Walters quailed but hesitated long enough to save face. He wondered briefly if Deveroux was running a bluff. Unsure, he turned to comply. A pissed-off chief warrant officer on a personal assignment from the CG was not a stray cat that he wanted to grab by the tail; even Walters was smart enough to know that.
“And, lieutenant…yew can send that young specialist on over here as you go by, I can use some quality hep cleanin’ this here mess up,” Deveroux added, putting an extra spoonful of molasses in his accent. He smiled. “Thank you, sir.”
Walters didn’t look back or break stride. He’d look into taking some action against Deveroux later, but for now he wanted to distance himself from the CID agent as expeditiously as possible. He barked an order to the young soldier as he walked by on his way to the intersection, putting enough edge in his voice so that at least one person knew he was important.
Deveroux slowly made his way over to the side of the Buick, looking at the ground closely as he did. The car was partially off the gravel with one wheel in the grass, which was brittle and spare after a dry winter. In the packed dust around the passenger’s side and rear of the car, he could see at least six different shoe treads—all appeared fresh. He was still looking when the specialist reported.
“Sir, Specialist Scotty Law—you wanted to see me, sir?”
“Slow down there, bubba, yes, I did. First of all, Chief or Mr. Deveroux will work just fine—I like to think I work for a livin’; second, you got any bullets in that M-16 or do you carry it around just to attract the pretty girls?”
“Sir? I mean, Chief?”
“Your rifle, son. Your gun. Your best friend. Is it by any chance loaded?”
“Ahh, well…”
“Okay. Got it. I tell you what, I won’t tell anyone if you won’t…deal?”
“Hooah, sir.” His looked conveyed utter confusion.
Deveroux sighed. “Here’s what I need for you to do for me now. All these folks are engaged in what’s known in the textbooks as contaminatin’ a crime scene. Now, you can either find yourself some bullets and shoot all them folks with that gun of yours, just mow ’em down, or, alternatively, you can move ’em on back about a hundred meters—I don’t rightly care which—but get ’em off this crime scene. Now. Understood?”
Scotty Law didn’t quite snap to attention, but his body language implied that he didn’t need to be told a second time. He simply nodded and immediately set about pushing and directing the noisy crowd back.
Deveroux took a moment and finished scanning the ground. The unique imprint from his own worn Chuck Taylor’s, worn flat on the outside of each heel, stood in sharp contrast to the other footprints in the dust and minimized the risk of his contributing to the scene contamination. Nevertheless, he stepped carefully as he walked to the front of the driver’s side of the car. He glanced up at Specialist Law pushing the crowd back with newly found authority.
He could smell clotted blood now, and he heard the faint buzz of a dozen green-bottle flies. A second call from the office as he was leaving home had told him that he had either a suicide or a probable homicide on his hands. He looked through the windshield, cupping his hand near the glass to shade the glare while being careful not to touch the car. Covering what appeared to be a body on the front seat was a camouflaged army-issued poncho liner; its quilted, rip-stop material humped up in the center almost in the shape of a question mark. Another young MP—a buck sergeant this time—stood nearby, hands on his hips. He was watching Deveroux carefully and from a distance.
“You the first officer on the scene?” Deveroux asked, not looking up. He intentionally put a smile in his voice. Nothing can make an average Joe Soldier zip up faster than his thinking he’s stepped on his dick somehow.
“That’s right, Chief.” He’d obviously heard the exchange with Lieutenant Walters and didn’t need to be presented with any further credentials. “Got the call at approximately oh-nine-forty-five. About thirty, thirty-five minutes ago. Arrived to find a Sergeant Roscoe Charles here, pretty shaken up. He’s the one who actually found the body. I got a statement from him and his address—then I let him go on to his quarters before he puked all over everything. He lives here on post if you need to talk to him some more.”
Deveroux frowned and mumbled as he pulled two latex gloves from his rear pocket. He kept a box in his truck for situations like this and had grabbed a couple as he parked. He snapped them on and then opened the car door. “What’s that?” He nodded at the poncho liner as he looked at the sergeant.
“Poncho liner.”
