Split Second (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell 1)

“They were all right, for men, but Jane stands alone.”

“Okay, consider yourself so anointed, Miss Smart-ass. What do you have?”

“You were right. The name you gave me was the name of the village in Vietnam where he was held prisoner and then escaped from. Now, can you tell me what’s going on? Where did you get that name from?”

King hesitated but then said, “It was scratched on the wall of the prison cell in the Tennessee bunker.”

“My God, Sean, does that mean what I think?”

“There was also a Roman numeral two scratched in after the name. Sort of makes sense. It was his second POW camp; I guess that’s the way he was looking at it. First Vietnam, now Tennessee.”

“So Bob Scott was the prisoner in that cell, and he left the inscription as a way to say so?”

“Maybe. Don’t forget, Michelle, it could have been left as misdirection, a clue we were meant to find.”

“But it’s such an obscure one.”

“True. And there’s the other thing.”

“What?” she said quickly.

“The ‘Sir Kingman’ note that was pinned to Susan Whitehead’s body.”

“You don’t think Scott could have written it? Why?”

“A number of reasons, but I still can’t be sure.”

“But assuming Scott isn’t involved, who the hell else is out there?”

“I’m working on it.”

“What have you been up to?”

“I had some legal research to do at the UVA law library.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Yes.”

“Care to fill me in?”

“Not yet. I need to think about it some more. But thanks for verifying that info. I’ll talk to you soon… Miss Marple.” He clicked off and Michelle put down her phone, not very pleased with his declining yet again to take her into his confidence.

“You help a guy out, and you think he’ll return the favor, but nooo!” she complained to the empty room.

She threw some more wood on the fire and started rummaging through the box of files and Joan’s notes.

It felt a little awkward reading over the woman’s personal comments on the case, considering she might be dead. Yet Michelle had to admit Joan kept meticulous notes. As she worked through them, she began to have a greater appreciation for the woman’s skill and professionalism as an investigator. Michelle thought about what King had told her about the note Joan received on the morning of Ritter’s murder. The guilt she must have carried all these years, though, seeing a man she cared for being destroyed while her own career rocketed onward and upward. And yet how much could she have really loved him if she chose not to speak up, in effect picking her career over her feelings for Sean King. And how must King have felt?

What was it with men anyway? Did they have this dominant gene that made them have to act noble when it came to suffering, however stupidly, as some woman walked all over them? Certainly a woman could pine over a guy just as hopelessly. And too often members of her gender fell for the bad boy who would break their hearts and even sometimes their heads. Yet a woman would have just cut her losses and moved on. Not the boys, though. They had to keep ramming their big pigheaded selves into a wall no matter how cold the heart lurking underneath the blouse and breasts. God, it was so frustrating that a man like King could be taken in by a woman like Joan.

Then she caught herself and wondered why it mattered so much. They were working a case together, that was all. And it wasn’t like King was perfect. Yes, he was intelligent, sophisticated, good-looking, and had a witty sense of humor. But he was also more than a decade her senior. And on the negative side he was moody, aloof, occasionally rude and at times condescending. And he was so damn neat! To think that she’d actually cleaned out her truck to please—

She suddenly blushed at this frank admission and quickly refocused on the papers in front of her. She studied the warrant filed against Bob Scott that Joan had found and was the only reason they’d discovered the cabin and empty bunker. Yet from what King had just told her, the conclusion that Scott was behind all of this had become a lot more tenuous.

> And still, it was his cabin, and the arrest warrant had been issued against him for a weapons violation. She looked at the document more closely. What exactly was the weapons violation? And why had the service of the warrant failed? Those answers unfortunately weren’t apparent in the documents.

She gave up in frustration and continued perusing Joan’s notes. She came across another name that gave her pause. For her, the fact that Joan had drawn a line across the man’s name, ostensibly writing him off as a suspect, wasn’t in itself conclusive. For though she probably wouldn’t admit it to anyone, she was as confident about her investigative abilities as King was about his.