Chapter Ten
They stopped for coffee at Starbucks on the way into the office the next morning.
The way Thayne figured, they were going to have a long day at their desks.
Thayne loaded his coffee up with sugar and half-and-half, and Jarrett ordered a Venti bold, drinking it black the way he always did.
Thayne wondered if that was some sort of a Marine thing because Craig Baldwin, the rookie in their work group at the office, drank his the same way.
Thayne shuddered at the thought of it.
They drove the Crown Vic into the office.
Thayne had decided to leave his Mustang at home and drive with Jarrett since he still didn’t have transportation other than the Harley he drove.
Jarrett hated taking the motorcycle when he wore a suit, and they both agreed that taking more than one car when they were going to the same place wasn’t really earth-friendly.
They walked in to the office and greeted Sarah and Tim who were the only two not out on cases.
Thayne figured that was probably a good thing since there was a lot to follow up on.
After greeting them, Thayne carefully removed his jacket and laid it over the back of the chair while Jarrett flopped into his.
Thayne had to give his partner credit.
For a guy who spent nearly all his adult life either in a uniform or in clothes designed to be worn while taking up a sniper perch, Jarrett was making an effort with his wardrobe now that he carried ATF credentials.
Thayne knew that Jarrett was much more comfortable in one of his olive-green muscle tees and cargo pants, but he really was trying to look and act as professional as he possibly could.
Besides, as long as Jarrett wore suits, Thayne could admire him in them.
Damn if his lover didn’t wear a suit well.
“So, I kind of made up a list of the stuff we need to follow up on this morning.”
Thayne pulled out his phone where he’d typed up notes.
“What’s that?”
Jarrett drawled.
He sat back in his chair as he sipped his Starbucks.
Thayne held up his phone.
“It’s a mobile device.
You can punch in numbers and talk to someone on the other end.”
Jarrett smiled as Sarah snorted from beside him.
“Look who’s a clown this mornin’.
You know what I mean.”
“I made notes.”
Thayne grinned back at his partner.
“For what?”
“All the stuff we need to do today.”
“Such as?”
“Well, I kind of broke it down like this.
First we have to call Ada Carrillo and ask her to forward the autopsy report, have her collect the field strips I saw out at the blast site at Miramar, and get them off to the lab.
She also should check to see if the lab has results back from the bomb fragments on your Wrangler and on the remnants of the fireworks from the explosion.
If the lab is able to find any chemicals that shouldn’t have been present, that might just mean that the Mason crew was using illegal fireworks as well as the legal ones,”
he said, reading from the notepad on his phone.
“Next, we should have her check with Chief Willis to see how the investigation into who blew up your Jeep is going or maybe you want to do that.
I don’t know.”
He took another sip of coffee and continued.
“Then, I was thinking, someone should follow up with Suki Chang to see if she’ll tell us who she wrote down as the lantern maker so we can follow up with that.
Then, we need to call the ATF satellite office in Mexico to see if they have any information about the smuggling operation, and I know you said you wanted to look at pictures of the field strips I saw at Miramar.
Maybe you want to do that stuff.
Then, I figured I would check to see if there are any other firework crimes in other jurisdictions with photos so we can look for field strips, run background checks on the Mason crew, and see if there’s a log at the base of who was allowed on base the day of the explosion.
Oh, and we need to follow up with Special Agent Snow to find out if he’s heard back from the Behavioral Analysis Unit to see if there is a serial killer using fireworks as weapons anywhere else in the country.
He was also going to check to see if the FBI has investigated any other explosions anywhere in the country where notes with a bible verse were left.”
He looked up to find Jarrett smirking at him. “What?”
“Land your plane, Wolfe.”
Thayne blinked at him as Sarah and Tim burst into laughter.
“Seriously, you sound like a squirrel on Red Bull.”
“What?”
Thayne huffed, giving an exasperated shrug with his phone in hand.
“I just didn’t want to forget anything.”
“That’s a pretty comprehensive list, Thayne,”
Sarah added, still laughing.
“Thank you.”
Thayne felt vindicated.
He took another sip of his Starbucks.
Jarrett stood up and stretched his hands over his head before taking off his jacket.
“What Connor means is, you have the worst case of OCD anyone’s ever seen, Wolfe.”
“I got back some info on the little matter you guys wanted Sarah and me to look at under the radar,”
Tim Darcy said, quietly changing the subject.
