friends’ pages to steal more photos—of both of them. He knew where they worked, had figured out where they lived.

One at a time, he told himself.

Like Christine, Kenzie was the active type. Outdoorsy. Athletic. Looked like she’d put up an exciting fight if it ever came to that.

His curiosity about her had gotten the better of him. He’d hung out in one of his cars at her building’s parking lot just for the hell of it that one time.

He’d needed some fun, needed to blow off the tension after that incident on I-95. First he’d swapped cars to get rid of the banged-up one. It hadn’t taken more than one good hit to force Christine off the road. Her fear of him had made her swerve too hard.

Coming around for a second look had been fun. He’d covered up the damage to his right front fender with a can of spray paint. He’d covered his hair with a quality rug and hidden his eyes with a pair of wraparounds.

That car had gone straight to the back of the garage belonging to a house he owned but didn’t live in. Nondescript one-story, sketchy lawn, curtains always closed. If the neighbors only knew what he kept in the living room and parlor ... His own arsenal. Disguises in the closet. But they kept to themselves. The tenants in Kenzie’s building were kind of the same.

He’d scoped the windows, figuring out which one was which. A nearly invisible mist had drifted out an opaque little window, open at the top.

He could almost smell her taking a shower. He’d gone up the back stairwell and tried a slim tool he kept in his pocket for just such occasions. The lock was easy to pick—but then that guy dressed for a wedding had run up the stairs and interrupted him.

He grinned. He planned to go back.

Maybe he could pay a call on the kennels, schmooze with her boss, one ex-military man to another, get to know her professionally, gain her trust. Although he didn’t like dogs. And the animals she trained knew the stench of fear.

He had to wonder why Kenzie hadn’t answered the medic’s posts sooner. Apparently she hadn’t been on the memorial page before. It seemed she didn’t check her own page too often—he hadn’t noticed new posts from her while he’d been lurking here and there. She didn’t seem to waste time on other people’s pages.

Not a problem. Now he had an e-mail address for Randy Holt. He typed it in and introduced himself as a friend of Frank Branigan’s. It bounced back.

Mailer Daemon unable to deliver
.

Randy Holt must have canceled the account and used another one to e-mail Kenzie. Covering tracks. As if the medic knew someone was spying.

Good guess.

He swiveled around in his chair until he was facing the window. All that plate glass and nothing to see. The nondescript office park that housed X-Ultra might as well be invisible. Worked for him.

Kenzie forced herself to call Mike Warren and postpone the meeting at the impound lot. He was nice enough about it.

First she wanted to get to Christine’s apartment and make sure Mrs. Corelli had everything she needed. She would phone SK Corp from there, give someone in charge the basic info on Christine’s accident and offer herself as a contact.

Barely seeing her surroundings, she drove to Christine’s, maneuvering the car through the narrow streets that led to the other side of town.

Life went on.

The ordinariness of that fact was small comfort. She was still numb. She happened to drive past the motel that Linc was staying in, wondering if he was there. She caught a glimpse of a red pickup. Confirmed.

She pulled up in front of Christine’s building and parked. Her friend lived in a second-floor apartment. Its curtained windows had been left closed, Kenzie saw. She got out and looked up at the semi-sheer panels. For a second, she imagined that they moved. No. The closed windows were reflecting the autumn sky. A cloud had moved across the sun, that was all.

Locking her car, she took the key to the apartment from her purse. She hadn’t had to ask Mrs. Corelli for it. Since forever, Kenzie had had Christine’s key and Christine had hers. There were no secrets between them. But she felt a little funny about rummaging through her friend’s papers. It had to be done, though.

She squared her shoulders and marched up the exterior stairs to the second floor.

The key turned soundlessly and the apartment door swung inward. Kenzie hesitated on the threshold.

It was as if the place had never been lived in. At least not by Christine. It was immaculate, not how her far-from-organized best friend kept it.

She told herself not to be silly.

It probably looked like that because Mrs. Corelli had put things away and tidied up when she was here. Christine’s mother was as neat as her daughter was messy.

Kenzie smiled to herself. She owed it to her best buddy to disorganize it again. Closing the door and setting down her purse, she took another look around, trying to remember where Christine kept bills and documents. Her gaze stopped on a tall, modern-style hutch that held family photos on its top shelves, with two roomy cabinets behind closed doors below.

She walked over and kneeled in front of it, pulling the doors open as slowly as she could. Despite her carefulness, a heap of miscellaneous papers slithered out, tilting the laptop they’d been stacked on. Kenzie steadied it with one hand and gathered up the papers with the other. Some of the bills had the logo of a health insurance company. Christine had even scrawled “paid” across a few.

Kenzie repositioned the laptop, a slim model with a pearly cover and kittycat decals. She smiled. Christine liked girly stuff and decorated her laptop like an old-fashioned diary.

The laptop was warm to the touch. It must be plugged in somewhere—she’d figure that out in a minute. First she checked the dates on the bills. They were current. Excellent. Christine wasn’t so disorganized that she didn’t take care of the copays for her health insurance.

She set those aside and sat cross-legged on the floor, going through more paperwork. Looked like everything they might need was here, though not, of course, in order.

That wouldn’t take long.

Taking out the laptop to get to the box beneath it, she followed its cord to an outlet strip snaked through an opening in the back of the hutch. Christine had probably left it there to recharge the afternoon she’d borrowed the sports car. Kenzie lost her hold on the smooth cover and the laptop slid from her fingers, landing on the floor and partly opening.

She set it flat and put the screen at a right angle. A pink-purple screen flickered into life. If Kenzie spotted any unicorns on it, she was going to give Christine a hard time, for sure.

There weren’t any, just vibrant colors that swirled. She set the open laptop to one side, clicking the menu to shut it down. She just didn’t feel like leaving it here, and the Corellis might need something on it.

Kenzie got up to stretch and wandered over to the window, peeking out through one side of the closed curtains. The street was quiet, lined with parked vehicles underneath trees that were beginning to let go of their leaves.

A black car with tinted windows cruised by slowly and disappeared. She let the curtain fall and went back to the laptop, seeing the same colors. A whirling-wheel icon in the middle was still going.

Okay, it was slow, she thought absently. Christine liked to download stuff and there were tons of videos on her hard drive. Kenzie had time. She settled down on the couch, not minding the few extra minutes to think.