by Scott Blade
“He radioed the Coast Guard. There’s a tape.”
“He told them what he was going to do?”
Dayard nodded, said, “He said that he wanted us to find the boat. He didn’t want me to think that it had been stolen.”
Silence fell over the room.
Dayard fidgeted his fingers and then moved his hand across the top of his pajamas. He felt around a breast pocket that was empty, like he was looking for cigarettes.
He didn’t find any.
I was sure that he did this out of habit more than anything else. The nurse probably was constantly taking them away from him, or maybe not.
Dayard said, “They played the recording in court. At my other son’s trial.”
“Why did they do that? Talbern asked.
“The prosecution thought that it would show James was disturbed. They wanted to show that psychotic tendencies ran in my family. All a part of the evidence against him.”
“The defense allowed that?”
“They believed that it might help James’s case. Like the traumatic loss of killing his mother in childbirth and then his brother committing suicide had traumatized him so much that he started killing those women.”
Dayard paused for a moment and then he said, “It was all crap!”
Talbern said, “Mr. Secretary, the FBI already knows all of this.”
He didn’t respond.
She said, “Why are we here?”
He seemed to get upset. His gray eyebrows furrowed and he turned a shade of red like he was boiling over.
But he maintained a calm voice. He said, “You found another body?”
Talbern looked confused and said, “No, sir.”
Then Dayard looked confused. He asked, “Then why is your agency reopening the case?”
“We’re not,” Talbern lied.
Dayard looked at me for an answer. But my face remained the same.
“Agent Talbern, I know that your agency has renewed interest.”
Silence.
“For God’s sake! My son will be executed in two days! You can save his life!”
Talbern was gripping my arm. Her nails were cut short, but they still dug into my skin.
Dayard took a breath and paused a moment. Then he said, “I know that you found something. Now, I don’t know what.”
He stopped at the “what” like he was giving Talbern a moment to respond. A notable tactic used in undercover interrogation, also known as subtle interrogation.
When a cop is undercover, it is impossible to traditionally interrogate assets. So typically, subtle interrogation tactics are employed. Lead someone in a conversation. Make them feel a part of it. You say this and that. Leave off information that they know and nine times out of ten they’ll volunteer it.
Talbern didn’t give anything away.
She stayed silent.
Dayard said, “Whatever you have found can at least get him a stay of execution.”
“All I can tell you, sir, is that the FBI will do everything that it can to follow the law and make sure that justice is done.”
Dayard rested the palms of his hands on the armrests of the chair. He stretched his fingers out.
He nodded and said, “The official position.”
We said nothing.
He looked away for a long moment. Another scene that felt rehearsed. There was something almost cinematic about him.
The guy had a presence, even if he was a shell of the two-star general that I imagined he used to be.
He turned back to us and asked, “Talbern, will you excuse us for a moment?”
She stayed where she was and then she said, “Yes.”
Talbern looked at me, nodded, and then she got up and left the room.
“Widow, can I be honest with you?”
“I hope so, sir.”
“I saw your records.”
“Seems like everyone is doing that tonight.”
“Your records are the reason that I know you found a new dog tag.”
I stayed quiet.
“The FBI ran your Navy records. As you know, some of your records are classified beyond classified.”
I nodded.
“That set off some red flags. Obviously.”
“You’re not in the Navy, General.”
“No. I’m not. But the Navy answers to the same department as the Army and the Air Force and the Marine Corps.”
I sat back on the sofa, crossed my foot over my knee.
“The DOD.”
“The Department of Defense,” he said, nodding. “Know who is in charge of the DOD?”
“The current secretary of defense.”
“The current secretary was on my team, way back when I was in charge. He owes me. And he knew my son.”
“He called you.”
“He called me.”
“He told you about the dog tags.”
“No. Actually, he referred me to the MPs in Graham down in Florida. I called there, personally and spoke to a guy named Hamilton. He told me. The FBI doesn’t work for me, but the Army sure as hell used to.”
Silence. I noticed the tears in his eyes had dried up and now he was showing me the face of a former general. Some remnants of the face he used to show his officers when he was barking orders at them. I was certain.
“You’re not in the Army, but you were a sailor for fifteen years.”
“Sixteen, but only four. Technically.” I said. “I was in the NCIS for thirteen. I wasn’t technically in the military any more. I was civilian.”
“That’s sixteen years that you were deployed with military men. As far as I’m concerned you’re one of us. You were a SEAL. That’s even more one of us.”
I nodded. He wasn’t wrong about that point.
I said, “Look, I’m just a guy now. I don’t work for the military anymore.”
“Aren’t you helping the FBI?”
“Yeah, but that’s against my will.”
“They’re forcing you?”
“They were using handcuffs.”
He said, “Isn’t the Navy SEAL slogan ‘All in, all the time’? Something like that?”
