Aimpoint by Candace Irving (best mystery novels of all time .TXT) 📗

focused on a nurse who worked the same shift as Ava. The nurse was so flattered the hound sniffing around was SF, she slept with him. Unfortunately, her commission wasn't the only thing she was risking. She was married with a kid. Her husband—some civilian doc Ava met a few times—found out and complained to the post commander. The nurse was so humiliated and terrified she was about to be court-martialed for an inappropriate relationship, she dropped the kid off with a friend for the night, went home and swallowed a bottle of pills. Her husband found her the following morning when he got off work. She'd been dead for hours. LaCroix didn't even bother to fake regrets to her folks when they came to collect her for the funeral."

"Jesus."

"Yeah." Jelly hooked a hand to the back of his neck and began to rub. "I'll bring up Bragg tonight with Ava, casually work my way around to the old gossip, see what else she knows about the guy."

Regan hid her wince. "You sure?"

Jelly might be a fantastic agent, but he was the lousiest of liars. Newborn baby or not, Ava could not be that sleep-deprived. No one could.

"Funny. Fine. I'll ask her while she's bathing the monster. She never looks away when she's doing that."

More like the former sergeant in Ava still knew when to keep her head down. Either way, Jelly's wife also knew how to keep her mouth firmly shut.

Probably why she and Ava got along so well.

Regan dropped her stare to the phone records. Their NCIS colleague had included the entire past year's worth.

Why?

She spread the papers out along the table, the knot in her gut tightening as she scanned line after highlighted line, noting dates, times and durations. Twenty-seven calls over the last year, almost evenly split between incoming and outgoing—and though most were ten to twenty minutes, at least five had breached the hour mark like that first call a year ago. Even more telling, every one of these longest five had been logged in the past six weeks, including the one their stateside sailor had overheard.

If LaCroix had been turned and if he was planning an attack, those recent, lengthening calls suggested an escalation. The hashing out of a plan.

Jelly leaned closer, squinting down at the records. "That's a hell of a lot of gab-time. Whatever he's planning, it's big."

Shit.

Regan stiffened. So did Jelly. They were both thinking it.

Again, it was Jelly who voiced it: "Oktoberfest."

Precisely. Oktoberfest. Their host country's infamous folk celebration of all things German was slated to begin roughly a hundred enticing kilometers southwest of Hohenfels…in fifteen days. Six million clueless, Bavarian-pretzel-savoring, beer-soaked revelers would be descending on Munich.

Six million targets.

They simultaneously shifted their attention to the photo on Jelly's laptop. To a blue-eyed, baby-faced blond who was more than capable of blending in long enough to execute whatever nefarious plot he contrived. Especially in Germany.

Jelly's whistle filled the office. "If your buddy's right about LaCroix—and my gut says she is—we're fucked."

She was about to agree when her phone pinged, alerting her to yet another text from DC, though this one had a slightly positive spin tacked on at the end.

Still in with boss—but on my way there. Flight details coming asap.

Regan texted back a thumbs-up emoji and slipped her phone into the pocket of her navy trousers. "I need to see Brooks. We need that phone tap and tail—yesterday."

Jelly shot her a grimace. "You know what he's gonna say, and how he's gonna say it."

She knew. But she wasn't asking. And she definitely wasn't taking no for an answer again. She couldn't afford to. They couldn't afford to.

Regan swung around her desk to retrieve the suit jacket she'd left warming her chair's shoulders when she'd returned from lunch two hours earlier. She donned the jacket, shifting her dark, heavy braid over the collar and down her back as she headed to the table to gather up the pages of Scott Platt's records. "Keep reading that personnel file, will you? And take notes. I'll be back in a few to discuss them."

Hopefully, with her head still attached.

This time, Jelly laughed. Sort of. "Good luck, Prez. You always were braver than me. Must be that presidential juju you channel from your namesake."

Wrong. She wasn't brave—just stupid.

And desperate.

Platt's phone records in hand, Regan abandoned Jelly and headed out through the maze toward their boss' office. Like Mira, she could feel this one in her bones. Evan LaCroix was the real deal. If he had been turned, something was about to go down. Something big. Maybe Munich, maybe somewhere else.

Unfortunately, neither she nor Jelly had been able to convince their boss that the sailor's tip was sound, much less that Captain Brooks needed to pull out all the stops to support it. They both knew why. Hell, the whole blessed command knew, if not the entire US Army and most of their nightly-news-watching citizens back home.

Brooks had been burned.

Heck, they all had. But no one else was still cowering in the corner of his office two weeks on, licking his wounds and bitching about it.

Make that shouting.

Regan heard the captain's bellow while she was still a good twenty feet from his door. She had no idea who was on the other end of that one-side conversation, because it ended with the loud slamming down of a phone long before she'd reached the wooden portal. She knocked anyway.

"Enter!"

Her commanding officer was on his feet, his ebony scowl locked into place as he slapped his own sheaf of papers into his outbox. Regan drew the door shut behind her, patiently waiting for her CO to vent the remainder of his fury on the lid of his laptop before she stepped up to his desk.

"Good afternoon, sir. I just received a text from—"

"—Special Agent Ellis. I know. That was her boss on the phone, sticking his Navy-owned prick in where it doesn't belong. Why? I don't know. They've got their own goddamned pond, and it's a bloody