Deveroux’s expression clearly indicated that he knew what a military poncho liner looked like. It also indicated that he might be inclined to share that information with the young MP.
“Sorry, Chief,” the sergeant quickly corrected, seeing the warrant officer’s face. “All sorts of people been here.”
Deveroux looked over at the crowd, now assembled a football field away. “So I see.”
“Yes, sir, Chief. Lot of people. I figured they didn’t need to be around this…” He made a look with his face to convey the unpleasantness of the situation. “You know.”
“’Course that’s the problem, ain’t it? All these people around; they shouldn’t have been here in the first place.”
“Chief, I’m just Sergeant Joe Snuffy. Lieutenant Walters, he—”
Deveroux put his hand up to indicate that no explanation was needed. With the car door wide open he shifted his position a foot or two to take in the scene from a slightly different angle. He bent at the waist and dipped his head. “Tell me, Sarge, would that be your poncho liner?”
“Like I told you, Chief, I figured people didn’t need to see all the…blood and all.”
“Roger that. Cover it up. Of course, like I said, another approach might have been to keep all them people away and leave the body here untouched.” He stepped forward to look more closely into the front seat of the car, careful where he placed his foot so as to not disturb any evidence. “So tell me, Sergeant, you have any reason to kill this here fella? He owe you some poker money maybe? Romancin’ your wife?”
The sergeant looked as if he’d been jolted with a car battery. “What? You mean me, personally? Why? No…I mean…no, sir. Why would you say that? I don’t know this man. I mean—”
Deveroux interrupted. “I only say that because we’re gonna send this evidence down to the lab in Georgia, and my guess is that they’re gonna find your hairs on this here liner. Probably some trunk fibers from your car and maybe some of your dog’s dandruff—you got a dog?”
“Sir, I—”
“A man needs a dog. Yessir, who knows what all they’ll find when they start goin’ over this here body with their little tweezers and cotton swabs. Amazin’ what those crime scene folks can do with some tweezers. Best forensic lab in the world, they say. I believe ’em too. I just wanted to know if you had a good alibi is all.”
“Ah shit, Chief. Yeah, I mean they might find my hairs on the body and all, but that’s because it’s my poncho liner…but listen here, that don’t mean I…”
“Calm down, cowboy. Calm down.” Deveroux smiled as he snugged up his gloves, snapping the latex against his wrist. “You can bleed off some of that steam. Just makin’ a point, which I reckon you get by now. The point is, this scene is way too dirty.”
The sergeant took a deep breath and relaxed. Class time was over.
“So, let’s take a look see, shall we?” Deveroux’s knees popped as he knelt. He gently lifted the corner of the poncho liner.
All the wind left his lungs.
“That’s why I covered him,” the sergeant remarked quietly, seeing the look on Deveroux’s face.
“Holy Jesus,” Deveroux said. “The man’s been scalped.”
CHAPTER 17
Fort Campbell, Kentucky
SUNDAY, APRIL 6, 2008
It was Sunday morning and Chief Warrant Officer Shuck Deveroux was at his office, humped over his desk, rather than at home. In
fact, he hadn’t been home since depositing his children the day before, as the stubble on his face and the stuporous red in his eyes testified. The investigation initiated the previous morning had rapidly spiraled out of control despite Deveroux’s best efforts to keep the lid screwed down tight. The problem was that he was stationed at Fort Campbell, not Fort Apache, and it was 2008 not 1876, and middle-aged men being found scalped in the park tended to be an unusual occurrence, and unusual events have the ability to bring out the earthly stupids in people. To start with, the deputy commander had ordered the post locked down, apparently in fear that Crazy Horse and his painted warriors might try to escape capture, and on an early spring Saturday that was about the best recipe for what the military called a cluster fuck that anyone could order up. Even after more logical heads prevailed and got the gates opened and the vehicles flowing again, traffic remained snarled well into the evening. Of course, with no leads, no suspects, no description of a vehicle, closing the post down two or three hours after the crime had probably occurred had served no purpose. None whatsoever.
