Breakpoint Read online

  “It’s not chauvinistic to recognize your strengths. And weaknesses. I’ve spent the past years in places no one in their right mind would go. While you’ve been riding a desk.”

  She welcomed the annoyance. The quick, hot flame of it burned off her earlier fear.

  “Well, in case you’ve been too busy flexing your manly muscles, you may note that we’re behind a desk now. Which puts us on my territory.”

  “Point taken.” His jaw, which had been stiff and jutted forward far enough to land one of those F-18s on, softened. Just a bit. “The deal is, we’re teammates. Which means we watch each other’s sixes.”

  Although the various branches of the military didn’t always use the same terminology, this—meaning “watch your back”—both had in common.

  “And believe me, darlin’, watching yours is becoming my favorite thing to do,” he tacked on.

  “I give up.” Julianne threw up her hands. “You’re impossible to argue with.”

  “That’s only because I’m an agreeable kind of guy.”

  As the dimples flashed, she thought of what he’d told her about the years of learning to charm his way into a new family, like an abandoned pound mutt, and the last of her annoyance faded.

  “We’d better get to work,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Despite the seriousness of their situation, his snappy salute had her smiling.

  After working their way through the medical officers Roberts had sent them and learning nothing other than what they’d already figured out—that gossip traveled at the speed of sound around the carrier—they instructed the ensign to contact whoever was in charge of the ordnance guys.

  Within three minutes a red-shirted sailor, who didn’t look old enough to have a driver’s license, let alone be loading bombs onto planes, entered the small room.

  After a brief introduction about who they were and why they’d been sent on board, Julianne got down to business.

  “How was Lieutenant Murphy to work with?”

  “She was okay.” The sailor shrugged. “She got hot under the collar if she thought preps were taking too long. And she definitely didn’t like being waved off. But she didn’t swagger and act like her shit don’t stink. Like a lot of the pilots do. And she actually made a point of learning people’s real names.”

  “Real names?” Dallas asked.

  “Aboard ship people tend to get called by their jobs. Like the chief engineer is called ChEng. The boatswain’s mate is Boats. The chief, is well, Chief. The chaplain’s usually Padre, even if he isn’t a Catholic. Though this tour he is.” He shrugged again. “Like that.”

  “Did you witness the altercation with LSO Manning?”

  “Sure. She was hotter than a hornet. For a minute I thought she was going to slug the guy.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “LT Murphy was a good pilot. A smart pilot. Even with her temper, she wasn’t dumb enough to do that. At least, not with an entire deck filled with witnesses.”

  “I heard that sometimes pilots write something on their bombs,” Dallas said.

  Leading a witness, Julianne thought, even as she remained silent.

  “Some do. Sometimes.” This time the shrug was verbal. But his eyes shifted nervously toward the hatch, as if he were wishing he could escape to anywhere but here.

  “Did the LT ever write anything?” Julianne followed up.

  There was a long silence. “Is this gonna go in her record? Because, like I said, she was always good to the shirts. Gave us respect, you know.”

  “I understand. Which is why, if there’s anything you know that might help us find her killer, she’d want you to share it with us.”

  “So she really didn’t off herself?”

  He didn’t sound nearly as surprised as the captain had been.

  “You don’t sound all that surprised,” Dallas observed, echoing Julianne’s thoughts.

  “There’s been some scuttlebutt.” He paused. “It’s kinda weird, thinking that we’ve spent all these months supposedly fighting the bad guys, when one might be on board with us. Eating with us. In the shower.” He shook his head. “Creeps me out.”

  “You’re not alone there, sailor,” Dallas assured him. “So, getting back to the LT sending a message.”

  “Her brother was killed. In Iraq. By an IED.”

  “So we learned,” Julianne said. “I come from a military family. I have two brothers in the military. One’s currently on the Nimitz. The other’s in Afghanistan. Even understanding the risk, if anything happened to either of them, I’d be devastated. And mad as hell.”