Jarrett flopped back down and rolled his chair across the aisle toward Tim and Sarah’s cubicle as Thayne did the same.
“You mean you looked into Suki Chang for us?”
Thayne asked quietly, glancing over his shoulder in the still quiet office.
“Yeah,”
Darcy said.
He handed Thayne a piece of paper and Jarrett rolled his chair close so they could read it together.
“I looked as far into her personnel file as I could without raising suspicions.”
Thayne glanced up from the report he’d just been handed.
“How’d you do that?”
“I used to date Cindy Tyler in Human Resources so I took her to lunch yesterday.
She was reluctant but she finally gave me a peek at Chang’s file.”
Jarrett grinned and reached out and gave Darcy a high five. “Word.”
Tim grinned, gesturing at the report Thayne still held.
“Anyway, the long and the short of it is that before coming to the ATF as an investigator three years ago, she was a graduate student at UCLA.
She has bachelor’s in criminal justice and a master’s in chemistry.
Her file also states that she’s fluent in Mandarin, Tibetan, and Russian as well as English.”
Thayne exchanged a glance with Jarrett, knowing that he was going to want to follow that up.
“Anything else?”
Darcy shook his head.
“Naw, man.
She’s got the cleanest file I’ve ever seen.”
Thayne looked over at Jarrett again, communicating with him silently.
They both knew what that meant.
If it looked too good to be true, it probably was.
When Thayne had gone undercover with Mills Lang’s crew, the ATF had not only given him a whole new identity with a long arrest record, they’d thrown in stuff that looked like it could appear to be real, like a tendency to fight dirty and a penchant for playing the horses which he was never really good at.
But, they’d also included things like having good grades in school until he lost both parents and then started hanging out with troublemakers.
No one was perfect and because Chang appeared to be, at least on paper, her whole file read as super fishy.
“Yeah, no one’s that clean on paper,”
Jarrett said.
“Even her evals are stellar,”
Darcy added.
“I mean, I’m a psych major and a sharpshooter and I don’t score the way she does.”
“It’s suspicious, I have to agree,”
Thayne said.
“But let’s not jump to conclusions.”
He looked around to the rest of them.
“What? I just think we have to be careful here.
None of this points to Chang being complicit in this fireworks case regardless of how damning it looks at the moment and…”
He held up his hand when Jarrett opened his mouth, probably to argue with him.
“None of us would want to be accused of something we didn’t do.
There’s a religious fanatic connotation to these crimes, and you have to remember she’s got a Buddhist shrine in her house.
I think we have to give her the benefit of the doubt here.
That’s all I’m saying.”
Jarrett nodded.
“She may have a Buddha in her house, but she wears a cross around her neck.
I think you’re right to some degree, Wolfe.
Profiling someone’s religion gets us into dangerous territory.
Don’t get me wrong.
That don’t mean it don’t have merit.
We have to give her the benefit of the doubt until we prove otherwise,”
he said.
Then he turned to Tim.
“Thanks a lot, Darcy.”
“No problem.
I live to serve.”
“So…,”
Jarrett said, pushing off and rolling his chair backward toward his cubicle where he did a perfect one-eighty to face his desk.
“How should we divvy up the rest of the chores, boss?”
Thayne snorted.
“Boss.
That’s really funny.
Pick a task and finish it and I’ll do the same until it’s all done.
It looks like we’re both gonna have a long day riding a desk chair, Evans.”
When Jarrett was silent he turned to stare at him.
He was wearing a devilish expression and he winked at him.
“Sounds like a plan, Wolfe.”
Jarrett smirked.
Thayne grinned and picked up the phone.
****
Jarrett decided he should be the one to call Ada Carrillo for a couple of reasons.
First of all, even though he’d apologized for being a complete ass to her when they were down in San Diego, he still felt bad for having been so abrupt with her and he wanted to mend more fences.
Second, he didn’t think that she was going to have a lot of luck with figuring out who the bomb maker was that tried to blow up his Jeep.
They might have the name in their database but Ada didn’t have Jarrett’s level of security clearance and Jarrett’s best guess was, even though his partner did, Thayne still wasn’t going to get the kind of information about the bomb maker that he could.
Now that Jarrett knew someone targeted him specifically in the burning barn down at the border, he was pretty sure whoever tried to blow up his Jeep, was the guy who’d been on the wet works team in the Mideast way back when.