The victim was presumptively identified as a civilian from Nashville. The medical examiner announced that he wouldn’t have a dental ID before Monday noon, but a wallet found in the victim’s pocket suggested that he was a sixty-seven-year-old Asian male named Trinh Han, and that he owned a chain of dry-cleaning and laundry shops in downtown Nashville and the surrounding area. What he was doing on post was unclear, but a PX card found among his things offered some explanation, that and the fact that he had a lucrative dry-cleaning contract with the military. A check with the front gate revealed that a Mr. Trinh Han had obtained a visitor’s pass for his ’99 Buick Park Avenue shortly before 6:00 A.M. What happened next was precisely the question that Shuck Deveroux had been working on for the last twenty-some sleepless hours.
In fact, Deveroux had spent most of the remaining morning and afternoon, while the evidence techs worked over the car with their little vacuum cleaners and tweezers and cotton swabs, trying to locate anyone who knew something or had seen something. Anything. On an installation the size of Campbell—home of the 101st Airborne—with soldiers jogging at all times of the night and day, it was hard to believe that no one had seen anything. Deveroux had never personally scalped anyone, but he had gutted his share of deer over the years and that particular activity had led him to figure that taking the top of someone’s head off had to involve some commotion—but no one seemed to have seen or heard a thing. The scene itself offered little more promise. The lab results would take a while, but a cursory examination revealed little physical evidence. There were fingerprints all over the car, of course, but then what car wasn’t covered with fingerprints? His own truck had “Wash Me” and “Dirt Devil” and a dozen smiley faces—written and drawn in the dust on the hood and fender—none by his finger. Mr. Trinh Han’s car, while perhaps cleaner, had no reason to be different. A bloody partial palm print on the back of the seat looked promising at first, but the consensus was that it wouldn’t be readable. There were no usable tire tracks and way too many shoe prints—most of them seeming to match Lieutenant Walters’s size-seven boot soles—to offer any real leads. There was no bloody tomahawk, no coup stick, no witnesses, no nothing.
Just an elderly dead Vietnamese dry cleaner now shy of some hair.
The afternoon saw all official attempts to contact Trinh Han’s family, assuming he had some, coming up unsuccessful. One of Deveroux’s NCOs had accompanied a couple of Nashville detectives to Han’s house, but found no one at home. Nashville PD unenthusiastically agreed to work that scene if necessary. In the meantime, Deveroux had put a call through to INS to run immigration records to see what could be turned up. He doubted that many sixty-seven-year-old men named Trinh Han were native-born in the Volunteer State, and that meant there might be some record of his entry into the United States, but it was Saturday, and even with calling in some markers, it probably was going to take a while.
His evening was spent on the phone with the Armed Forces medical examiner in Washington, the FBI, and the Nashville police trying to work out who was going to get stuck to the jurisdictional flypaper. No one seemed eager to draw the short straw on this one, and it was resolved finally with no clear resolution. The AFME, overworked from the bodies coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, had happily found a jurisdictional rabbit hole to dive into. The Nashville medical examiner’s office was equally unenthusiastic, but finally agreed to take the body for safekeeping, but he also made it clear that he would assume no jurisdictional interest, nor even perform an autopsy, until someone officially established the body to be a Nashville native—and even then he was leaving room to look the other way. The FBI considered getting involved until Deveroux described the contaminated crime scene and pointed out that there didn’t seem to be a single shred of promising evidence. Then they remembered how thinly they were stretched at the moment. The temptation to assume responsibility for a case that someone else has cocked up, and for which another agency can be made to look utterly foolish if the floor gives way, is hard to resist, but only if you can solve it. In the end, the FBI resisted the temptation, and in the end, Chief Warrant Officer Shuck Deveroux was left with his tongue frozen to the flagpole.
The cork in the bottle was a midnight briefing with Fort Campbell’s commanding general in which Deveroux had gotten to say at least a dozen times that he didn’t have the slightest lead in the case, and in which the general had gotten to say—just once—that he’d better find one quickly or confess to the murder himself. One way or the other, this was to be put to bed, and soon.
