“Tessie, I know you’re in pain—”
“Spare me your pathetic TED Talk! He was with her, wasn’t he? That’s who the phone was for.”
For the first time, O.J. didn’t respond.
“You think I’m an idiot? I know him twenty-five years,” Tessa said, her voice finally slowing down. “You have any idea how much Rashida cost us in marriage therapy?”
Rashida. Zig knew that name, from the back of Nola’s canvas. One of her first military paintings—from Grandma’s Pantry.
Archie Mint
Rashida Robinson
Elijah King
It reminded Zig of— Wait. He just saw— There. Right in front of him, on the assistant’s desk, was an old-school logbook for incoming and outgoing calls. Every wing commander’s assistant used one, to make sure there was a written record for when a fallen soldier’s family member insisted, “I called ten times and no one called me back!”
At the top of the logbook were two entries. Outgoing calls—one last night and one this morning—to Elijah King. The third name on the list.
Comments: Left message. Still no reply.
“I’m getting warmer now, aren’t I, Oren?” Tessa said, still focused on Rashida. “Maybe it’s better if I call her myself,” she added, pulling out an imaginary phone. “Hey, Rashida—remember all those years ago when you were fucking my—”
“She’s dead,” O.J. said.
“What?”
“Rashida’s dead. We found her body two nights ago. Out by the airport, burned to a crisp. Cops tagged it as suicide, but . . . Let’s just say we’re looking into it.”
Some spouses would’ve burst into tears. Military wives? They were built different.
Sure enough, Tessa stood at the center of the office, planted like a telephone pole. She stared down at the folder of photos, her brain still working through the details.
“Archie told me—” Her voice wavered, but not for long. “He said he was going to the steak house—that it was a work thing, but—” She shook her head. “Is that who he was with—？ Were he and Rashida still—”
“She met him at the steak house—we know that for sure,” O.J. said. “What we don’t know is— When the shots were— We think she might’ve been in the back seat with Archie when he got shot.”
She was. Zig knew she was. He’d seen it on the CT scan . . . from the bone shrapnel that he’d found in the side of Mint’s face. When Zig first saw it, he didn’t know who the bones belonged to, but to hear this—that Rashida and Mint were meeting at the restaurant, and that their history was more than just work related . . .
Zig glanced around the empty hallway, putting together his own pieces. Could O.J. and the Dover medical examiners have missed it on the CT scan? Maybe at first—especially since it now seemed clear that someone had pulled Rashida’s body from the back seat. But from what O.J. just said, he knew that Mint wasn’t alone when he got shot. On top of that, he knew that Mint and Rashida were together that night. And if that was the case . . .
“How could you not tell me?” Tessa asked O.J.
“Tell you what? That we’re as concerned and lost as you are?”
“This is from that night—it goes back to the Pantry, doesn’t it?”
“That’s a theory.”
“It’s more than a damn theory! It’s why you took this case!”
“It is why I took the case. But Tessie, I swear to you, it wasn’t until we actually brought him in that we found the second phone, which by the way, forensics is still digging through. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer not to dredge up my friend’s worst mistakes until I know what the hell actually happened, which I’m glad I did, considering we’re now chasing a second body.”