Killer Focus Read Free Page A

hardly been able to part with: a snapshot of Todd, darkly handsome in full dress uniform; a wedding photo; a disreputable old T-shirt she’d tried to throw away half a dozen times and which he’d stubbornly retrieved from the trash can; his favorite baseball cap.
    Knowing that the box didn’t contain his body, and that his remains would most likely never be recovered, didn’t make the grieving any easier. She still couldn’t accept Todd’s death; she didn’t know if she ever would. A part of her expected him to come home with some wild explanation as to why he and the rest of the guys had gone AWOL, wrap her in his arms and blot out the horror of the past month.
    Jaw clenched, she dropped a white rose onto the coffin lid, and gently squeezed Steve’s hand to let him know it was his turn. Steve’s rose dropped, the stem broken, the petals crumpled, as if he’d gripped it too tightly.
    Swallowing the sharp ache in her throat, she hugged him close in an attempt to absorb his pain. His shoulders felt unnaturally stiff, his spine ramrod straight.
    Since the day he’d come home insisting that she find out where Todd was and check that he was all right, he’d been…different. He hadn’t wanted to play with any of his friends, or swim; instead he’d stuck close to home, staying within earshot of the telephone. When they had finally heard that Todd was missing, presumed dead, Steve had simply gone to his room and had sat staring at the wall, his focus inward.
    The doctor had said that children coped with grief differently from adults, but he didn’t understand that Steve had known Todd was in trouble before they’d been informed he was missing.
    Commodore John Saunders handed Eleanor Fischer the folded flag that had draped Todd’s coffin, his expression grim.
    This was the second ceremony he’d officiated at this week, and there were six more to go. Eight men lost at sea, nine men lost in all, if you counted the launch skipper, and none of the bodies had been recovered. When that many men disappeared on a peacetime mission, it was difficult to stop the speculation, and so far the media had had a field day, calling the incident a bungled mission.
    To compound the embarrassment, the civilian who had instigated the hunt, an old crony of Admiral Monteith’s, had also died, a victim of a heart attack after drinking too much at an official function. When the news had broken, Monteith had run like a rat, hiding behind his medals and his Boston connections and taking early retirement. He had refused to be questioned over the affair. Monteith’s secretary and his personal aide had also resigned, leaving the office in disarray. The file on the mission had been conveniently “lost” and had somehow never made it onto the Admiralty’s new computer system.
    As far as Saunders was concerned, the whole affair had been a wild-goose chase from start to finish, and a waste of taxpayers’ money. And he had lost eight good men.
    He would carry out an investigation. Regulations demanded that a proper reporting process had to be adhered to, but with Monteith’s defection, the likelihood that they would come up with any satisfactory conclusions was close to nil.
    The launch had broken up on the rocks, and to date only a small part of the wreckage had been located. The life raft had been found farther along the coast, fully inflated and equipped, which had added to the speculation. Something had gone seriously wrong, and Saunders wasn’t buying into the accidental-drowning scenario.
    Fischer had been a seasoned veteran, and so had every member of his team. They should have survived what had amounted to a recreational dive on a sunken wreck in calm waters. With no witnesses other than a fishing boat that had seen two launches in the vicinity, and no bodies or evidence beyond the wrecked launch and the life raft, there was little chance that answers would