  The personal information seemed to relax the red shirt. Slightly.

  “I don’t really blame her,” he said. “But yeah. She wrote something on one of the bombs about a week before that last flight.”

  Both Dallas and Julianne waited.

  “ ‘Take that, you fucking ragheads. Courtesy of Uncle Sam.’ ”

  Julianne and Dallas exchanged another look. It was the same thing Lieutenant Harley Ford had told them.

  “Did you tell anyone about that?” she asked.

  “Hell, no. Ma’am,” he said. “It’s not my job to pass stuff like that along. The day a pilot can’t trust me is the day we’re both in a world of hurt.”

  “But the word got around?” Dallas coaxed.

  “Only because she was talking about doing it beforehand. And bragged about it afterward. Especially after she took out a building where some bad guys were supposed to be hanging out.”

  His lips, badly chapped from his spending so many days out in the sun on the flight deck, curved. “Since the aviators spend a lot of their time acting as air support, they don’t always get to drop that much ordnance. So she was really stoked about it.”

  Once again, it wasn’t pretty. But Julianne could empathize.

  “Is there anything else you can think of that might aid our investigation?” she asked.

  “No. Maybe if the LSO hadn’t gone overboard, you could’ve talked to him. Because they definitely had some serious vibes going on.”

  “Good vibes?” Dallas asked with far more casualness than Julianne suspected he was feeling.

  “Nah. She hated the guy’s guts. Even before he waved her off. Which . . .”

  He slammed his mouth shut.

  “You were about to say?” Julianne asked.

  “Look, she might have been a female, which a lot of guys, especially the old-timers belowdecks, don’t think belong flying fighters, but she was, from what I could tell—and I’ve seen a lot of cat shots and traps—one of the best pilots on the boat. But that last night, she was just, well, off.

  “So, whatever people are saying about them having some sort of lovers’ spat, or him being against women, maybe those things are true. But, the way I see it, he was right to wave her off. Because if she crashed, a lot of us on deck could’ve been toast. And if there was a fire . . . Well, shit. I might not be an officer, or the smartest bomb in the box, but even I know that a pilot’s ego is never worth risking that.”

  “Well.” Julianne blew out a breath. “Thank you. We appreciate your cooperation.”

  “It’s not like I had a choice,” he pointed out.

  Then his face turned hard, and in it Julianne saw the warrior who, although obviously too young to legally buy liquor back home, had been given the responsibility of massive tons of weapons that could, if mishandled, blow the boat to kingdom come. “But if it helps you catch whatever son of a bitch offed the LT, then it was worth it.”

  “Well,” Dallas said after the red shirt had left the quarters. “Seems we’ve got a bit of a difference of opinion. Lieutenant Ford said, and I quote, ‘Mav was all about Mav.’ Yet according to that young man, she went out of her way to connect with the rest of the crew.”

  “It’s not necessarily a discrepancy. My dad always said that if you’re good to the shirts, they’ll be good to you. The more a crew respects and even likes you, the harder they’r
e going to work.”

  “Which makes for more successful cruises. Which, in turn, greases the wheels toward promotions.”

  “Exactly.”

  “At least we now know the story about her writing on the bomb wasn’t a carrier version of an urban legend.”

  “True.” Julianne sighed. Glanced down at her leather-banded watch. “You realize that, unless someone gets racked with guilt and up and confesses within the next few hours, like in those movies you liked to watch with your mom, we’re not going to make our Pearl deadline.”

  “Probably not. But since there’s no way we’re going to be able to conduct interviews when all those civilians are boarding tomorrow, if you don’t get your Perry Mason confession moment, we may as well take advantage of the opportunity to do what a lot of other sailors probably do on shore leave.”

  “Get drunk?”

  “Actually, although it’s going to cost me my rep for smooth talking, I was going to come right out and suggest we skip past the luau I was hoping for and just get a room.”

  “Well, that was, indeed, blunt.”

