“But then, Agent Rossi came in and demanded that—”
“Goddammit!” Mia barks, placing her hands on her waist. “No one was supposed to—”
“Good thing he did,” the ME interrupts.
“What… how’s that?”
“And,” Yanez adds, “that he also demanded that I at least tried to ID the body. Since I was basically finished with your cut, I decided to indulge the man and pulled his John Doe out of the cooler and onto the next table. And guess what?”
“C’mon, Harry. Stop screwing around.”
“John Doe’s DNA is a perfect match to the DNA from the residue under Corporal Dawson’s fingernails.”
“What?”
“Yes.”
“Holy crap, Harry… that’s—”
“One hell of a coincidence that isn’t,” I say.
Mia nods emphatically and unknowingly pulls out a cigarette from her new pack and places it between her lips.
“Don’t,” Harry warns and waits while Mia removes it from her lips and slips it back inside the pack. Then he adds, “This is as good as it gets in my line of work. But that’s not even the best part.”
“Oh?”
“I had Jerry run his fingerprints through our database and got a match. Turns out that our John Doe has a different last name: Rourke.”
Yanez thumbs a couple of buttons on the remote control, and the screen changes to a military ID. It shows the photo of a clean-cut man in his mid-twenties.
“Please meet Sergeant John Rourke, Seventh U.S. Special Forces Group… who went MIA in Afghanistan in August of 2010.”
I rub my chin at the comment. Dix was also with the 7th SFG, but not until 2012, two years after Rourke presumably vanished. Another coincidence? But since Mia and I seem to be in coincidence overload, I decide to just make a mental note of that.
Yanez then adds in his forensic tone, “According to Jerry over there, who worked Rourke’s crime scene while I was busy working Dawson’s crime scene and before that Franklin’s, the Special Forces sergeant was alive and well yesterday.”
I look over at the kid still plugged into the computer, surprised—impressed actually—that he could work anything that isn’t digital. Then I say, “Alive and well until someone jumped in the rear of that stolen SUV and stabbed him to death.”
“MIA since 2010 but definitely KIA yesterday,” Mia adds. “And now Harry has placed Rourke in the apartment with Corporal Dawson last night.”
She then walks over to Rourke’s body on the pedestal table next to Dawson’s and lifts the sheet enough to reveal his face.
“And Lil’ T. has placed the missing sergeant in Harry’s morgue next to his victim, and squarely in the sights of my case.”
Chapter 17
“I need everything he has on the case,” Mia says, holding her pack of Marlboros while occupying the same chair in the NCIS Norfolk Field Office of Special Agent in Charge Roy Ledet, located on the second floor, where I sat this very morning.
I’m guessing the man must have been stationed overseas at some point in his career given the Asian decor, including a few Chinese paintings by the entrance, a bronze Buddha on the small conference table behind us, and a pair of hand-carved wooden dragons on the right side of his desk.
At least they look hand-carved to me.
“So first she screws me over and insults me, and now she wants to collaborate? Could someone please tell me what’s wrong with this picture?” Anthony Rossi counters, sitting in the adjacent chair. He just got back from the mess in Portsmouth to make this emergency meeting that Mia called.
I stand behind them.
The way I understand the NCIS organization—and mind you I’m still learning the ropes after six months on the job—is that the Portsmouth Regional Agency is subordinate to the Norfolk Field Office. And that should mean that Rossi is supposed to willingly yield any information he has on the murder case of Sergeant John Rourke.
But just as in the SEALs, the way things are supposed to work isn’t always the way they actually work. On the surface, it would be very easy to blame it on just good old agency politics. But the reality is that these residency agencies and resident units all operate based on congressional funding, which is allocated out of Quantico based on results, on metrics such as cases solved. And that has a tendency to promote the bad behavior I’m witnessing now: the sharing of information between units so they can outshine the others and thus get more budget dollars next year. And with that, also come promotions.
