by Scott Blade
I said, “The general was already dead before he hit the floor, right?”
“We think so. He was shot in the heart. Like Thompson and the receptionist.”
“Those are professional hits. Why the double tap in the head?”
“If you’re right and there was a different shooter, then it’d be like that. A professional. Carl was the target. He got double-tapped.”
I nodded and asked, “Was he shot in the head or in the face?”
“What’s the difference? Both will kill ya?”
“Which was it?”
“Face.”
I nodded, thought for a moment.
“What?”
“You told me that Turik got a purple heart for saving Carl’s life.”
“Yeah.”
I asked, “You told me that was in Iraq?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t have the file in front of me or anything but I think so.”
I said, “I need to see that report.”
“I can get it.”
“Good.”
“So what next?”
“After our shooter killed Carl, then Turik came out of the bathroom.”
She said, “After he hid his phone inside the tank.”
“No.”
“No? We found it. Remember?”
“No, it wasn’t his phone. They would’ve taken his phone. And most people take their phones out and either play with them or set them on the table. And Turik did neither.”
“What?”
“Back at the diner, this morning. He didn’t have a phone on him. I’d bet on it. They took it.”
“Who? Who took it?”
“Them. The guys who made him go along with this whole operation.”
“You sound paranoid. Them? We don’t even know that yet.”
“The big guy. From the diner. The giant.”
“What about him?”
“He must’ve been Turik’s babysitter. You can’t let a patsy go out in public without one. They wanted him to be seen doing his regular things. The waitress told me that he came there three mornings a week, before work. They wanted him to be seen wearing his camos and carrying his gun. They probably told him to look crazy. Which wouldn’t have been hard, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“The way they got him to go along with this whole charade.”
“How?”
“Leverage.”
“What leverage?” she asked. Then she said, “His wife.”
I nodded and said, “There’s no better way to get a Marine to go along with something so evil than holding his family hostage. I’d guess they took her. Told him to help the shooter and then kill himself.”
“I’m not religious, but isn’t suicide a mortal sin in Islam? Like it is in Christianity?”
“Depends on who you ask. Jihadist would tell ya that it’s fine in the name of martyrdom, but regular Muslims would fight back against that. But.”
“But what?”
“Turik wasn’t even Muslim.”
“What? Sure he was.”
“No. His sister told me that he disavowed it privately to her, months ago. He’s been atheist for years. He just claims Islam, so as not to be blackballed by his family.”
“Then he killed himself because they gave him no choice.”
“Yeah.”
“What now? How do we prove any of this? And whose phone is this?”
“It’s probably Carl’s phone. Did you ever find his?”
“I don’t think anyone even thought to look, but I’m sure we don’t have it. I don’t remember it logged into evidence.”
“Call Kelly. Ask him, would ya?”
She nodded and asked, “Anything else?”
“Why don’t you call him? I’m going to walk through one last time.”
She nodded and went to the stairwell to make her call.
I walked down to the far end of the hall, and walked the length of it from that end all the way to the other, and then back again. Then I walked into Carl’s office and looked it over again.
I retraced the shooter’s steps back to Warren’s office and then I looked around it.
I started to wonder. How did the shooter get in here unnoticed?
CHAPTER 26
COLONEL WARREN’S OFFICE was a standard military office. There was a clean receptionist area, two plain chairs set out in front, a wall with a portrait hanging on it of a face I didn’t recognize, and the door to Colonel Warren’s office.
I walked over to the door and tried the knob again, in case I had been wrong about it being locked, which had happened to me before. Sometimes, I’d tried a knob and thought it was locked and then tried it again and it wasn’t. I was tired after all.
Warren’s door was still locked.
The office was meant to be private, which meant that there was no window to look in on it.
I stared at the locked door and turned back to see if I could see Romey. She wasn’t in my line of sight. It wouldn’t take a warrant to get her to unlock the door. I was sure that she could simply get a key to it. But I didn’t want to wait. I didn’t need to have a warrant or go through official channels.
I faced Warren’s door, stepped back, and pulled my right knee into my chest, not like a soccer kicker, more like a guy about to stomp on someone’s face. I charged it straight into the door, just to the right side of the knob.
The key to kicking in a door comes from pressure and that comes from mass. Getting the right mass in the right spot will work every time. I had plenty of mass and knew where to put it to work. My boot heel and sole landed viciously against the back of the door.
The door fired open like a breach charge had exploded against it. Wood splintered and metal ripped. The door flung in so hard that it rebounded against the wall and started to come back before I even put my foot back down on the floor.
I stayed in the doorway, surveyed the room. It was dark. This office did have a window to the front of the building, but the blinds were drawn closed as if a Howard Hughes had been living in here with mason jars full of urine.
