Page 85 of A Deeper Darkness

“That reporter you were talking to? Gino Taranto? Just fished him out of the Potomac, with a third eye.”

“Oh, my God,” Sam said.

Fletcher just asked, “Where’d he go in?”

“No idea. But he didn’t last long outside your meeting with him.” He turned his focus onto Sam. “We need to go over it again. Every little last detail.”

Fletcher smiled for the first time all evening. “We can do you one better. We have it all on tape.”

A rotund nurse with a crew cut and jangling gold earrings came into the waiting room.

“Is there a Detective Fletcher here?”

“That’s me,” Fletch said, standing.

“Your partner is asking for you.”

“Go on, then,” Roosevelt said. “We’ll handle this in a minute.”

Fletcher gave Sam an apologetic look and went with the nurse. Hart was four doors down, in a private room. Everything smelled oddly clean, antiseptic. A machine hissed air into his lungs. Hart was pale, but at least his eyes were open. Ginger moved from her vigil at his bedside and let Fletcher take her place.

“Fletch.” Hart mouthed the words. The doctors had done a temporary tracheotomy; they had a hard time intubating him with the trauma to his throat. He couldn’t make sounds, but could make himself understood.

“Dude, you gave me a scare,” Fletcher said. “Did you see who shot us?”

Hart shook his head, a tiny movement. “You okay?” he mouthed.

“Yeah. ’Tis but a flesh wound.”

His Monty Python impression worked, Hart smiled.

“Really, I’m fine. Don’t worry about it. You just heal up. I’m gonna get whoever did this to you. I promise.”

Hart just closed his eyes. Fletcher gave his hand one more squeeze and stepped away. Ginger gave him another hug.

“Be careful, Fletch.”

“I will. Call me if anything changes, okay?”

“Of course. Be good.”

Good.

If he found the man who shot them, and the opportunity arose, he would kill him.

Chapter Forty-Three

Washington, D.C.

Metro Homicide

Dr. Samantha Owens

Sam tried not to yawn. It had been an exhausting day, and it was now two in the morning.

The disk Taranto had given to her was confusing, at best. It seemed to be a video taken of a nighttime military raid, but it wasn’t marked. She had to assume it was Afghanistan. The video had been shot through night vision from above the scene, probably from a Predator drone or Apache helicopter. The screen was grainy and bobbing, and looked something like a video game crossed with a science-fiction movie. Globs of green-shaped soldiers moved through a blackened backdrop, five of them, spreading out in a fan, converging into a single file line, then stopping. Friendlies. Two blobs headed off on their own while the remaining three stayed stationary. Then one blob stopped moving, and its partner walked off in a totally different direction, looping back to the main group. As he got close to the cluster of soldiers, there was a sudden scramble and flashes of light from the right, which Sam took to be shooting. Pandemonium looks the same through night vision as it does in daylight. People started running all over the place, traces of light shot through the air. The single blob on its own didn’t move again, didn’t engage in the firefight. It seemed he’d gone down before the shooting started.

The whole video took forty minutes. It gave Sam a vicious headache, trying to decipher what was happening. But she, Fletcher and Roosevelt agreed: this had to be the friendly fire incident.