Serve ‘N’ Protect by Tee O’Fallon
Chapter Twenty
The inside of Mansfield’s condo was a stark contrast to the coldly fueled rage brewing inside every cell of Markus’s body.
Expensive-looking rugs in red, blue, and orange tones covered the living room floor, with matching fringed pillows lining the backs of the sofa and chairs. Enormous leather hassocks with gold stitching stood like sentries, flanking the huge brick fireplace. Completing the whole Marakesh look were ornate lamps with red glass panels hanging from the ceiling and casting the room in an eerie red glow. The only thing that mattered to Markus was the enormous glass display case on the wall over the fireplace mantle.
The one filled with over a dozen knives.
Long ones and short ones. Straight blades and curved. Some were adorned with different colored gemstones. Like the one Kade had described that had arrived in the U.S. in a diplomatic pouch. Twelve inches long, gold-plated, and jewel-encrusted.
Surprisingly, the man had consented to questioning and without legal representation. Considering the charges Mansfield was looking at, caving so quickly was the last thing Markus had expected.
Mansfield had also consented to a search of his condo and the backpack he’d been carrying, signing the requisite form without hesitation. So much compliance had Markus suspecting there was a lot more going on here than he’d originally thought. As if murdering a federal officer isn’t enough.
Kade and Matt searched the sofa, tossing the pillows on the floor and upturning the cushions to search for hidden weapons. Like more knives. When they’d returned the cushions to the sofa, Markus pointed. “Sit there.”
Mansfield skirted past Ghost, giving the dog a wide berth before sitting on the sofa and lowering his head into his hands. Any fight the guy might have had left in him was totally gone. Unless this okay-you’ve-got-me attitude was nothing more than an act.
They’d checked his arm, verifying there were no puncture wounds that required immediate medical attention. Mostly deep pink depressions mottled the skin, with less blood than Markus had expected.
Needing to sit after his sidewalk sprint, Markus took the armchair opposite the sofa, wincing at the slight pain in his abdomen.
“Here’s his ID.” Kade handed him the man’s driver license and passport.
His friends remained standing, their stance wide and their arms crossed. Between them and Ghost, if Mansfield so much as twitched in the wrong direction, he’d be slammed to the ground and cuffed within two seconds.
“Are you Robert Mansfield?” Markus held up the passport, opened to the photo, and waited for Mansfield to look up. He already knew the man’s identity but needed confirmation before proceeding.
Mansfield nodded.
No sense beating around the bush.“Did you murder Jack Barnes?”
Again, he nodded.
“Answer the question,” Markus growled.
“Yes.”
There it was. The truth. Finally. Hearing the words was one thing. Processing them wasn’t so easy. He was staring into the eyes of the man who’d killed his colleague in cold blood.
To keep himself from launching across the room and wrapping his hands around the guy’s throat, Markus slowly and deliberately closed his fingers around Mansfield’s passport, curling it so tightly it was nothing more than a half-inch-wide tube.
“And did you also try to kill me?”
Dark eyes met his. “Yes.”
The blood in his veins boiled, sending a fiery rage shooting through his system, and again he resisted the urge to do serious bodily harm to Mansfield, the kind that wouldn’t leave the guy breathing.
Pretending calm that he didn’t feel in the slightest, Markus tossed the curled passport on the coffee table. “Why?”
Mansfield looked at his clasped hands but didn’t say anything.
“Answer the question, dammit.”
“You saw us,” he answered, so softly Markus almost didn’t hear him. “In the car that night at the party.”
Cassidy was right. Whatever the hell was going on had something to do with the couple he and Jack had interrupted. “So?” he prodded, still having no clue as to why witnessing two men making out was an issue.
Mansfield’s hands tightened until his knuckles whitened and cracked. “I couldn’t risk the chance that either of you would go to the tabloids.”
“Why would we do that?” Markus began tapping his finger on the side of his leg. The missing piece of the puzzle still hadn’t fallen into place and he was getting impatient.
“I told you I murdered your colleague and tried to kill you, too.” The look on Mansfield’s face turned to one of abject misery as he leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “I confess. I did it. That’s all there is to it.”
“Bullshit.” Markus knew there had to be more. “A man doesn’t just up and commit murder because he was caught making out. I’ll ask you again, and this time I want a straight answer.” He gritted his teeth so hard his gums squealed in protest. “Why were you so worried we’d go to the tabloids that you felt the need to kill us?”
“You don’t understand. None of you could possibly understand.” Mansfield began shaking his head. “Not every country openly approves same-sex relationships. Saudi Arabia is one of the last holdouts in which there is legal precedent for the death penalty as the prescribed punishment for same-sex sexual acts.”
“You’re American,” Markus said, narrowing his eyes.
“My lover is not.”
“I get it. He’s from Saudi Arabia. We already know that. But why would you automatically assume that we would go to the tabloids just because a Saudi on American soil is in a homosexual relationship?”
“Bodyguards feed stories to the tabloids all the time. I couldn’t take the chance.” He sat back, resignation written all over his face. “Have you ever been in love, Officer York? I mean, really in love?”
