What the Moon Saw Read online

  She was his life! Their souls were destined to be together, weren’t they?

  It couldn’t end this way. Not after all they’d been through to stay alive. To stay together!

  His chest tightened as if a merciless hand were squeezing his heart. Tears that held unimaginable grief welled in his eyes, blurring his already tainted vision. Standing was impossible, but he tried anyway. He needed to go after her, but pain gripped him and he fell back. He reached a hand in her direction, but throbbing and despair washed over him, dropping him into dark nothingness where there were no Indians or longhouses, no gunshots or pain to add another mark to his body, or to a memory he’d have to blot away.

  Later, he awoke to nighttime. For a split second the moon seemed to peer from behind a cloud before frowning and tucking away again. Broken Arrow found himself alone in the vast, forbidding darkness. This time, the tears turned to sobs as the pain of losing Morning Meadow collided with the pain of a life without her. He was certain he wouldn’t survive it.

  Because there was no life without her.

  She had been his life. Now, she was gone.

  Chapter One

  June 2016

  Looking back later, Libby Shaw would swear her life began the day of her death.

  She should have known. Should have grasped it. If only she had paid better attention.

  But, she’d been looking in a different direction—at the present, right where all the philosophers, talk show hosts, and MEMEs on Pinterest and Facebook advised one to focus.

  The ponderous revelation that changed it all was divulged on an unusually sultry evening in mid-June in one of Georgetown’s finest restaurants. The kind that delivered five-star service seconds before conveying a bloated bill. After that, everything in Libby’s life had become one baffling, tumultuous whirl.

  Earlier, that afternoon and into evening, she had sat at her desk at FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. tethered via headphones to a recording machine. Listening. Translating into English what she could.

  Voice One: “People go missing all the time. It’s luronchelavyek.”

  Voice Two: “No, Scrakoheu will not want grubpemry carried out this way. Killing her is only part of the solution. Davryemya wants a more permanent ludpanyat.”

  Libby pressed the cold plastic of the headset tighter to her ears and leaned in to hear the perplexing words better, which was pointless of course because the volume was fine. The language too. As a linguist, Libby had full command of this foreign language and eight others.

  The problems were the unusual accent and the speakers’ baffling tendency to use an unfamiliar term every few words. If she didn’t know better, she’d guess they were using a cipher or code, or perhaps select words from a language that was either so new or so old it would make sense to a handful, if not only these two. Regardless, she didn’t want to meet them, particularly Voice One. His chilled tone carried a sinister edge to it.

  Voice One: “But this will solve everything. She is predictable. She will felvzyat.”

  Voice Two: “Only if you kipmaiteu sarinzvya.”

  Libby groaned, hit the stop button, and yanked the headphones from her ears. She slouched back in her chair, her gaze darting to the scenic poster above her desk featuring a lone, rustic cabin set amidst a range of mountains. Emblazoned above it were words that taunted her daily with advice she had yet to achieve: Seek a Simpler Life. “Yeah, right,” she mumbled. Her shoulders ached, head throbbed, stomach growled. Despite her long day, she harbored hope of finishing the audio translation before leaving the office.

  She sipped her coffee and grimaced. The pot must have sat on the burner all afternoon, and now it was bitter. She pulled open her middle desk drawer and pushed aside camping brochures, hiking trail maps, and packets of herbal supplements, to find packets of sweetener. This coffee was her only hope of making it through these tapes.

  After the attacks on September 11, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation switched its primary focus from criminal investigation to counter terrorism and domestic intelligence, which prompted an increase in translation and interpretation jobs. Libby and the other linguists analyzed and translated thousands of pages of foreign materials each year, and provided several hundred hours of vocal translation. The translations had proven astonishing, shocking, even threatening at times, but never had they been more puzzling than this case. It was one of the few that didn’t involve Islamic radicalism. Even more confounding, the bureau suspected a mole.

  Libby looked at the time on her computer screen, 6:09 p.m., then swept a gaze behind her, around the large office space. As she suspected, her co-workers had gone home.