  “I like to think of it as being outspoken. Like I said, under normal conditions, I’d love nothing more than to do the wine-and-dine thing—which we could’ve done at the del Coronado if you hadn’t treated me like Jack the Ripper,” he reminded her.

  “I’d prefer to take things nice and slow,” he continued. “But we’re up against a clock here, darlin’, and I gotta admit that it’s getting more and more difficult to keep my mind on the mission when all I can think about is getting you naked.”

  Julianne felt the telltale color rise in her cheeks. Tamping down a slight regret that she hadn’t been a little more open to his obvious interest at the del Coronado, she decided that it wouldn’t hurt to make him work a little harder before he got what they both knew each wanted.

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” she said mildly.

  From the wicked gleam in his eyes, she knew she wasn’t fooling the man for a minute.

  41

  Dragging his mutinous mind, which, ever since that party at the del Coronado, had been locked onto the idea of getting down and dirty with the sexy former LT like a Hellfire missile locked onto a target, Dallas sat back in the chair he’d abandoned for the red shirt, tilted it onto its back legs, and asked, “So. Who’s next, Lieutenant Galloway?”

  Dallas had traveled the world. He’d scuba dived off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, climbed Mount Fuji, and once, while on a training mission in the high-altitude oyamel fir forests of central Mexico, witnessed an estimated eight billion monarch butterflies arriving after their two- to three-thousand-mile migration to their winter retreat.

  But never had he been more entranced by a natural wonder than by the color that rose high on Juls’s cheekbones when he’d compared her to the fictional JAG officer. He suspected that, despite her creamy complexion, she was not accustomed to blushing. Which meant that the attraction that had been grinding away at him was decidedly mutual.

  “You really have watched a lot of movies.”

  “A Few Good Men was one of the best military flicks ever. Though parts of it weren’t all that realistic.”

  “Such as?”

  “Like in what universe were they living that the Tom Cruise character wasn’t going to be attracted to Demi Moore’s sexy law-and-order LT Galloway JAG officer?”

  “They were investigating a murder.”

  “So are we. And believe me, that’s not keeping me from thinking about what it’s going to be like when we start tangling the sheets.”

  He watched, pleased, as a similar awareness had her pupils widening. Dallas had learned to watch for the smallest clues to a person’s feelings, and while he’d watched her keep her emotions in check during her interrogation, she kept lowering her shields on him this time around.

  “You know what I think?” he asked.

  “From what I can tell, you mainly think about sex.”

  “Hey, like I said, we CCTs pride ourselves on our multitasking. And I think the fact that there wasn’t one bit of sexual chemistry in that flick means the role was originally written for a guy. But then, since that was back when Moore was a big box-office draw, they changed the role to a female for her. But never put the sexual-attraction stuff in.”

  “That’s exactly what Merry says,” Julianne admitted.

  “I’ve really got to meet your sister,” Dallas decided. “If for no other reason than to thank her for designing that dynamite spray-on dress.”

  “It wasn’t sprayed on.”

  “Maybe not, but I’ll bet you had to shimmy like hell to get into it.”

  “How I get into—or out of—my clothes is not the topic at hand.”

  “Until we reach Pearl.”

  “Okay.” She blew out a short, impatient breath. “There’s something we need to get out onto the table before we dock.”

  He’d like to have the luscious LT on a table. Unfortunately, he doubted there was a private one available anywhere on the boat.

  Which made him wonder how and where Mav, the wannabe top gun, got herself pregnant.

  “You’re not paying attention.”

  “Sorry.” He reluctantly dragged his thoughts back from the idea of Juls lying on a white-draped table in the officers’ mess, wearing only a whipped-cream bikini. Which he’d slowly lick off, beginning at her pert breasts and ending at that triangle between her legs. “My mind was wandering.Thinking about our case.” He improvised what he hoped she’d accept as a reasonable excuse.

  The arched-brow response suggested acceptance was never going to come all that easy where Julianne Decatur was concerned.