But I can tell that Ledet—who looks less a seasoned agent and more a polished politician with carefully-groomed silver hair, a handsome tan, and even an American flag pin on the lapel of his fitted dark suit—is trying a healthier angle, probably in the spirit of intra-agency cooperation.
“Look, Tony,” Ledet says. “The evidence that Harry dug up connects the cases and…” dropping his brows, he adds, “Where’s Harry, by the way?”
“Pegged,” Rossi replies. “He’s juggling dissecting the brains of Dawson and Franklin, processing Rourke, who killed Dawson, and now he’s handling a new double murder that just took place a couple of blocks from the Tidewater Yacht Marina. So, busy guy.”
“First time I heard about that last one—though I’ve been holed up in a quarterly review with Quantico. When did it happen?” Ledet asks.
“About an hour ago,” Rossi says, frowning before glancing at Mia and then me.
Ledet raises his open palms over the desk. “What the hell’s going on in Portsmouth, Tony? Is it a full moon?”
Rossi looks at Mia again. She sighs heavily and proceeds to give Ledet the ten-minute version of what went down as well as the events leading up to it, including everything I told her over brunch, or lunch, or whatever that was we did at The Big Kahuna Diner. But I’m grateful she decides to leave out my hollow-point guillotine deed.
And I’m actually impressed. Mia has one hell of a memory, recalling everything I’ve shared with her on my months-old private investigation.
“Damn,” Ledet says. “And you corroborate all that, Commander Pacheco?”
“Yes, sir. Every last word. Something’s rotten, and for better or for worse, we just peeled another layer of this onion in Portsmouth. We can now link the Agency collaborating with former Russian operators first in country and now on American soil. And it looks like there’s at least one brigadier general involved. I think this resulted in the murder of Major Norman in what the Air Force labeled as a training accident, and now the assassination of Captain Kerns at the hand of one of those Russian operators, who I’m pretty darn sure is the same Russian I saw that day in country working alongside CIA operatives. But I’m afraid that in getting this far, including contacting Kerns and taking out the driver of the van, we may have kicked the bear. There will be repercussions, overtly and also covertly.”
“When will we know more about this alleged Russian driver?”
Rossi leans forward. “Yanez is working the cut, running the prints and DNA through the system now.”
Ledet frowns, then lifts his hands an inch off his desk, palms up. “What about facial recognition and dental?”
Oh, boy.
Rossi exhales heavily, glances over his shoulder at me with a sorry-dude look, and says, “Not possible. The driver is… ah, missing most of his head.”
Ledet tilts his head forward a bit. “Missing… What are you talking about?”
“Shot fifteen times, sir. Nine in the head. With hollow-point forty-fives.”
“Christ,” Ledet mumbles, his eyes widening. “What the hell?”
Mia now looks at me in an I-told-you-so way.
“It appears,” Rossi elaborates, “that Commander Pacheco still thinks he’s in country smoking Talis.”
“I’m working on that with him,” Mia chooses to intervene.
Ledet looks at her
, then at me, before saying, “Okay. Okay. Let this be a lesson to you, Commander.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, I want a written report from each of you on my desk by the end of today,” he says. “If we’re going to look into this—meaning escalating to Quantico—I want to do it by the book. Clear?”
Rossi and I nod while Mia decides to pull out a cigarette from the pack.
“Seriously?” Ledet says, staring at her. “Get rid of it.”
She frowns and tries to slip it back inside the pack but it breaks in half.
“Shit,” she mumbles to herself, looking for a place to toss it as the thing crumbles in her hand. She quickly dumps it in what looks like a large ashtray on the corner of his desk.
“Goddammit!” Ledet explodes, leaning forward.
“What? You said, get rid of it. I got rid of it.”
“That’s a Chinese rice bowl from the end of the Ming Dynasty. Four hundred years old.”
“Oh,” she says, reaching for it, but Ledet beats her to it, picking up the ancient artifact and tossing its contents into a waste basket, before wiping it clean with his fingers and relocating it by the double dragons, beyond her reach.
