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silence stretched for a full minute.
    Jack stirred. Blew out a breath. “I got decent grades,” he said mildly.
    Bingo. She smiled.
    “Any good grades you got were strictly because you charmed the teachers. I never saw you open a book all that summer I came back to the US. And not once while we were—”
    She stopped. Fought a blush. She was about to say he’d never cracked a book while they were dating but they’d “dated” for about a week. Enough to stoke her infatuation and introduce her to world-altering sex before he disappeared.
    So
dating
wasn’t strictly the right term.
    And this walk down memory lane had had the unfortunate effect of reminding her that they’d essentially spent that one week in bed, having sex so incredible it should have been classified as a controlled substance.
    “You’re blushing,” Jack said.
    “Am not,” she answered sharply. And then, because she’d sounded like a child, she said, “So—how close did I get?”
    “Nailed it. Except I’m not CIA anymore.”
    “No. Because you’re dead. So let’s hear this story and I need to know why it has to remain secret because there’s been more than enough secrecy around the Washington Massacre. I’ll hold off if there’s a really good reason, but not for long and you’d better be pretty convincing.”
    Jack drew in a deep breath and for a moment she was startled at how wide it made his chest.
Focus
,
Summer!
She told herself. This was important and she couldn’t be distracted by a gorgeous male chest. She wasn’t eighteen anymore.
    Jack leaned forward, shifting away the plates with one strong forearm. “Why were you at Hector Blake’s funeral?”
    He wanted to ask questions first? Okay. “Well, he was sort of a relative. For a little while, anyway. Remember? But mainly because the whole thing stinks to high heaven.”
    His face gave away nothing, but his fingers curled up in a
gimme
gesture.
    She sighed. “First of all, the reports state that he drowned in the Potomac but everyone is real vague on exactly where in the Potomac. And it is unclear whether he was in a vehicle or just sort of fell in. Like you’d trip and fall into a pond. It’s really hard to do that. Either he committed suicide, diving in from a bridge, or it was homicide and he was thrown in, or it was an accident and he drove off the road into the river. The coroner’s report is unavailable, which is the first time that’s happened to me. The authorities didn’t exactly invoke the Patriot Act, but they might as well have. I applied for a copy of the report and got a sharp email from the coroner’s office. The office, not the coroner herself. She’s on indefinite leave. Starting yesterday. And no one has been appointed to replace her. And the DC morgue itself has been closed for ‘scheduled repairs’ though no such schedule has ever been published. I can’t figure out what happened to Hector but something did and it wasn’t what the reports say.”
    Jack held her eyes. “Hector Blake drowned in the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon four days ago. I know because I was there.”
    He dropped that bombshell and watched her reaction. She kept her face without expression, but her hands itched for the iPad, because this was the story of a lifetime.
What were you doing there in Portland?
What was Hector Blake doing there?
How did it happen?
The questions bubbled up inside her.
    When she felt a story start to happen, it was like a fisherman feeling a big tug, knowing he had a whopper at the other end of the line. That was exactly what she was feeling right now. A huge tug from a momentous story.
    “You’re going to have to explain that to me,” she said steadily.
    Jack nodded sharply, as if happy at her cool reaction. “Well, the short version is that Hector kidnapped Isabel, who had moved to Portland. I was there and, together with three other men, we followed him. Isabel says he told her the plan was to fake her suicide in a motel, because