Silent Warrior: A Loveswept Classic Romance Read Online Free Page A

in the Blue Circle was also part of the chain of command on the project. So the fact that they found nothing proves nothing.”
    “He died in a car accident on the way to a meeting, Cali. There was absolutely no evidence of foul play. There was nothing else to investigate. We questioned you on his current projects, and you had no specific information about what he’d been working on. No one we talked to in the Circle knew anything about it. His contact never stepped forward.”
    “Mighty convenient, don’t you think? And neither driver survived. Hard to get a confession from a dead man.” She leaned back and crossed her arms, holding his gaze intently.
    He stared at her. She waited for the argument. Instead, he asked, “How did the project surface again?”
    “It was literally handed back to me. By an insurance company.” A fresh rush of frustration pushed at her. “Nathan apparently understood better than he let on just how sensitive the project was. We’d already decided not to discuss particulars for my protection, but he must have felt the need for more insurance. So that was exactly what he did. He insured it.”
    “The project? Or himself?”
    “Himself. But I know it was the project that made him do it.”
    “Explain.”
    “He’d received the first payment, an advance based on some preliminary work he’d delivered to them the day before his accident. I didn’t know about that. The deal hadn’t originally been set up that way. Anyway, as it turns out, he took the money, a substantialsum, and set up a convoluted funding system to pay against a policy he bought to cover himself.”
    “Sounds like something Nathan would do.”
    She nodded, surprised at how much comfort there was, even now, in being able to share her past, to share what she had with Nathan, with someone who knew him as she had. She smiled softly. “I’m sure he relished the challenge, despite the concerns that drove him to do it.” She sobered. “He died that same day. I was the sole beneficiary. I never saw the policy or got any paperwork on it, so the bank and the insurance company weren’t notified of his death. The bank account paid into the policy automatically on a regular basis. It was set up as a ten-year note.”
    “Which just paid out.”
    “Exactly.”
    “And the paperwork generated by all of this?”
    “Stored in a safety-deposit box in the same bank, filed automatically by some arrangement he worked out. I was only to be notified of all of this if anything happened to him.” She stopped, sighing. “I guess he didn’t want to worry me.”
    If she expected any compassion, she was waiting on the wrong man to deliver it. In a way, that relieved her. It
had
been many years. And though all of this had dredged up a lot of old, buried emotions, grief wasn’t one of them. She’d long since come to terms with her losses. What she couldn’t deal with was the idea that Nathan’s death might not have been accidental.
    And she’d let ten years lapse without bringing the killer to justice.
    “So you got the money,” John said, making some notes in the column of his notebook. “What about the program? You went through his things when he died and—”
    “Whatever had been done on each contracted project was turned over to the contracted group. I never did find any work on the Blue Circle project.”
    “You weren’t suspicious, though.”
    “I had no real reason to be. He’d just started it, as far as I knew. They never contacted me asking for anything. I assumed anything he’d had, he’d turned in. I was dealing with so much at the time, I was more relieved than anything.”
    John was silent for a moment. She could almost hear the wheels turning. Nathan had often boasted of McShane’s almost fanatical persistence in analyzing situations. It was the one thing she’d trusted about him back then. It was the reason she’d given herself for asking him to help her now.
    “Okay. So ten years have gone by. The project