Breathing Space (Ellis McFadden Mysteries #1)

Chapter 21

T he cake was delicious, and the coffee was better than any I’d had on board before. “What kind of coffee is this? I need to know so I can change what my Instachef makes.”

He sipped his, keeping his eyes on his dessert. “This one is, uh, a special blend.”

“I can taste that. What’s the name of it? How do I order it?”

“You can’t order it. It’s my own personal coffee that I brought with me. The beans are from Ethiopia.”

I narrowed my eyes, trying to understand. “You have your own personal coffee?”

He looked up, the guilt in his gaze catching me off guard. “Yeah. I do. I know how it sounds. Grossly pretentious.”

“I wasn’t thinking that. I just thought it was the best coffee I’ve had on board and was wondering how I could get it for myself. But you’re saying no one else on the ship has it?”

“I’m sure there are others who have their own particular teas and coffees and so on, but yes, this one is mine alone.”

He was right. I’d brought ten boxes of my favorite cinnamon tea with me. “How did you manage to get it into your Instachef, though? Is this another upgrade?”

He exhaled softly. “Something like that. For a fee, I was allowed to stockpile these coffee beans as part of my supplies, and whenever we dock at the starport of a planet that has good coffee, I pick up a few bags of whatever’s supposed to be the best.”

“Did you get some in Aetrea?”

He nodded. “Yes. Ten pounds of their Kreva beans. Supposed to be the best that planet has to offer. Ordered ahead of time so they were delivered to my quarters while we were on our tour.”

I stared at him, studying him, trying to see Frank in the light of all this new information. “Who are you, really?”

“I’m still Frank Kitson. I haven’t lied to you about anything. I swear it, Els.”

I took a moment. “I believe you. But you’re not just a guy who works in mechanical engineering who did some time in the Space Marines and knows about computers and programming. You can’t be. That isn’t possibly all there is to you. A guy like that doesn’t live in massively upgraded quarters twice the size of everyone else’s and have his own stockpile of premium coffee.”

He rested his fork on his plate next to the remains of his cake and sat back. “There is more to me. But I don’t think that’s what’s important about me. I don’t like to be defined by … what I have.”

“Okay, but what do you have?”

He stayed silent for a long span. Something new and odd sparked in his eyes when he looked at me. Apprehension. “A lot of money. More than I could spend in a lifetime. Maybe two.”

I’d met people with money before. Wealth was interesting, but wealth alone wasn’t impressive. What people did with it, that was what mattered. And most, in my opinion, didn’t make great choices. “Why do you work then?”

“Because I need to. I can’t be idle. I want to do something that matters with the remaining portion of my life, not just sit around, having others wait on me. I need to live my life in a way that means something. And I like working. I like feeling useful. It’s important to me.”

Admirable. “I can understand that, I suppose. But no one would ever look at you and think you had money. Not this kind of money, anyway.”

He gave a quick, short nod. “Good. That’s what I want. To blend in. To be treated like everyone else.”

“If it’s all right for me to ask, how did you get all this money?”

“It’s all right to ask. I invented a few things. Sold some patents.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t planned.”

“Not that it’s any of my business, but did you do anything with the money?”

He picked up his fork again and used it to cut off a small piece of cake. “Funded a few schools that needed it. Built a hospital. Paid off everyone’s—” He suddenly shook his head like none of that mattered.

“I tried to do good with it. As much as I could find to do. But word started getting out and I got bombarded with requests for things that didn’t matter. People wanting money for cosmetic surgeries. For ridiculous businesses. For outrageous trips. For reasons that made no sense.”

He ate the bite of cake and after swallowing it said, “I had no peace. Then the Athos came about, and it seemed like the perfect escape. A way to reinvent myself.”

“Is Frank Kitson your real name?”

“Yes, it is. But Frank is actually my middle name. My first name is Michael. Since I first learned about the Athos , I went back to using Frank. I only switched to Michael when I went to college. Anyway, I was hoping it would give me a little separation from my previous life.”

His expression held so many emotions. He was clearly worried what I was going to think of all this, but there was hesitation and sorrow and almost a sense of resignation coming off him. Like he already knew how I was going to react.