When everything had been happening at breakneck speed down at the Fernandez farm, Jarrett thought he’d recognized the operative running into the barn.
Hell, the guy had turned and shot at him.
After the whole melee, he was wondering whether a lot of it had been his memory playing mind tricks on him.
It was all a little fuzzy now.
He didn’t know the guy’s name so he couldn’t do a check on him anyway.
All Jarrett knew was that someone had it out for him.
That was clear.
The bottom line was, Jarrett had a better chance of getting a look at a file that wasn’t completely redacted than Thayne did.
He really wanted to find out who and why so he could keep breathing a little while longer.
It wasn’t that Jarrett was particularly afraid of the afterlife; he just didn’t want to put Thayne in danger any more than he already suspected he was.
The “someone trying to kill us”
theme was getting really old as far as Jarrett was concerned.
Before calling Ada, he sat at the desk and looked at the photos she’d emailed them from the Miramar blast site and wasn’t surprised that Thayne had been absolutely right.
There were field strips in the photos and Jarrett had totally missed them.
Next, he checked his email to find that Ada had forwarded the autopsy report the M.E.
had sent over.
It confirmed Cornwall’s suspicion that Greg Mason had died from being hit with an object prior to the explosion.
She concluded that whoever struck him did it with such force that it had pushed a perfectly circular piece of his skull two centimeters into his brain.
Her best guess was the blow had been caused by a hammer and had concluded Mason’s death was homicide due to blunt force trauma.
Now, didn’t that just narrow down their suspect pool? The real question was why had Mason been killed.
Jarrett glanced over at Thayne to tell him what he’d found out but at the moment his partner was on the phone.
“There’s no way to get names?”
he was asking.
“But then, how do you know…? Okay, but you check everyone’s…? Okay.
Thank you, Sergeant.
I appreciate your help.”
Thayne hung up the phone and turned to look over at Jarrett.
“That was the guard at the gate out at Miramar.
They check visitor’s IDs against a list of those invited onto the base.
They cannot come onto the base without some reason for being there.
On the day of the fireworks show like other community events, because it’s open to the general public, the screening process was slightly different.
The guards checked vehicles with bomb sniffing dogs including opening trunks and they checked IDs, but they didn’t require everyone to have an invitation.”
Jarrett frowned.
“That seems really foolish.”
“Right? You’d think after 9/11 they’d be a little more careful with the general public.
I guess they think they can handle any infiltration.”
“Sure.
Tell that to a suicide bomber who’s packed explosives in his car, ready to take a run at a guard gate.
I’ve seen that more than once and it sucks.”
Thayne nodded.
“You’re right.
It’s definitely a hole in security but for our purposes, we now know that just about anyone could have gotten onto the base that day and we’d have no idea if they were there for a nefarious reason.
It’s looking more and more like one of the remaining three people on the Mason crew planned this.
I don’t think we can rule out Mary Mason, do you?”
Jarrett shook his head.
“No way.
She might be the grieving widow she appears to be but she may be a member of the Freedom Brigade or just a plain nutcase for all we know.
I ain’t ready to rule her out.”
Thayne looked over at Jarrett’s computer screen.
It still had the blast scene photos from Miramar open.
“What did you find out from the autopsy report?”
“That the coroner has ruled it a homicide due to blunt force trauma.
She thinks Mason was hit with a hammer.
He definitely died from a blow to the temple and it was done with such force that it drove a piece of his skull right into his brain.
The burns he suffered were inflicted after the blow to his head but he would have died from the skull fracture regardless.”
“Ouch.”
“Exactly,”
Jarrett said.
“Anyway, back to the grind.”
He turned to Thayne.
“Have I ever mentioned how much I hate desk work? Ain’t this somethin’ the investigators are supposed to do?”
Thayne smiled at him.
“Bitch bitch bitch.”
He waved his hand.
“Just make your calls, Jarrett.
The sooner we get this done the sooner you can go out and shoot something.
If we get this done, I might even take you to the rifle range after dinner.”
Jarrett sat forward. “Really?”
Thayne chuckled.
“God, you’re so easy.”
Jarrett frowned at him and then picked up the phone to call Ada.
He glanced at the clock on his computer.
It read 9:30 a.m.
Jeez.
It’s gonna be a long day.
****
Jarrett’s call to Ada wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be.
