Now You See Her Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PRAISE FOR ALL THE WRONG MOVES

  “A 21-gun salute for All the Wrong Moves, a fast-paced, original, authentic military mystery that builds to a pulse-pounding finale.”

  —Carolyn Hart,

  Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of the bestselling

  Death on Demand series

  “All the Wrong Moves has all the right stuff . . . Fast-paced adventure starring an irreverent heroine you’ll never forget. I couldn’t put it down!”

  —Vicki Lewis Thompson,

  New York Times bestselling author

  “Samantha is great—sassy and indomitable and believable . . . [The] action never stops.”

  —Joanna Carl,

  author of the bestselling Chocoholic Mysteries

  “Merline Lovelace once again affirms her position as a five-star author with this strong look at military testing inside a wonderfully drawn investigative thriller.”

  —Genre Go Round Reviews

  “What fun! Merline Lovelace delivers a wisecracking heroine with a fascinating and interesting occupation that teams her with a cast of eccentric and peculiar characters. If you are looking for a good laugh with a strong mystery, All the Wrong Moves is the perfect choice.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  RAVES FOR MERLINE LOVELACE

  “Strong and clever characters populate the Lovelace world in stories that sizzle with a passion for life and love.”

  —Nora Roberts/J. D. Robb,

  New York Times bestselling author

  “Merline Lovelace’s stories are filled with unforgettable characters . . . Each new book is an enjoyable adventure.”

  —Debbie Macomber,

  New York Times bestselling author

  “Merline Lovelace rocks! Like Nora Roberts, she delivers top-rate suspense with great characters, rich atmosphere, and a crackling plot!”

  —Mary Jo Putney,

  New York Times bestselling author

  “If you’ve never read Merline Lovelace before, you’re in for a treat. She’s one of the best. Heart-stopping action and high-stakes intrigue spiked with sexy, pulse-pounding romance—a reader couldn’t ask for more.”

  —Carla Neggers,

  New York Times bestselling author

  “Lovelace’s many fans have come to expect her signature strong, brave, resourceful heroines, and she doesn’t disappoint.”

  —Booklist

  “Compulsively readable.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Merline Lovelace

  ALL THE WRONG MOVES

  NOW YOU SEE HER

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  NOW YOU SEE HER

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / May 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Merline Lovelace.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18743-2

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To the men and women serving our country and the families who often sacrifice so much to support them.

  With special thanks to:

  Gerald Luedecking, Michigan police officer, U.S. Army reservist, and CID Protective Services agent, for sharing some of his incredible expertise.

  My RomVets buds—

  women who have served or are now serving—

  who did their best to keep this AF vet straight

  on Army ranks, MP procedures,

  and investigative techniques.

  And most especially Maggie Price,

  my friend, fellow author, and former crime analyst

  with the Oklahoma City Police Department.

  When two devious minds like ours get together, watch out!

  CHAPTER ONE

  OKAY. I admit it. I was conducting a totally unauthorized test the bright February afternoon I got up close and personal with a stone-cold killer. My only excuse is that the gizmo submitted for my team’s evaluation was too slick not to play with.

  Wait! I have another excuse. I’m a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force. Everyone knows butter bars are all velocity and no compass heading. I suspect my boss would assert that’s doubly true in my case. Sadly, I would have to agree with him. I tend to jump into things feetfirst. My brief, disastrous marriage to Charlie Numnutz Spade being a case in point.

  But back to my close encounter with a killer. I had no inkling that particular life experience awaited me when my team crowded into my cubbyhole of an office that morning. If I had, I would never have glanced at, much less dug into, the cardboard carton Dennis O’Reilly deposited on my desk. Oblivious to my fate, I peered at the box’s Bubble-Wrapped contents.

  “What’s this?”

  “This, oh Goddess of Gadgets, is the NLOS system you wanted to add to our test schedule. It just arrived.”

  Goddess of Gadgets is one of the titles O’Reilly has bestowed on me, along with Widget Woman, Techno Div
a, and several others that can’t be repeated in mixed company.

  I’ve come up with a few for him, too. Nerdo Supreme is probably the most accurate. The lenses in his black-framed glasses are an inch thick, and you can see his frizzy orange hair coming at you from a block away. But the man is an absolute wizard when it comes to deciphering and tinkering with lines of software code. Too much of a wizard according to some. Unauthorized tinkering is what landed him on my team.

