M-9

by Marvin J. Wolf

  “Meaning that it was set afire?”

  Malone looked at the page again. “'Destroyed by fire.’ That’s all it says. It’s been hauled to Hueneme. If you want to get in touch with the NCIS Agent there, I can call him for you.”

  “No need. We have the report,” Will replied. “After that, I’m going back to talk to Dunahoo. Do you want to come with me?”

  Malone shook his head. “If he doesn’t give you full cooperation, let me know.”

  Fifty-eight

  Will found Dunahoo sitting in one of the pickups, drinking coffee from a Thermos and eating a sandwich with 7-11 logos on its wrapper.

  “Back already, officer?” he asked.

  “It’s Detective,” Will replied, with a tight smile. “I understand that one of your vehicles was stolen a few days ago?”

  “That’s right. Sheriff’s deputies found it yesterday in a gully off the Pearblossom Highway, all burned up.”

  “An hour ago, when we spoke, you didn’t think that it was important to mention this?”

  Dunahoo shook his massive head. “You said that a white pickup was seen in the vicinity of the gas station when it blew up. I told you what I knew about that.”

  “Let’s put that aside for now,” Will said. “Whose truck was stolen, and when can I talk to this man?”

  “It’s a new day in the Navy, Detective. Petty Officer Second Class Sharon Marshall is out on the job site pouring concrete. It’s about time for a break, anyway, so I’ll call her in for you.”

  Dunahoo finished his sandwich in two bites, swallowed some coffee, then pulled a walkie-talkie off the dashboard.

  “Attention on deck,” he said, and on the job site, a loudspeaker repeated his words with a tiny echo. “Take ten. The smoking lamp is lit. Field strip all butts. Petty Officer Marshall, report to the Master Chief, in the parking lot.”

  Marshall was tall and willowy, with large hands, sunburned cheeks beneath her hard hat, and an endearing, gap-tooth smile.

  “Marshall, this is Detective Spaulding from Barstow police. He wants to know about how you lost your truck,” Dunahoo said.

  “I told the NCIS agent at Hueneme everything I could remember,” she said.

  Will took out the manila folder that Chelmin had left for him with photos of Flores and the rest of his crew.

  “While you were at that motel, did you see any of these men?” Will asked and laid the photos on the hood of the pickup truck, one at a time. Dunahoo peered over Miller’s shoulder as the pictures were displayed.

  “What’s wrong with those men?” Marshall asked. “Are they...”

  “Dead,” Will said. “Except for these two, yes, they’re now dead.”

  Marshall bit her lip and looked at the pictures again. Then she stabbed one with her finger. Then another.

  “Those guys were in the parking lot.”

  “When was this?”

  “The night my truck was stolen. And the morning before, I think.”

  “Did you leave the keys in it?”

  Marshall bit her lip again and shook her head. “No. No. I told the Master Chief, and I told the NCIS agent, and now I’ll tell you. I took my personal stuff, locked the vehicle, and went to my room to shower and change. When I came out, forty or fifty minutes later, the truck was gone.”

  Will scooped the pictures back into the envelope.

  “Thank you, Petty Officer,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that the men you picked out were part of a street gang that stole your truck.”

  “Well, who are they? Why are they dead?”

  Will thumbed through the photos and pulled out one of the two that Marshall had selected.

  “Franklin Flowers, AKA Felon. He ran the crew.”

  He pulled out the second photo. “Darwin ‘Travieso’ Maldonado. He fired the RPG that wiped out the gas station. And fired it again at the Criminal Courts Building in San Berdoo. They were both shot dead by a federal agent.”

  Marshall’s eyes grew bigger. “That was when that judge and the others were killed?”

  Will nodded, yes. “Here’s the thing, Petty Officer. They were gangbangers. Street thugs, drug dealers, robbers. I’m sure that those two, or anyone in that crew, could easily have broken into and hotwired your truck. They do stuff like that all the time.