Markus’s heart squeezed with uncertainty. Even if he had a mind to gush his personal feelings to a murderer, which he didn’t, he wasn’t capable of answering the question because he didn’t know. Cassidy’s lovely face shimmered front and center in his mind, her golden hair glistening in the sun and her ocean-blue eyes shining up at him. Would he even know love if and when it ever happened for him?
“When you’re in love,” Mansfield continued, smiling grimly, “you’ll do anything to protect that person. Anything.”
That’s exactly what he’d felt for Cassidy when he’d seen her lying at the base of her stairs, semi-conscious. A hundred burglars armed with machine guns could have rushed the door and he would have protected her with his life.
Rather than answer the question, Markus growled, “Go on.”
“My lover is a very important person, and not just to me. If his sexual preference were to be made public, there would be…recrimination. Humiliation. Perhaps death.”
Markus exchanged looks first with Kade, who shrugged, then Matt, who arched a speculative brow. Meaning, like him, they thought something about Mansfield’s romantic explanation still didn’t jibe enough to kill for. And Markus’s patience was worn as thin as a tissue.
“Who is your lover? And don’t tell us it’s Mohammed Al-Amri. We know he wasn’t in the country the day of that party. You both lied about that.”
Mansfield dragged a hand down his face. “Mohammed Al-Amri is a friend. He agreed to help me out by saying it was him in the car with me that night.”
“Then who was in the car with you?” When Mansfield didn’t answer, Markus took a deep breath, struggling to hold back the tidal wave of frustration. A murder confession was one thing, but even a federal prosecutor would hesitate to indict without knowing the motive. Clearly, Mansfield was of sound mind and not some raving lunatic. Whoever his lover was, he—
A quick flash of the overwhelming joy on Mansfield’s face when the limo with the diplomatic tags had pulled up to the mansion and discharged its passengers tugged at his memory.
Christ. Now he understood. The missing piece of the puzzle he’d been searching for snapped into place louder than a bullet being racked into a chamber.
Mansfield’s lover was an important person, so much so that if he were actually put to death it would have international implications, some even affecting the United States as a nation.
He locked eyes with the man who’d tried to kill him. Unspoken understanding must have transferred to Mansfield. For the first time tonight, the man’s expression turned fearful. He really wasn’t afraid for himself.
“You’re having an affair with Faisal bin Abdulaziz—the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.” It was a statement, not a question.
Mansfield swallowed, his throat working faster now. “We met six years ago at the U.N. He procured me the position at the embassy to make it easier for us to meet privately without it being questioned.”
Cassidy was right. The abnormality of an American working at the Saudi embassy was something he should have investigated further.
“Faisal’s father is quite ill,” Mansfield continued in a shaky voice. “It’s only a matter of time before the crown prince becomes king. If this were to come out, it would be devastating. Faisal would never be permitted to take over the throne when his father steps down. He would be shunned by his family. If he isn’t executed outright, they might force him to leave the country.”
For the most part, Markus didn’t follow international politics much. What little he did know was that under the king’s regime, Saudi-American diplomacy had been strained at best. The crown prince had visited the U.S., specifically the White House, more frequently of late, partly, he now suspected, to see his lover, but also to make known his significantly more progressive socio-economic stance in the world of politics.
“Does the crown prince know what you did? Was he behind all this?” If so, there wouldn’t be anything Markus could do to stop this from snowballing into an international incident.
“No!” Mansfield leaped to his feet.
Kade and Matt went for the guy, but Ghost beat them to it, lunging across the table to plant his front paws on the man’s chest and push him back onto the sofa.
“Release!” Markus shouted, pushing to his feet. Another second and his dog would clamp his teeth around Mansfield’s neck, crushing his windpipe.
Ghost didn’t budge, nor did he bite. He remained standing on his hind legs, growling with his lips curled back and his paws now on Mansfield’s shoulders.
Gently, Markus rested his hands on Ghost’s back, stroking his thick coat. “Easy, boy. Release. Release.” Behind him, Matt and Kade moved closer to assist if needed.
Muscles quivered beneath Markus’s fingers, then Ghost pivoted and returned to the rug as if nothing had happened. In his dog’s mind, it was game over. Markus wished he could turn his own emotions on and off so easily. As much as he wanted Ghost to administer his own brand of canine justice by using Mansfield’s throat as a chew toy, he needed the guy alive and capable of speech so his confession could be recorded for the courts.
“If I were you,” Markus suggested drily, “I wouldn’t make any more sudden moves.”
Mansfield’s entire body shook as he cringed, eyeing Ghost warily. He crawled to the far end of the sofa, looking like he wanted to disappear into the cushions.
Markus sat, relieved to be off his feet again. His body ached and his strength was waning fast. “Now, where were we? Oh, yeah. The crown prince. Does he know anything about this?”
Remaining where he was, Mansfield shook his head. “I never told him anything, before or after. He doesn’t know. I swear it. There’s no reason for this to be made public. I beg of you, think of the implications.”
Markus was thinking of the implications.