She was very nice to him and told him that she’d sent the crime scene investigators back out to the base to have them collect the field strips to test them for DNA.
She’d already made calls to the lab to see if the bomb fragments from Jarrett’s Wrangler matched anything in their system.
It turned out that they had received the reports back and as Jarrett had suspected, the style of the bomb exactly matched a bomb maker known to be operating in the Middle East, but he hadn’t left the signature he usually left.
She’d been able to get very little off the report, and she made the suggestion that perhaps Jarrett or Thayne should follow up on it and see if either of them could get a less redacted version.
The fact that it confirmed what Jarrett already suspected didn’t make him feel any better.
If he hadn’t already suspected that someone was trying to kill him, at least now he was certain of it.
Ada had also just received the lab report from the trace analysis of the explosives in the fireworks and she’d forwarded it on to Jarrett.
He hung up the phone with a hearty thanks.
She’d done a lot of work in the last day or so and he was grateful.
Jarrett opened the email Ada sent and began reading over the report before turning to Thayne who had just hung up with the crime lab in San Diego.
“So, what did you find out?”
Jarrett asked.
Thayne shook his head.
“Unfortunately, not a lot.
The crime lab down in San Diego wasn’t able to pull any DNA off the note sent to the base.”
Jarrett frowned.
“And the other one?”
“The same.
I spoke with the LA crime lab just before that.
No prints or DNA there either.”
“How about you?”
Thayne asked.
Jarrett explained what Ada had found out about the bomb fragments having the signature of a bomb maker suspected of operating in the Middle East.
“You think that’s the guy Dayan’s been chasing?”
Thayne asked.
“It’s possible,”
Jarrett said, hedging just a little bit.
He certainly couldn’t tell Thayne what he suspected about someone from his past wanting to kill him suddenly or his suspicions that they had ties to the CIA and his covert missions… at least until he had proof.
Then, he’d have no choice but to tell Thayne everything he knew, unless he never wanted Thayne to trust him again.
Thayne was a smart man.
Jarrett knew he was probably already wondering whether the bomb in his Jeep had something to do with his past but he wasn’t about to bring that up until he was certain.
As if he’d read Jarrett’s mind, Thayne frowned at him.
“What else could it be, Jarrett?”
Jarrett paused for a few seconds before looking back at Thayne.
“I think that I’ll make some calls to my government contacts.
The reports Ada was able to get were so redacted, she could only read a word or two.”
Thayne nodded.
“That’s a good idea.
Even if I called and tried to get a non-redacted report, I doubt I’d have the success you would, regardless of our security clearances being identical.”
“It’s possible I’d have a better chance but most of them missions are need to know, Thayne.
I might hit the same stone wall you’d hit but we’ll have to see.
So, look at this.”
Jarrett pointed to the report on his screen and Thayne rolled his chair over so he could look.
“Ada just emailed me the lab results from the explosives the Mason crew used for the fireworks show that went awry.
They ran a trace analysis on the explosives and the report clearly shows two different types of explosives were used.”
He used the mouse to flip to the next page.
“These are the chemicals in the fireworks listed on the HAZMAT manifest for the shipment delivered to the base to be used in the show.
These chemicals showed up in the samples collected after the blast but”—he paused for full effect—“there are entirely different ones that aren’t on the manifest. See?”
He tapped the monitor.
Thayne read over the report and then took the mouse and flipped back to the first page.
“I’ll be damned.
It looks like there were illegal fireworks used for the show along with the legal ones,”
Thayne said.
“Mason was dirty.
I just wonder whether they match the stuff the militia was trying to buy.
It would make tying them to the case down there easier and maybe we could actually make an arrest in this shitty case.”
“I know I’d feel better if I got that fuckin’ militia off the streets,”
Jarrett said.
“Me too.”
“What’s next?”
Jarrett asked.
Thayne looked at his watch.
It was nearly three.
He stood up.
“I don’t know about you but I need to get out of the office for a little while.
Besides, I’m starving.”
Jarrett grinned, staying right where he was.
“Or, I could make a couple of calls to my friends in high places and follow up with Suki Chang on the name of the lantern maker.
We can ask Connor and Darcy to help us run background checks on the Mason crew and the FBI regarding the guns they have in evidence, and you could call the satellite office in Mexico.
It would probably only take a couple more hours and then afterward…”
He leaned forward and lowered his voice.