  “Country Roads” sounded from her cell phone. She smiled when she read the caller ID. Andrew Grey. “Hello, handsome. You have perfect timing.” Melting into the back of her chair, she wondered why, after four weeks of titillating moments and outings together, her skin still goose bumped when he called.

  “Hey beautiful. You still at work? We have reservations at eight-thirty, you know.”

  Libby groaned. “I should work on this....”

  “Still that same project?” His tone sounded annoyed. “Must it be done tonight? That investigation has been going on for years.”

  She picked up the folder detailing her part of the assignment. Case 2157, the ‘Matryoshka Project.’ Hmm, Matryoshka, Russian for nesting dolls. Remove one and there’s still one there. It was marked “high priority,” but not “urgent.” No further details given. Not surprising, since she was often given portions of important investigations. The sensitive parts generally were provided on a ‘need to know’ basis only. Her role was simply to listen, translate, and develop a transcript.

  Fine then, she would pick up the task tomorrow. A fresh perspective was best for the job anyway.

  “I’ll be there. Don’t worry.” She grinned. “I’d still like to know what’s so important about tonight.”

  He had selected one of the finest restaurants in Georgetown, La Cicia, and urged—practically begged—they talk that night.

  “You’ll see.” His tone had grown serious, a startling change to his warmth when she answered the phone earlier. “Hey, babe, I better go.”

  With a sigh, she clicked off the call and turned her thoughts to the horrendous rush-hour traffic awaiting her.

  “Why tonight?” Libby’s roommate and co-worker Colette Ma yelled from their living room.

  They shared a two-bedroom apartment in Old Towne Alexandria, on the south side of the nation’s capital. Colette was two years older than Libby’s age of twenty-nine, and a six-year bureau veteran, whereas Libby had been recruited only a year earlier. When they’d met, Colette wasted no time convincing Libby to become her roommate.

  “Why is he so insistent?” Colette continued, having returned moments earlier from her latest assignment, a job she’d described as “tedious,” and “child’s play.” Her plan was to repack and head out for a birthday surprise for her widowed mother on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

  Libby could hear her traipsing around the living room, the sounds of luggage and paper bags being shuffled from the front door to her bedroom.

  Finished changing, Libby rubbed make-up concealer on the puckered scar that marred the skin beneath her collarbone. Her aunt Isabel had told her not to be ashamed of it, that it simply meant she was stronger than what had caused it. Libby had never really bought into that concept, given that she didn’t remember what produced it anyway. She checked herself one more time, then strutted into the living room with an exaggerated catwalk and posed provocatively.

  Colette moved her gaze from her bags to Libby, taking in the four-inch heels and black silk dress with its daring slit up the right leg. Libby had piled her unruly shoulder-length auburn curls atop her head, leaving little tendrils loose around her face.

  A Cheshire grin grew on Colette’s flawless face and Libby caught the familiar bright alertness in her narrow gaze. There was nothing fainthearted or indecisive about her roomma
te. Colette threw her shoulders back, parked a hand on her waist, and with the index finger of her hand, traced the air. “Girl, you are rocking that LBD.”

  This attempt at humor was so out of character for her staid, hardboiled friend, that Libby rolled her eyes. “I’d rather be in jeans. And, don’t ever accept an assignment as a Valley girl. You’re not convincing.”

  “Yeah well, I’m not a professional shopper either, but I pulled that one off.” She pointed toward the door where four department store bags sagged to the left of the threshold, each brimming with colorfully wrapped presents. She’d worked undercover in New York City and D.C. for the past two weeks on a push to bring down a counterfeit designer handbag operation with ties to human trafficking. “There’s three more in the bedroom.”

  “What is all that stuff?”

  “For the senior center.” Colette shrugged. “I got side-tracked. No big deal.”

  Libby walked closer and perused the purchases. “Took your directive seriously, eh?”

