“I’m feeling fine,” Gary said. “Thanks for the tea.”
She turned to Lou. The tension in her face seemed to have tripled. “I’m guessing you’re here to revoke his license or something like that?”
“Like I said, I’m here to help him.”
“But he is going to lose his license.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m really not allowed to discuss anything pertaining to a physician’s PWO contract, even with a spouse.”
“Oh, you don’t need to discuss anything. I know what’s coming. It’s a good thing the twins are in the last year of college, that’s all I have to say. Otherwise, Gary might have to sell his precious plane. Look, I’m going out for a while. The Whitmans’ Christmas party is tonight. Gary, I assume you won’t be coming.”
Grateful that Missy was about to break some of the excruciating tension in the room by leaving, Lou risked a peek at the screen. Still no mention of McHugh’s name in the caption line.
McHugh ignored his wife’s thrust and poured two cups of tea.
Without another word, Missy turned and, a moment later, was out the door.
“I’m sorry you had to be here for that, Lou,” McHugh said.
“Nonsense. You had my back any number of times during the dark days.”
“As I’ve told you before, it’s been years since we had much of a marriage. I guess I don’t have to explain my relationship with Jeannine.”
“I don’t require explanations. You called and asked me here. We’ve been close friends for years, so here I am.”
McHugh rubbed at his stubble. “I didn’t shoot Elias, Lou, but proving that isn’t going to be easy. I called you because I’m afraid I’m going to need your help to check around about him—see if you can learn who might have wanted to kill him. Hire a detective if you think you need one.”
“Gary, shouldn’t that be a job for your lawyer or, better still, the police?”
“His
lawyer,
actually,” said a woman. “But either would be correct.”
CHAPTER 4
Lou turned, expecting to see Missy McHugh again. The woman in the doorway couldn’t have been more dissimilar. She was tall and slender—an athlete, Lou guessed, dressed in a gray pants suit. Her straight ebony hair descended to just below her shoulders. She assessed him with intensely expressive eyes—an unsettling blue-green. There was something familiar about her, and Lou wondered if he was staring because of that—or simply because he couldn’t pull away.
“Lou, I’m assuming this is Sarah Cooper, my attorney.”
“You assume correctly, Dr. McHugh.” She turned to Lou. “Grayson Devlin, Dr. McHugh’s usual attorney, is in court with a case, so he sent me. Dr. McHugh, your wife let me in as she was leaving, so I just hung my coat in the foyer.”
Sarah shook McHugh’s hand, then, without waiting for a formal introduction, Lou’s. Her fingers were long, and her grip confident. She wore a simple band on the fourth finger of her right hand, but none on her left. Her eye-to-eye contact was practiced and so firm that Lou felt he had been thoroughly analyzed by the time she turned away.
“Thanks for getting over here so quickly,” McHugh said. “Grayson told me that he’d be at your disposal should you need him, but that you would take good care of me.”
“Count on it,” Sarah said.
“Lou, this woman was in charge of her firm’s team in the Sandra Winkler trial. I assume you know about that case?”
Of course.
That’s where Lou had seen her before—in the papers and on TV. She wasn’t easy to forget. The case made international news when an attractive young mother from Bethesda was accused of strangling her eight-year-old daughter behind the garage of their home. Cooper earned her client an acquittal, while she herself received a slew of death threats from outraged court vultures, who believed justice had not been served. Subsequently, a man accused of another, similar crime, admitted to guilt in the case.
“Nice job,” Lou said. “Even after the verdict, I never knew what to make of that whole thing. I’m afraid to admit it, but until the killer confessed and the police found the proof in his room, I was on the side of those who thought she was guilty.”
Sarah assessed him once again. “You were wrong,” she said coolly. “And you would be?”
“Lou Welcome. I’m an ER doc at Eisenhower Memorial and a friend of Gary’s.”
He flashed on the first time he had met Renee. He was a resident at the time, awkwardly trying to start up a conversation while the two were standing in the lunch line of the hospital cafeteria. Eighteen months later, they were married. Ten years and one Emily after that, they were facing a judge while Renee dissolved the union, citing the havoc wreaked by Lou’s methamphetamine and alcohol addictions.