“I could buy you dinner, take you home, and do nasty things to your body.”
Thayne smirked and flopped back down into his chair.
“That sounds much more appealing than lunch at the moment and much more fun than the rifle range,” he said.
Jarrett frowned and scratched his three-day old beard.
“Damn.
I forgot about the rifle range.”
He raised an eyebrow and Thayne punched him on the arm.
Jarrett snorted with laughter.
“You really are easy.
You know it?”
Thayne swung his chair to face his computer.
“Go call your friends in high places, ass.”
Jarrett was still chuckling when he picked up his cell phone and walked out of the office.
****
Even though it was after three in the afternoon, it was still beastly hot when Jarrett stepped out of the ATF’s Glendale offices to make his call.
He found a shady tree away from anyone who might overhear his conversation and dialed the number he’d so long ago memorized.
He had to wait almost a minute as the call was routed through several secure switching stations to connect to its intended recipient.
When the ring tone finally began, it was picked up by a man with a graveled voice. “Jensen.”
“Fox? Nice to hear your voice.”
A chuckle came over the phone almost immediately.
“Well, as I live and breathe, I was wonderin’ when you was gonna call me,”
the man drawled.
“It’s been a while since I heard that name, boy.
Heard ya almost bought it down at the California border, Hawk.
When did you join the ATF?”
Jarrett chuckled at the use of a nickname he hadn’t heard in a while.
“You heard about that, Declan? That was fuckin’ quick,”
Jarrett said.
“I keep my ear to the ground, Evans.
You know that already or ya wouldn’t be callin’, boy.”
“So tell me what I need to know.
Who built the bomb? Was it our friend?”
The voice chuckled again.
“Don’t be naive, Evans.
When he comes at ya, you’ll never see it comin’.
I tried to tell Mossad that but them idiots only listen to us half the time anyway.
Think they got the best intelligence on the planet, which just proves they don’t know what the hell they’re talkin’ about, jes like I always told ya.”
“I know,”
Jarrett said, hesitantly.
“Declan, tell me who it was then.”
“Could be anyone, boy,”
the old man said.
“He didn’t sign it, did he?”
“I guess you already know that, but look.
Someone took a shot at me in the barn before blowin’ up my damn Jeep.
It may have been the same person.
I got a glimpse of the guy and he looked like a guy I did some wet work with a long time ago, but I never knew the guy’s name.
A CIA asset, I think.
He was very nearly successful taking me out too,”
Jarrett said.
“I’d tell ya if I knew who is after you exactly.
All I know is whoever is trying to kill you is most probably a member of a rogue cell controlled by someone very high up.
They would have access to the blueprint for the Middle East bomb builder and try to pin it on them.”
“So, why didn’t he sign it? We know the bomb builder used his style but he didn’t sign it the way our friend does.
That’s what’s confusing.
These bastards always leave a signature ‘cause they’re narcissists.
That means he’s a copycat.”
“Yer right, boy, but I know it ain’t anybody I know, Jarrett.
Last thing I wanna see is you takin’ a bullet or gettin’ your ass blown up.
We always got along jes fine.
You made a great Marine and the rest of what ya done after, even if it weren’t so damned legal.
I can tell you this.
Virgil wasn’t the only one huntin’ you and if ya think it was your boyfriend he was after, that was only part of it.
His contract would have been doubled if he took ya both out.”
“What the fuck?”
Jarrett asked.
He’d been surprised by what Virgil had told him as he lay dying on the asphalt in Turlock after trying to kill him, but he really hadn’t believed it.
“Why, Fox? Why is someone after me?”
“Hell, Jarrett.
I wasn’t kiddin’ when I told ya this one goes way the fuck up the flagpole.
I’m talkin’ so high up, you’re gonna get a nosebleed if ya try and climb it, Evans.”
Declan Jensen had always been straight with Jarrett.
That’s why he’d called him.
He was about as highly placed in the Intelligence Operations Center as anyone could ever be and he’d just basically told Jarrett that someone very high up in the government with some serious contacts was trying to kill him.
He was calling Jensen on a secure line but that didn’t mean his old friend didn’t have eyes and ears on him and Jarrett could only pray that he hadn’t put his life in grave danger simply by making this phone call to him.
The fucking CIA watched their own people even closer than the bad guys.