  “If you need me to call your commanding officer and tell him that, I’d be happy to tell him the same thing.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Dunahoo said. “And thanks. I wouldn’t like to see Marshall get jammed up for something that wasn’t her fault.”

  “Why would they want to take my truck and then just torch it?” Marshall said.

  “They used the truck to get onto this base and steal some weapons from the museum.”

  Dunahoo nodded. “Sure. All they’d need with that truck is a driver wearing utilities. You can buy those uniforms at any Army-Navy store. There’s one in Victorville, right on the main drag. The MPs would wave him right through. Same thing leaving the base.”

  Will asked, “Do you think the MPs would have noticed whether the driver was wearing a Marine uniform or if he was in a Seabee outfit?”

  Dunahoo shook his head. “Only difference is the insignia. And the hard hat. You can get a hard hat easy enough. I’ve got seven Marines detailed to this project, and sometimes they drive our pickups.”

  “Why do you have Marines?” Will asked.

  “We’re shorthanded, especially for carpenters. You can make a lot of money working construction in California these days. I asked the Marines for experienced carpenters, and several volunteered.”

  Fifty-nine

  Will parked in front of the NCIS office and called Chelmin.

  “I’m on the road,” Chelmin said by way of greeting, “heading back down to Santa Ana.”

  “I have an update on the white pickup,” Will said.

  “You find it?”

  “Sort of. I’m pretty sure that it was a Navy vehicle. Stolen from a Seabee from the parking lot of her motel in Victorville. It turned up yesterday in a gully near Pearblossom, which is up by Edwards Air Force Base. It had been torched. So, the pickup, and the Marine in it—that’s a dead end.”

  “What was the Seabee doing at that motel?”

  “She’s a petty officer, and she’s working on a big construction project here at the Marine base. They don’t have enough living quarters for all the Seabees. So, some are on per diem and staying in motels. And boss, I showed her the pictures of the Flowers crew, and she picked out Flowers and Maldonado. Said she saw them in the parking lot.”

  “What’s your impression of this woman?”

  “I think she’s telling the truth.”

  “Check her out. Call her commanding officer and find out where she’s from, where she grew up. If it was in Southern California, I’ll want to talk to her.”

  “Got it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I’m going to interview a guy that Kendra said was stalking her. He’s here, on the base.”

  “Who did Kendra tell about this guy?”

  “I don’t know yet. But she posted his picture on her Facebook page and had some unfriendly things to say about him. That’s where I got his name.”

  “Check him out before you interview him.”

  “Got it. You coming back tonight?”

  “Don’t wait up. I’ll call you if anything changes.”

  “Got it.”

  “Out,” Chelmin said and broke the connection.

  §

  Malone was out when Will returned to the NCIS office. Brenda gave Will the phone number of the Seabee battalion’s headquarters at Port Hueneme.

  “Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

  Will said, “Uh, no thanks. I’m coffeed out today.”

  Granting Will another little smile, Brenda looked up Eugene Alter in the base directory. He worked in the Information Technology Center, in the same building that Kendra Farrell had worked in, but three floors below her Data Entry office
.

  “Do you think I could look at his personnel file?”

  Brenda frowned. “I’m sorry, but Marc—Special Agent Malone—will have to make the request,” she said. “I’m not allowed.”

  “What if you called and asked for a few particulars?”

  “Like what?”

  “Date of birth, local residence, employment history for, say, the last five years?”

  Brenda shook her head. “They don’t like to give out personal information on the phone.”

  Will smiled. “I’ll go see the Human Resources folks. Where are they, exactly?”

  §

  Human Resources was a half-mile away, a low building sandwiched between warehouses. Will’s badge got him a meeting with Paige Raye, the records supervisor, a slender, pretty, black woman about Will’s age, who gestured him to a chair, listened to what he needed, and smiled.

  “Unless you have a federal warrant, I can’t let you look at his file, but I may be able to answer some questions.”

