The Bishop's Pawn (Cotton Malone #13)(90)

I reached into my front pocket and produced it. The small reel of tape was in my back pocket, out of sight to her, and there it would remain.

“Do you plan to explain what happened here?” she asked me, taking the coin.

I nodded. “But not tonight. Let’s do this tomorrow or the next day.”

“It doesn’t work like that, Cotton.”

“It does for me.”

Foster seemed near tears.

Deputies were finishing photographing Coleen’s now uncovered body. No father should have to watch that. He should leave, but I realized that wasn’t going to happen. This man had helped kill Martin Luther King Jr. What it had taken for him to live with that wrong for the past three decades I could only imagine. Now he would have to live with the fact that his daughter and son-in-law were dead, too.

And he was certainly at least partially responsible.

“Reverend Foster, one of the deputies will take you home,” Stephanie said. “I’ll be by to see you in a few days.”

“Don’t waste your time,” he said, the voice filled with sorrow. “I’ll have nothing to say.”

His gaze met mine and I could read his thoughts, as clear as if he’d spoken the words out loud.

He and I were a different story.

We did need to speak.

“Do you need a ride?” Stephanie asked me.

I shook my head and found the keys in my pocket.

“I have a truck.”





Chapter Fifty-six


Coleen and Nate were buried three days later, a little before noon on an endless, dragging, dreadful day. The funerals were held at her father’s modest church in Orlando, a small, bricked, single-nave building with a pointed bell tower. Every pew was filled with mourners, the sheriff’s department honoring one of their own with a color guard and a uniformed escort to the cemetery. The sheriff himself spoke. Foster did not officiate. Instead, he sat on the front pew, silent and solemn, a prone figure communing with himself.

I’d returned home from Disneyland in Lael’s truck. Its presence raised questions with Pam, and I explained that I inherited it from someone who no longer had any use for it. She asked about what I’d been doing, but I deflected the questions, telling her I wish I could tell her but I couldn’t. Official Navy business. She actually seemed okay with the explanation, and a lovely dinner at a local seafood restaurant helped ease any of her lingering fears.

I would give anything not to have hurt her.

Thoughts of Coleen and Nate stayed in my mind. Along with the fact that three other men had died. Two I helped, the other I killed myself. Of course, not a word of any of that could be uttered to anyone. I was only beginning to understand that being an intelligence officer was a lonely profession. Little to no recognition ever came from anything you did, good or bad. The job was only about results.

Nothing else mattered.

I returned to work at Naval Station Mayport and, amazingly, my CO acted like nothing had ever happened. Perhaps it was the fact that the Justice Department had specifically recruited my services. That had the smell of some captain’s or admiral’s touch, and the one thing my CO could sniff out at five hundred yards in the middle of a hurricane was the sweet waft of command. All my past transgressions seemed to have been forgiven. I resumed my job as a staff attorney and it didn’t take long for me to realize that there was no comparison between that and what I’d done for the past few days.

On the way back from Orlando I’d stopped in Gainesville and retrieved Valdez’s file photos from the Mail ’N More. The cassette tape had remained safe inside the truck’s player. Both items, along with the reel tape from Oliver, were now resting in the lower right drawer of my desk at work. Nobody had a clue I possessed them, which to me seemed the best protection. What to do with them was still up in the air. My assignment called for me to turn them over to Stephanie Nelle.

But I had to speak with Foster.

So I took a personal leave day and drove to Orlando for the funeral.

Another lie to Pam quelled any questions she might have had.

Follow-up to what I just did.

I’ll be home by nightfall.



Coleen and Nate were laid to rest together in a small cemetery west of Orlando, beyond the sprawl, in what was once orange groves. A perfect bowl of bright blue stretched overhead east to west. About two hundred people came to the graveside service. Foster sat with a few others, whom I assumed were Nate’s family, in rickety wooden chairs as the final words were said. Then everyone filed by and paid their respects. Foster remained in a daze, but seemed mindful of each person, shaking their hand, forcing a sad smile, thanking them for coming.

The crowd progressively thinned, everyone leaving the quiet cemetery in cars parked in an orderly line atop the close-cropped grass. Foster lingered, and a few of the older folks in the crowd remained with him. I loitered off to the side, among the other graves, waiting for a chance to speak with him.

Finally, he walked over.

“What have you told them?” he asked.

Right to the point. “Not a thing.”

“I knew that about you.”

I was puzzled by the observation.

“When I first met you in the house by the lake, I told myself you were a man who could be trusted.”

“How could you possibly know that?”