“Oh?”
“Put something on your desk.”
He knew I was flying to Santa Clara, and he’d been in my office recently, rigging up my briefcase with his little toy confetti bomb. I kept my overnight bag in my office closet.
He’d set me up.
The way he’d set the other guys up. Trevor Allard and Brett Gleason were dead.
And now Kurt had turned on me.
50
My day’s appointments had been canceled, so I drove straight home, steaming mad. Kate was surprised to see me at home. She seemed somber, depressed, remote. She told me that her sister had taken Ethan to the Museum of Fine Arts to look at the mummies, and I gave her the short version of how airport security had detained me for almost two hours on a bogus suspicion that I was carrying a bomb.
She was barely listening, and normally this was the sort of thing that really got her going. Normally she’d be listening with eyes flashing, indignant along with me, saying things like, “Oh, you’re kidding,” and “Those bastards.”
Instead she made little pro forma clucks of sympathy, her mind somewhere else far away. She looked haggard. Her eyes were bloodshot. While I was telling her how Dick Hardy had basically exploded, she cut me off. “You must be so unhappy with me.”
“Now what?” I said. “What in the world makes you say that?”
Her eyebrows knit together. Her face crumpled. Her eyes got all squinty, and her tears began flowing. “I sit here all day like-like an invalid-and I just know how sexually-frustrated you must be.”
“Kate,” I said, “where’s all this coming from? You’re pregnant. High-risk pregnancy. We both understand that. We’re in this together.”
She was crying even harder. She could barely speak. “You’re a senior vice president now. A big shot.” Her words came in ragged clumps, between gasps. “Women are probably coming on to you all the time.”
I leaned over next to her, took her head in my hands, stroked her hair. The pregnancy, the crazy hormones, all this time in bed. She was going out of her mind. “Not even in my wet dreams,” I tried to joke. “Don’t worry about it.”
But she reached over to her nightstand and picked something up, held it out to me without looking.
“Why, Jason? How could you?”
I looked. It was a condom, still in its packet. A Durex condom.
“That’s not mine,” I said.
She shook her head slowly. “It was in your suit jacket.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You dropped your suit on the bed this morning when you were packing. And when I got up, I felt something in one of your pockets.” Her breathing was uneven. “And I-you-oh, God, I can’t believe you.”
“Baby, it’s not mine.”
She twisted her head to look up at me. Her face was all red and blotchy. “Please don’t lie to me. Don’t tell me you’re carrying someone else’s condom around.”
“I didn’t put it there, Kate. Believe me. It’s not mine.”
She bowed her head. Pushed my hands away. “How can you do this?” she said. “How can you do this?”
Furious now, I grabbed my BlackBerry from my suitcoat pocket and hurled it toward her. It landed on the pillow next to her head. “There you go,” I shouted. “That’s my personal scheduler. Go ahead, look through it. Maybe you can figure out when the hell I’d even have time to have an affair, huh? Huh?”
She stared at me, taken aback.
“Let’s see,” I said. “Ah, yes. How about sneaking in some quickie nookie between my eight forty-five supply-chain management call and the nine o’clock long-term-strategy staff meeting? Slip in a little horizontal mamba between the ten o’clock end of the staff meeting and the ten-fifteen sales call with Detwiler? Some coochie in the two minutes between the meeting with the systems integrators at the Briefing Center and the forecast review session?”
“Jason.”
“Or maybe a minute and a half of the funky monkey between the eleven forty-five cross-functional concall and the twelve-fifteen meeting with the order admin, then a quick game of hide-the-salami in the fifteen seconds I have to get to a lunch meeting with the district managers? Kate, do you realize how insane this is? Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I don’t have a goddamned free second! And for you to accuse me of something like this just pisses me off. I can’t believe it.”
“He told me, you know. He told me he was worried for us.”
“Who?”
“Kurt. He said-said he probably shouldn’t say anything-wasn’t his business, he said-but he wondered if maybe you were having an affair.” Her words were muffled, and I had to listen hard to understand.
“Kurt,” I said. “Kurt said this. When did he say this to you?”
“I don’t know. A couple of weeks ago.”
“Don’t you understand what he’s doing? That just fits right in to the pattern of everything else.”
She glanced at me, shaking her head, a disgusted look on her face. “This isn’t about Kurt, whatever his flaws,” she said. “We have bigger problems than Kurt.”
“No, Kate. You don’t know about Kurt. You don’t know what he did.”
“You told me.”
“No,” I said. “There’s more.”
I told her everything now.
Her disbelief slowly melted. Maybe it’s more accurate to say it turned into disbelief of another kind.
“Are you leaving anything out?”
“Nothing.”
“Jason, you’ve got to talk to the police. No anonymous calls. Openly. You have nothing to hide. Tell them everything you know. Tell them what you told me.”
“He’ll find out.”
“Come on, Jason.”
“He knows people all over the place. In the state police, everywhere. He’ll find out. He’s got everything wired.” I paused. “And-he threatened me. He said he’ll do something to you.”
“He wouldn’t. He likes me.”
“We were friends, too, him and me-remember? But he’s totally ruthless. He’ll do anything to protect himself.”
“That’s why you’ve got to stop him. You can do it. I know you can. Because you have to.”
We were both quiet for a few seconds. She looked at me. “Do you hear a funny sound?”
I smiled. “No.”
“It sounds like a…maraca. Not right now, but I keep hearing something.”
“I don’t hear anything. Bathroom fan, maybe?”
“The bathroom fan’s not on. Maybe I’m losing my mind. But I want you to call the police. He’s got to be arrested.”
I fried some eggs, toasted an English muffin, brought a breakfast tray up to her. Then I went to my study and called Franny and filled her in.
“The detective called again,” she said. “Sergeant Kenyon. He asked for your cell number, but I wouldn’t give it to him. You’d better call him back.”
“I will.”
As I spoke, I was tapping away on my laptop. I pulled up that Special Forces website I’d bookmarked and went to the “Guestbook” where Trevor had posted his question about Kurt. No other replies had gone up.
“I’ll be in soon,” I told Franny, and hung up.
I signed on to AOL, the account I hardly ever used. Six e-mails in the in-box. Five of them were spam.
One was from a Hotmail address. Scolaro. The guy who’d replied to Trevor, said he knew something about Kurt.
I opened it.
I don’t know this guy Semko personally. One of my SF brothers does and I asked him. He said Semko got a DD for fragging a team member.
DD, I remembered, meant “dishonorable discharge.” I hit reply and typed:
Thanks.
Where can I get proof of his DD?
I hit SEND, and was about to sign off, when the little blue AOL triangle started bouncing. New mail.