Private Vegas (Private 9)

She introduced herself, said okay to dinner, and three days later, he picked her up at home and took her to a small, very hip, quite intimate Italian restaurant.

After they ordered, Jack had fiddled with the cutlery, then told her that he’d been a captain in the Marine Corps, a pilot, and that he’d served for three years in Afghanistan. He said that the war had changed him and that he was seeing a shrink in the building where she worked, hoping to get a grip on his memories and dreams.

It was unusual conversation for a first date, but Justine went with it. It was as if Jack wanted her to know every hairy thing about him so that she could make an informed decision about whether to go forward or not.

He said to her, “Justine, when you said you’d have dinner with me, it was as if you’d cupped your hands around my heart.”

She’d touched his hand. He said, “Who are you?”

She told him, and from this first date, Justine determined that Jack Morgan was open and that he wanted to grow. That was one side of him.

Months later, she said, “Jack, you’re like a clam. With a rubber band around your shell.” That was the other side.

He had said, “I can’t tell you everything, Justine. I’ve seen too much. I’ve lived through too much. I have thoughts I want to keep even from myself. I keep ninety-five percent of my interior life locked up. You see the five percent that gets over the wall.”

Justine had to adjust her first take on Jack as an open, emotionally expressive man, but by then, it was too late. First impressions no longer mattered.

Justine was hooked. She loved him entirely.

He loved her too. He hired her at Private, made her a partner. They bought a house and lived together. They fought about the ninety-five percent that he kept behind the wall, because walls went against everything she believed in. They went against everything she was about. Jack’s lies and evasions undercut her integrity.

They fought, broke up, reconciled. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Justine wanted their relationship to work, but it couldn’t. Jack was who he was. As much as Justine loved him, it hurt her to be with Jack.

Maybe this time she would learn.

Chapter 56

I WAS FEELING surly when I walked into the war room at 8:00 a.m. Twenty pairs of eyes followed me as I went to the fridge, grabbed a can of Red Bull, then took my seat at the conference table, the only piece of furniture remaining from when Private belonged to my dad.

I said, “Hello,” then rested my eyes on Justine, who was sitting across from me. I couldn’t read anything on her beautiful face.

I said, “I want to bring everyone up to date on Harold Archer. As some of you know, I went to his house at his request yesterday evening. I found him in his pool house with the body of his dead wife, Tule.

“Tule had been murdered; looked to me like she’d been killed in a rage. There was every manner and type of blood spray and spatter on the floor, furnishings, and walls. I saw a bloody kitchen knife, probably the murder weapon, next to the body. I couldn’t count the stab wounds, but there were a lot of them. Hal had showered and left his bloody clothes across a chair.”

I picked up the remote, and images of the crime scene went up on the wall-to-wall flat-screens around the room. It was all there: stark, bloody murder.

I said, “I called the police. There was nothing else I could do. Hal is in custody pending his arraignment tomorrow. He took my advice and lawyered up.

“Any questions so far?”

Cruz asked, “Did the wife have a weapon?”

“None that I could see.”

“Was Hal injured?”

“Not that I could see.”

Justine asked, “Did he tell you that he killed her?”

“I’m going to say no to that. Now, here’s the thing. We have to do what we can to give Hal’s lawyers something to work with. Mo-bot, I need you to turn up anything you can on Tule Archer—her past, her known associates, her record if she has one. Do some background on Hal too, while you’re at it.”

“I’ll have something for you in an hour,” Mo said.

I knew she would.