“I have no way of knowing what Robinson told him. If he did tell him something that might have led Bobby on to something else.”
&nb
sp; “What about Susan Reynolds? You think he’s going to visit her?”
“Maybe, if he hasn’t already.”
“Don’t you think we would have heard if he had?”
“Not necessarily. If Reynolds is on someone else’s payroll then she might not want her official superiors to know because it would direct attention onto her. She might have only told her coconspirators. Or maybe she did tell people and no one bothered to tell us. Or she called Robinson and told him. I guess that’s all possible.”
As they were walking along, Puller’s phone buzzed. He looked at the screen and his demeanor changed.
“Bad news?” asked Knox, who was watching him closely.
“Doug Fletcher was as good as his word.”
“What?”
“He just sent me the copy of the letter my dad filed with the court during Bobby’s court-martial.”
Knox put a hand on Puller’s arm. “Look, you go up to your room, finish packing up, read your letter, take all the time you need. I’ll check out and be down in the lobby waiting.”
Puller looked across at her. “I appreciate that.” He hesitated. “And I’m sorry that I was shitty to you this morning.”
“Forget it. I’m not a morning person myself. And I can be an asshole too.”
“You said you weren’t close to your dad, but do you ever see him?”
“That would be kind of hard, because he’s dead.”
“Sorry, I didn’t know.”
“He drank too much, withered away, fell into depression, ended up all alone, and ate a round from a Glock without bothering to leave behind a note.”
“Damn, that must have been tough.”
“Not as much as you might think. We’d been estranged a long time by then.”
“Still, he was your father.”
“Actually, in my mind at least, he had lost that title. It’s not supposed to be simply granted, Puller, because a sperm happened to hit an egg. You have to earn it. He chose not to. And he suffered the consequences. It’s incredibly sad, but it wasn’t my choice, it was his.”
“I admire the fact you can be so… analytical about it.”
“That only happens after you spend about ten years of your life crying about it. Once the emotions are gone, analytics are all you have left.”
But as she said this Knox turned away from him and stared directly in front of her.
They had reached the hotel by now and she pushed him toward the entrance. “Go do what you have to do. I’m going to run next door to the pharmacy and pick up some things I need. Meet you in the lobby.”
Puller looked at her for a moment and then walked into the hotel.
Knox looked frantically around for a few moments and then spotted the narrow alleyway behind the hotel. She slid into it, turned away from the street, and began to cry.
CHAPTER
44
ROBERT PULLER SAT in a seedy motel room next to a strip mall on Route 1 in south Alexandria staring at the beaten-down strip of carpet but not really seeing it.
Puller opened his laptop and went online. He studied the professional bios of each of these people, running his eye down the list again and again hoping that something would pop.
He had one critical time point.
The decisio
n to kill me at DB. What happened to trigger that? It would have taken planning, say a couple of months to manage all the necessary details. The trigger for it could have come anytime before that, I just don’t know how long before it. But I have another critical point that might lead me in the right direction.
He hacked a secure database to search for Susan Reynolds’s internal and nonpublic c.v.