“Prolonged opioid use?” He shook his head and instantly regretted it. “That doesn’t jive with media reports and background investigations. Who did the autopsy?”
“Massachusetts Chief Medical Examiner Doctor Maisy Gatineau. Know her?” Adam asked.
“No. Any reason she’d lie? Falsify her findings?” He pulled a small bottle from the pocket of his khakis, and popping the top, he shook out a handful of pills before swallowing them down with a sip of his lukewarm coffee. He had a killer morning after headache, and so far, caffeine alone had done little to support his body’s recovery efforts.
“Not that I can find,” Jay replied. “So far, she’s coming in squeaky clean.”
“Doesn’t mean someone didn’t get to her,” Cody piped in. “She has a family. Young children. Wouldn’t take much to coerce her. A couple of threats against her kids, and boom, she’s involved in a cover-up of massive proportions.”
“It’s possible,” Grant agreed. “Could be a return trip to Boston is in order.”
“Could be. But let’s have another look at the autopsy reports first.” Adam shot his gaze over to Jamie. “You up for it, Doc?”
“Yeah. No problem. Give me a day or two.” Another thread to pull. Another mystery to solve. But not one that brought him any closer to his goal of putting Johnson six feet under. “What about Tak? Have any luck tracking him down?”
Chase shook his head. “No signs of him since Boston.”
“You think he did it?” Jamie asked, still not wanting to believe the JTT’s sniper had been the finger on the trigger behind the bullet that killed Nancy Laski-Haines.
“He’s one of a handful who could have made the shot,” Adam replied as Jay added the blurry picture of Tak to the screen. “And he was in the area. Other than that, there’s no physical evidence to link him to the VP’s assassination.”
“What’s Mutt’s take?” Still in Washington, Tak’s uncle had Johnson under constant surveillance, an obstacle to Jamie’s plan to get up close and personal with his ex-wife’s killer, but not an insurmountable one.
“He’s on the same page we are.” Chase shrugged a shoulder. “Innocent until proven guilty.”
“And the CIA?” Jamie asked.
“Same as the rest of the feds,” Adam replied. “Guilty until proven innocent. FBI issued a BOLO using the CCTV image from Boston. They’re not naming names at this point, but a few, including Diane Heughan, have identified Tak, and tagged him as the shooter.”
“So why not enhance the picture, slap his name to it, and make it public?”
“Can’t,” Jay said. “The fed’s computer geeks have tried everything to sharpen the image, but the signal was jammed at the source, and this is the only time he was caught on surveillance.”
“Jammed at the source? How’s that possible?”
“No one knows.” He blew up a second picture showing the non-blurry faces of the people around Tak. “It’s not something I’ve seen before either.”
“That’s bizarre,” Jamie said. “It looks like someone wanted to cover his identity, but he wanted to be seen. Why else would he look directly at the camera?”
“Yeah,” Chase nodded. “Looks that way.”
“Makes no sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Adam agreed. “But until we have something definitive one way or the other, we’re considering all possibilities.”
“You think he’s a danger to the team?”
“Let’s just say we’re not taking any chances.”
“Christ. He knows where we are.” A spike of fear shot Jamie through the spleen as an image of Summer standing in front of Halia’s bassinet hoof-picked its way through his brain.
“He knows we’re in Montana,” Zander said. “But he was taken before being given the coordinates for the lodge.”
“Not good enough,” he growled. “There’s women and children here, for fuck sakes. If Tak’s working for Johnson or his backers, we need to relocate ASAP.”
“Z is scoping out possible options,” Adam replied. “In the meantime, we’ve put extra precautions in place. Grant’s in charge of base security. Right now, we’re on a two-man, twenty-four seven watch schedule. He’ll bring you up to speed and add you to the rotation.”
“I can’t—” About to point out he was incapable of providing any level of security protection, his mouth snapped shut when Adam cut him off with a steely gaze.
