by Dale Mayer
Jackson could see the nervousness in his eyes.
“I get the feeling the MPs think I had something to do with this.”
Deli jumped to her feet. “What? You crashed on purpose? Got yourself shot somehow? It’s not like you could have shot yourself.” She was thunderstruck and outraged on his behalf.
Jackson reached out a calming hand, had her sit back down again, so the guard didn’t come in and remove them. “I suspect it’s more about keeping you safe,” he said.
“I hope so.” But Max didn’t look convinced. He motioned at the door. “And Barney there, he’s not even awake yet. I’m not sure he’ll ever wake up.”
That was a sobering thought. And it would add to their body count unfortunately.
“They weren’t able to find that vehicle or the man who shot you, or his cohort, and we don’t know who killed the other two men.”
“Which really means, we know jack shit,” Max said in disgust. “I suppose the military police aren’t letting you in on anything.”
“I’m supposed to be attached to the investigation,” Jackson said, “but they haven’t shared anything with me. Now they’ll use my visit to James last night as a reason not to. Plus I was the one who found the driver dead. They’ll try to put me on the suspect list just to keep me out of the loop.”
Max nodded. “You have to admit, from their perspective, that makes logical sense.”
“Only because they’re too lazy to look any further.”
They left soon afterward. Jackson stopped at Barney’s side. The man appeared to be sound asleep. Jackson didn’t understand how comas worked, but this man looked more asleep than unconscious. Maybe that was normal. He waited for a long moment, studying the man’s eyes to see if he was in REM sleep, but there was no movement. And again Jackson didn’t know if that was normal or not.
Frowning, he motioned for Deli to leave ahead of him. Outside he stopped and asked the security guard if there had been any other visitors.
The guard looked at him curiously. “Just Max’s wife.”
Jackson leaned forward and said, “Two men have been murdered over this incident. Stay alert.”
The security guard nodded. “Always.”
Jackson and Deli walked outside to the Jeep again. Their visit hadn’t taken very long, and he still had an hour to kill before Kanen came over to his place. He looked at Deli, but she looked worse for the wear. He hopped back into the Jeep and drove around to the Coronado Beach, stopped at one of the parking spots and held out a hand. “Let’s walk for a little bit, get some fresh air on our faces.”
Eagerly she jumped out of the Jeep, and together they walked to stand at the water’s edge.
“I don’t hate him, you know.”
“Of course you don’t,” he said. “I don’t know what he was up to with the calls, and I don’t know where it would have gone. But, because we don’t have those answers, remember him as the coworker you used to know.”
She squeezed his fingers. “Thank you. That’s an easier way to consider it.”
And then silently they turned and walked along the beach, neither saying anything, just enjoying the moment. When they got down a good mile from their parking spot, she said, “We need to trace the families.”
He stopped for a moment, then walked slowly back toward the way they’d come. “Meaning, to see if there was a connection between Chester, Max, and James?”
“There’s an awful lot of personal in this. Maybe it has nothing to do with the military at all. Maybe they all knew each other or are related in some way, belong to some group together.”
“We should definitely see if they have anything in common,” he said.
“We can set up a time line when we get back, and we’ll do a family tree for each of them as well.”
And that was what they did. Now at his place, which they’d tested and found clean of bugs, he brought out a large poster board. He put it up on the wall and then started genealogy research on each of them.
By the time Kanen arrived, they had already done Max, Barney, and James, now working on Chester. Kanen stepped in, looked at the board and whistled. “Oh, that’s a good idea. Should also go into their hobbies and any clubs they belong to.”
“I’ve got Max’s phone number. We can call him at the hospital and see if he belongs to any clubs or has any hobbies. Even sports.”
Up went another poster board as they tried to track hobbies. Kanen sat down to do computer work on both James and Chester and, through social media sites, found out both were involved in the popular forums, both having accounts and responding to a lot of various posts. There didn’t appear to be a trend. Just active on Facebook, active on Instagram, posting a lot of photos of various things they did. But always alone.
“So both of them were alone. That makes Max the odd man out here because he has a wife and two daughters.”
“And his wife has visited the hospital, the security guard said,” Deli pointed out.
“What about Barney? Anybody know anything about his family history?”
“Single, never married, no children listed,” Kanen said.
“What’s the chance they belong to a singles club or an online dating program?” Deli asked, turning to look at Kanen excitedly. “Is that possible?”
Kanen shrugged. “Well, I can check a few.” And he bent back to his laptop.
She turned to Jackson. “There has to be something that connects them.”
“They could be car hobbyists or something,” Jackson reminded her. “James worked with you. So obviously mechanics was an interest. What we don’t know is what Chester’s interests were. And they may have nothing to do with Max and Barney.”
“Well, there was the shooting. That’s a pretty common thing between them,” she said drily.
“But,” Jackson added, “Barney was bent over in the truck. The shooter may not have even known he was there.”
Deli nodded. “It would be nice if we had the bullets. Will forensics let us know if the shots came from the same gun?”
“I’ll give Mason a call to see if he can wrangle that information. But I doubt that type of forensic information will be released until trial.” Jackson pulled out his phone and dialed Mason.
