An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) Read Free Page B

Anderson,” Chase said, “and this is Sergeant North.” The woman pressed a bony hand into Chase’s but ignored Sergeant North’s.
    “I’ll get the car,” North muttered, then sprinted down the sidewalk toward theparking lot.
    Chase hadn’t noticed the purse in Mrs. White’s hand until the woman pulled the strap over a shoulder and unzipped the bag. “I know there’s been a crash,” she said, “an 81.”
    Chase silently cursed the media and their scanners. “Yes,” she said, glancing out the window. North had parked the car at the end of the sidewalk and was running around to the passenger door to open it for her. She willed herself to look stoically back at Mrs. White. In seven years, Chase had tap-danced her way through dozens of press conferences, soft-shoeing past the questions that might have landed the Marine Corps before a Senate hearing, but never had she faced this situation. It wasn’t as though she wasn’t used to hearing from the next-of-kin. After all,whenever a helicopter went down, it seemed every mother of a Marine tearfully called Chase’s office and every other Public Affairs office in the country, even if her Marine was stationed a thousand miles from the scene of the accident. Now that the Associated Press had been notified, she knew the voice mail would be full by the time she and North returned. They would have to refer the anxious mothers to the Chaplain’s Office. But here was Major White’s next-of-kin in person. Chase’s face was growing hotter. She knew she was sweating. She nodded toward North in the parking lot. “They’re waiting for me at the front gate.”
    Mrs. White seemed awfully young to be the mother of two children, one a preteen, but she had the dried out look of someonewho had spent too much time on Waikiki. When she began rifling through her purse, her hair fell across her face. “It’s Tony, isn’t it?” she said, behind the heavy curtain of hair. Chase resisted the impulse to tuck it behind an ear. She’d never had patience for someone whose eyes she couldn’t see when talking to them.
    North was still waiting beside the open door of the sedan. “I’m sorry,” Chase said, “but all names are pending release until the next of kin have been notified.” The woman was still rifling through her purse. “I really need to go,” Chase added.
    “No, wait,” the woman said, grabbing Chase’s wrist, fingernails pinching flesh.
    Funny how many thoughts can speed through the mind in less than a second. Maybe it was true what people said abouthow your whole life flashed in front of you before you died. Had Stone’s before his crash? It wasn’t as if Chase felt in this moment she were about to die, but Mrs. White’s fingernails digging deeper and deeper were causing Chase to imagine Major White’s last seconds. The photograph of this woman flashed through her mind. She saw the background behind the woman’s face and imagined it being taken on that stretch of Perimeter Road where the jungle creeps down the cliff to the shore … or was that a photograph Stone had taken of her and Molly before his deployment, the one still under a magnet on the refrigerator door? Chase imagined White’s eyes fixed on this woman’s face, this face before her now, as he and his bird fell from the sky like a stone. Chase pulled against the woman’s hold. “You needto go home, Mrs. White.”
    “I’m not—you’ve got it all wrong,” she said. The woman twisted Chase’s wrist and wedged a set of dog tags onto her palm. “I think his kids should have these.” Releasing Chase’s wrist, the woman stormed off toward the parking lot.
    Chase was still staring at Major White’s dog tags when she and North pulled up to the front gate. When the MP, a young female corporal, saluted, Chase returned the salute, and slipped the dog tags into the breast pocket of her flight suit as North steered the car to the shoulder. Reporters were milling about, some talking on cell phones.