“Oh, thank you so much.” She slid her hand along his ribs, feeling the hard layers of muscle, then regretfully eased away in the interest of keeping up the conversation because if they kept kissing, then dinner would go on hold and they’d end up naked. That had already happened too many times for her to think otherwise. “Did he know where you were going?”
“No, but he knows where I live so he wouldn’t have had to hack any database to get my address.”
“That could have been to fake people off.”
“That’s what Axel said.”
Bo scowled at him because she didn’t like thinking she had anything in common with Axel the Asshole.
Morgan grinned and tapped her chin with his finger but continued, “I don’t see it, myself. Kodak is a friend, has been for a long time. If I got crossways with him during the mission we were on—and I didn’t—he had plenty of opportunity to take me out and make it look legit. I’ve trusted him with my life a lot of times, and vice versa. My gut says no.”
“Okay, I trust your gut. What happened next?”
“I went to the marina where I keep my boat. On the way I stopped for breakfast—drive-through fast food—but didn’t see or talk to anyone other than the kid in the window. At the marina I said hello to the marina owner. He made a phone call immediately afterward, but Axel checked that, and the call was to his wife. Nothing there.”
“Unless his wife is some kind of master spy and you saw something you shouldn’t have seen at the marina.”
She expected him to laugh again, but he said, “I checked out the marina, sure, like I always do. Everything looked normal. There weren’t any piece-of-shit boats with an expensive antenna array, no unusual license plates, and Brawley—the marina operator—has been there since before I started renting a boat slip. He doesn’t click for me.”
She blew out a breath, trying to get her head around the mindset and level of alertness required to check out a familiar place every single time he went there. It was mind-boggling. After a few seconds she gave up and shook it off. “Does anything click?”
“Not really. Next up: I saw a congresswoman and her husband on the river in their boat, went over to say hello. I know them both—not well, but their son was kidnapped and we got him back alive, so I’d say they’re both kindly disposed toward me.”
“I don’t remember anything in the news about a kidnapping involving a member of Congress,” she said as she took a pair of baking potatoes out of the microwave. Yes, it was heresy to zap potatoes instead of baking them, but so what; she was going for speed.
“It wasn’t in the news. The whole episode was kept dark.”
“Was anyone else on the boat with them?”
“Not that I saw.”
She had put pork chops in the slow cooker that morning; she got a platter and dished out the chops. “If you don’t know them well, how did you recognize their boat?”
“I didn’t. I recognized her hair. It was Joan Kingsley.”
“Oh,” Bo said, thinking hard. A face flashed into mind. “I know who she is! White hair. She’s big time.”
“Yep. She’s on the House Armed Services Committee.”
“Do you think she’s behind this whole thing?”
“In my experience, politicians are to blame for almost everything, so that’s what I default to. Her husband is a D.C. lawyer, which is almost as bad because in that town they’re all in bed with each other. But even with that tilt, I can’t make it work.” He took the salad to the table, then got the plates and silverware.
“You know what Sherlock Holmes said: eliminate the impossible, and what’s left is the truth no matter how improbable. Paraphrasing, of course.”
“All of it’s improbable. Every possible suspect.”
“Except for the one who isn’t. Okay, how far from the congresswoman’s boat were you when you spotted her? Did you know it was her?”
“Not for certain, but that hair’s distinctive. I was about a hundred yards away, give or take. Their boat was anchored in a fairly open stretch of water, though it was a long way down the river toward the bay.” He paused, thinking. “Where the boat was positioned, no one could come up to them from any direction without being seen from some distance away. That’s good safety strategy.”
They took the food to the table, sat down, and began serving themselves. Bo ate quietly for a minute, thinking about what he’d already told her but also taking the time to savor the fork-tenderness of the pork chop. God bless the inventor of the slow cooker, was all she could say.
“Would she need to be so safety conscious?” she asked, when their immediate hunger had been satisfied.
“She isn’t the speaker, but she’s important in D.C. Plus her son had been kidnapped, could have been killed. I’d say the answer is yes.”
“So the position of the boat wasn’t suspicious?”
“No. If I’d anchored, I’d have done the same.”
“What did you see as you drove toward her?”
“She was standing at the railing, waving. Her husband was on the deck with her, but he went below.”
She put her fork down, tilted her head at him. “How do you know it was her husband, if you weren’t close enough to know for certain it was her?”
Morgan paused, thinking, his gaze absent as he looked into the past. “I didn’t, not from that distance, but he was wearing a blue shirt and when he came back on deck he was still wearing it—Fuck!”