The crown prince of a nation that disavowed homosexual relationships getting outed in conjunction with a murder investigation would make international headlines. Worse, he couldn’t imagine getting put to death simply because he loved someone. Mansfield was not only pleading for his lover’s reputation but for the man’s life.
Cassidy. They weren’t lovers, but he imagined that if they were, that if he harbored such strong emotions about her, he wouldn’t hesitate to beg, borrow, steal, or plead for her life, too.
I must be going soft.Smitten-soft. Because some inner part of him understood what Mansfield had done. Not that he would murder innocent people, but he felt an absurd, sympathetic connection to the guy, and how messed up was that? Mansfield would spend the rest of his life in a federal prison for his crimes.
“Did you try to shoot me in Leonardtown, outside the hospital?”
He closed his eyes. “Yes.”
“How did you find me?” His location had been a closely guarded secret. If there was a leak in the agency, they needed to know who it was.
“I saw you on television,” Mansfield admitted. “Tammy Teague was at the hospital that day, and the press was camped outside. You were in a wheelchair. I wasn’t sure it was you, at first, but photos of you and your dog were all over the news. It was easy.”
That was true. But his and Jack’s names weren’t. So how did—
Another piece of a damned complicated puzzle dropped into place like an anvil. It was the letter, the one McMurray had given him from the Saudi embassy. “You asked the Secret Service for our names so you could send us a letter of gratitude for working the party. That’s how you got our names, isn’t it?”
Mansfield nodded. “Yes.”
Once he had their names, it couldn’t have been hard to find out where he lived. Nothing was sacred these days. The internet made it frighteningly easy, no matter how many safeguards were in place. “Where’s the gun?”
“Locked in my desk inside the embassy.”
The embassy was smack dab in the middle of the capitol but, legally speaking, it was an extension of Saudi Arabia. Foreign soil. In other words, they’d still need a search warrant to retrieve the weapon. If the Saudis refused to cooperate and voluntarily turn over the gun, the red tape to retrieve it could take years.
He looked at the glass case over the fireplace. “Which one did you use?”
Mansfield let out a heavy sigh. “The gold one. Top right.”
The one that had entered the country in a diplomatic pouch.
Markus went to the fireplace. The knife sat peacefully on a display trivet attached to the back of the case. As he stared at the long, shiny blade, he had a vague recollection of a flash of gold protruding from his abdomen. It was weird, surreal even, looking at a murder weapon that had to have been dripping with his and Jack’s blood.
“Use this.” Kade stood beside him, holding out a white towel he must have retrieved from the kitchen.
Markus opened the case, reaching up with the towel to grab the knife and wincing as the skin around his wounds stretched to their limits. For another long moment, he stared at the blade resting on the white towel. Shiny metal glinted, the many faceted gemstones twinkling as they caught the light and seemed to be mocking him. It had to be worth thousands of dollars. At least Jack and his family would finally have justice.
After wrapping the knife carefully in the towel, he turned to face Mansfield. All it would take were three steps and he could plunge the knife into the guy’s neck and save the taxpayers all the money it would take to keep the guy alive in prison for the rest of his life. Too bad he couldn’t take that money and give it to Jack’s family instead.
A heavy hand landed on his shoulder. Kade’s. Markus had a feeling his friend knew exactly what he was thinking.
Unmoving, he watched Mansfield. Under his intense scrutiny, the guy looked away. Emotions roiled inside him, ones he seriously needed to keep in check. Rage. Relief. Sadness. Those he could easily identify. So why in the hell couldn’t he figure out what he felt for Cassidy?
“Ghost, stay.” They didn’t need Ghost having another Cujo moment. To Mansfield, he bit out, “Get up.”
The moment Mansfield stood, Ghost growled, hair along his spine standing straight up.
“Care to do the honors?” Matt held out a set of handcuffs.
Oh, yeah. Markus gave his friend a curt nod of thanks as he handed Matt the wrapped-up knife in exchange for the cuffs. “Turn around,” he ordered Mansfield, then cuffed him behind his back and began ushering him to the door. “You’re under arrest for the murder of a federal officer and for the attempted murder of another.” He didn’t bother reciting the host of weapons charges for the knife and the gun. Unless it was in a prison exercise yard, the murder charges alone meant Mansfield would never again see the light of day.
They’d already worked out the logistics. Kade and Matt would transport Mansfield in the back of the SUV they’d arrived in. Markus and Ghost would follow in the other.
As they pulled from the curb, a peaceful yet numb feeling settled around him. It was finally over. Now he and Ghost could get back to their lives. No longer did they have to hide out in Leonardtown. He could finish out his recuperation in his own house in Virginia. The realization should have sent a surge of triumph through his veins, but it didn’t. Because it meant leaving Cassidy.
In a heartbeat, his priority shifted. Given what he knew about himself, he didn’t know what he could offer her in the end. Probably nothing. Maybe nothing. Besides, they lived nearly two hours from each other. But wasn’t that what weekends were for?
As he followed Matt’s taillights, he wondered if this time would be different. Could he actually make a relationship work for the first time in his life without fucking it up?
He honestly didn’t know.