Romey was behind me. She said, “What the hell, Widow?”
“Sorry. I needed to see.”
“See what?”
The office had been full of framed photographs. Most of the ones on the desk faced away from me, toward Warren if he had been sitting there. Some of them were facing the visitor. These were photos of Marines standing together in different training shots. There were a couple of photographs that were taken out in the desert. Iraq was my guess. Plenty of evidence for makeshift forwarding bases and military equipment.
One guy was in all of the photographs, first as a young man and then later as an older man. It was Colonel Warren, I guessed.
I stepped into the office, closer to the desk. I reached down and grabbed a framed photograph off the desk at random. I turned it around, stared at the picture.
Romey repeated, “What?”
I turned back to her and showed her the framed photograph.
I asked, “If Warren left, why didn’t he pack this photograph of his wife?”
CHAPTER 27
ROMEY SAID, “He didn’t pack anything. Everything’s still here?”
I looked around the office, set the framed photograph back down on the desk. I didn’t touch anything else.
I walked behind the desk and looked out the window. I looked down at the sidewalk.
I said, “You can see the walkway up to the entrance from here.”
I turned to Romey and said, “Our shooter was in here. Probably from the night before. Maybe only hours before.”
“How did he get in here? Warren?”
“I’d say so. You need to call somebody. Find out about his orders to go to South Korea. Find out exactly where he’s supposed to be.”
“Do you think he lied?”
“I’d say so. I’d say he never had orders.”
�
�He gave the shooter a key to his office?”
I stayed quiet.
Romey said, “Was he the shooter?”
“I doubt it.”
She took out her phone and started dialing. She put the phone to her ear and waited.
She said, “Hey. Listen. Send the forensic team back over here to the crime scene. We’ve got new intel.”
Romey looked at me and decided to take the rest of the call out into the hallway. Before she crossed over the automatic glass doors, she pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at me. She said, “Don’t touch anything else. They’re going to sweep over this room. Better to not move anything. Let my guys do their thing.”
I nodded. She left the room.
I turned back to the desk and walked around it. I inspected Warren’s chair. It was tucked in neatly under the desk.
I felt the black leather. It was cold. As was the desktop.
There were papers neatly stacked to the left of the desk. I gazed over them, quickly. They were typical military paperwork. Nothing of interest there.
I pulled out his top drawer, which I found to be also typical of a colonel. He had kept everything that had a daily use in that drawer. I found a stapler, pens, and other office supplies.
I shut the drawer and then opened the second one. That’s where I found what I was looking for.
I found a Taurus Millennium G2 handgun, which is a pretty nice piece. The last time I checked, this gun was retailing at around three hundred bucks. Not bad for a good reliable, concealable weapon.
It is compact, but not tiny like other weapons. It had a twelve-round magazine and one in the chamber. The Millennium G2 is comparable to a Glock—a fine weapon.
The Millennium G2 wasn’t a regulation service weapon, not that anyone would question a colonel in the Marine Corps. But I figured that this was Warren’s personal weapon. It was probably off the books.
I looked up to see if Romey was still out of the office. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her speaking to Kelly on the phone.
Two thoughts passed through my head. The first was that I should tell Romey about the gun. It’s the honest thing to do. The second was that she would most certainly bag it and tag it. She’d hand it over to her guys as evidence. Not that it was evidence of anything related to our case, but a gun found on site and a possible implication that Warren was involved here, would categorize the gun as evidence.
On the other hand, I had a third thought. If there was a professional shooter out there, and we were going to be trying to track him down, then I would need a gun. And I doubted that Romey was going to oblige and have one for me.
Way back in the day, I was a good cop. Not the best, but far from the worst. In my experience, there were rules you followed and rules you didn’t. I know that not everyone agrees with that. And some guys break the wrong rules. To me, you just stick to what’s right. Sometimes there are some rules that are just plain wrong. And I wasn’t a cop anymore anyway.
I picked up the Millennium G2 and ejected the clip and racked the slide. The chambered round ejected out. I caught it. I stared into the chamber and performed a visual check. The gun was safe. It looked like it hadn’t been fired recently. All thirteen rounds were accounted for. It looked in good working order, which I imagined it was.
I dry-fired it to make sure that it worked. It did.
I loaded the magazine, kept the extra round out, and chambered a fresh one. Then I ejected the magazine and stocked the extra round on top. I returned the magazine into the weapon. I gripped my hand around it. This model came with a pinkie extender on the tip of the magazine, which was good for a guy with large hands. Still, I had a three-finger grip on the gun. Not ideal for me, but my pinkie wasn’t a problem. The extender didn’t compensate for me the way that it might’ve for the next size hand down from mine. It did give me a better grip on the gun than if there was no extender.