So Sunday morning broke with Deveroux humped over his desk, the wrinkles in his shirt matching the pattern of lines under his eyes.
“Hey, Chief. Why am I not surprised?” Special Agent Dave Pagano said as he walked into the office. He was a toe-walker whose heels rarely touched the floor, and he seemed to bounce with each step. “When I heard about it last night, I figured you’d get the call. Man, if it ain’t shit to be you.”
Deveroux looked up from the stack of papers on his desk. His eyes had glazed over an hour or so earlier, and he was searching the recesses of his skull for an angle on the case and finding none. “Nice of you to show up. Called you a dozen times yesterday.”
“Yeah. Damn cell phone of mine won’t hold a charge for more than an hour. Crapped out midway over to Knox the other day,” Pagano said over his shoulder as he poured some coffee into a stained ceramic mug that read NYSP Williams Homicide Seminar. He’d returned the night before from a three-day trip to Fort Knox where he’d gone to pick up a young soldier who seemed to have forgotten that he was stationed at Fort Campbell.
“That’s why God made rechargers,” Deveroux answered.
“Maybe.” Pagano slurped loudly as he took a seat in front of Deveroux’s desk. “But at my age, the number of things I can remember is limited. It was either fresh underwear or my phone charger. Don’t have enough brain cells left for both.” He slurped again. “But enough about me. The TV said you shut the base down. That right?”
“Whole garrison locked down for three hours yesterday mornin’.”
“Jesus, I’ll bet that made for pleasant driving. Gimme details.”
Deveroux took a deep breath and held it as he leaned back in his chair. He exhaled slowly through his nose as he searched for the loose end that would best unravel the story. “Homicide. Bad one. Some young sergeant scoutin’ out a place for a barbecue yesterday mornin’. Early. What does he find for his trouble but a dead body. And not only a dead body, mind you, but a civilian body. On base.”
“You get the initial call?”
“I wish. Lieutenant Walters was already there when I got there. You know him? Fat little chucklehead MP whose gut covers his belt buckle?”
“Yeah, yeah. Had the pleasure. Don’t laugh, though, I hear he’s on the list for promotion. Screw up, move up. Good news is that he’s also transferring in a couple of weeks. He gets to go be an instructor at the MP
school.”
“Great. That’s just what the New Army needs. What was it Genghis Khan said?”
“Hmm. Can’t say that I remember Genghis Khan being known for his speeches.”
“Shows the limits of your schoolin’. He said somethin’ about every man havin’ a purpose in life, even if it’s just to serve as a bad example.”
“I like that. At least Walters’ll be a bad example somewhere else.”
“That’s some consolation. Anyway, he gets to the scene first and instead of doin’ anythin’ constructive—like secure the area—he commences to walk all over everythin’ that’s not vertical. Next thing I know, the CG calls me in—by name, mind you—and tells me to get it fixed.”
“Like I said, my friend, sure is shit to be you.” Pagano smiled broadly and propped his feet on the corner of Deveroux’s desk. “By the looks of you, I’m guessing that the old man’s in for some disappointing news when you brief him. Need help?”
“Of course. I don’t have lead one.”
“Like I say, shit to be you. But, damn, Shuck, I swear to God, lately it’s like we’re living in the Wild West around this place. First Knox and now here.”
It took a minute to register. Deveroux was still filtering information through the thick wad of moist cotton that no sleep had packed into his head. “Say again? What you mean? First Knox?” He leaned forward and knocked Pagano’s feet off his desk.
Pagano’s boots hit the deck loudly, and his coffee sloshed out onto his lap. “Shit, Deveroux. What the fuck, over?” He brushed at the wet drops with the back of his hand.
“What does ‘first Knox’ mean?”
“I meeeeean, first Knox. I was talking to Chief Sallot and his bunch over there yesterday, and they were telling me about a case they had a few months back. Before Thanksgiving; October, maybe. Some old vet and his grandkids taking in the exhibits at the Patton Museum. Finds some real-life action by one of the old tanks outside—you know that big Russian one? They say it looked like someone had taken a machete to the guy’s head. Blood and shit allllll over.”
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