Rising Sun (29 page)

Harris was pleased. For once his request for information and help from local police had gotten results. Generally there was no love lost between the FBI and the San Diego cops and he’d been afraid that his asking for cooperation had wound up in a waste basket. Most of the local cops were extremely territorial and he was the outsider. They even thought he talked funny, originally being from out east and all that.

He’d pressed the point with his local contact, a detective named Flaherty. He’d said he was looking for possible saboteurs and maybe that had gotten their attention and enabled them to look past their prickly pride. Or were they prideful pricks, he wondered? Flaherty said he’d keep an eye out. It helped that the cop was a good guy and that Harris was the one who’d told him about the possibility of sabotage and murder by Germans. Harris had worked with Flaherty before and there was a level of mutual respect.

The woman on the slab looked up at the ceiling through lifeless eyes. She was naked. Her body was pale and there were a number of bruises and cuts. Harris wondered if they were from crawly things gnawing on her after she died and decided he didn’t want to know.

“Where’s her clothing?” he asked and was informed that she’d been found naked on the beach yesterday morning by a couple of very surprised hikers.

Flaherty volunteered that she was probably a local whore and their immediate assumption was that she’d gotten killed by a jealous boyfriend. What had made Flaherty curious was the fact that she’d been shot by a nine-millimeter bullet to the back of the head, just what Harris had asked the locals to be on the lookout for.

Flaherty held a handkerchief to his nose. The body was getting a little ripe. “I took the liberty of circulating her photo around some areas on the assumption that, looking Mexican, she was probably a prostitute. I was right. A couple of her coworkers gave me a name, Juanita Morales, said she worked alone, and said she left with a middle-aged white guy the night before she was found.”

“Anything more about him?”

Flaherty sniffed. “Nah. They were all busy earning a living and didn’t notice anything special about her new friend. They said he was kind of nondescript, frankly.”

“Great work, detective.”

“You think the killer’s the guy who’s wrecking your trains?”

“I would put serious money on it,” Harris said. “I owe you.”

“What do you want me to do with the body?” Flaherty asked. An autopsy would be performed, but that would confirm the obvious—death by bullet to the head. The police would keep her prints and a photo on file as a matter of course.

“Just give Miss Morales a decent burial. She may have died actually helping her country.”

“She’s Mexican,” Flaherty said with a slight grin.

“Okay, helping our country.”

Harris drove away with the bullet in a paper bag. An hour later and back on base, he and another agent were peering through microscopes, comparing the bullet recovered from the woman to the bullets extracted from the border guards and the Mexican kids.

“Son of a bitch,” Harris snarled, although he was not surprised. The grooves on the bullets had all matched. Whoever the saboteur and killer was, he was still on the loose and still killing.

CHAPTER 15

TIM ROLLED ON HIS SIDE AND LOOKED AT AMANDA, WHO WAS lying on her own beach blanket and looking contentedly at the full, billowing clouds. He thought they were cumulus but wasn’t sure. She knew he was staring at her and smiled slightly. She hoped he liked how she looked in her new two-piece bathing suit. Both Sandy and Grace insisted that it accentuated her very slender figure, while the light blue color went well with her lightly colored hair.

“Honey,” Grace had said, “if I had a flat belly and perky little breasts like that, I’d wear one of those suits too.”

However, Grace added, she didn’t. Her figure was more on the voluptuous side and she really needed something to help tuck in her tummy. Like most women, she wore a girdle when out in public. Amanda generally did, too, although she didn’t think she needed one. Not wearing a girdle was liberating but it scandalized older women, which she sometimes found amusing. Where was it written in law that women, especially slender ones, had to wear a heavy and constricting girdle that made a woman sweat and itch? Grace said it made it so much harder for a man to undress her if she wasn’t willing, so maybe that was a selling point.

Sandy sat a few yards away from them with Steve Farris. They seemed to be hitting it off. After some initial shyness, there was now a lot of laughter coming from their blanket. Grace and Merchant were somewhere off on their own. The difference in rank was too much for them all to be comfortable, especially Steve, who was still only a first lieutenant, and Merchant, the Army’s equivalent of a full colonel. Amanda thought that the military’s fixation with rank was silly, but it was something they had to live with.

Amanda rolled onto her side so she could face Tim. “Like what you see?”

“Immensely. You’re beautiful.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the women who lie half naked on a beach with you.”

“I’d even say it if you were totally naked.”

She giggled. Sandy and Steve turned to see if they were missing something, decided they weren’t, and went back to their own conversation. Amanda liked what she saw of Tim in a bathing suit, even though it was baggy and too large for him and admittedly borrowed from a friend. He was muscular and had told her that he worked out at one of the base gyms to relieve stress. She thought that lying on a California beach was a much better way of alleviating stress. The only mildly disturbing factor was the presence of several destroyers and patrol craft at the opening to San Diego Bay. She rationalized their presence by thinking that they would have been there in peacetime as well.

“Tim, every now and then you have a good idea and this is a wonderful one. Your nephew seems like a nice man and it looks like he and Sandy are hitting it off.”

The four of them were on a beach a mile south of San Diego and it was a Sunday afternoon. A number of other couples had similar ideas, which meant there was little real privacy. Steve’s unit was through packing, and his battalion had been given the weekend off, which was why they were near San Diego and not Steve’s small base. On Monday they’d be heading north and on to the vast wilderness of Alaska to confront the Japanese army that was slowly approaching Fairbanks. Steve was less than thrilled and Tim shared his worry. After all, the woods up north were filled with angry, hungry, and fanatic Japs.

“Will you ever go back to Hawaii?” Tim asked.