  “My hand to God.” Risking being struck by lightning, he lifted his right hand and assured himself that his answer was at least partly true. “I was wondering how the pilot got pregnant.”

  “I’m assuming the usual way.”

  “No, I mean where? It’s not like there are a lot of places to be alone, even on a boat as big as this one.”

  “True. But there’s always shore leave. . . . Damn.” She didn’t literally hit her forehead with her palm, but her tone suggested it. “We need to check out what dates the ship was docked at a port.”

  “I can do that.” He flexed his fingers, like a master safecracker preparing to break into Fort Knox.

  “I’ve not a doubt you could. But there’s no point in pissing people off if you get caught.”

  “I never have yet.”

  “There’s always a first time for everything. When we’re having dinner tonight, I’ll just ask the captain for the log. Meanwhile, since Ford hit one bit of scuttlebutt right, let’s try another.”

  “You’re calling in her pastor,” Dallas guessed. “The one her roommate told us about.”

  “They argued about her dabbling in paganism,” Julianne said. “Which means that although she wandered away from his church, or congregation, or whatever the hell it’s called, he might have talked with her about her anger toward the Muslims on board.”

  “Which means he might be able to give us a name of one of them who might have decided to take a more personal form of justice into his own hands.”

  “Exactly. Especially if the pastor wants to deflect any suspicion from himself.”

  “You’re considering him a suspect?”

  “Despite our system of a person being innocent until proven guilty, in our job, the Napoleonic Code of presuming the opposite works better. There’s less chance of someone slipping through the cracks. And, hey, the pastor wouldn’t be the first to diddle one of his congregation. So if he is the father, it only makes sense that he’d want to hand us a bunch of names to turn us in a different direction.”

  “Makes total sense to me. Remember when you said you liked the fact that I was suspicious?”

  “Since it was only a few hours ago, it rings a bell.”

  “Well, I really like the fact that you’re sneaky.”

  “I’m not sneaky.”


  “Okay. Maybe that’s the wrong word. How about devious?”

  “I’m not sure I like that one any better.”

  “It’s not a negative if it’s done for good,” he pointed out. “And Quinn McKade’s wife, who’s a former FBI agent, says the Supreme Court gave cops the right to lie to coerce the bad guys into confessing.”

  “Frazier v. Cupp, 1969,” Julianne responded. “The officer lied, telling the defendant that his cousin had not only confessed to the possession of cocaine with intent to distribute, but had implicated the defendant, who, believing the false statement, confessed. The Court determined that the criminal defendant’s confession was voluntary, and the fact that he was given his Miranda rights prior to making the confession was relevant to a finding of waiver and voluntariness.”

  “Hot damn. And I thought I was the king of trivia. I’m duly impressed, Counselor.”

  “That’s a very basic legal concept.” She shrugged off the compliment, making him wonder if she wasn’t accustomed to them. “If I didn’t know it, I shouldn’t have passed the bar.”

  She appeared to be one of the most self-reliant people he’d ever met. Was that by choice? he wondered. Or because, being a Navy brat, she hadn’t had a father around to protect her or build up her feminine self-esteem?

  Dallas wasn’t as much of an expert on women as his reputation suggested, but he’d read somewhere that most women’s first crushes were on their fathers. Wouldn’t it be more difficult if said crush were constantly abandoning you for months at a time?

  “You’re an absolute legal eagle,” he said. “I imagine grown men’s knees shake when they’re forced to sit on the other side of an interrogation table from you.”

  “Yours weren’t shaking.”

  “You don’t know that. You couldn’t see them, since I was wearing my dress blues, which, by the way, you never invited me to take off.”

  “There you go again. Talking about sex.”

  “Actually, we began talking about Lieutenant Murphy having sex,” he reminded her. “You can’t blame me for being attracted to brains and beauty all wrapped up in one hot package.”

  She shook her head. But he could tell she wasn’t immune to the compliment—which was not a line, but the absolute truth.