for booking and transport to a federal containment facility.”
The next scene showed a white-haired, handcuffed individual being led into the jail, flanked by a platoon of uniformed and plainclothes officers. As is typical of so many in this part of the country, the sun had baked his lined, craggy face to leather. His shoulders were hunched and he kept his head down to avoid the cameras. But when another reporter dropped a boom mike a foot from his face and yelled a question, his chin snapped up.
“Yeah, I shot ’em,” he shouted back, his eyes as savage as his voice. “Murdering bastards, both of them. They and their kind killed my son. They deserved to die.”
Ooooh-kay.
I wanted to sympathize with a man who’d lost his only son to druggers but to tell you the truth, Armstrong looked and sounded more than a little scary . . . until the man’s shoulders slumped and tears began to course down his leathery cheeks. Then he just looked like a broken-hearted father.
The perky blond reporter embellished on that image in the clips that followed. Several neighbors and friends talked about Armstrong’s devastation at the loss of his son, his loneliness after his wife died of cancer, his increasing bitterness over a flawed justice system that would release a murdering renegade like Hooker. The reporter confirmed Armstrong had written several scathing letters to the editor calling for impeachment of bleeding heart, left-wing judges like the one who’d ordered Hooker’s release, and he had talked about petitioning the White House to intervene.
The last clip panned across a small, dust- and wind-swept country cemetery before zooming in on the meticulously tended graves of Margaret Catherine Armstrong and her son, John Armstrong Jr. The last image viewers saw was the small American flag planted beside Gunnery Sergeant Armstrong’s grave whipping in the wind.
Effective. Very effective. I’d felt sorry for an obviously grieving father a few moments ago. Now I was ready to whip out my checkbook and contribute to his defense fund.
“In other news . . .”
I hit the remote and surfed the channels. I caught bits and pieces of the story on all local channels, with more details promised at ten.
O’Reilly called again while I was surfing. I could hear him clicking a keyboard while he peppered me with questions via his hands-free phone.
“Did you catch the story?”
“Yeah.”
“Whaddaya think? Did Dead Guy Number One get his just deserts?”
“Well . . .”
“That was something about the boot print, wasn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Think Armstrong is the one who set fire to our lab? Or hired someone to do it?”
Well, duh! The possibility hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been too caught up in all the murder stuff.
“He didn’t confess to arson,” I pointed out, “only to shooting Hooker and Sandoval.”
“Yeah, but the two gotta be connected. Armstrong could have nosed out the identity of the military officer who found the bodies. Learned what kind of testing we do out there at the site. Maybe the old man got a hint through his son’s Marine Corps connections that we’d collected data from the murder scene.”
I chewed on my lower lip and replayed snippets of my meeting with Dan-O in my head. Squirming a little, I recalled whining about having to put my team’s test schedule on hold while we processed data collected at the scene. I couldn’t believe Danny would deliberately leak that information to any of his other acquaintances. But then I hadn’t intended to leak it, either.
Another possible charge to add to my list of sins! Desertion, liability for the loss of thousands of dollars’ worth of government equipment, and now unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information. I was envisioning how I’d look in black-and-white prison stripes when I remembered a law enforcement officer had sat right beside me during the tête-à-tête with Dan-O. Mitch hadn’t issued any warnings or
The next scene showed a white-haired, handcuffed individual being led into the jail, flanked by a platoon of uniformed and plainclothes officers. As is typical of so many in this part of the country, the sun had baked his lined, craggy face to leather. His shoulders were hunched and he kept his head down to avoid the cameras. But when another reporter dropped a boom mike a foot from his face and yelled a question, his chin snapped up.
“Yeah, I shot ’em,” he shouted back, his eyes as savage as his voice. “Murdering bastards, both of them. They and their kind killed my son. They deserved to die.”
Ooooh-kay.
I wanted to sympathize with a man who’d lost his only son to druggers but to tell you the truth, Armstrong looked and sounded more than a little scary . . . until the man’s shoulders slumped and tears began to course down his leathery cheeks. Then he just looked like a broken-hearted father.
The perky blond reporter embellished on that image in the clips that followed. Several neighbors and friends talked about Armstrong’s devastation at the loss of his son, his loneliness after his wife died of cancer, his increasing bitterness over a flawed justice system that would release a murdering renegade like Hooker. The reporter confirmed Armstrong had written several scathing letters to the editor calling for impeachment of bleeding heart, left-wing judges like the one who’d ordered Hooker’s release, and he had talked about petitioning the White House to intervene.
The last clip panned across a small, dust- and wind-swept country cemetery before zooming in on the meticulously tended graves of Margaret Catherine Armstrong and her son, John Armstrong Jr. The last image viewers saw was the small American flag planted beside Gunnery Sergeant Armstrong’s grave whipping in the wind.
Effective. Very effective. I’d felt sorry for an obviously grieving father a few moments ago. Now I was ready to whip out my checkbook and contribute to his defense fund.
“In other news . . .”
I hit the remote and surfed the channels. I caught bits and pieces of the story on all local channels, with more details promised at ten.
O’Reilly called again while I was surfing. I could hear him clicking a keyboard while he peppered me with questions via his hands-free phone.
“Did you catch the story?”
“Yeah.”
“Whaddaya think? Did Dead Guy Number One get his just deserts?”
“Well . . .”
“That was something about the boot print, wasn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Think Armstrong is the one who set fire to our lab? Or hired someone to do it?”
Well, duh! The possibility hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been too caught up in all the murder stuff.
“He didn’t confess to arson,” I pointed out, “only to shooting Hooker and Sandoval.”
“Yeah, but the two gotta be connected. Armstrong could have nosed out the identity of the military officer who found the bodies. Learned what kind of testing we do out there at the site. Maybe the old man got a hint through his son’s Marine Corps connections that we’d collected data from the murder scene.”
I chewed on my lower lip and replayed snippets of my meeting with Dan-O in my head. Squirming a little, I recalled whining about having to put my team’s test schedule on hold while we processed data collected at the scene. I couldn’t believe Danny would deliberately leak that information to any of his other acquaintances. But then I hadn’t intended to leak it, either.
Another possible charge to add to my list of sins! Desertion, liability for the loss of thousands of dollars’ worth of government equipment, and now unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information. I was envisioning how I’d look in black-and-white prison stripes when I remembered a law enforcement officer had sat right beside me during the tête-à-tête with Dan-O. Mitch hadn’t issued any warnings or
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