One Was a Soldier

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  Fergusson snorted. “You don’t need a badge to be good at asking questions and figuring things out.”

  “Besides, if Tally’s death has been ruled a suicide, you can hardly call it an active investigation.” Stillman didn’t lift his eyes from his PalmPilot while speaking.

  “That’s right,” Fergusson agreed.

  “Barracks law,” McCrea said.

  “Join us, Eric.” Fergusson looked far too sly for someone professing to be religious. “You know you want to.”

  “Oh, my God.” McCrea snorted. “This is how you got the chief to do all that crazy stuff with you, isn’t it? You just badgered him until he gave in.”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay. Okay.” He sighed. “I can question her co-workers. Lyle took statements over the phone from a couple people, but we were looking for evidence of suicidal intent at that point. I’ll see if I can get an idea as to how she might have laundered the money.” He huffed a laugh. “I think you’re all freaking crazy, though.” Then his breath broke, and he bent over again. “I think I’m freaking crazy,” he said in a cracked voice.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11

  Eric had hoped that somehow he could get by without telling Jennifer. Dawdle in the morning, maybe, so she didn’t see him not getting into his uniform. It wasn’t until he tried that he realized how set the three of them were in their morning routine. Jen in the shower first while he got Jake up and started the coffee. Then he showered while she dressed and yelled at Jake to hurry up. Downstairs, he and Jake ate breakfast while she blow-dried her hair. He put away the milk and cereal while Jake fed the cats and Jen checked to make sure the boy hadn’t forgotten anything that ought to be in his backpack. Then out of the house, look for the bus, wave good-bye, slamming doors, and they were all on their way, to the middle school and the elementary school and the cop shop.

  “What are you doing?” Jennifer bent over, towel-drying her hair. “You’re going to be late.”

  He mumbled something. Went into the bathroom. Turned on the shower. Sat on the toilet lid and considered exactly how far he was going to go to keep Jen from knowing about his suspension.

  What the hell, he had to take a shower anyway.

  He sat at the table and methodically spooned Cheerios into his mouth while Jake read The Last Olympian and occasionally managed to get a bite in without taking his eyes off the book. Jennifer’s blow-dryer cut off, and he could hear her putting it in the drawer. She came into the kitchen. Paused with her hand on the refrigerator handle. “You’re not dressed.”

  Eric looked down at his khakis and shirt. “Sure I am.”

  “Why aren’t you in uniform? Is there something special going on today?” She frowned. “Are you working plainclothes?” Which he did, once in a blue moon.

  It was so tempting to say yes. He wiped his mouth. Stood up. “No,” he said. “I’m off for the next ten days.”

  Jennifer glanced at Jake, still lost in Percy Jackson’s adventures. She beckoned Eric into the family room. “What do you mean, off? You don’t have any vacation coming until Christmas.”

  He took a breath. “I’m on suspension.”

  Jennifer’s eyes widened. “Suspension? Oh, my God. What did you do?”

  He felt a flare of irritation at her instant conclusion that he was the problem. It could have been an administrative action. If he had been involved in a shooting, for instance. Which he would have told her about as soon as he got home yesterday. His anger deflated. “I got into it with a suspect who resisted arrest. The chief thought I was too … physical.”

  “Physical? As in what? You hit the guy?”

  “Look, Jen, he was—”

  “You hit some guy, right?”

  He looked toward the bookcase, littered with pictures of Jake and half-completed craft projects. “Yeah. I hit him. Put him in the hospital.”

  She covered her mouth. “Oh, Jesus,” she said into her palm.

  “Listen—”

  “No. You listen. First it was yelling at Jake and blowing up at me. Then it was threatening that doctor. Now it’s beating up suspects.”

  “For God’s sake, Jen, he threw the first punch—”

  She shook her head. “You have a problem, Eric. A serious, serious problem. You need help, and your little group isn’t cutting it. I don’t know if you need psychotherapy or drugs or what, but you find someone who can help you and you get yourself sorted out.” She gulped. “Or I’ll leave and take Jake with me.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to wait around for you to start beating on us, too.”