“Can I ask why Dr. McHugh called you here now?” Sarah asked.
“You can ask, but I’m professionally constrained from telling you.”
“Well, that certainly gets us off to a strong start.”
“Here,” McHugh cut in, grabbing a sheet of paper from his desk. “If you really need to appease your boss at the Physician Wellness Office, I’ll write you a release. Ms. Cooper, Lou is my monitor. I was required by the board to contract with Physician Wellness because of a DUI I once had. Lou is the only real human connected with the PWO, but he’s still a company man.”
“So if Dr. McHugh drinks, he loses his medical license,” Sarah said. “Is that it?” Lou looked to McHugh, and Sarah groaned. “Great, so now we’re playing charades.”
“Yes,” McHugh said. “If I drink, I lose my license.”
“And what’s Dr. Welcome supposed to do for us here, Dr. McHugh? From what I was told by Grayson, you may be facing some pretty serious charges. The fewer people you speak to about this, the better. I’d suggest you make that rule one.”
“You can call me Gary. Lou is a friend of mine since college. He’s is going to help figure out who killed Elias Colston.”
“No, he’s not,” Sarah said.
“Yes, he is,” McHugh countered.
“Somehow, I think I must have a say in this,” Lou cut in. “If Gary needs my help, and if I think his request is reasonable, I’m going to try to help him.”
Lou had actually not decided if there was anything he could do, but Sarah Cooper was inadvertently discovering that the one sure way to get him to do something was to push in the opposite direction.
The attorney frowned. “His involvement could seriously compromise your case, Gary. Isn’t there some sort of conflict of interest at work with his being your monitor at all?”
“He’s going to help,” McHugh said. “No matter what it looks like, I didn’t kill Colston.”
“Great,” Sarah said. “That’s just great. Listen, Gary, this isn’t
The People’s Court
or
Judge Judy.
If you are charged with this crime, there are people whose livelihood will depend on seeing that you spend the rest of your life in prison, and the laws that they will use to do it are built around rules and technicalities. So what happens when this man here does something dumb and amateurish that forces us to toss out evidence critical to your defense? Listen, we have plenty of investigators at our disposal—investigators highly trained in what they do.”
“I don’t care how good your investigators are,” McHugh said. “I have a gut instinct about these things, and my gut is telling me I need him.”
“In that case, Doctor,” Sarah said, “I’m going to have to discuss things with my partners and see if we want to continue representing you.”
At that moment, the doorbell rang. McHugh wandered over to the window, peeled back the drapes, and peered out into the dark. Blue and red strobe lights illuminated his face.
“The police,” he said. “Guess they decided to keep CNN out of this until they paid me a visit. He looked first to Lou, next to Sarah. “Lou, as soon as possible, I need you to go and speak with Jeannine. She knows you’ve been helping me with my recovery, and is much more likely to speak with you than with any investigator. Now, please, I’m counting on you both. Please … please don’t let me down.”
The doorbell rang again.
Lou and Sarah Cooper exchanged unspoken questions.
“I’ll go with you, Gary,” Sarah said finally, “but our discussion about this issue is not done. Dr. Welcome, here is my card. Please use it before you try to be of any help.”
CHAPTER 5
Staff Sergeants Bucky Townsend and Fenton Morales were the first pair in line to tackle the Big Hurt. To have gotten this far, Townsend, along with ninety-nine other members from Mantis Company, had to pass a series of rigorous tests—physical and mental.
The Big Hurt was their final exam.
Townsend wanted desperately to make the cut for Operation Talon, but all he knew about the most intense and intimidating obstacle course in the military was that its name was not undeserved.
A rolling fog, low enough to brush the frozen ground, spilled out from the woods surrounding the Mantis reservation, buried deep in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. The dense blue of the receding night was yielding to the flush of dawn. A thin coat of rime covered the frozen ground. It was a huge break that Townsend and Morales had drawn first team out. In another hour, the temperature would be well below freezing.
Townsend, determined to keep moving, bounced to stay warm. He and the others had spent an hour sweating in the chill, when the door to the large, rough-hewn cabin swung open and, preceded by two aides, the legendary Major Charles Coon strode out onto the parade ground, his breath swirling out like a fighting bull’s. Second in command to Colonel Wyatt Brody, he was solidly built, with eyes that glowed like the business end of an acetylene torch.