I double-checked that the Millennium G2 was safe and slid it into the right front pocket of my jacket.
I closed the drawer.
I saw nothing else of interest on the desk.
Romey came back in and said, “Anything else?”
“Warren’s desk is full of office supplies and his work papers. We need to find him.”
“I agree. I got Kelly coming over here with our forensic guys. They’ll check everything out. They already collected everything in the hall and Carl’s office. I’ll make sure that they focus in here.”
I said, “Not everything. They missed the phone in the tank.”
She nodded and said, “Why would they even check there?”
“True, but someone should’ve realized that Carl’s phone was missing.”
“We would’ve. It’s only been hours since the whole thing happened.”
I said nothing to that.
Romey said, “What now?”
“Two things.”
“Which are?”
“First, there’s something else in that video that bothers me.”
“What’s that?”
“The phrase Turik uses. He says Good Measure.”
“What about it?”
“Earlier, when I was waiting for you near the flag pole, I was staring up at the flag and I thought about a saying that we had out in the field. Not really a saying. It was just sort of spoken words. We’d often revel in the flag. Like it was a symbol of our patriotic religion.”
“As it is to all military personnel. And all Americans.”
“Not all Americans.”
She said, “Most. The good ones.”
“In the SEALs there used to be some saying about how we served the flag without measure. It meant that the power behind the American way is immeasurable. Something like that.”
She nodded.
“I think the Marines have something similar, but it uses the word good. Like good measure.”
“I never heard that.”
“Maybe I heard it from an old instructor. I think that Turik was saying that to name something specific. I don’t think that he was just rattling off a Marine saying.”
“So what could it be? About the flag?”
“No. I think it’s the name of a mission.”
She stayed quiet.
I said, “Get someone to research it. Will ya?”
“What was the second thing?”
“We need to go to Warren’s house. If he’s involved, we need to find him.”
“Let’s go now.”
“Also, I want to know about the secret service. Who are they?”
“Let’s get out of here. We can wait downstairs.”
I nodded and we walked out to the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door in silence.
CHAPTER 28
WE WAITED IN FRONT of the command building, out on the street.
Romey said, “The agents who are here are British.”
“British?”
“You know like crumpets and James Bond?”
“They’re a part of Her Majesty’s Secret Service?”
“I’d say so. They got the accents.”
“How many?”
“Just two guys.”
“So what are they here for?”
Romey looked around the street. She looked in the direction of both checkpoints, like she was checking her guys. Then she said, “You can ask them yourself when we head back to the station. I think they’re still there.”
Just then we saw Kelly pull up outside the checkpoint to the south, as he had before, with me in the car. A police van followed behind him. I hadn’t seen it before. They all passed the guards and rolled up to us. The van pulled around and off to the sidewalk and parked.
Four people got out. Two of them were women. All four of them were young. They looked like they were in their twenties.
Romey walked over to Kelly’s window and said, “Don’t get out.”
He didn’t.
She said, “We got some new info.”
“What?”
“A video. From Turik.”
“A confession?”
“No.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll show it to you later. But it looks like Turik is innocent.”
Kelly said, “What? How?”
“It looks like he might’ve been coerced. Or at the very least he had an accomplice.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Stay here with the team. Make sure they go over Colonel Warren’s office.”
She went on to explain to him the situation and my theory of what happened.
I stepped toward her car and looked at the checkpoints again. Some of the MPs stared back at me. I made eye contact with one of them. He looked me over suspiciously and then returned to talking to one of the other MPs.
I saw the forensic team go to the back of the van and pull out a bunch of gear. They wore eye protective goggles and plastic gloves.
I looked down at mine and pulled them off, stuffed them into my pocket.
Romey came over and said, “Let’s go.”
We got into the car and she backed up, headed back toward the same checkpoint that we had gone through earlier. She said, “Where to first?”
I said, “Got Warren’s home address?”
“Of course. It’s in the computer.”
“We’d better head over there.”
“No reason to call South Korea then?”
“You can have one of your guys call to see if there ever were orders, but I doubt it.”
Romey headed toward the gate.
I said, “How are you going to get past the media?”
She said, “Don’t worry about that.”
And she smiled.
CHAPTER 29
ROMEY SAID, “Can I make a confession?”
I looked over at her and said, “What?”
“I always wanted to outrun the press. When I was a little girl, I had always pictured myself growing up to be Marilyn Monroe. You know, like a celebrity?”
“She’s a little before our generation. Don’t you think? Shouldn’t you’ve been trying to be more like somebody current?”
“Like who? Madonna?”
“I don’t know. I always had more of a thing for Pamela Anderson.”