When he explained the favor, Mason said, “It’s probably way too early, but I’ll get on it.”
Jackson put his phone back on the table and heard his stomach grumble. “So maybe it’s my turn to provide lunch,” he said. He looked around the kitchen, realizing he didn’t have much food. “When we’re at Mason’s, we’ll fire up the barbecue and throw something on it.”
“If we’re at my place,” Kanen said, “it would be pizza all the way.”
“It’s my turn to make a meal.” Deli turned and walked back into the kitchen. “Provided I can find something, that is.”
Kanen looked at Jackson and raised an eyebrow. “Sounds good.”
Jackson shook his head at Kanen, murmuring, “Don’t go there.”
Chapter 10
Deli worked away in the kitchen, making sandwiches. There hadn’t been a whole lot of choice otherwise. But, with the men talking cheerfully behind her, and everybody pulling together as a team, she managed to create enough sandwiches to fill them up. She carried a large cutting board into the living room and set it down on the coffee table. The men stared at the stack she had created and cried out in joy.
“Oh, wow, there’s enough to feed us,” Kanen said. “Hey, Jackson, she’s a keeper.”
Expecting some snappy response back, she was surprised when she glanced over at Jackson’s face to see a thunderous frown as he glared at his friend. Kanen, on the other hand, had a big smirk on his face as he picked up a sandwich closest to him. It was obviously an inside joke. She wasn’t sure what it would take to become an insider herself, but she was happy to be included at this point and to help solve this nightmare.
James still caused her distress when she thought about him. She knew it was stupid. She didn’t even kn
ow him that well. But to think he’d been involved somehow and then had died for something he’d done, it was just difficult to process. She really wanted to make sure Max stayed safe. Not to mention Jackson and Kanen.
As she ate a sandwich, she studied the wall full of Jackson’s pictures of family and friends. “Are we considering what military groups and teams they might be on?” she asked.
Jackson looked at her and frowned. “Such as?”
“Clubs, sports competitions, that kind of stuff. You know? The base is a whole city in itself. What about medical? It’s not that they’d be part of a club, but they could have used the same doctor. For all you know, one of them managed to see a specialist and the other didn’t, or one got something paid for that the other didn’t. Same for education,” she said. “I know James was trying to get training to work higher.”
“What do you mean by higher?”
“Literally. Higher. He wanted to work on helicopters. But he was a truck mechanic.”
“So then you’re suggesting maybe somebody else also wanted to be a helicopter mechanic and may have gotten there before him?” Kanen asked doubtfully.
“No, I mean, maybe somebody else got funding that he didn’t get. Maybe the other guy doesn’t even know anything about him. Maybe James just got pissed off and said something to the wrong guy, or said that, you know, the other guy didn’t deserve it. Who knows?”
“I would admit that something like that is definitely possible if we were talking about only one murder,” Kanen explained. “It just seems like a stretch, considering all the scenarios.”
“Let’s think back to that day when I pulled into the truck stop and somebody shot the vehicle I was driving,” Jackson said. “That seemed very targeted. I highly doubt anybody knew I would be driving it. So it was either targeted at Chester, who is dead, or it was random.”
“Maybe they wanted to take Chester out at that spot. Maybe they were supposed to be part of a rendezvous and take him out down the road. He was supposed to drive that rig, not you.”
Jackson froze. “Actually,” he said, speaking slowly, trying to remember the details of what he’d heard. “I’m pretty sure another guy, a friend of Chester’s, was supposed to drive it in his place. At least he volunteered too.”
“Do you remember who it was?” Kanen asked. “Why are you just remembering this now?”
“I overheard a random conversation as the truck was loaded. I never heard a name,” Jackson said. “But I do remember a face. Tall, dark hair …”
“Then we need to find out who in Chester’s circle is tall and has dark hair. Which unfortunately is likely to be a lot of people.”
“What was the truck carrying?” Deli asked. “Maybe they were hoping to divert the truck or its contents.”
“I don’t know specifically what my rig carried,” Jackson said. “I was asked to drive it back to base. I hopped into it, started the engine and pulled in behind the convoy.”
“And we never checked it the entire time we were there either, did we?” Deli asked.
“No, I never did,” he said. He put the half sandwich down on his plate and settled back in his chair. “That would imply that somebody, such as this friend who volunteered, had set up a rendezvous. And, when they realized it was the wrong driver, they shot the vehicle, hoping to ambush it.”
“Which they did, but I’d already gone back to help you. So, instead of ambushing you, they would now have to deal with me too. And that might have pushed them a little bit too far. They took off, hoping maybe the gunfire would chase us away. Instead it brought more military down on their backs, which they dispatched quite easily.”
“We need to know what was in the back of that truck,” Kanen said.
“Even better,” she said, “I might be able to get into the truck. I wasn’t allowed to be there, but I checked it to see if there was more engine damage. I was concerned with the mechanics of the vehicle,” she said in disgust. “I never once checked to see what was in the back of the truck.”