Even though Jarrett had wracked his brain, he still had no idea what he’d done to warrant a death sentence.
In the past, yeah, he might have believed it, but not now.
He wasn’t into anything that should earn him a bullet, at the moment anyway.
Not only that, if the guns used by the Freedom Brigade down in San Diego turned out to have a connection to Mills Lang, that meant the arms dealer might also be tied up in all of this somehow.
He still didn’t believe Lang’s jury hadn’t been tampered with.
If he was connected high up, hell, someone wanted him freed where they could keep the tap of illegal weapons cranked all the way open and flowing like bathwater.
The whole thing was giving Jarrett a headache and he didn’t want to believe that Virgil had been telling the truth as he lay dying.
The very troubling thing now was trying to figure out who in the hell wanted him dead and why.
It sucked big time and the phone call had raised infinitely more questions than it had answered.
He and Thayne were apparently both still in danger.
“There’s nothin’ at all you can tell me about it, Fox?”
“No, Jarrett.
There’s not a damned thing I know other than what I jes told ya.”
“Okay,”
Jarrett said, dejectedly.
Jensen’s voice paused for a very long time.
“Jarrett.
You be careful, boy.”
He was silent for a few moments before Jarrett heard the old man sigh.
“I know how ya feel about yer daddy, Jarrett, but your death would hurt him immensely.”
Jarrett went cold.
“Please don’t bring him up, Jensen.
He and my brothers are dead to me.
I know you and daddy are close, but not a single one of ‘em called me back when they heard about my injuries after the last time.”
“Try to understand who they are and where they’re comin’ from, boy.
It’s hard for yer daddy to deal with havin’ a gay son even though he should ‘a known ‘bout it for a long time, especially knowin’ what he knows and who he is.”
Jarrett felt the pain lance through his chest, settling in his stomach like a large rock.
He hadn’t been home since his father kicked him out and his brothers certainly hadn’t done anything to get in touch with him or try to make him feel welcome back home since he’d walked out years before.
“They’re the ones who turned their damned backs on me,”
he said, hearing his voice crack.
He cleared his throat, swallowing down on the hurt that always rose in his heart when he talked about people who were supposed to love and support him.
“Look, Declan, just try and find somethin’ out.
Do it quietly and don’t go to my daddy.
You have to promise me.
You could be in terrible danger if they know you’re snoopin’ around.
Be careful.
If I’m being targeted, you can count on them doing the same to you.
They have to know we’re close.”
“They do.
Just keep yer damn head down and I’ll call ya if I learn something.”
“Please be careful, Declan.
I’m serious.”
“Will do, Jarrett.
Take care, boy.”
Jarrett swiped the phone and tucked it back in his pocket.
Not only had he learned nothing to help them with the case, but he’d now possibly put Declan “Fox”
Jensen in danger just by speaking with him.
Now he was really certain he could very possibly die.
A rogue CIA cell was the last thing he wanted chasing his ass… or Thayne’s for that matter.
Jarrett was a man on a mission now.
He was more determined than ever.
He had to kill whoever wanted to kill him first.
****
Jarrett looked positively grim when he walked back into the office.
Thayne didn’t have good news for him but he knew he had to share it.
Tim and Sarah had been running background checks on the Mason crew and they’d come up with some things that required follow-up.
“I don’t like the look on your face, Wolfe.”
Jarrett glanced across the aisle and Thayne noted Sarah and Tim didn’t look too happy either.
They stood up and walked over as Jarrett sat down at his desk.
“What’s up?”
“We did a background on Anthony Revilla and Beth Quinn, the two interns who were hired by the Masons most recently,”
Sarah said.
She bent over Jarrett’s desktop computer and pulled up the report she’d sent to his email that was still open. “Look.”
Thayne watched as Jarrett ducked his head and squinted at the screen, reading the report before looking up at him.
“Revilla was dishonorably discharged from the Army last summer and Quinn washed out of basic training in the Marine Corps,”
Jarrett read.
“Well, that explains the field strips we saw out there,”
he concluded.
Sarah nodded and flipped the page.
Jarrett bent to read it for a second before glancing back at Thayne.
“Mason and his wife were both Marines?”
“Right?”
Thayne said, recalling the gray-haired Mrs.
Mason and how frail and innocent she looked.
“They have decent service records though.
It seems they met in the Corps and served together in the Gulf in the late 80s.