Rossi is grinning at Mia, who doesn’t appear to give a damn.
“Alright,” Ledet says, leaning back, though I can tell that he’s either annoyed at Mia or maybe this new finding is starting to weigh on him.
My sixth sense tells me it’s probably the latter.
Yeah. Welcome to the party, Pal.
The man stares at his hands as he interlaces his fingers over his desk, as if he were praying. Then, slowly looking up he says, “Let’s go back to your other thread for a moment. The way I read this, a decorated USMC corporal, Jay Dawson, is caught on surveillance video stealing files from a VA hospital, just to end up dead in his apartment hours later, and the files are gone. And now the DNA under his fingerprints matches the DNA swabbed from the mouth of John Rourke, a murder being worked by the Portsmouth office, who happens to be an SFG sergeant who’s been MIA since 2010. And the files that Rourke stole from Dawson, who stole them from the VA Hospital, are then stolen once more by some mystery man, who allegedly murdered the thief who murdered the thief. And if this apparent lack of honor among thieves isn’t enough to give you a headache, the digital copies of the stolen files, which could have given us a clue why they might have been stolen, have been conveniently erased.”
Ledet then leans back, picks up one of the wooden dragons, dusts off its head, and sets it back down while adding, “But why stop there? Let’s add insult to injury by having Dawson’s theft at the Hampton VA take place just as Petty Officer Franklin had gone postal. And then we have Yanez’s report that they both show some weird brain anomaly that could have prompted their actions. I’d say this turns your investigations into a major case, and it adds a third component: Franklin, the shooter, which is Agent Howard’s case.”
Mia immediately leans forward. “Wait a moment, I—”
Ledet raises his right palm, as if he is about to take his oath of office. Mia leans back, crosses her arms, and just sinks in her chair.
With the same hand, he then stabs a button on his phone, says, “Let her in,” and leans back in his swivel leather chair.
A moment later, Beatriz steps in and waltzes up to the side of Rossi’s chair.
“Hey, Bea,” Rossi says. “Thanks for backing me up.”
“My pleasure. Sometimes the little people need to stick together to bring down a tyrant,” she says, before staring down at Mia with her pair of green lasers. The ends of those bee-stung lips, which today are painted a hue of red that makes them even more pronounced, curve up just a notch.
“Hey, Roy,” Mia finally says. “What the hell is she doing in—”
“Now,” Ledet adds, “I’d say that three dead American servicemen in less than twenty-four hours under highly suspicious, and likely related circumstances, turns this into a major case. Wouldn’t you say?”
Mia and Rossi exchange a glance and then look at Beatriz, who keeps staring at her former mentor.
Then tilting her head at Rossi, Beatriz says, “She did suggest to take our synchronized whining to San Ledet, right, Tony?”
“Damn right.”
“C’mon, Roy,” Mia starts. “You know I work better alone and—”
Clapping his hands, Ledet uses one of my favorite sayings from my SEAL days: “There is no “I” in teamwork, Mia, and it seems to me there’s plenty of work here for everyone. Or am I wrong? And on top of that we now have this new… incident in Portsmouth, which resulted in yet another dead serviceman. And while it might not be related to your ongoing cases, it does feel like rubbing salt into the wound.”
Mia leans forward again and is about to say something when Ledet, smiling a politician’s smile, shifts his gaze between the three special agents and says, “So, how about the three of you show Commander Pacheco here just how well Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agents collaborate? And you can do that by getting your heads out of your collective asses and dial down the territorial pissing contest so you can actually start to investigate.”
So much for the healthier angle.
Before any of them can reply, Ledet finishes with, “Now get the hell out of my office and don’t come back until you sort out this goddamned mess.”
Chapter 18
Fifteen minutes later, we’re huddled in a conference room on the first floor of the Norfolk Field Office, near the cubicle area where I was told my desk resides.