  “Thanks,” Will said. “How about his age, local address, his job on the base, and how long he’s been here. And where he was previously.”

  “That’s doable,” Raye replied. “Wait right here.”

  Ten minutes ticked by until Raye returned with a thick records jacket and opened it.

  “I apologize for taking so long. The records were not in the right spot. Someone borrowed them and returned them, but they hadn’t been re-filed yet.”

  “I’m not in a hurry,” Will said, as Raye opened the file jacket and scanned the first document.

  “Eugene Leonard Alter, 52, lives at 40 Desert Mirage Drive, Apartment 510, in Barstow.”

  Will remained silent, but his mind was processing that: He and Kendra lived in different apartments in the same building.”

  Raye continued, “He’s a GS-12 System Engineer. Has worked here for, let’s see, a little over seven years. Before that, he was with Qualcomm in San Diego.”

  “Does he have a security clearance?” said Will.

  The woman turned a few pages. “Yes, but I can’t tell you what it is.”

  “You’ve been very helpful,” Will said and got up.

  §

  The fact that Alter had a security clearance meant that he almost certainly had never been arrested for a felony or convicted of a misdemeanor. It meant that he likely did not use drugs. But that’s all it meant. Plenty of people with security clearances had committed serious crimes after receiving their clearance.

  Instead of heading to Alter’s office, Will decided to pay a visit to his apartment. He still had the key card, electronic gate opener, and keys that Gelber had left him. Again, he parked in the underground garage and rode the elevator to the fifth floor.

  Apartment 510 was at the opposite end of the hallway from Kendra’s place. Will knocked, waited, knocked a second time, then used the passkey to enter.

  The apartment was a mirror image of Kendra’s but with nicer furniture and a laminate floor instead of rugs. It was well-kept, with no obvious dust or clutter. The bedroom was neat and clean: the bed was made, a wicker hamper in the bathroom was half-filled with soiled clothing, and the bath towels were fresh.

  Will found a laptop computer in the bedroom, but it was secured with a combination lock and a steel cable that went into the wall. He inspected it carefully: In almost a year as a detective and four as a patrolman, he had never seen a laptop secured in this manner.

  On his way back to the base, Will thought about what he had seen in the apartment. Taken as a whole, it reflected a highly organized and disciplined mind.

  The kind of mind that could pull off a murder and dispose of a body by sending it far, far away.

  Sixty

  Will found Eugene Alter in his cubicle in the Data Processing Building, flashed his CID badge, handed him a paper cup of coffee and invited him to join him in the conference room.

  This was a tiny space, almost filled with a table and four chairs, but it had a window that could be partly opened for ventilation.

  “You didn’t come here just to bring me coffee,” said Alter, a big, soft, man with owlish eyeglasses who was losing a battle with baldness. He was nicely dressed in pressed slacks, a white shirt and tie, and a sports jacket that looked new.

  Will smiled, took a pull on his own coffee, and pulled out his notebook and a blue pen.

  “I’m no Luddite, but I don’t understand what you do here. What does a system engineer do on this base?”

  Alter smiled and sat back in his chair. “This base is to the Marine Corps, well, kind of what Amazon.com is to the American consumer. Whatever you need, you find it on their Website, order it, pay for it with a credit or debit card, and Amazon ships it to you. We do the same sort of things for the Marine Corps. Amazon has an amazing IT structure, with all kinds of specialized software applications, computer servers, backup servers, and so on and so forth. They have computer systems that purchase goods from manufacturers and wholesalers, warehouse them or ship them expeditiously to the consumer. They have other systems for their internal operations.

  “We have a similar setup: much smaller but far more secure. Amazon is connected to the Internet. Our system, the accounting, inventory, billing, and shipping part, is air-gapped—isolated—from the Internet. Can’t be hacked from the outside.

