Marcia Talley - This Enemy Town

The gaze I sent Special Agent Amanda Crisp was shot straight out of the gates of hell. “Let me get this straight. The NCIS and the FBI and the Navy I.G. have conspired to frame me for a murder I didn’t commit just so you can divert attention from the real target of your investigation, some rogue admiral?” I was shouting now, and I didn’t care who heard me.

“You clapped me in handcuffs, sent me off to that horrible place in Baltimore, you humiliated me…” I sputtered. My temper rose like mercury on a hot summer day. I could practically feel my red blood cells congealing. Any minute, I was going to have a heart attack. “You may have taken years off my life. How dare you?”

I spun on my heels and headed for the elevator. “That’s it. I’m out of here.”

By pure dumb luck, the elevator door opened the minute I pushed the button, and to my enormous satisfaction, it slid shut in Agent Crisp’s astonished face.

She caught up with me by the fare card machine. “We arrested you in good faith, Mrs. Ives. You have to admit there was probable cause.”

Sounding like a win at Dover Downs Slots, the change from my twenty-all quarters-tumbled down the chute. I stooped to gather it up. “I don’t believe you,” I said.

“Look, Mrs. Ives. Go home. Now. Chill out. You need to trust me. Trust that I’m doing everything I can to get you off the hook with the feds.” She paused. “ All of them.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It will have to do. It’s all I have to offer.”

I folded my arms and scowled at her. “So, what exactly are you doing to clear my name, Agent Crisp, tell me that? Aside from putting a tag-team tail on me.” I remembered some unexplained static on my landline and added, “And tapping my telephone, too, for all I know.

“And speaking of telephones, I haven’t had any phone calls from my lawyer telling me that the FBI has called to tell him that it’s all been a big mistake and that the charges against me have been dropped. For me, that’s the only acceptable outcome.”

“We know about your involvement with the Dunbar, Vorhees, and Tinsley cases,” Crisp said. “But I need you to back off now. This investigation could have serious, international repercussions.”

“Frankly, Agent Crisp, I couldn’t care less about international repercussions. I just want to be able to hold my head high in public again.”

“This case is much broader than little cases of domestic violence,” she continued.

“Little cases of domestic violence?” I repeated. “Little?” I didn’t realize I had been shouting until a woman standing at the fare card machine grabbed her daughter by the hand and, with a nervous glance in my direction, scurried off in the opposite direction. “Explain that to Mr. and Mrs. Dunbar! That little case of domestic violence, as you so crudely put it, cost them the lives of both their daughters.”

Amanda Crisp raised a cautionary hand. “I certainly don’t mean to trivialize those tragedies, Mrs. Ives, but I think it’s fair to say that if government contracts are compromised, particularly in wartime, thousands of soldiers and innocent civilians could die. We’ve spent over a year setting this up and I’m not asking you to go home, I’m ordering you to.”

I studied her face in the harsh Metro station lights and decided that in spite of myself, I believed her, but I was too angry to give her the satisfaction.

“You’re a long way from Annapolis,” she said. “Give you a ride home?”

I shook my head. “No thanks. I’d rather not.” I didn’t want to spend one more second in a police vehicle, even if I were sitting up front in the passenger seat holding a doughnut in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

I fed my fare card into the machine and pushed through the turnstile. As I headed for the train, I turned and called back over my shoulder. “And it’s Kinsey Millhone.”

“What?”

“Kinsey Millhone, not V.I. Warshawski. Nicer wardrobe. Cooler car.”

By the time I got home, it was after eight. Itossed my keys on the table in the entrance hall, peeled off my coat and scarf and called out the proverbial, “Hello, honey, I’m home!”

Paul returned my greeting from the living room, where I found him reading the latest Robert Parker crime novel. He’d propped his stocking feet up on an ottoman and aimed them at a fire that flickered in the fireplace, more for ambience than for warmth. He closed the book and let it drop from his fingers to the carpet, then patted the arm of his chair, inviting me to join him. “Successful day?”

I crossed the room, kicking off my shoes as I went. I perched on the chair next to him, kissed the top of his head. “You won’t believe it when I tell you.”

“Try me.”

“Chris Donovan tells me that Jennifer was blackmailing the admiral. She’d discovered some gross irregularities in the contracts coming out of his office and she was using that information to get money out of him. But then, he discovered-how, I don’t know, Chris didn’t say-that Jennifer Goodall is, or was, gay, so there went Jennifer’s leverage.”

Paul’s eyebrows shot up. “Gay? Now that’s a surprise.”

“I got it straight from Chris Donovan, and she had no reason to lie about it. At one time she and Jennifer were lovers.”

“I never would have guessed, not with the way she came on to me.” Paul captured my hand in both of his and squeezed it reassuringly. “I wasn’t the only faculty member she singled out for special attention, of course.”

“That’s because you’re so devilishly handsome,” I quipped. After a moment of silence, I added, “Of course, it’s perfectly possible that Jennifer swung both ways.”

An equal opportunity sexual predator, I thought maliciously.

“We need to call Murray.” Paul reached for the portable phone sitting on the end table.

I took the receiver from his hand. “No need, he already knows. Chris said he’d interviewed her about it.”

Paul’s eyes narrowed. “Funny he didn’t mention it.”

“My thoughts exactly,” I said. “But then I ran into Special Agent Crisp at the Metro.”

Paul turned in the chair to face me. “Ran into? As in ‘What a coincidence seeing you here, Special Agent Crisp?’”

He had such a goofy grin on his face that I had to laugh. “More like, ‘Agent Crisp, we can’t go on meeting this way.’” Skipping the part about my embarrassing karate demonstration, I forged on. “That phantom Taurus we’ve been seeing lately? I think it’s for real. The FBI has been keeping tabs on me, it seems, and Crisp wanted to rap my knuckles for messing about in her investigation.”

“If you won’t listen to me, Hannah, and you won’t listen to your lawyer, I don’t know why she thinks you’ll listen to the FBI.”

“But Paul, that’s just it! It’s not my case she’s afraid I’m messing with. The FBI is part of some multiagency sting operation that’s focused on Admiral Hart.”

“Damn!”

“And it gets better. In warning me off, Crisp practically admitted that she doesn’t think I had anything to do with Jennifer Goodall’s murder.”

“Now we definitely call Murray.”

I handed him the phone. “You dial,” I said.

We got Murray out of the bath. After Paul had passed on what I’d told him about the sting operation, he handed the phone to me. “Agent Crisp is right, Hannah, you need to stay out of it. Let me and my staff do the work.”

I asked Murray why he hadn’t told us about his interview with Chris Donovan, but he brushed me off with a simple, “I’m interviewing dozens of people, Hannah. When I know what’s important and what’s not, then I tell you. That’s what you pay me for.”