From the looks of it, though, I don’t think I’ll get to see it today, much less unpack the personal stuff I still have in that cardboard box in the back seat of my truck.
Rossi sits at the head of the table, where he’s trying to connect the back of his laptop to the cables that would link it to the large TV screen at the opposite end of the room.
Mia, who has been toying with the pack of Marlboros since we reached this room, sits to his right, next to Beatriz, who is fingering her phone. Neither has said a word to each other.
I sit across from them.
Rossi fiddles with the cables, then pecks at his laptop with two index fingers until he finally gets it to talk to the large monitor on the wall.
“Alright,” he says as the TV displays a frozen view of the four-way stop intersection in front of the bank. “Here we go.”
The image flickers and comes alive, showing cars cruising by in both directions. It’s night time, so the picture is a little grainy under what looks like street lights. He fast-forwards for about thirty seconds and then stops and advances the video in slow motion.
A black Cadillac Escalade SUV with tinted windows pulls up very slowly to the intersection and just stops there for almost a minute. A few cars honk and go around it. Then what appears to be a tall man wearing a hoodie rushes to the rear door on the driver’s side, but his back is to the camera. He gets in, closes it behind him, and thirty seconds later, he emerges through the opposite side, so his back remains to the camera, and finally he runs off. But it’s clear he is carrying a small box. The whole thing takes place quite rapidly, and I’m impressed at his fluidity. Expertly executed, almost SEAL style.
“There go the damn files,” Mia mumbles to herself.
The Escalade remains at the intersection, and it takes a good couple of minutes of more cars honking and going around it before a few people start approaching it.
“They came from a bar at the corner that’s just off camera,” Rossi clarifies.
A woman points at the windshield and another one dials on her phone. Over the course of the next minute, both women and three men approach the vehicle and peek through the side windows and windshield, but everybody backs away when they see Rourke dead behind the wheel. And after another minute, the video ends when the first police cruiser arrives at the scene.
“That’s it,” he says, stopping the video.
“Witnesses?” Beatriz and Mia ask in unison, before they stare at each other and frown.
Rossi shakes his head. “We’re still working it, but so far nothing. Here’s the best thing we have.” He rewinds the video to the moment the assassin approached the SUV, pauses it, and then zooms in on the rear side window, which provides a partial and very dim reflection of his face on the tinted glass. The hoodie is slightly pulled back as he is reaching for the door handle, revealing the very front of what looks like ash-blond hair, but the image is too blurry to make out a face.
But I have a pretty good feeling who it could be.
“I have tech cleaning it up so we can run it through the database and—”
“Casper,” I mumble to myself.
“What?” Mia asks while Beatriz looks in my direction.
“The bastard who shot Kerns had that color hair,” I add. “Like the Russki I saw outside Compound 35.”
“Just another coincidence that isn’t?” Mia says, reading my thoughts.
“Something like that.”
“Well, the bastard certainly knew where the camera was,” Beatriz says.
“Tech’s trying to clean it now,” Rossi repeats. “Maybe we can get enough for a partial. Also, it’s hard to tell from the video, but he’s wearing clear skintight gloves, so probably no prints. Ditto for Rourke. He was also wearing gloves.”
“So, it looks like both were pros, which adds to Law’s observation,” Mia says. “Anything else in the SUV?”
Rossi shakes his head again. “Clean. Nothing but the prints of the owner, who’d reported it missing earlier in the day. Stolen from a parking garage in D.C., and we have no useful video from that.”
“And the murder weapon?” asks Beatriz.
“Not in the vehicle or anywhere in the vicinity, so we assume he took it with him. Probably dropped it in the box he was hauling after he was through stabbing Rourke.”
“Terrific, Lil’ T.,” Mia says, leaning back in her chair and tapping the pack of cigarettes against her right temple. “We’re no better off than before we started to… collaborate.”
Highest Law: A Gripping Psychological Thriller Page 20