As one, a hundred eager marines snapped to attention—rows of wooden planks dressed in camo, eyes fixed forward, expressions blank as virgin slate. Had it been demanded of them, they could have remained in that position almost indefinitely. They were trained to endure discomfort. For them, this was the norm. They made even severe pain look manageable.
Coon slowly walked the line, probing the men’s faces as if betting with himself which of them would make the cut.
“You are the elite of the elite,” he said finally, his voice a mix of gravel and thunder. “Out of seven hundred Mantis warriors, you are the final one hundred to make it this far. Two thirds of you will not be chosen for Operation Talon. Many of you will consider that a failure.” Coon paused here, but never turned his back on the men, and never lost eye contact. They might not be his equal, but they had earned his respect. “You will not have failed. None of you. Just getting to this point means you have succeeded. Delta Force can’t tell you about the Big Hurt, and neither can the Rangers or the SEALs. That is because they have never run this course. Thanks to the vision of your leaders, this experience is reserved for Mantis only. It is the exclusive property of the best of the best, the bravest of the brave. You are Mantis!”
“Whatever it takes!” one hundred men shouted in perfect unison.
Whatever it takes,
Townsend thought as he readied himself for the start.
Despite what Coon had proclaimed, failure was not an option. He would make the cut. He would be one of the men selected for Operation Talon. Of course, he still had almost no clue what the operation entailed. He knew only that it was high priority, high profile, and high prestige—his kind of work. He had come a hell of a long way from being a dairy farmer’s kid in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
Mantis—the most decorated unit in the United States military.
I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee.…
The Merle Haggard song ran like a tape through his mind, as it did whenever he was keyed up.
“Team One, are you ready to commit?” Coon shouted at Townsend and Morales. His stentorian voice roused a crow from its tree. It took off with an irritated caw.
“Sir, we are ready to commit. Sir!” Townsend and Morales shouted in unison.
Townsend saw a thin smile crease the man’s chiseled face. “Gentlemen, this is what you’ve been working toward. This moment. We are alone out here on this course, but believe me, whether they can see you or not, the country is watching you.”
Coon fired his starter pistol, and the duo sprinted off, their heavy black combat boots crunching through the rime. A Mantis instructor indicated the first obstacle, labeled in crudely painted blue lettering on a board nailed to a tree.
BELLY FLOP.
The Big Hurt, the men had been told, was not designed to test a soldier’s orienteering and navigation skills. It was about strength and grit—getting up, over, under, and through the toughest obstacles the military had to offer. Belly Flop was a fifty-yard crawl inches below barbed wire, through mud and frigid groundwater.
Twenty yards into the test, Townsend’s muscles felt on fire, twitching as he clawed his way commando-style through thick, muddy clay. He rose up to negotiate a depression and tore his forearm through his sleeve on the teeth of an unforgiving strand of razor wire. The pain barely registered. There were medics along the course route, but to seek help meant automatic disqualification.
Whatever it takes,
Townsend chanted to himself, grunting as he scrambled out of the mud.
I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee
.…
Slightly dazed, he drove ahead.
“You’re not a tourist!” the Mantis guide waiting at the end of the obstacle shouted at them. “Move it. Move it!”
Townsend stumbled over a tree root, and then, following another guide’s outstretched arm, sprinted toward the next challenge. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Morales coming up alongside him.
“Let’s go, Fenton! Let’s go!” Townsend shouted.
UPSIE DAISY.
The two men easily ascended and descended a twenty-foot wall, and then sidestepped along G-STRING, a taut wire that crossed a dozen feet above a churning river with ice coating its banks.
“If you slip, you swim!” the guide yelled after them.
A hundred-yard sprint along a twisting, uneven forest path, and there was another guide.
“Get set for some climbing, ladies!”
As a boy, Townsend had been afraid of heights—too scared to ride the Ferris wheel at the county fair. But that was before Mantis. His acrophobia, once paralyzing, now was gone. He rapidly negotiated the largely trimmed branches of a massive, sixty-foot oak called SHISH-KA-BOB and then rappelled down.