“No,” she said softly. “That part of my life is over. I wanted to spend a year or so there on a kind of lark that turned into a tragedy. From what I’ve heard about the horrors of living on the Islands, especially Oahu, I wonder if anyone will ever want to go there on vacation again. I’ll continue nursing here until I get the chance to go back east and then on to med school. Do you think I can make it and become a doctor?”

“Easily,” he responded.

Nor would she have much trouble getting into any med school. Not only was she very bright and well educated, but her nursing experience would help her immensely. And it would not hurt at all that her father was a senior surgeon on the staff at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. But would she like it as a woman doctor in what was a man’s world?

She sat up and brushed sand off her pale skin. “Let’s go in the water. I can’t stand too much sun.”

She’d earlier explained that her badly sunburned body was pretty well healed, but that her new skin was still very tender. The doctors explained that she might be susceptible to sunburn for quite some time, perhaps forever. Therefore, her time on the sun-drenched beach would be limited and infrequent, unless she wanted to wear clothing, which struck her as silly. Why go to the shore if you had to stay dressed? Today was just too nice to spend indoors and, besides, even southern California weather couldn’t be wonderful all the time, especially with winter on the horizon. She would take a few chances and enjoy life.

They waded in and then swam out beyond a large seaweed encrusted raft that shielded them from being seen by anyone on the beach. No other swimmers were in the area so they were deliciously alone. The water came just up to their chests and they stood comfortably, letting this day’s fairly gentle waves splash around them. If the sea had been any rougher, they wouldn’t have been able to stand out there. They would have had to climb onto the raft.

Pleased by the privacy, they slipped into each others’ arms and kissed tenderly, then passionately. Tim was aroused and didn’t care if Amanda knew it.

She nuzzled under his chin. “I guess you really do like me.”

Tim kissed the top of her head. He slid his hands down and lifted her up, squeezing her bottom. So far she’d permitted him very few liberties and he wondered what would happen today, out of view and already half undressed.

She read his mind. “You’re a very good man, Tim. Someday you and I will make love, just not right now.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t. I was hurt once, betrayed by someone I loved very much, and I thought he loved me.”

The light dawned. “Is that why you came to Hawaii? Not just for the sailing and not just on a lark?”

“Partly,” she said and wiggled against him, arousing him even more. “The young man in question, and I will never tell you his name because you might want to challenge him to a duel, said he wanted to marry me and when I wouldn’t go to bed with him, told everyone I had. Then he spread it around that I had done some strange things with him. Look, there are a lot of people who do and that’s their business, but they keep it quiet. When he broadcast such lies, I felt like my reputation and trust had been destroyed.”

“People don’t want to believe the truth, do they?”

“Not when salacious tales are so much more fun. And there’s no way I could deny it. I tried, but people preferred to believe the more interesting lies. Tim, I’m no saint. A long ways from it in fact, but I do consider myself a private and discreet person.”

“Is that why we’re hiding behind a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?”

“Absolutely,” she said and kissed him hungrily, teasing him with her tongue.

She pulled back and smiled. She slipped out of her top and guided his hands across her small and firm breasts. He hoisted her farther up, thankful for the ocean’s buoyancy, so he could kiss and nibble them. Her breasts were beautiful and delicious, tasting like salt water. She groaned with pleasure and let him shift the bottom of her suit so he could caress her even more intimately. After a few moments she groaned and shuddered, almost clawing at his shoulders.

She smiled tenderly and pulled his swim trunks town to midthigh. It was her turn to caress him, and she did until he climaxed.

“Who taught you to do that?” he asked.

She laughed softly and licked the inside of his ear. “You did. Just now.”

“I love you,” he said softly.

“I know, Tim, and I love you too. Now let’s get dressed and go back in.”

“Can we come back?”

She grinned wickedly. “Perhaps later if I get hot.”

This trip with his men was much different from the earlier trip to California, thought Farris. Way back then, he’d been a total rookie with a cast of misfits under his command, along with an NCO who held him in contempt and a pair of drunks as company and battalion commanders.

Since then, he’d been promoted, given an understrength company to command, seen combat and felt that he’d grown immensely. That did not, however, make him pleased as the long column of trucks rattled north. Taking on the Japanese army in the woods of Alaska was quite frankly frightening. Since receiving word that they’d be heading north, both he and the new battalion commander had been driving the men hard. They’d worked on their marksmanship, their conditioning, and their ability to operate in dense woods as a unit.

They’d also watched with a mixture of sadness and relief as a fresh and innocent-looking unit took over what Stecher referred to as their beachfront property. Leaving was a little bittersweet for Farris. After all the time watching for enemy ships and complaining about being lonely, he’d finally met someone. He and Sandy Watson had hit it off. They’d promised to write and he wondered if he could finagle some telephone calls from up near the Arctic Circle. She’d let him kiss her a few times, but stopped him when he tried to go a little farther. “When you come back,” she’d told him.

Steve was delighted that Uncle Tim had found someone as nice as Amanda, although both he and Sandy had been amused by the fact that they’d gone behind that raft thinking no one would notice. Sandy insisted they really weren’t going to go all the way because Amanda had said they wouldn’t. They’d made jokes about all the splashing and waves coming from behind the raft. Amanda and Tim had gone out there three times during the afternoon. What the hell, let them all be happy, Steve thought. Let everyone be happy. There’s a war on and tomorrow everybody could be dead.

There had been other casualties before they set off. One company commander and three lieutenants had been shipped off either for being utterly incompetent, for toadying too much to the previous regime, or both. No loss was the consensus. They were going into combat and nobody wanted jerks commanding men.

They’d been issued cold-weather gear including flannel shirts, field jackets, and fur caps that, in Farris’s opinion, made them look like Cossacks. Stecher said that barbarians in training was more like it.