I felt for him. I laid my hand over his. “It couldn’t have been easy for you to tell me all of that. I want you to know I appreciate that you did. I’m also sorry you went through such a tough time because of your money. I’m sure a lot of people would think that would be a nice problem to have, but I’m not one of them.”

A breath slipped out of him, and his shoulders relaxed a bit.

“I know firsthand that money isn’t everything.” I smiled at him. “My husband and I never had a lot. We were all right. Comfortable. But not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. At best we were maybe middle class. Didn’t matter. We had a good life, a great daughter, and plenty of happiness.”

Frank smiled. “What made you happy?”

“Honestly? Knowing we were healthy. That Hazel was doing well. The way we lived our life.”

“Which was how? Did you travel? Go places together? How did you spend your time?”

“Often in the simplest way possible. Sometimes just a quiet night of television, or maybe him reading the paper and me reading a book. We did puzzles a lot. We kept one going on the dining room table all the time.” The memories brought another smile to my face. “We had a regular life. No whirlwind trips, no crazy adventures, just time spent together doing what made us happy. Nothing wrong with that.”

“Nothing at all,” Frank said. “It sounds great. It sounds like you were really in love.”

I laughed softly. “Even Ned would tell you that wasn’t true. We were good friends. We cared deeply for each other, but it was no love-at-first-sight kind of thing, no sense that we were meant to be, and we were okay with that. We loved our life, that was true. But sometimes, love isn’t everything. Sometimes, safety and security and being a family matters more than passion.”

“Really?” He seemed surprised. “I never thought about it like that before.”

“Have you never been married?”

“I was. I was twenty-two, she was nineteen, and we were each other’s world.” The sorrow returned to his eyes. “Two and a half years later, she was killed in a car accident. Drunk driver.” He dropped his gaze to the table again. His left thumb rubbed at his bare ring finger. “The light went out of my life for a while.”

My heart seized up with pain. I couldn’t imagine that kind of grief. I’d lost Ned unexpectedly, but I’d had him for many years. To lose a love so young… “Oh, Frank. I’m so sorry.”

His chest rose and fell with the intake of breath, and after a few of them, he looked at me again. “Rosalie was something special. But I think you are, too.”

I swallowed at the sudden emotion clogging my throat. That had to be one of the nicest, sweetest things anyone had ever said to me. “Thank you. I think you’re pretty special, too.”

He smiled. And then a low bell sounded from the study. His head whipped toward the noise. “The crawler found a way in.”

He got up, so I did, too. I followed him back to the office. He settled in behind the desk, his eyes on the big screen. “Okay, there’s a back door, but it’s still going to take me a minute to get through.”

“Take whatever time you need.” I sat next to him, watching the screen, even though I didn’t have a clue what was going on. Lots of letters and numbers and symbols that were part of a language I didn’t speak.

Frank’s gaze narrowed in concentration. He’d type something, glance at the screen, then type something else. That went on for a few minutes, more and more lines of code stacking up on top of one another.

Finally, he hit the Enter key with a decisive tap and sat back. The lines of green code on a black background disappeared, and what took its place seemed very much like a standard computer home screen. Labeled files were present as well as a few software icons.

“What are we looking at exactly?”

Frank smiled. “Officer Lu’s desktop.”

I sucked in air. This was definitely not … I hated to even think the word legal , but that was where we were. No denying it. Frank had hacked into the ASF server. “Okay then.”

“Don’t worry. I’m completely invisible. Doesn’t hurt that Lu is currently off-duty. He’s not around to notice anything strange. If there was anything strange to notice.”

I prayed Frank was right. He certainly seemed like he knew what he was doing. I pointed toward the top corner. “Probably that file there, don’t you think?”

“Ongoing? Yeah, that’d be my bet, too.” He clicked on it, and a new list of files presented itself. They were alphabetical, so Woolsey, Andrew, was near the bottom.

I did my best not to read the names on the other files. I did not want any of that extraneous information in my head. It wasn’t my business anyway.