  Colette waved a dismissing hand. “When in Rome.” Grabbing her stack of unopened mail from the dining table, she folded her tall, lithe body onto the arm and back of their couch in a pose of graceful exhaustion, her long black flowing tresses and chestnut-colored skin further paling the honey-colored upholstery beneath her.

  Her roommate hailed from a long line of FBI agents, her great grandmother Tillie having started the tradition in the early 1900s, long before the FBI officially acknowledged women on its books. Tillie had married a man while on an “undocumented” assignment in China, and a recessive gene remained hidden through subsequent generations of marriages to tall, white Americans and one Swede, before materializing on Colette, awarding her with a beautiful and unique look: East-Asian features mixed with blue eyes and freckles across the span of her cheeks. Sharp, feisty, acerbic and top of her graduating class in martial arts, Colette was part of the bureau’s Specialized Weapons and Tactics team and, therefore, often involved in high-risk situations.

  “Colette Ma, you’ve got a big heart.”

  “Pffft, keep it on the QT. It’ll ruin my image.” Colette flicked each piece of mail into one of two piles, a bored look on her face. Without looking up, she said, “Don’t change the subject. I’m still waiting for an answer, Libs.”

  “About what?”

  “Why Creases—”

  “Please stop calling him that,” Libby scolded for the umpteenth time. Colette had nicknamed him Creases because he was persnickety about his appearance and always meticulously tailored, with perfect pleats on shirts and pants.

  Colette continued without a blink, her gaze fixed on the mail. “—is so adamant about dinner tonight? You’ve been each other’s shadow from the moment you met. Why the big deal now?” She groaned as though she’d had a thought, and slumped further into the cushion. “He’s going to propose.”

  “What? No.” Libby rejected the suggestion, shaking her head.

  “You sure?”

  “We’ve only known each other a month, for pity’s sake.” Still, the question took root in Libby’s mind, and as she fumbled for another denial, Colette looked at her with a worried expression in her eyes.

  “See? You wonder, too.”

  Libby pumped both palms at her. “That’s not it. We agreed to take things slowly.” She turned away, emptying items from her shoulder bag into a clutch purse, and cringing at the realization that, for the first time in her life, she had defined herself as part of a “we.”

  When had that happened?

  Oddly enough, she liked the classification.

  Oh. My.

  The instant Andrew and she met four weeks earlier, following his lecture at the bureau on advanced digital forensics and incident response, Libby learned attraction has no logic. Their gazes had met and held a moment.

  Then another.

  She’d found it harder to breathe.

  As they shook hands, she’d been awash with a sense of reconnecting with a part of herself she had lost long ago. A jolt of recognition, but not from a memory. The air thickened and her chest tightened, and in a daze, she had agreed to dinner. That began four weeks of a frenzied romance. Each time, she was left feeling addled. Distracted. Anticipating the next date.

  Colette’s voice cut through Libby’s thoughts: “Slowly? The vibes between you two were thick like pea soup from the get-go. Don’t forget, I was there.”

  “That’s silly. Besides, he—”

  “Only has eyes for you, and you know it. I hear you tiptoe in, at the early hours of the morning. But hey, I get it. He’s older, handsome, smart, down-to-earth.” She lowered her voice to a murmur. “If you can tolerate his short stature and stuffy personality.”

  “Short stature? He’s five-nine, an inch taller than me. We’re a good fit. Besides, we can’t all be five-eleven like you.”

  “Ever heard of short-man syndrome?” Colette quipped.

  Libby ignored her. “Furthermore, he’s not stuffy. You just said he was down-to-earth. How could he be both? He has an old-world demeanor. It lends a gravitas to everything he says and does.” He certainly had the suave manners of a man several decades beyond his age of forty.

  “Please.” Colette dragged out the word. “Gravitas? He prefers Andrew, not Andy. Always the proper language. Tailored clothing. Carries a pocket watch. It’s like he’s from another time...or planet. Tell me something normal about him.”