  What team, you ask? Our official designation is Future Systems Test Cadre—Three. FST-3, if you’re into acronyms which everyone even remotely associated with the military seems to be. We’re a tiny microbe in the vast, amorphous amoeba known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

  Don’t let that fancy name fool you. DARPA itself conducts zero research. Instead, it doles out billions to universities and high-powered think tanks to explore new technologies that could improve or advance military operations. Over the years, DARPA fostered the technology that led to surveillance satellites, the Inter-net, stealth aircraft, laser-guided munitions, and night vision, to name just a few of its more notable projects. The agency does all this by employing super-brainiac military and civilian program managers who occupy nice, cushy, air-conditioned offices at our headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

  Then there’s FST-3 and our two sister cadres. Our mission is to evaluate projects too small for direct oversight by the scientists at DARPA headquarters. Translation: we play around with gizmos and gadgets submitted by whacko inventors and mom-and-pop businesses hoping to snag some of those billions DARPA tosses out.

  FST-1 tests items with potential for cold-weather application. They operate out of an igloo up in Alaska, somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. FST-2 wades through saw grass and battles alligators in the Florida Everglades. FST-3’s charter is to evaluate projects suited for desert environments.

  There’s desert, and then there’s desert. If you want the real thing, you should boogie on out to our home base at Fort Bliss, Texas. It’s a sprawling Army post that eats up most of the area around El Paso, Texas. The Franklin Mountains dominate the skyline to the west of the base, shadowing the muddy trickle of the Rio Grande as it snakes its way across the border into Mexico. If you do decide to visit, though, I’d better warn you that blissful the post is not! At any given moment, soldiers are learning to fire things that go boom out our one-point-three million acres of test range.

  Back to my little team. We call Fort Bliss home, but when we conduct our quarterly field evaluations, we bundle up ourselves and the projects we’ve selected for testing and deploy to a remote corner of those bazillion acres. That’s what we were scheduled to do the very next morning . . . with the gizmo Dennis just plunked down on my desk.

  “So that’s the NLOS system,” I said with a nonchalance that fooled no one. “Er, what exactly do the initials stand for again?”

  “Non . . . line . . . of . . . sight,” O’Reilly spelled out with exaggerated pity for my non-techie brain.

  His barely veiled sarcasm didn’t surprise me any more than my need for a memory jogger surprised him and the others who’d trooped into my office. We’ve worked side by side for almost a year now. I know their foibles and they know mine. Together we add up to a lot of foibles.

  Guess I’d better introduce you to the whole team. There are five of us assigned—or condemned, depending on your point of view—to FST-3. Three civilians in the persons of O’Reilly; Dr. Brian “Rocky” Balboa, our test engineer; and Dr. Penelope England. Pen earned a doctorate in two different bioenvironmental specialties and is so-far-out-there brilliant she has trouble communicating with mere mortals. Which might give you a clue how she ended up on FST-3.

  I represent the military side of the house, along with Staff Sergeant Noel Cassidy, a muscled-up Special Ops type working through some sexual identity issues. Don’t ask!

  I won’t bore you with every painful detail of how I, Samantha JoEllen Spade, product of a long line of boozers and losers, came to be in charge of this motley crew. Suffice to say that after catching my jerk of an ex-husband doing the dirty with our bimbo of an ex-neighbor, I decided I needed a change of scene. So on the advice of a really hot pilot stationed at Nellis AFB, right outside Vegas, I quit my job as a cocktail waitress at the Paris casino, tucked my bachelor’s degree in Management from UNLV under my arm, and sauntered into an Air Force recruiter’s office.

  Big mistake. Huge. Some people are just not cut out for rules and regulations.

  Although . . .

  To be fair, it’s not entirely the Air Force’s fault we’re such a bad match. I’ve never done real well at taking orders. Just ask my mother. She’ll tell you I also have something of a mouth on me. Combine those traits with my aforementioned tendency to dive into things and you can guess why my supervisor at the Air Force Research Lab “loaned” me to DARPA. And why my supervisor at DARPA takes several hours, sometimes days, to work up his courage before he returns my calls.

