Read Online Mom Zone Mysteries 02 Staying Home Is a Killer by Sara Rosett - Free Book Online Page A

exact expression. “She was afraid, but there was something else there, too. Defiance?”
    I wrote, Flight crew and listed the names as I spoke. “Zeke Peters was there. Pilot?” Mitch nodded. The squadron didn’t have hard crews, so once copilots upgraded to pilot and flew in the left seat the Air Force kept them dual qualified, so they could fly as either a copilot or a pilot, depending on what the needs of the moment were. I remember Zeke’s towering figure dwarfed the others as they labored up the ramp.
    “Then Aaron, our new neighbor. He didn’t say anything. Do you know his last name?”
    “Reed. He’s our newest co.” Mitch meant copilot. Aaron and Bree had moved into the property left vacant when our neighbor requested a transfer after his wife died last year. A management company now rented the bungalow, and the Reeds were the first to live in it. I’d met the couple one day when I was planting ground cover in a flower bed. They seemed polar opposites; Bree had spiky tomato-red hair and was an artist, a painter. She’d chattered nonstop about the local art scene while Aaron stood mute in the background. “Is he as quiet at work as he was that day I met them?”
    “Quieter. We call him ‘the Stealth Co.’”
    “Oh. I almost forgot. Rory was there.” Barrel-chested and with a thatch of blond hair over his owlish round glasses, he’d powered up the ramp.
    “Rory Tyler? Yeah, he was on it and someone else hopped on that flight.” Mitch left the kitchen and then returned with a small packet of paper, the week’s flying schedule. Now that everything’s computerized, the hard copy should have faded away, but the wing commander liked to see it on paper, so a hard copy went out every Friday for the next week.
    Mitch scanned the blocks filled with data. “No one else is on here, but I remember someone came in that morning, wanting to fly.”
    I wrote a question mark as Mitch said, “Willy. It was Willy. But it wasn’t this flight. The same crew flew the week before, Friday, I think. He hopped on the Friday flight with Zeke, Rory, and Aaron the week before.”
    “Will Follette? Wasn’t he just back from the deployment? Penny said something about being glad he’d be home for a few days.”
    Was it only last week? Things had changed so quickly. Will had been gone on the first rotation to the “sandbox,” or “SWA,” pronounced “sa-wah,” an abbreviation for Southwest Asia. Mitch was scheduled to leave in three weeks for his turn. Usually, you had some time off when you returned from a deployment. Sometimes it took a while to get readjusted to the time zone after being halfway around the world for months.
    “What was Will doing hopping on another flight right after he got back from a deployment?”
    “Don’t you know why we call him Willy? Because he always wants to be on the road.” Mitch tossed the schedule in the recycling bin and sat back down. “No matter how much he’s flown, he always wants on another flight.”
    “But doesn’t everyone? You always want to fly. There’s not enough hours to go around, is there?”
    “Well, no. We’d all rather be flying. But Willy takes it to an extreme. He never has any conflicts. Most people have some time they don’t want to fly, you know, a kid’s basketball game or family reunions or something. I can’t remember Willy ever blocking out any of his schedule. He even requested a trip during the weekend of that Frost thing. Penny put up flyers around the base, so I asked him if he wanted to be off and he said, ‘No, it’s not a problem. Penny won’t mind.’”
    I tossed down my pen. “And all this time Penny thought it was the schedulers who were working him to death, but he was requesting it.” I picked my pen up again and scribbled Will’s name, but anger distorted my handwriting so that I could hardly read it. “How could he do that to Penny?”
    “There’s three reasons to go TDY,” he said, referring to the acronym for