I nodded and said, “We’ve got a lot of slogans. Another is ‘Don’t run to your death.’ ”
“I need your help.”
I sat there.
“If you found another dog tag, then another girl has been killed.”
I looked away from him and glanced around the room again.
Dayard grabbed the photo of his family again. He showed it to me, again.
“Look at them!”
I looked.
“James is the only one left. I’ve got cancer, Widow.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, with nothing else really to say.
“It’s bad. I’m not going to live through the year. My son is the only person left in my family.
“Widow, he’s innocent. I know he is!”
“What do you want me to do?”
“The FBI thinks he’s guilty. They think that he killed one of their own during a raid.”
“I was told that.”
“They’re not going to pursue this. They don’t care if he dies. They want it all shut down. Case closed.”
Dayard took another deep breath and coughed briefly and then he asked, “Did you look over the case files?”
“I saw what they gave me.”
“Looking at your records, you were a brilliant investigator. What did you see?”
“I was an undercover operative. I didn’t investigate crimes in the traditional way. You need to trust the FBI on this.”
“What did you see?”
I paused for a moment and wondered if I should tell him anything about it. Was I authorized to share information? Then I thought he probably already knew most of it because there had been a trial.
“I saw the bodies. Read about the women.”
“All the murders were the same?”
“Not the same. Nothing is ever the same. But close enough.
”
“Same murderer?”
“That part is obvious. Has to be.”
“Why do you think so?”
“The dog tag. The fact that the women were all AWOL.”
“And that none of that stuff was reported?”
I half nodded and said, “The AWOL part was written about before the trial.”
“But the FBI never released that information. It was put together by the media.”
I shrugged.
“What I’m asking is, don’t you agree that the killer of these women is all the same man?”
I shrugged.
“What kind of chance is there that a random killer, a stranger to the real killer, would duplicate the dog tags? How would anyone know about that?”
“People talk.”
“That’s not likely. The juror was under orders by the judge. Even after they leave trial they can’t reveal that information.”
“You can’t police that.”
“Don’t you think that my son deserves a second look? If you did find a new dog tag, then he should get the stay of execution.”
I said nothing.
“Just do this old man a favor. Look into it for me. Look at how they got to him.”
I stared at Dayard’s face, hard. He was genuine, but any father would be.
Then I looked down at the coffee table, thought for a moment.
How did they catch Dayard?
I thought back to the files that I read. They tracked the bodies being dumped out of the old harbor in Portland. It used to be the main port after the American Revolution.
Times change. Cities grow. Needs change. Now, there was a huge port, and boat harbors all over the place.
I closed my eyes and recalled the text in my head.
Marksy and Lowe had gotten to Dayard’s boat. This was a part of their investigation that I liked. They were desperate for a crack in the case. So, they reached out to the US Coast Guard, who in turn referred them to the US Navy.
The Navy used good old-fashioned seaway patterning to search for a pattern for the dumping of the bodies, only the “old-fashioned” part was mixed with drones. They narrowed the seaways down to Portland, which led to nothing because Portland had thousands of boats and ships, corporate and private.
But they cross-referenced the passages of boats around a stretch of waterway called the Chickadee Pass.
They narrowed the killer’s routes down to this pass because it was an area that was both hardly traveled, giving the killer privacy, and it was at the apex of the dumping patterns. It made sense to rank it high on the list of pattern searches.
Two things stuck out to Marksy and Lowe and the sailors helping them. First, was that they were positive the killer was passing through Chickadee Pass. The odds were almost certain of it.
The second thing was that the year they caught the killer, the Maine State Congress had passed a bill protecting the Chickadee Pass from divers, fisherman, and even boats from passing through it.
The Chickadee Pass was a very small area of water, several miles from the coastline, north of Portland. It got its name because there was a little uninhabited island that was a major migration outpost for the black-capped chickadee.
The black-capped chickadee is Maine’s official state bird.
The island was declared a protected habitat of the bird. That led to the Coast Guard monitoring the area with drones that would fly over at least once a day.
As luck would have it, they spotted the Dayard family boat passing through a few times, enough to parallel it with the discovery of a body.
Marksy and Lowe didn’t want to wait on surveillance because there was a woman missing.
This wasn’t in the report, but I imagined they wanted to save her life. Catching a murderer and saving one of the victims all in one raid was a prize for law enforcement. So rarely did we ever get to see both the look on a rescued victim’s face as well as the total disappointment on a criminal’s face before he’s read his rights.
I knew the desire to feeling this. I had had that feeling.
That’s how they discovered the Dayard boat. The tracked it to an old dock among hundreds of boats.
They raided it. Lowe was shot in the process.
The killer got away.
I opened my eyes. Beyond that, I didn’t know any more details about that night.
The report had no more detail.
