She sagged back in her bed. “Life sucks.”
“It does,” he said, “but it’s also full of good things. So remember that too.”
She shook her head. “Says you. Right about now, I don’t see too much good about it.”
“Stay alive,” he ordered. “That’s your job right now.” And he turned and walked out.
*
Axel didn’t tell her that he was camping out here in the hospital for a while. Thought it was for the best right now. The element of surprise, for her and for her limping man. He snagged an empty hospital room nearby, sat back down, and called Mason. He clarified what was happening on her end, despite interruptions caused by Mason repeatedly swearing and interjecting comments. Finally Axel said, “So I’ll start running down the half brother and his friend, while you guys do your official investigation into whoever had access to both the sub and now the hospital. If not a limping navy man, our limping man has contacts to compromised seamen, I’m sad to say.”
Mason swore again. “Well, they’ve shut me out of the investigation now too,” Mason said, his voice hard.
“I wonder why?” Axel asked.
“More protocol than anything, I think.”
“Well, the navy’s bound to come after her soon, aren’t they?”
“Certainly they’ll come to her for questioning,” Mason said. “I’m a little surprised they haven’t already.”
“Oh, and Ally thinks a foreign country could be stealing our sub,” Axel noted.
“Hmm.”
“Yeah, well, she was in shock today when I got here after the guy visited her. Legit shock. Absolutely no way she was faking that.”
“But it could be for a lot of different reasons,” Mason warned. “You can’t get so sucked in to the scenario that you don’t keep your head about you.”
“No, that’s not a problem,” he said. “Better to spend the afternoon here doing research.”
“If you have trouble getting information,” Mason said, “let me know.”
“Will do.” After he hung up, he settled down and started researching. Not a hell of a lot was accessible. That was the problem. The half brother, Rory, was a pretty open-end deal. Raised by a single mom, he’d gone to a poor school and had lived in a poor neighborhood, yet he appeared to have turned out okay. He’d gone to college to get a degree in IT. Interesting that it was the same field as his sister, though IT was a pretty broad topic these days. They had connected a couple years ago, according to Ally. Axel wanted to contact her folks and get some confirmation on that but figured he could wait until he was done with this kind of research.
He plowed through as much as he could, then got the NYC coroner’s office on the phone. They were busy, didn’t see his case as a rush—not compared to their other rushes—were happy to rerun the DNA samples of Rory and Thomas and to reconfirm those samples taken from the dead bodies matched up with other medical records gathered on the two men. Axel should expect something in eight to twelve weeks.
With a sigh, Axel turned his focus on Thomas Hardy. Axel found even less on this guy than had been online on Rory. Axel snorted. Here were two twentysomething males who were not on social media, were not on the dating sites, weren’t even posting reviews on Amazon. But, then again, if these guys were gay, even in the 2020s, some people were not open to this lifestyle.
Maybe Axel needed to check for police records. Seems Rory and Thomas had moved around a bit. Not so surprising with job transfers and the like, much less for their chosen lifestyle. Axel didn’t want to call some twenty local PDs, checking out where both Rory and Thomas had individually lived over the past decade, before it seemed they finally moved in together, nearby here in California. Unfortunately they died soon thereafter.
At least they were together, Axel thought.
Problem was, the individual PDs didn’t share every offense to contribute to the NCIC national database, not unless it had to do with missing persons or felony-level offenses, like serial killers or serial rapists and the like. With that thought, Axel checked the sex offender list. That was national. Still no luck. Rory and Thomas were either under the radar for privacy or just were not criminals, at least at the federal level.
Axel finally ended up sending Mason a text. Nothing popping on the half brother Rory, practically nothing on the friend Thomas. Almost as if they didn’t exist.
Let me take a look. Mason came back a little later. California license. Thomas would have been 28 years old.
Axel replied right away. Right. So, the brother was 29. They were both about the same age.
Mason continued, Went to the same elementary and middle schools but not the same high school. Reconnected afterward.
Interesting. Where are you getting that from?
Mason phoned him. “Thomas and Rory were both in the navy.”
“Well, well, well,” Axel said, “there’s your connection.”
“Both confirmed deceased, with death certificates, cremations, burials.”
“Shit,” Axel said. “Do we really believe they both died though?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’ll have to dig in to look further.”
“I’ve asked the NYC coroner’s office for a redo on the DNA to confirm IDs. They said it could take up to three months, so I’m not expecting anything for at least four months. So if you can speed that up …” Axel said.
“I’m just trying to work out the justification for this,” Mason said, with a note of humor.
“But, in this case, eleven dead navy men is pretty good justification.”
“Very true,” Mason said. “But the brass already thinks they have their man—woman. Remember? So they don’t want any more evidence. Their minds are made up, and they don’t want anybody to distract them from Ally. They think they have enough as it is. Any connection to Hostettler?”
“I was just going to ask if you want to keep looking into that.”
“Yep. Will do. You keep digging too.”
“I’ll chase that one down next,” Axel said. When he hung up, he got up for another sandwich run to the hospital’s cafeteria and sat down there for a quick break. As he did so, his phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but answered it.
“You were talking to my daughter,” said the man on the other end of the phone.
“And your daughter is?” But deep inside, he knew.
“My daughter is Ally. She said you were there today.”
“Yes, I was,” Axel said, speaking slowly. “Did you have a specific reason for calling me?”
“Her brother Rory,” he said. “It’s a bad stage to set for a life, and it ended up even worse. But I can confirm what she said.”
“Well, you can’t actually,” he said, “because you don’t know what she said to me.”
“I didn’t know about my son Rory’s existence until later in his life,” he said. “The affair happened during a bad time in my marriage, and my wife and I had split up for a time. Rory’s mother never told me. When my son came looking for me, he was already twenty-four or twenty-five years old.”
“Interesting,” he said.