Third Degree - Greg Iles

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a liar.” He shoved her against the toilet, then walked away again.

      She scrambled to her feet and ran to her side of the bed. There was no point in trying to flee the house unless she could slow him down first. Pulling back the comforter and sheets, she crawled under them and pulled them up to her neck.

      “Get up,” Warren said from the foot of the bed. “I want to check your computer.”

      “Go get it, then. I’m going to lie here until the aura goes away.”

      “If I leave you here, you’ll climb out the window.”

      Damn right I will. “Ten minutes in the dark, Warren. Please. If the aura stops, I’ll do whatever you want.” She closed her eyes. “You can lie here with me, if you want to.”

      “I don’t,” he said, but he flicked off the light switch. “The windows are locked, by the way. All of them.”

      She shifted under the covers, then slid her hand into her back pocket and eased out the clone Razr. In one continuous motion, she opened the phone and slipped it into her front pocket. Warren was a black silhouette in the dark, leaning on his bureau.

      “When I read that letter,” he said hoarsely, “I felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart.”

      She slid her thumb lightly over the Razr’s keypad. Keying in a message was child’s play, but blindly pressing the proper sequence of buttons to put the phone into text mode wasn’t. She turned her head and looked at Warren as she worked her thumb over the faintly tactile buttons, trying to keep his eyes focused on her face.

      “I’m not having an affair,” she said softly. “I haven’t had one in the past, either. I would never do that to Grant and Beth.”

      Warren flipped out the cylinder of his revolver and spun it. “I wouldn’t have thought you could.” The cylinder snicked home. “But the letter says different.”

      “That letter is bullshit.” Laurel had the Razr in text mode. She began keying her message to Danny, her eyes never leaving her husband’s face. “Someone faked it to mess with your head.”

      To her surprise, Warren seemed to be considering her suggestion. “Who would fake something like that?” he asked, as though talking to himself.

      “Somebody who wants to drive you crazy. And it’s obviously working. Warren, if you lift a hand to me again, I’m calling the police and hiring a divorce lawyer.”

      This was pure bravado. Even in near darkness, she could see his neck and jaw muscles tightly flexed. Danny’s letter had utterly transformed him. With an infinitesimal movement of her right thumb, she pressed SEND and slid her hand out of her pocket.

      “I still have the aura,” she said with genuine anxiety. “My arms are tingling, and I’m craving ice cream.”

      “Imitrex only shortens the headache, you know that.”

      She closed her eyes again.

      “You’ve got to get up,” Warren said. “I want to see your computer. You can lie on the sofa in the great room.”

      Laurel prayed that Danny was already reading her message. She’d risked a lot to send it, and she hadn’t sent the message Danny would have wanted her to. But she still had the phone, and in her heart she still believed she could talk Warren down from this flight of rage—so long as her computer concealed its secrets. At bottom, the idea that Warren Shields, M.D., might shoot the mother of his children was preposterous. But what he might do to a man who had fornicated with and impregnated her was another matter.

      “Get up, goddamn it!” Warren snapped, kicking the side of the mattress.

      The violence of his anger was what worried her, for it was wholly new. Laurel stood slowly, gathered the comforter around her shoulders, and padded into the hall that led to the kitchen. Run, Danny, she thought. For Michael’s sake, run.

       SIX

      Danny McDavitt was lying on his back in a sea of clover when his cell phone chirped, signaling the arrival of a text message. He hadn’t heard that sound since the day he’d told Laurel that he couldn’t leave his wife and watched her crumble before him.

      Danny didn’t reach straight for his phone. He knew the true worth of lying in sun-drenched clover, waiting for the touch of a woman who loved him. There had been more than a few moments in his life when he’d been certain that he wouldn’t survive into the next minute, much less live to lie in a fragrant bower like this one, waiting for a beauty like Laurel Shields. In the air force, Danny had been known as an even-tempered guy, even among pilots. But falling in love with a woman he could not possess had rewired part of his brain. An emotional volatility was loose in him, and it frightened him sometimes. The chirping phone, for example. Laurel’s reply to the text message he’d sent after their “parent-teacher conference” had lifted him from depression to blissful anticipation in the span of four seconds. But this time the chirp had sent a tremor of fear through him. Laurel was already late, and a new text message was likely to tell him she’d decided not to meet him after all.

      He couldn’t blame her. It had been unfair of him even to ask. Nothing had changed in his marital situation. He’d simply reached a point of such desperate longing that he’d been unable to keep from begging. He hated himself for the weakness he’d shown this morning. It was true that Starlette had bailed on the teacher conference; that was par for the course. But the second she’d started making excuses, Danny’s heart had soared. Her avoidance would give him an excuse to see Laurel—in private—and even though he’d known she would be upset, he’d gone to her classroom anyway.

      Danny dug his hand into the deep clover and found his phone, but still he didn’t read the text message. He didn’t want to shatter his dream yet. Twenty-one years of military service had taught him to let good things linger while he could, even if they were illusory. Danny had seen the world from the cockpit of an MH-53 Pave Low helicopter, starting with the original bird in antidrug operations out of the Bahamas in 1982 (not the dream duty it sounded like), and winding up in the futuristic Pave Low IV in Afghanistan, where in late 2001 he was shot down and finally retired. In between, he had served on almost every continent, with Bosnia and Sierra Leone proving particularly memorable. Pave Lows from Danny’s group, the elite Twentieth Special Operations Wing, had opened Gulf War One by crossing the desert in pitch blackness and taking out Iraq’s air defenses, opening the skies for the army’s better-known AH-64 Apaches. Danny still remembered the unparalleled rush of flying a massed formation of birds into what everyone knew was going to be the first real war since Vietnam (his own personal Apocalypse Now moment). His sound track, rather disappointingly in hindsight, had been Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” rather than Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Though Desert Storm had ended faster than anyone expected, there’d been no shortage of adrenaline-charged missions to follow. But they paled in comparison to what he’d endured in the hellish mountains of Afghanistan, a land that bred warriors the way America now bred lawyers.

      “Give me some good news,” he murmured, raising the cell phone at last. He held the device far enough from his aging eyes to read the tiny letters on the screen and pressed READ. Laurel’s message materialized almost instantly.

      WARREN KNOWS GETMICHAEL LEAVETOWNASAP NO HEROICS

      Danny stopped breathing. This was the last thing he’d expected. After all the times they might have been caught—and there had been some close calls—he’d thought the danger had finally dropped to zero. He reread the message as he got to his feet, trying to work out what might have happened.

      Some sort of confrontation, obviously. But why was she telling him to run? Did she think he was in danger? That was difficult to imagine. Danny had given Warren Shields flying lessons for four months, and he’d come to know the doctor as a quiet, restrained, methodical man,

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