Free Evan Arden 03 Otherwise Unharmed by Shay Savage Page A

desert and probably would have lost my mind for good.  Instead, I just swallowed hard, focused on his face, and waited.
    “Military hero,” Trent sneered.  “What kind of hero gets his entire unit killed but somehow manages to survive himself?  Where’s that report, Johnson?”
    “Here you are.”  Johnson handed Trent a collection of papers held together with a clip.
    “Recognize this?”  Trent held up the first page, which contained a Marine logo at the top and a CIA stamp on the bottom.
    I did recognize it, but I didn’t answer.
    “This report is from your interrogation after you were brought back to the U.S.  There are a lot of questions about how you managed to survive for so long.  Why did they keep you alive, dickhead?  Was it because you were converted?  Did you lead them to your location and get your unit killed off?  Give up the other base running parallel to yours?”
    “There was no such evidence,” I snarled back.  “There were no charges.   I was found in a fucking hole, you asshole!  And that was a debriefing, not an interrogation!”
    “Finally got a rise out of you, huh?” he smirked.
    “Fuck you.  No action was taken—no charges.”
    Stop it, I told myself.  This is what he wants.
    “Yeah, yeah,” Trent said as he waved his hand dismissively.  “There haven’t been any murder charges brought up against you either, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t been on a killing rampage since you arrived in this city. ”
    I turned my eyes to the top of the table, refusing to be further engaged.  I wasn’t planning on letting him get to me at all, and I definitely couldn’t let him get under my skin again.  I had to keep myself prepared for more shit remarks about my capture or the debriefing.
    He must have realized I wasn’t going to be further goaded because he finally got to the point.
    “Here’s the thing,” Trent said as he leaned forward on his elbows.  “I’ve been waiting a long time to actually have something I could use on you that your piece-of-shit boss couldn’t just talk or bribe his way out of it for you, and I finally have it.”
    I wasn’t going to let myself be baited into asking what he meant, so I sat there and said nothing as Trent motioned to Johnson’s briefcase.  Johnson opened it up and pulled out a stapled set of papers.  The very first page had two boxes with images in them resembling a graphic equalizer display.  There were rows of vertical bars with smaller horizontal bars going through the middle of them.  Both boxes showed the exact same image.
    “ Do you know what that is?”
    I actually had an idea —I’d seen enough crime shows on television, but I didn’t let on.  With a shrug, I just looked back at him and waited.
    “ It’s a DNA report,” he said.  “See how the two samples match?”
    I shrugged again, and he pointed to one of the two images.
    “This one here—this is from the swab they took from your mouth when you were booked,” he said.  His finger moved over to the other image.  “That’s a pretty common practice, you know.  They even do it on dead bodies that are found lying around.”
    He watched me, presumably looking for a reaction, but I gave him nothing.
    “Guess where this one came from?” Trent pressed.
    I didn’t answer.  It could have come from a million places —I wasn’t overly careful about leaving shit like trace evidence behind—my kills were from afar.  If this guy thought he was going to use DNA evidence to link me to a sniper shooting, he was crazy.
    “ This was taken from the dead lips of one Brad Ashton.”
    Fuck me.
    Of all the victims they could have tried to nail me with, they went after the most high-profile one they could possibly find.  I’d been far more careful with him than I had with others because he was a well-known, highly paid movie actor and I was doing him up close.  He also owed my boss a lot of money in gambling debts, which was all I really cared about.  He