Midnight.
“Here’s to fair winds and a following sea,” Jackson said aloud to the empty office, and he hoisted a mug of hot coffee from midrats.
Earlier that evening he had officially disbanded the team, quietly thanking Lew and Indy for their service and their trust in him and repeating his promise of confidentiality concerning their clandestine formation. Now he was taking a quiet moment to, what? To mark the passage of an era, he supposed.
Savoring the victory. If you could call it that.
He sat brooding into his mug.
Trying to shake the thought twisting in his gut.
What if Papadakis wasn’t the guy?
What if he was set up? What if the killer went out of his way from the start to target victims in a pattern that would point toward a bigot, to throw any investigations off the scent? In a couple days they would be in Hawaii, and the mainland a few days after that. The boat would empty out. The killer could walk away free.
And that finger. If Papadakis was playing out some kind of vigilante fantasy, Keeping the Navy Pure for Straight White Males, okay—but why leave a finger? Why take a finger? And if it was Papadakis, how did that fit with Lew’s whole piece about the killer wanting to create a reign of terror?
It made no rational sense.
He took a hot sip, made a face, set the mug down. Weak as piss tonight.
Jackson had talked to Scott that afternoon, tried to anyway. It was a brief, strained encounter. He didn’t ask, but Jackson had wondered if Scott still liked Chief Finn for the murders.
But that made no sense—not after today. Let’s just say Finn was the perpetrator of these crimes and had set up Papadakis to take the fall. Then why in God’s name would he try to save the guy’s life?
Okay…but did he really?
The man was a SEAL, and not only a SEAL but a top operator. And before that he was an SAR swimmer. You didn’t get any more capable. He could imagine exactly what Scott would say: If he wanted the guy’s life saved, it would’ve been saved.
An excellent point.
And Jackson had to admit, the circumstantial evidence against the SEAL was impressive. The killings started right when he came aboard. Then stopped while he was in the brig, and started again the night he got out.
And it couldn’t be easy to track and kill someone, then dispose of the body, all completely without detection in such tight quarters as an aircraft carrier. Let alone do it four times. (Or five, depending on whether you were going by incident count or body count.) All that had to take some skill.
No, not some skill. An extremely high level of skill.
All of which pointed guess where.
And speaking of pointing, there was that damn finger, too. A trophy. Just like in Mukalla. Which Scott didn’t even know about.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of his phone. He stared at it. The last time he’d gotten a call at such an unexpected hour it had been the morning they found the two incinerator kids missing. He didn’t much care for the reminder.
It was Indy, calling from her office up in CVIC.
“You’re still up?” said Jackson.
“I can’t sleep.”
“No. Neither can I.”
“Well,” she said. “Even if you could, you won’t after you read this.”
“This?”
“That incident file you asked about? I have it.” She paused. “It’s ugly.”