“So, connected to the base?”
“Yes, that’s correct, related to the base,” he said. “And it involves Ally.”
With that, Carl’s face drained. He looked nervously at his wife and then said, “Well, maybe we should take this outside and not disturb my wife with it.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure this is something your wife needs to know about and to deal with,” he said, taking a step inside. He looked over at her and smiled. “Ma’am.”
She looked at him hesitantly and asked, “Why would you come after Carl?”
“Just some questions,” he said. “I need to know his whereabouts during this incident.” He quickly noted the date with a notepad and a pencil in his hand. “So where were you during this time?”
Carl stared at him and said, “I was here at home,” he said.
“The whole time?”
He frowned. “Well, I was at work too.”
Axel jotted down where he worked and who could vouch for him at the job. And then he said, “And the rest of the time. Who can vouch for that?”
“My wife, Mary, here,” he said. “I was here with my wife and my daughter.”
“The entire time?” Axel asked, looking at him.
Carl looked at his wife, the two of them frowning at each other, then he turned back to Axel and said, “Yes, I believe so.”
Axel kept quiet for a moment.
“Why? What happened?” Carl asked.
“I’m afraid that’s classified,” he said smoothly.
“And why would you come here?” Mary asked. “What’s this got to do with Carl?”
“Well, ma’am, his animosity toward Ally in the past has made him a suspect in this case,” Axel said. “His court case and his method of revenge led us back to check him out to make sure he wasn’t involved in this.”
“That was a long time ago,” Carl said quickly.
“Four years ago,” he said. “Yet you served only thirty days.”
“Yes, but that was a trumped-up charge,” Mary protested.
“Trumped-up?” Axel looked at her with interest. “You are aware that he took nude photos of his fiancée and posted them all over the internet in revenge, right?”
She gasped and stepped back slowly.
“Revenge porn is what they call it.”
She looked at her husband, clearly stunned.
“Look,” Carl said, holding up his hands. “That’s who I was back then. That’s not who I am now. I was really angry.” Mary stared, her gaze going between the two men. “You did what?”
Carl took a slow, deep breath. “Mary, calm down.”
“Me, calm down?” she said. “You did that to Ally?”
He took a deep breath, and then he slowly nodded. “I did. I was really, really, really angry.”
“Why did you break up?” she asked suddenly. Carl was silent. “Do you know why they broke up?” she asked, looking at Axel.
He turned to Carl and said, “Carl, why don’t you just tell her the truth and be done with it.”
With obvious reluctance, he spoke. “I had an affair, and she found out,” he said heavily. It was easy to see from the look on his face that he thought his whole world would come crashing down.
“You had an affair. She broke up with you, so you got revenge by posting private photos of her on the internet?” Mary’s voice rose higher. She took several steps back, looked at him, and said, “Do I even know who you are?”
“Mary, I’m a different man,” he said. “I went through hell over that. I made a mistake, and I paid for it.”
“You paid for it, yes,” she said, “but Ally is still paying for it. Every day. Those photos will never be gone,” she said, her hand over her mouth, as she stared at her husband, shell-shocked. “God, Carl,” she said. “That is an action that goes on forever.”
“I know,” he said. “And, as you can see, I’ll be hounded forever because of it too,” and he pointed at Axel. Then he turned to Axel and said, “Thank you very much for destroying my marriage,” he said. “I had nothing to do with whatever’s going on with Ally now.”
“Maybe not,” Axel said, “but I hardly think it’s fair that your wife doesn’t know what you’re capable of. After all, she’s now got to know that the nude pictures you have of Mary are likely to end up on the internet too,” he said. He turned to Mary and said, “I’m sorry, Mary. That’s not how I would want you to find out such a thing. But you’re much better off understanding what your husband is capable of.” He turned back to Carl. “And the bottom line is this—if you have any connection to this attack on Ally, you won’t be walking on a thirty-day sentence.” And, with that, Axel turned and walked away.
He could hear Mary behind him, screaming at her husband. With grim satisfaction, Axel realized life would not be quite the same for this man who had tried to hide from what he did. Maybe there was a point in time where Carl had paid his price to society for what he’d done.
But for Ally? That invasion would never go away. Mary had called it when she had said that it was a life sentence for Ally. Back in his Jeep, Axel wrote off Carl as being a suspect.
Chapter 7
Stuck in her hospital room, it seemed like Ally could do absolutely nothing. She had her phone, and she spent her waking hours researching all the members of the team that she had gone into the sub with. At least when her mind was clearer of drugs she could do this. There had to be a connection somewhere. She’d given the list to Axel, though surely somebody else was around who could have given it to him.
Knowing Axel, he probably had it five times over from different people. He seemed to be thorough and was always double-checking and cross-checking. But every time somebody walked past the window to her hospital room or her door, she glanced up, and, of course, it was always too late to see who it was.
She was becoming paranoid now that she’d had the one visitor. That it looked like her brother’s friend didn’t mean that it was. She knew her brother Rory and his friend had to be dead. And there was no reason to suspect that same body frame meant that it was actually the same man. They say there are like thirteen archetypes of people in the world. But it was just too damn easy every time she saw that slight angle to his head and, in her mind, to replace it with her brother’s friend Thomas. But how was that even possible? Because Thomas really died. And his body had been cremated, right? The fact is, her brother’s friend also had another sibling.
It all just made her sick to her stomach. But why would anybody go to the sub and kill everybody? And that was the point she kept coming back to. If it was revenge, why didn’t they take them out one at a time, each in a different way? Then there would be no outright connection for the police or the navy to follow, right? Surely a major killing spree event like that on the sub took a lot of planning all at once. And, sure, the shock of multiple killings would then completely stymie most people as they tried to figure out what was going on, but the investigators would get to the bottom of it eventually.
She just didn’t know when that would happen. The sooner, the better, but it felt like it was her against the rest of the world. Yet she needed to heal. She needed to get that “good” leg capable of holding her weight so she could at least be mobile. She didn’t want to stay in the hospital. And the guards? Well, the guards were a whole different story.