  Most of the time I shake my head and wonder how the heck I’m going to make it through my four-year commitment without ending up in front of a firing squad. At odd moments, though, this really strange sensation sneaks up on me. Like when I stop at a fast-food joint and/or gas station and folks glance over at my boots and ABUs.

  Ooops, there’s that initial thing again. Sorry. ABU stands for airman battle uniform. They’re the Air Force’s latest version of haute couture. Baggy pants; boxy big shirt; and a brimmed, peaky patrol cap, all done in pixelated brown, green, tan, and blue tiger stripes. Said stripes are imprinted on a fabric specially treated to reduce the wearer’s heat signature.

  Wish I could tell you that reduction thing works on the inside as well as it does on the outside. I may not give off much of a signature externally. Come summer, though, all it takes is five or ten minutes in the high desert heat to leave me gasping for breath and my dark red hair a sweaty tangle inside my patrol cap.

  Sweaty or not, I’m always surprised by the reaction of civilians I encounter off-post. The respect in their eyes isn’t for me, God knows, but for what these combat boots and baggy fatigues represent. Gives me a goosey feeling to think I am now a walking embodiment of centuries of honor and tradition and service to one’s country.

  I get even goosier when I think my little team might stumble across an idea or invention that could make said service easier on the troops out there actually doing it. That faint hope was swimming around somewhere at the back of my mind as I poked at the Bubble-Wrapped contents of the carton O’Reilly had deposited on my desk.

  “So this is the non . . . line . . . of . . . sight system,” I commented, treating him to a taste of his own sarcasm.

  Actually, now that he’d jogged my memory I remembered reading the specifications for a pair of souped-up video goggles. The inventor claimed they could see over hills, around buildings, and through trees. Curious to examine this marvel, I peeled back the layers of plastic wrap.

  I’ve learned the hard way to handle items submitted to my team for evaluation with extreme caution. I’m still sporting a patch of red, irritated skin from an inflatable communications armband that ballooned up and refused to un-balloon.

  Thus my wariness as I lifted out and unwrapped what looked like a pair of futuristic shades. I scoped them out from all angles and decided these babies looked très cool. Tubular-shaped and less than an inch wide, they sported a narrow slit running horizontally along the center. Presumably to let the wearer see out and allow the transmitted images in.

  They had a sexy sort of sci-fi allure. When I slipped the specs on, I got the feeling that I’d morphed into Terminator Woman. All I needed to complete the image was a lipstick red bodysuit and a sawed-off shotgun tucked into a holster on my hip.

  Angling my chin, I squinted through the slit while our test engineer lifted out what looked like an ordinary egg carton. Inside the carton were a dozen round, shiny disks nested in cardboard cups.

  “Battery operated sensors,” Rocky
commented.

  In direct contrast with the he-man nickname we’ve bestowed on him, Dr. Brian Balboa is as far from the Rocky Balboa of movie fame as you can get. He used to work at DARPA headquarters. None of us know the precise reason he left. We suspect it might be due to his unfortunate tendency to expel gas when he gets too excited. He’s also let drop one or two cryptic comments about a former colleague whose eyebrows have yet to grow back. Whatever the reason behind his assignment to FST-3, Rocky really gets off on this ultra-high-tech stuff. An almost ecstatic expression came over his face as he turned one of the shiny disks over in his palm and stroked its wire tail.

  “This is an omnidirectional transmitter. The inventor claims it can backscatter sun- and moonlight off aerosols in the atmosphere.”

  I didn’t even try to hide my ignorance this time. “Ooooo-kay.”

  “The air around us contains a significant amount of atmospheric particles,” he explained earnestly. “That’s especially true during daylight, where you encounter minimal solar interference at solar-blind wavelengths.”

  I exchanged looks with Staff Sergeant Cassidy. Noel didn’t exactly roll his eyes, but he darn came close. With more than twelve years in Special Ops under his belt, he’s counting the days until his shrink clears him to get back to the world of camouflage face paint and midnight insertions into hostile areas. In the meantime, he is stuck with us.

  Thankfully, Pen stepped into the breach. “Think of the particles as tiny mirrors,” she translated.

  None of O’Reilly’s sarcasm there. Dr. Penelope England is nothing if not serious. About everything. I’ve tried to lighten her up. Trust me, this is not an easy task. The woman’s idea of a really fun weekend is strapping on her Birkenstocks and attending a Scientists Against Biospheric Exploitation rally.