  Her words took his breath away. His stomach ached and his chest was tight. “I would never, ever harm you or Jake. I love you. You two are my whole life.”

  Her face fractured. “There was a time when you would have said the same thing about a suspect. That you’d never hurt anyone if you could help it.” She pressed her fingers against her mouth for a second. “You were always the most conscientious, sweet-natured man I knew. Sometimes you had to do hard things, but you never let them make you hard. I loved that about you.”

  Loved that. Past tense. His gut knotted itself even tighter. “I just need some more time. To get my bearings again.”

  “You’ve been home four months now. It’s getting worse, not better.” She stepped back. Looked around the room. Lifted Jake’s backpack off the desk. “Get help. Or I swear to God, I’m out of here.”

  * * *

  Clare had tried dropping by the Stuyvesant Inn, to see if she could meet with Arlene Seelye, but the two MPs had been out. She lingered as long as she could over her mother’s menu options, but there was only so much time she could kill debating brown sugar versus mustard glaze on the Virginia ham, and eventually she had to leave unsatisfied.

  When she got home, she had a message on her machine. “Hey, it’s me. Are you there?… No? Huh. Look, I’m sorry. I know this whole thing with Tally McNabb has been hard on you. I shouldn’t have hammered on you like that. I’m flat out today—I gotta meet with the board of aldermen about Eric’s suspension—but maybe we can have lunch tomorrow? At the diner?”

  She tried to reach him but had to settle for playing phone tag. Frustrated, she called her junior warden, Geoffrey Burns, Esq. Not about Russ—there was no love lost between the two men—but about Arlene Seelye. “She’s investigating a theft from the army,” Clare explained. “The suspect is dead, but her husband lives here, and Colonel Seelye thinks he knows something about the missing money. What does she do?”

  “She’ll go to Judge Ryswick for a warrant.” Geoff didn’t hesitate. “She’ll want to search the house and, based on what she finds there, any accounts that might be in either spouse’s name or further locations, like a second home, cars, boats.”

  “Can she arrest the husband?”

  “As an accessory? Possibly. She might get the Feds involved. Undoubtedly, your fiancé as well, since the guy’s in his jurisdiction. Are you sure you want to marry him?”

  “Yes.” Despite their disagreement over Tally McNabb. “And I expect you to at least pretend to have a good time at the reception.”

  Next, she phoned Assistant District Attorney Amy Nguyen. She had met the woman just enough times to justify calling her on a fishing expedition. Unfortunately, Amy hadn’t seen anyone fitting Seelye’s description at the courthouse, and she hadn’t heard anything about a possible arrest involving the FBI in their area.

  That evening, she sat for a long time with one of the sleeping pills Trip had prescribed in one hand, and a highball glass full of Macallan’s in the other. I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t.

  He’s not going to spring a blood test on me the day after I got the prescription filled.

  She chased the pill down with a long swallow of Scotch.

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12

  Wednesday morning, she told herself the same thing when she popped two Dexedrine. It’s too soon for a blood test. The familiar jittery rush of heat went through her when the pills hit
her system, and she thought, Okay. I can get through today. She wouldn’t be tempted to drink before early evening, and she’d burn that bridge when she got to it.

  It was a relentlessly busy morning; a 7:00 A.M. Eucharist, a stack of phone calls to get through, then a sermon to draft. She struggled with it; Sunday’s gospel was Matthew, the Great Commandment, but her attention kept circling back to the beginning of the passage. One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. It brought back the nightmare she had had, with her old SERE instructor quoting scripture at her while Russ’s body burned.

  She was grateful when Lois, the church secretary, interrupted her. “Your mother phoned. She asked me to tell you the florist is coming over this afternoon to look at the space and take measurements.” Clare had taken to letting Lois handle as many maternal calls as possible. The secretary actually seemed to enjoy debating the virtues of tulle versus netting for the sugared-almond favor bags. “Magnolia swags and gold-sprayed live oak,” Lois went on. “Very romantic.”