“You also can’t count on the fact that whatever was in the back would still be there. And we don’t know to what lengths people will go to in this case. Maybe they just wanted the rig itself. Maybe it was supposed to be diverted to a whole new chop shop.”
“Maybe. But I think what it was carrying is more likely the goal.”
“We were on a training mission,” Jackson said. “How much in the way of valuable goods could there possibly be?”
“We’ve seen people murdered for twenty bucks,” Kanen said. “Let’s not diminish the value of what might have been involved there. If it was our weapons or any new tech, those would be worth a lot of money. And it could have been easy money made. Just sell off the arms. Maybe this is something they do on a regular basis. Maybe the payoff is only ten thousand dollars, pennies on the dollar, like when selling counterfeit money in exchange for real bills. But ten thousand dollars is a lot of money for some people. How do we find out what was in the rig, if its contents have already been removed?”
“The paperwork will have a manifest,” Deli said. “Everything is marked down as to who’s going where with what.”
Jackson grabbed his phone from the table and waggled it. “Mason again then?”
“You could try one of the others,” Kanen said. “Dane is in town. Swede is too. Even Tesla. Depending on what she’s doing right now.”
“Going directly to Tesla without going through Mason would get us in trouble,” Jackson said with a big grin.
“For that matter,” Kanen said, popping the last of his second sandwich into his mouth and standing, “I might be able to get into it.”
“Hacking the government database?” she asked in mock shock.
“Hardly,” he said. “I have somebody in the supply department. We’ll see if he can get me any answers.” He pulled out his phone, walked onto the small deck and started talking.
Deli looked at Jackson. “Do you guys know everybody everywhere?”
He shook his head. “No. But it does help to have friends in certain places. If somebody is stealing military goods, this is an easy way to find out.”
“Not really,” she said. “Not if they wanted to get away with the theft. The manifest would have listed everything.”
“Well then, the manifest would be a good way to keep track of which vehicle you wanted to put things in. But it doesn’t mean what was in that vehicle was only what was on that manifest.”
She stared at him in surprise, then slowly nodded. “In other words, there could have been a whole lot more in there that nobody knew about.” She thought about it and gave a quick nod. “Smart.”
Kanen came back in with a grin on his face. “He looked it up while I was on the phone. There were supplies, mostly camping gear, in that truck.”
“And has it all been removed?”
He nodded. “Another vehicle came into the shop where your rig was taken and removed all the gear from it.”
“Does he have confirmation that what was removed was actually what was on the manifest?”
“He never assumed anything different,” Kanen said. “But, if somebody is trying to steal stuff and get away with it, they wouldn’t mark anything that’s not on the manifest anyway.” He turned to Deli. “Any chance we can look at the security tapes from where that vehicle was emptied, see if anything extra was taken out?”
She stared at him in surprise, then slowly nodded. “Maybe. I do know the security guys. I’ve hassled them a time or two myself,” she admitted.
“Why?”
She winced. “At one point, I thought somebody was stealing tools from the navy garage.”
“Were they?”
“We had no proof,” she said. “There was some suspicion, but nothing that we could ever prove.”
“And who was it that you were suspicious of?”
She sighed heavily. “James.”
The two men looked at each other, looked at her and said together, “Bingo.”
; *
Jackson stared at her. “I guess, until we asked the right questions, it was hard to get the right answers.”
“I mentioned it earlier, how it happened like a year ago. I don’t think I mentioned James’s name,” she admitted. “Of course the MPs never got back to me about that initial investigation. And James still worked for the navy in the garage, but no more stolen tools were noticed, so I figured he had been cleared and just dismissed it from my mind.” She sighed. “And then with all this here lately, I was so hung up on James being dead, it never occurred to me that he might have been involved in something else. But, of course, we never had any proof of who stole the tools back then either,” she reminded Jackson. “The only one we ever caught on camera was him.”
“What was he doing?”
“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, acting weird. But he had nothing in his hands, and we couldn’t follow any of his movements to anything suspicious, other than his very own mannerisms.”
“Then let’s see if we can find someone who can give us a hand looking at the videos of that rig.”
“If we go to the base”—she looked at her watch—“I think Carney might still be there.”
“Carney?”
“One of the guys who handles security. He is the one I spoke to before, who ran the videos for me.”
“No point in sitting here,” Jackson said, hopping to his feet. He cleaned off the table, snagged his jacket and cell phone. “Let’s go.” He looked over at Kanen. “Are you coming?”
Kanen nodded. “Hell yeah. We need everybody on board to make sure nobody else gets killed. I’ll be in my truck behind you.”
On that note they dispersed to their vehicles. Jackson unlocked the Jeep, waited until Deli was in before he turned on the engine and slowly pulled out. “On to the base then. Which garage are we talking?”
She gave him the number.
“Any idea if the rig’s still there?”
“No, no idea,” she said. “We’ll find out when we get there.”
It took fifteen minutes. The traffic was light, the weather dark. And, even though he’d just eaten, he couldn’t stop thinking about dinnertime. And maybe he could sneak her away for a real date this time. He glanced at her, but her profile was set, as if she was angry at herself regarding James.