Frank clicked on Woolsey’s file. This time, more alphabetized document names showed up. Autopsy was at the top. Woolsey-PM was near the bottom. “Start there,” I said. “Woolsey-PM. That’ll be the postmortem report.” If I could avoid seeing pictures of the autopsy, then that’s what I wanted to do.

“Not the autopsy?”

“I’d rather read about it as opposed to having those images in my memory bank. If at all possible.”

“Roger that. All right.” Frank selected the PM file and opened it. The pages appeared on the screen. The first sheet was a standard form that had been filled out, but there were several pages of notes as well. He looked at me. “I can’t send this to either of our accounts because that will leave a trail on the ASF server, but I can grab screenshots and send those to you.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I should have them. If it were found in my possession…”

“Yeah, smart. But I can keep the screenshots in an encrypted file. You can look at them here all you want.”

“Thanks. You are very handy.”

He laughed. “I do try.” He moved his fingers over a touch panel on another part of his desk, and the other pages of the report disappeared, leaving the first page front and center and big enough to read easily.

We both peered at it. The first page held basic information. Andrew Woolsey’s name, starliner address, time the body had been found, Officer Lu’s information, nothing too Earth-shattering.

After a few moments, Frank looked at me. “Ready for page two?”

“Yes.”

He brought it up. This one had a lot of writing on it. Again, we started to read. Lu had detailed everything from what Andrew had been wearing to the color of the bed linens, confirming that he had been discovered on his bed. I grimaced at the thought that I’d been in that bedroom.

Woolsey had still been wearing his jumpsuit. He’d been found prone on the bed, eyes open.

I read a little further and found something interesting. “Huh.”

“What?” Frank asked.

“Lu’s notes say he had a visible contusion near his left temple but no other marks.”

“You think someone hit him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” I thought back to that night and what Woolsey’s quarters had looked like when I’d been inside. Had there been any sign of a struggle? Maybe… “You know, when I was in his apartment, one of his dining table chairs was pulled out, but also the small table by his couch was on its side on the floor. I thought it was just because the table was poorly designed. Three legs, kind of top-heavy. Didn’t look that sturdy to me. But it’s possible it was on the floor because there’d been a scuffle.”

Frank looked at page two again. “Doesn’t mention anything about the side table. You’d think that would be an important detail.”

“Well, yeah, except…” I made a face. “I set the table right side up again.”

Frank cut his eyes at me. “And you didn’t tell the ASF about that?”

“I started to, but then Lu cut me off and it slipped my mind. Never got back to it, either.”

“You can’t exactly tell the ASF you read the postmortem and found a missing detail.”

“No, but maybe I could call Lu and tell him I remembered something else from that night? Just say I’d forgotten about one small thing?” I sighed. “Lu already doesn’t like me.”

“I don’t think it’s anything personal. He’s just doing his job. That kind of matter-of-fact attitude is probably his way of keeping his distance.”

“Maybe, but it could be he doesn’t like me because he thinks I’m involved in this somehow. Or he doesn’t like Hazel, and this is his chance to get at her through me.”

“The vice-admiral is pretty well liked. And you are involved. Not in the murderous way he thinks, obviously,” Frank quickly clarified. “Wouldn’t your prints be on the table if you set it upright?”

I chewed my lip. “Yes, they would be. Which might be exactly why Lu’s been treating me like I’m lying.” I groaned. “No wonder I’m a suspect. I have to tell him about the table.”

“Tonight? You’d have to leave a message.”

“No. First thing in the morning. I want to talk to him directly.”

He nodded. “You can always tell him you had a dream that reminded you.”

“Maybe I will.” I glanced at the report. “Seems pretty straightforward. Anything else jump out at you so far?”

“One thing. But you’re not going to like it.”

“What?”

“That we need to look at those autopsy photos. We need to see that contusion for ourselves.”

I wrinkled my nose. “You’re right. I don’t like it.”

“If you don’t want to look at the photos, I’ll do it by myself.”

“No, I’ll look at them. Just don’t expect me to enjoy it.”

He chuckled. “I would never expect that.” He went back to the keyboard. “Okay, brace yourself. I’m opening the file.”

The PM disappeared, and Lu’s list of files reappeared. Frank selected Autopsy and clicked on it.