  Libby tilted her head to think. “He loves cars...and he reads.”

  “What does he read? GQ? Comics? Pokémon Go guides?”

  “The classics. Dickens. Tolstoy. Melville.”

  Colette kept her face pointed toward her mail, but rolled her eyes upward long enough to shoot Libby a gaze that said, “Are you serious?”

  “He likes the old stuff.” Libby kept her tone flat, hoping to sound indifferent. “That’s part of his charm.” Despite her words she weathered a cringe. Her feminine dander did rise when he acted too stuffy. But, that was his only flaw to date. Well, that and the fact he was a little obsessed with finery and abhorred camping, whereas she loved being close to nature and roughing it.

  She had hoped their sense of connection would abate as they got to know each other. That they would do more to disillusion one another. But, it hadn’t happened.

  Colette pressed her lips together like she was holding in a barrage of disparaging comments, then looked up from her mail. “There’s just something off, don’t you think?”

  “He’s distinct. That’s all.” Libby’s tone grew softer. “Why do you dislike him so much? Are you afraid I’ll move out?”

  “Have you done a background check?”

  “Col, why would I bother when the bureau did one already? Relax, it’s not like my skills are going to take me to the head of the bureau one day, so I doubt he has a nefarious intent.”

  “True...about your skills, I mean. Not the nefarious intent. That’s still questionable.”

  Libby smiled. She wasn’t insulted by Colette’s honest assessment. Libby was average in almost every agent ranking, except languages and target shooting. For some inexplicable quirk of her DNA, she excelled at both. Particularly languages. Nine, to be exact, including several from Asia: Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Farsi. After her parents’ deaths, she’d traveled in third-world countries with her aunt Isabel, a physician, in a type of doctors-without-borders program. She didn’t remember much of those years except discovering her aptitude for languages. Given that translation was the only unique skill she brought to the bureau, she doubted she would see many opportunities to demonstrate her competence. That was fine. She was happy to have a more balanced life and excel below the radar. Colette could be the one who rose to the top.

  As Libby studied her roommate now, she felt a warm rush of affection. “You worry too much.”

  “You don’t worry enough.”

  Their gazes locked, silently acknowledging a stalemate.

  As usual, Libby gave in first. “Just give him a chance. For
me?”

  Colette frowned, and reached for Libby’s hand. “You’re right. You, my dear, are falling in love.”

  Love? The word burned in Libby’s mind and gave her a start. Hearing it from Colette’s mouth, it resonated differently in Libby’s head than anytime she had posed—then flatly dismissed—the sentiment to herself.

  Was it true?

  But, marriage? No, too much, too soon. If ever. All he wanted that night was for her to meet his family or discuss where they would go from here.

  Didn’t he?

  Chapter Two

  2016

  A half-hour after the prim, stiff-backed maître d’ seated Libby, she still wondered about Andrew’s intent. She studied him from across the table—clean-shaven, olive-skinned, and a stalky kind of muscular. He appeared a patron relaxed, a man enjoying where he was at the moment and in life. His dark curly hair topped an alert face with thick, level brows and wide eyes hidden beneath gold wire-rimmed glasses.

  But, as an agent, Libby had been taught to read people. If she gauged him correctly, he acted anxious, almost fretful. One knee bounced up and down, and he kept checking his pocket watch. She sat back in her chair, doing her best not to let him know his demeanor unnerved her.

  And, what was with the table he’d reserved? Uncharacteristically, he’d selected one near the wide front window. She didn’t like such placement because it was hard to secure situational awareness with so many patrons continually in and out the main entrance, and intense people scurrying by in every direction seeking their versions of thrills and nightlife. She preferred sitting more strategically, her back against a wall and some distance between her and any threat that might come at her.

  He had dismissed her confusion over their placement with a wave of his hand and a trite, “It’s something different.” His momentary deer-in-the-headlights look had left her wondering. Still, he made a stab at normalcy, discussing random things—the weather, the restaurant, the problems with the Metro that morning.