Secretary Dayard stared at me with hope in his eyes.
“Please, Widow help us.”
Don’t run to your death.
I nodded and said, “I’ll do what I can.”
“Thank you! Thank you!”
I stood up, stretched my legs.
Dayard also stood up.
He reached his hand out to shake mine. I took it and shook it. The whole thing felt like a gentleman’s deal. Like a pledge.
I walked out of the room, left him in the doorway.
Dayard spoke to Clayton, alone. I met Talbern downstairs.
“What did he say?”
“What do you think?”
“He wants you to prove his son is innocent in less than two days?”
I asked, “What time is it?”
Talbern took out her cellphone. She unlocked it with a passcode and ignored a text from Kelvin, as well as several missed calls from him.
She noticed that I noticed and she said, “I texted him what was going on. When they first asked me to get in the car.”
I nodded.
“It’s almost two-thirty.”
“We’d better get back.”
“Are you going to help?”
“I already told Pawn I would.”
“Yeah, but that was to help us find Karen Dekker. What about Dayard? You going to help him too?”
“I don’t care about him. He’s had a long life. I only want to find this girl alive. Let’s save her life. If we can prove along the way that his kid is innocent, then great.”
“We need to get back.”
“I need some sleep.”
She said, “So do I.”
After a couple of minutes, Clayton came down and said, “Come with me.”
We followed him back through the huge house and to the Agusta AW139 helicopter. The pilot was already in the cockpit. The rotor blades started spinning when he saw us exit the manor.
We flew back to New York. This time. It was just Clayton, me and Talbern and the pilot.
The same driver from earlier waited for us at JFK.
Clayton walked us to the car. He didn’t get in. He waited for me and said, “I got to get back. But here’s my card. That’s my personal cellphone. Call me anytime. This is very important to Secretary Dayard.”
I looked at the card and then at the shadows that covered his eyes.
“This says retired Secret Service?”
“I’m not with the Service anymore. Just head of Dayard’s security.”
“Are all of your guys retired?”
“We’re all private. Technically. Dayard isn’t in public life anymore. Therefore, he doesn’t get Secret Service protection.”
“You guys all look the part.”
“We all were. Every man that works with me, I hand selected.”
“Why so many guards?”
He stopped, looked at the top of the car, said, “Dayard had a long career. He made some enemies. Plus, the whole thing with his son has brought some hate mail and such. Why?”
“If his son is innocent, then I have to look at every possibility.”
He nodded and rapped on the trunk lid of the car, signaling to the driver to head out.
“You have a good night. Thanks for helping us out.”
I nodded and got into the car. We drove away from the airport. We sat in silence the whole way back to the hotel, but Talbern sat close to me.
At the hotel, we got out of the car. Didn’t say a word to the driver. We went up to my room.
Talbern came in, which I wasn’t expecting. She sat down on th
e bed.
“What did Kelvin say?”
“I didn’t tell him yet. Just told him that we were approached by the Secret Service.”
“They weren’t Secret Service.”
“What?”
“Not technically. Clayton told me all those guys are former agents. Now, they’re private.”
“He showed me a badge!”
“It’s probably real. Probably never turned it back in whenever he left the service.”
“They have to!”
“No. They’re supposed to. Not the same. It doesn’t matter anyway. They would’ve gotten us to speak with them no matter what. Dayard has a lot of connections.”
“So he mentioned. Did you know him before tonight?”
“I heard of him. He reached the rank of two-star. He was armored division. Had a solid reputation. Best I knew.”
I yawned, which I hadn’t meant to. But Talbern saw it.
She said, “We should get some sleep.”
I paused a moment because a part of me was hoping that she meant together, but I knew that was a stupid thought.
I nodded.
“What’s the next step?” I asked.
“Tomorrow, we should check in with Pawn and then I guess brief with Marksy. Maybe we should go see Dayard. The son.”
“What for?”
“Don’t you think that you should meet with him? See what you think of him?”
“Not sure. I’m not buying he’s this innocent pawn who got arrested by mistake. Marksy’s notes are pretty thorough. She seems like a good agent.”
“What about the killer murdering her husband?”
“What about it?” I asked.
“Makes for a compelling argument as to why she might be blinded to the facts of the case.”
“Maybe. But Pawn said there was an entire task force involved. They wouldn’t have just let her go rogue. Blame some sucker for the whole thing.”
I paused another long beat.
“What is it?”
“I didn’t read why they picked Dayard.”
“You didn’t read the whole thing about how they connected the boat? It was because of a bird.”
“I read that part. I mean. That night they tried to raid the boat. It’s presumed that the killer was onboard. He shot Lowe and got away. But they never saw his face.”
“Right.”
“So how does Marksy know it was him?”
“She saw him. It says that in the report.”
“It does? I missed that part. But is that all?”