  “For Tidewater Virginia in June. Too bad I’m getting married in November in the North Country.” Clare looked down at her crossed-out paragraphs and scribbled notes. “I guess I’m not going to be able to leave until after I’ve spoken to the florist. If I get a call from a Colonel Arlene Seelye, will you keep her on the line and track me down?”

  “I will.” Lois retreated down the hall, humming “Here Comes the Bride.”

  “No Lohengrin!” Clare shouted.

  Her practice of writing her sermon on Wednesday served two functions: It gave her enough time between then and Sunday to come up with something else if her first try was crap, and it made her positively happy to have her solitude broken by the lunchtime vestry meeting.

  This week’s meeting was brisk. Twenty minutes to cover Gail Jones’s education budget and the feasibility of an energy audit; forty minutes of Clare listening to Terry McKellan and Norm Madsen and Mrs. Marshall waxing on about their own nuptials. It was sweet and charming, and it made her uncomfortably aware that Russ had been part of this club, too, long married and happy to be so.

  Clearly, I should keep out of your business. Like Linda did. God, she was an idiot. As if Russ needed a reminder of the difference between Clare and his late wife. His beloved wife.

  She was cleaning up after the meeting when Glenn Hadley stuck his head in the door. “Summun in the sanctuary to see you, Father.”

  She was always “Father” to the sexton. She handed him a tray loaded with uneaten sandwiches. “Thanks, Mr. Hadley. Would you put this in the icebox downstairs?”

  “Ayuh.”

  She sniffed. “Were you smoking?” The sexton’s granddaughter, Hadley Knox, had enlisted Clare’s help in keeping the seventy-six-year-old diabetic away from cigarettes.

  “Me, Father? You know the doctors told me not to.”

  She rolled her eyes as she walked down the hall toward the church. Short of following him around all day, she didn’t know how anyone could keep the old fellow from indulging. She switched on the nave lights and hauled the oak door open. If a heart attack and a quadruple bypass couldn’t convince him to—

  Quentan Nichols was standing in the center aisle.

  Clare froze. Behind her, the heavy door whispered closed. Despite the soaring space, the thick stone walls of St. Alban’s seemed to close in around her. Lois was running errands on her lunch hour. Mr. Hadley was in the undercroft. No one would hear her if she screamed.

  Nichols took a step toward her. Frowned. She tensed, ready to bolt for the hall.

  “Major Fergusson?” His voice was uncertain. He took another step toward her. “I mean, Reverend Fergusson?”

  Clare nodded. Cleared her throat. “Chief Nichols. I’m…” Surprised didn’t begin to cover it. “What are you doing here?”

  “It is you.” He relaxed, which wasn’t the relief it might have been, since he seemed to be all muscle. He was in mufti—khakis and a turtleneck sweater. “You look different.” He touched his throat. “I mean, beyond the collar and all.”

  “I’m growing my hair out.” Idiot. The man was a possible killer, a probable thief, and likely absent without leave as well. And she was talking about her hair. “There are several people here. In the offices. And I’m expecting a visitor any moment.”

  He held up his hands. “Whoa. I’m not gonna hurt you.” He took one step, two, and as Clare rocked onto the balls of her feet, ready to run, he sat in the first pew. At the far side of the aisle. He spread his arms across the back of the pew and rested his hands over the smooth, dark wood. “I need your help.”

  Well. That, at least, was familiar. “Go on.”

  “You knew Tally.”

  “Yes, I did.” She relaxed enough to take a more comfortable stance. “I don’t know how you knew that, though.”

  “She told me about her therapy group. The doctor, the cop, the Marine and Episcopal priest.” He shrugged. “I Googled ‘Episcopal church in Millers Kill.’ When I saw your name, I figured there’s no way there are two woman priests who were also vets. Leastways not in a dinky town like this.”

  “Tally told you about her group.”

  “We talked, yeah. A couple times. I was—” He shook his head. “It’s complicated. I don’t know where to start.”

  “How about where you helped her steal a million dollars?”