  “Well, system engineers designed that setup. How many computers, what kind, how many servers, where to put them, what kind of software and applications to install, who gets access to what, which computers talk to each other, backup systems, and the whole Information-Technology suite. And of course, it changes almost daily. The pace of hardware innovation is very fast, but software evolves even faster. System engineers find new applications, new hardware, test it, customize it, purchase it, install it, secure it, train operators to use it, and meanwhile maintain the whole mess, in whole and in part. That’s what I do. I supervise a small group—six engineers now—that tests and modifies software for one part of our system, the end-user interface.”

  Will sat back in his chair, scratched his head, smiled. “I’d like to talk to you about Kendra Farrell’s car,” he said and watched Alter shrink back in horror.

  “I don’t… I honestly don’t know what got into me,” he said, tears forming in his eyes.

  “Rage—that would cover it, don’t you think?” Will said in a matter-of-fact way.

  “But I’m not like that,” Alter whispered. “I don’t ... am I under arrest?”

  “Not yet. Tell me about the car. Why did you do that?”

  Alter removed his spectacles and put his face in his hands and started to sob. Will gave him two minutes, then rapped softly on the table.

  “If you’re done, I’d like to speak to you as one adult to another,” he said, curiously aware that Alter was almost old enough to be his father.

  Alter took out a handkerchief, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and put his glasses back on. “Sorry,” he said. “She meant the world to me, and I ... I drove her away.”

  “Is that why you killed her?” Will asked softly, watching Alter’s face.

  “What? No, No, No! I never laid a hand on her. What are you talking about? Didn’t she move to Texas?”

  Will shook his head. He took an envelope out of his coat, took out an autopsy photo and laid it before Alter.

  “My God, my God,” he sobbed. “I didn’t know. What happened to her?”

  “What I’m most curious about is how you got her on that boxcar. A boxcar filled with boxes of Army skivvy shorts.”

  Alter looked blank. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Let’s put that aside for now. Tell me about the car. What was that all about?”

  Alter again buried his face in his hands. “I just didn’t want her to go. I tore up her car so that she’d have to stay here, or else she’d have to try to get an airplane ticket, only it was almost Christmas and all the flights were booked full. I thought that maybe if she stayed even a few more days, we co
uld talk this through, and then she wouldn’t move to Texas.”

  “Why did she want to move to Texas?”

  “I’m not sure. Really, it was all very strange. We went on vacation to Costa Rica, and then right in the middle of our vacation, she said that she had to leave. Wouldn’t even let me take her to the airport. I thought that was very odd.”

  Will said, “Hold on a minute, Alter. For openers, when was this? And why were you in Costa Rica in the first place? What’s the attraction?”

  “That’s part of the strangeness. We had been talking about going away together for a few days. Over last Thanksgiving. Maybe Puerto Vallarta, Cancun, Cabo San Lucas—someplace with sun, nice hotels, good food, beaches, where we could relax.”

  “But you wound up in Costa Rica?”

  “Yes. That was very sudden. We were dating—we live in the same building, but I have my own apartment—and we usually drove to work together. No reason to take both cars, really.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, she picks me up after work, and she looks awful. Like she had been crying. And she says, ‘Forget about Mexico. Let’s go to San Jose, instead.'”

  “San Jose? You’ve lost me.”

  “Exactly. I thought she was talking about San Jose, California. But she wanted to go to, Costa Rica.”

  “Why?”

  “She said it could be a real adventure. A beautiful country, many English-speakers, inexpensive, and instead of sitting on a beach, we could explore new places. And that maybe, it might be a place where we could retire to, if, you know, we were to get married.”

  “So, you were talking about marriage?”

  “No, no. We’d only been dating a few months. It was very pleasant, you understand, but until that moment, we’d never actually talked about it, about marriage.”

  “Did marriage scare you, Alter?”

  “No, no... Well, maybe a little. I’m divorced. I’m putting two kids through college on a GS-12’s salary. I wanted Kendra in my life, but I wasn’t quite ready to assume the burdens of marriage. Buy another house, you know. Things like that.”