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supposed to know.”
    “Such as?”
    “The military is full of secrets. And plenty of people have died trying to keep them.”
    “I need more than that.”
    “Then help me find it, damn it.”
    She was clearly frustrated, and Jack could understand it. He rose, walked around to the front of his desk, and took a more casual seat on the corner of it, no barriers between them. “Look, you’re probably thinking that lawyers defend guilty clients all the time, so why is this guy so obsessed with guilt or innocence. But this case is—”
    “Different,” she said, finishing the thought for him. “I know.”
    “You understand why?”
    “Of course. You want what’s best for your,” she caught herself, then said, “for my son. Just as I do. Which is why I would never—even if I’d wanted Oscar dead—I would never have shot him in our house while our son was sleeping in the next room. Deaf or not. Does that make any sense at all to you, Mr. Swyteck?”
    Jack met her stare, and suddenly the silence between them was no longer uncomfortable. It was as if the proverbial light had finally come on. “Yes, it does, Lindsey. And I think it’s probably time you started calling me Jack.”

6
    A lejandro Pintado was searching for good news. Literally.
    As usual, his search had taken him over the Straits of Florida, a band of water some ninety miles wide that connected the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean, that separated Key West from Cuba, that divided freedom from tyranny. For more than four decades Cubans had fled Fidel Castro’s oppressive communist regime in makeshift rafts, leaky boats, or even patched-up inner tubes. They risked their lives on the high seas, many of them making it to the United States, many others succumbing to tropical storms and walls of water, blistering sun and dehydration, or sunken vessels and hungry sharks. It was a tragedy that Alejandro had seen unfold with his own eyes, starting with his first mission in 1992. He’d made two passes over a small boat. On the first, he counted nine bodies strewn this way and that, as if they had simply collapsed. His second time around a woman stirred at the bow, barely able to raise her arm. She never moved again. As best the Coast Guard could tell, a storm had washed their water and supplies overboard on the first night of their journey. In desperation they drank seawater. There were no survivors. It was no wonder that, to the exile community in Miami, the Straits of Florida were known as the Cuban Private Cemetery.
    Despite the danger, they kept coming. So long as they were out there, Alejandro Pintado was determined to keep looking.
    “Key West, this is Brother One,” he said, speaking into his radio transmitter. “I have a visual.”
    “Copy that,” came the reply.
    Alejandro pushed forward on the yoke and dropped to an altitude of five hundred feet, his old single-engine Cessna whining as it picked up speed. The scene on the open waters below him was a familiar one, but it still made his heart race. Six-to eight-foot seas, foamy white caps breaking against a vast ocean as blue as midnight, a thing of beauty if it weren’t so dangerous. A small raft rising to the top of each swell, then disappearing between them, the white canvas sail tattered from winds much stronger than most rafters could anticipate. The craft was overloaded, of course, packed with three children, five women—one of them holding an infant—and six men. Some were standing, having spotted the plane, waving the oars frantically to get the pilot’s attention.
    You are almost home , thought Alejandro, smiling to himself.
    His aircraft continued to descend. Three hundred feet. Two hundred. The rafters were jumping up and down, shouting with joy, as Alejandro sped past them. He waved from the cockpit, then began to circle around.
    “Key West, this is Brother One,” he said. “Looks like a happy group. Fairly good shape, considering.”
    Alejandro had definitely seen worse. He’d