Page 19 of Cyn
He sorted through his memories before landing on one. “The explosives expert?” Six nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I can’t tell you much more than that, but I can tell you she has my utmost respect and gratitude. She also plays a mean game of two-on-two basketball. She and I were undefeated for the four weeks she was with us.”
“Yes,” Six said. “I say we trust him.”
He blinked at her sudden acceptance. He had no idea what it was about his recollection of Fitzroy that had sealed the deal for Six, but clearly, it had. Considering that he’d only known Cyn for two days and the others a day less than that, the wave of relief—and pride—that washed through him at being accepted into their group was way out of proportion with what it should have been.
“Great, now what does that mean?” he asked, deciding to analyze his reaction later. He glanced at the clock. He still had thirty minutes before he could partake of the beer waiting in Cyn’s fridge.
“It means she tells you everything she’s discovered about James McElroy and Meleak,” Devil said.
“But more importantly,” Six jumped in, “it means she’ll tell you what shethinksabout it, too.”
He swiveled his gaze to look at Cyn, but she had her attention back on the pages in front of her. “Do you know what an incel is, Joe?” she asked.
“An involuntary celibate?”
Cyn nodded.
“I don’t suppose you mean the harmless ones. Is that what you think James was?” he asked.
She looked up and, for a moment, the gray of her eyes startled him with their intensity. Then she frowned and drew his attention to her lips, which he was quite sure wasn’t a better place to focus. Not with her friends in the room.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It occurred to me that it might be a possibility, though. Like you, I noticed his friends were mostly white, but I also noticed that all of them were young men. There were a few women he interacted with, but once I dug into it, it was clear they were relatives of some sort.”
Joe thought back to all the profiles he’d viewed the night before and felt a little chagrinned. Now that she’d called his attention to that fact, he saw it clearly. But when he’d been looking on his own, his own biases had interfered, and he hadn’t noticed the fact that McElroy did indeed interact almost exclusively with other young men.
“Does that tell us anything, though? Was he ever a student of yours? Was it possible he became fixated on you and somehow, your friend Meleak found out and wanted to let you know he was no longer a threat to you? But wait, that doesn’t work. You said you didn’t recognize him, so I assume that means he wasn’t a student of yours. He still could have been fixated, but if you didn’t know, there’d be no reason for Meleak to feel the need to send you the message.”
Cyn stared at him for a beat, then took a sip of wine. “Did you read the report of his death?”
Again, he nodded, not sure where she was going with the non sequitur.
“If you had been investigating it, what do you think your report would have looked like?”
He half-frowned, half-smiled. “Are you asking a Navy man if he could have done a better job than Army CID? If so, the answer is yes.”
That elicited a flicker of a smile from the women, but even as he spared a second to appreciate it, his mind was already working. “You think they covered something up.”
Cyn glanced at her friends who were listening intently, then shrugged. “It’s sparse. That’s all I can say. To me, that means they either didn’t investigate thoroughly—intentionally or not—or there really was not enough evidence to investigate. I know the officer who signed off on it; Mac is as solid as they come. So, if the investigation itself isn’t in question, then I have to believe there wasn’t a lot to investigate.”
That happened more often than law enforcement cared to admit, and he said as much.
“I operate in a different world, so I’ll have to take your word for that,” Cyn said. “But it still seems a bit, well, for lack of a better word, suspicious.”
“You said your friend was solid,” he pointed out, trying to follow her logic.
“He is, and I’m not suspicious of him, but even if there was nothing to investigate, don’t you think it’s unusual that the investigation into the death of a US soldier was wrapped up in a week with what essentially amounts to no findings. I’m not questioning Mac, but I do have to wonder what happened so that this,” she said, pointing to the report, “was all the investigators could find.”
Joe considered her point. “I agree, the situation is unusual. There are political ramifications to the murder of a US soldier. Even if they couldn’t find anything, they’d want to at least appear to have exhausted all possibilities. Could you call your friend?” He gestured with his head toward the papers signed by Macarthur Carver.
Cyn nodded. “Not now, of course, it’s nearly one in the morning in Djibouti, but I’ll put a call into him later tonight or first thing tomorrow morning.”
“None of this is really relevant to your investigation, though, is it?” Devil asked.
“What exactlyareyou investigating?” Six followed up.
He didn’t stop a wry smile from escaping. “I’m not investigating anything anymore. The Army CID, or CIC as they are now called, officially took over the case this morning. Private McElroy’s body has been returned to his family, and his funeral is in two days, but they are investigating the body snatching.”
“Did you tell them about Meleak?” Nora asked.