They were both munitions specialists which probably explains their love of fireworks.”
Jarrett rubbed a hand over his face.
“Jeez.
Can this case get any more complicated? I was hopin’ we could narrow our suspect pool and instead, we don’t know nothin’.”
“Sorry, Evans.
It would have been nice if we could have eliminated at least one of them,”
Sarah said.
“Well, we know Mason didn’t bash his own head in so that leaves his wife, Revilla, and Quinn who were close enough to him before the explosion to have done it, so if we can figure out a motive, that would be the key here,”
Thayne added.
“Mason had a sizeable life insurance policy and the beneficiary was his wife,” Tim said.
Thayne and Jarrett both turned to look at him.
“You checked on that?”
Thayne asked.
“Well, yeah.
As soon as we found out about their military backgrounds, I figured it might be best if we could see who’d benefit from his death.”
“Thanks, Darcy,”
Jarrett said.
He turned and looked over at Thayne.
“We should call Captain Willis and let him know.
If she’s still down there, he could bring her in for questioning.”
“Yeah.
We will.
Did you learn anything about who may have built the bomb?”
Thayne asked.
Jarrett seemed to hesitate for a split second.
Anyone else might not have noticed it but Thayne saw it.
Jarrett shook his head.
“Nothin’ we don’t already know.”
He’s lying.
Thayne’s stomach flipped.
It was always possible that Jarrett really hadn’t learned anything new but he’d seen the worry in Jarrett’s face when he’d walked back in the office.
It was possible that he just didn’t want to say anything in front of Sarah and Tim but it still bothered him like crazy.
He would ask Jarrett again when they were alone.
“So what’s left to do?”
Jarrett asked, staring at his computer screen and studiously avoiding Thayne’s eyes as Sarah and Tim walked back across the aisle to sit down at their desks.
“I called Snow to ask him about the guns they collected after the raid.”
“What did you find out?”
Jarrett asked, sitting forward in his chair.
“That they definitely are stolen and all from the same shipment.
I was really hoping they matched some of the guns we recovered when we arrested Mills Lang but no such luck.
They actually came from a break in at a bonded warehouse used by one of the gun manufacturers.
He also checked to see if there were any crimes where notes with bible verses were left at crime scenes across the nation.”
“Any luck?”
Jarrett asked.
Thayne shook his head.
“No.
Nothing that specific and he also told me that their behavioral analysis unit doesn’t know of an active serial killer using explosives or fireworks as a murder weapon.”
“Well, there goes that theory.”
“It’s just more to rule out and it is progress,”
Thayne said.
Jarrett rubbed his eyes.
“I know.
I’m just not used to thinking of progress by taking such baby steps.”
Thayne smiled.
“You like to jump headlong into situations which is what gets you into trouble.
Oh, by the way, I called Chang and she said she went through her notes and couldn’t find the name of the lantern maker.”
Jarrett snorted.
“No surprise there.
I don’t like that woman.
I seriously think she’s either exceptionally incompetent or she’s hidin’ something on purpose.
I don’t trust her as far as I can throw her, Wolfe.”
Thayne nodded.
“Me either but she sounded completely sincere.
Then her baby started crying and she hung up quickly.”
“Damn,”
Jarrett said, finally looking over at him.
God, the man was beautiful.
His eyes were such a light ice-blue, they could almost be silver and with that white hair… shit, Thayne felt a stab of lust wash over him.
He smiled as Jarrett smirked and leaned close.
“Ya look hungry, Thayne.”
Thayne nodded.
“Yeah.
It’s time to leave.”
He stood up abruptly.
“Did we accomplish everything we were supposed to?”
Jarrett said, standing and grabbing his coat off the back of his chair.
“Everything except calling the Mexico satellite ATF office and that can wait until morning, Jarrett.”
He lowered his voice to a whisper.
“Right now, I need food, a beer, and you.”
Jarrett grinned.
He waved at Sarah and Tim as he walked beside Thayne toward the door to the office.
“I like that idea.
I guess I’m hungry too.
We worked through lunch.”
Thayne shot him a sideways glance.
“I’m starving but I wasn’t talking about food when I said I was hungry.”
The sound of Jarrett’s laughter was like music to Thayne’s ears.
He punched the button as they stood at the bank of elevators.
As far as Thayne was concerned, he wanted only two things.
Getting Jarrett fed and naked in that order.