  “I didn’t! I mean, yeah, I guess in a way I did.” He looked ahead, at the stained glass triptych behind the high altar. Christus Victor. Christ, victorious over death and sin. “I didn’t mean to.”

  This, too, was familiar. A person sitting opposite her, talking around and over and between the problem, taking his time because getting to the point meant getting to the pain. She sighed. Sat down in the pew on the near side of the aisle. Faced Nichols, her hands relaxed and open. Listening. “Tell me about when you met Tally.”

  He smiled a little. “It was my second tour. Hers, too. I was stationed at Balad. After the insurgency took hold, it was the most secure airfield in the country. Crazy busy. Planes flying in from everywhere, day and night. Everybody in the world passing through—reporters and security contractors and politicians. I saw that guy from The Daily Show once. Anyway, Tally’s company was staging out of there. They had a construction project going, shoring up some old buildings. Tally told me it was going to be the in-country version of a Federal Reserve Bank. She was going back and forth between Balad and Camp Anaconda, which was stressing her big-time.”

  Clare nodded. Ground travel was tense. Taking long trips over the same highways, you figured every time you didn’t get blown up just brought you closer to the time you would.

  “We met at the club. She asked me if I knew where she could get some booze, and she just about died when I told her I was a cop.” He glanced at Clare’s collar. “We, um, started spending time together. You know.”

  “Uh-huh.” She wondered where Wyler McNabb fit into the picture. “Did she ever mention her husband?”

  “She said he was a civilian.” He shrugged. “At the start, I didn’t care. I mean, people were jumping in and out of the sack all the time. Nobody checking for rings. By the end”—he tilted his head back—“I pretty much convinced myself he was history.” He looked at her. Smiled humorlessly. “To look at me, you wouldn’t think I could get played so bad, would you?”

  “She asked you to do something for her.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He heaved a breath. “She did. Asked me to keep my patrol away from a storage building. Tell my team anything they saw around one of the hangars was authorized. For one day. That should have been the tip-off it was something big. People smuggle in booze or dope or other contraband, they’ve got drops. Regular customers. A supply chain. One-off, that’s got to be something big.”

  “You didn’t know what was going on?”

  “I didn’t want to know.” He bent over, resting his elbows on his knees. “Jesus help me. She could have been smuggling those WMDs out of the country. I didn’t want to know.”r />
  “So then what happened?”

  “Nothing. The finance building got finished, and she went back to Anaconda for good. We e-mailed and IM’d back and forth as much as we could.” He gave her a challenging look. “It wasn’t just sex. She was really easy to talk to. I felt like—like she got me, you know? Even though she was from this pissant little town in upstate New York and I’m from Chicago. Like those differences didn’t matter at all.”

  “I know.” Did she ever. “When did you start to think there was something more than just a romance going on?”

  “When she shipped home. All of a sudden, she’s not answering my e-mails, she’s not taking my calls. I knew she was separating, and I thought maybe the readjustment to civilian life was hitting her hard. I had leave after I cycled back stateside, so I decided to come out here and talk to her in person.”

  “Which is where you and I met.”

  “Yeah.” He paused for a long moment. “After that’s when I started looking into what actually happened. It took a while, because I wasn’t officially investigating and I wanted to keep things on the down low.”

  “To avoid incriminating yourself?”

  “Hell, yeah. She already made an idiot out of me. I didn’t want to lose my career, too.”

  “So you found out she had gotten away with a million dollars.”

  “The building I was supposed to keep my patrols away from was a transshipping facility, right next to the airfield. Usually, any cash coming in would have been secured, but this stuff was transiting, off one Herky Bird and onto another within a few hours.”

  “Do you know how she moved it?”

  He shook his head. “There were quite a few finance people at the base. She might have gotten help there. Or who knows, maybe she had a string of guys she was playing along. One with a forklift, another with a truck.”

  Clare rubbed her arms. “That doesn’t sound like Tally.”

  “Yeah. Well. She had friends. It was her second tour. She knew people.”