The police had kept them for hours, so it was now around six in the morning. Mars had driven Decker home. Decker was sitting at the kitchen table, still looking a little pale.
Mars eyed him. “Man, it was hairy in there. I can hold my own in pretty much any fight, but those dudes had some serious firepower. Good thing Alex told me where you were. I got in from the airport about ten minutes after you left. I drove my rental car right over to the place. Looked around and then heard all the noise from the basement. When I got down there it wasn’t looking too good.”
“You saved my life, Melvin,” said Decker. “I’d be under a slab of concrete now but for you.”
“Payback, man. How many times did you save my butt? Besides, I just treated it like running plays. Blow through the line and deliver some hurt.”
He looked at Jamison. “You’re doing good work with him, Alex. He’s even skinnier than when I saw him last time.”
Jamison did not appear to be listening. “Amos, you told me you weren’t going to do anything dangerous. You almost got yourself and Melvin killed!”
“Look, I’m sorry. But something was obviously going down in there.”
“Then you should have called the police. Like you told me you were going to.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have given Melvin the address, then he wouldn’t have come.”
“Hey, man, don’t get mad at her. I made her do it. Had to make sure you were okay.”
Decker looked at Jamison, who was still scowling at him.
“Because he’s your friend, Amos. Friends don’t put other friends’ lives in jeopardy.”
“Okay, Alex, message delivered loud and clear.”
“Has it been really? What, until next time you ignore it?”
No one said anything for a long moment.
Finally, Decker turned to Mars and said, “How are things in Alabama?”
Mars sat down on one of the barstools and Jamison poured him out a cup of coffee, though it was easy to see that she was still upset at Decker.
“Not bad. I did my thing with the high school football team and then decided to take some time off.”
“Are you living down there?” Jamison asked tersely.
“Had a short-term rental. I’m looking around now to find a permanent place. Maybe somewhere up here.” He glanced at Decker. “How about that, Decker? Me living up here?”
“You can live wherever you want, Melvin,” Decker answered. “You can buy a mansion if you want.”
Grinning, Mars said, “I spent twenty years in a little box, what would I do with a mansion? I’d get lost.”
“There are a lot of nice places around here,” said Jamison. “And it’s a fun area. Lots to do.”
Mars sipped his coffee. “So you guys working on something? I mean, besides what happened last night?”
“If Decker doesn’t go off and get killed, yeah, we are working on something,” said Jamison with one more glare at Decker. “And it’s pretty complicated. We haven’t made a lot of headway.”
Mars motioned to Decker. “That dude’s middle name is ‘complicated.’ What he can’t figure out can’t be figured out.”
“Well, this might be the one,” said Decker, heaving himself to his feet and plopping down on a stool next to Mars.
“Want to tell me about it?” asked Mars.
“You heard about the guy who shot the woman outside the FBI headquarters?” asked Jamison.
“Yeah. Saw the story a few days ago on CNN when I was having lunch. Saw some more stuff when I was waiting at the airport.”
“Well, that’s the case.”
“We know part of what happened,” said Decker. “But we don’t know why Walter Dabney shot Anne Berkshire.”
“We think he was blackmailed by someone to do it.”
“Blackmailed? How?”
“This is confidential, Melvin,” said Jamison.
He chuckled. “Hey, who do you think I’m going to tell? Hell, I don’t know anybody to tell.”
Decker said, “Apparently, Dabney was stealing secrets from a military project he was working on. He sold those secrets to raise money to help his daughter. Her husband was in to some bad guys for gambling debts. Russians. It was either pay or get slaughtered.”
“Damn, so this Dabney guy was caught between a rock and a hard place?”
“He committed treason, Melvin,” said Jamison.
“Yeah, but it was his family, Alex. Tough to turn your back on that.”
“So that part we know,” said Decker. “What we don’t know is the Berkshire piece. We can’t find a connection between them. But there may not be one if he was blackmailed to do it. Which means we have to try to get there from Berkshire’s side and the people who wanted her dead.”
“Bogart and Milligan are tackling it from Dabney’s end,” interjected Jamison.
“And Dabney shot himself, right?”
“Yes, but he had terminal brain cancer,” said Jamison. “He’d be dead in six months or less. So maybe he didn’t care.”
Mars frowned and slowly shook his head. “Wow. Blackmail, gambling debts, brain tumor. This Dabney guy had a dark cloud over him.”
“It is pretty sad,” said Jamison. “You think you’re having a bad day, think about what happened to him. His family is devastated.”
“What about the daughter whose husband got him into this mess?” said Mars.
“What about her?” asked Jamison.
“Well, she must feel pretty bad.”
“She does. We’ve seen that firsthand.”
“Yeah, I get that. But what about something her old man might have told her?”
“Told her about what?”
“Well, I take it this whole gambling thing was a secret between them?”
“It was,” said Decker. “His wife didn’t know anything about it. Neither did the sisters. At least so they claimed.”
“So maybe he had a closer relationship with this daughter. Parents do, you know, have that special thing with certain kids. And if he did something illegal to help her and then he gets blackmailed to do something else bad, he might have talked to her about it.”
“Why?” asked Jamison.
“Because he’d want her to know why he did what he did. He wouldn’t want her to think he was some kind of crazy murderer. If they were blackmailing him for stealing secrets that he stole and sold to help her, I think he’d want her to know.”
Mars looked between Decker and Jamison. “Hey, just my two cents.”
Jamison stared at Decker. “But didn’t Agent Brown say that Natalie knew nothing about what her dad was planning in the way of stealing secrets to pay for the gambling debts?”
“She did. But there’s no way she could know that for sure. I’m not sure she even talked to her.”
“But if Natalie and her dad communicated via phone or email or text, there’d be a record of it.”
“But what about face-to-face? We checked on Dabney’s travel schedule. We never looked at Natalie’s.”
“So you mean she could have come here, or met up with him somewhere?”
Decker looked at her. “If you were sick and suspected what was wrong, would you go to MD Anderson, or any hospital, alone? Or would you want a family member with you?”
“I’d want someone with me,” replied Jamison. “But why not his wife?”
“Maybe he didn’t want to freak her out. She seems the nervous type. And if he was closer to Natalie, like Melvin suggested, she might have gone with him. I mean, she owed him big for saving her husband’s butt.”
Jamison said, “We never asked the hospital if someone was with him. But do you really think Natalie might know who was blackmailing her father?”