Danger Close (John Taylor #7) - Chapter 7

After giving the body and scene a thorough once over with Chenier, Whitaker declared she had what she needed, and he could take over the scene. When it came to this kind of thing, she was the expert, so Taylor didn’t question her. The body didn’t have a lot to tell them, in his opinion, since they knew whoever did it was the same person who’d done the others. He was confident that meant they’d leave the same lack of evidence on the body as they had on the other murders.

He was more interested in the evidence they did have, namely the lack of information on how the black marketeers had gotten into both the warehouse and the holding cell. The lack of evidence was evidence in of itself, since both had been very similar. He was confident that if they dug enough, they’d be able to close in on whoever had managed to compromise base security.

First, he had to inform the general about the murder of their prisoner. Taylor was surprised by how well Lane had taken the news. Taylor couldn’t blame him for being so resigned to investigations going off the rails. Considering the six failed investigations before theirs, it had probably become routine by this point for everyone involved.

That didn’t mean the general wasn’t furious that a man had died in custody on the base. Even after this investigation wrapped up, he understood that there’d be all kinds of red tape to deal with that. Lane was also a good man and took the death of any of his personnel seriously, but to his credit, he didn’t start making demands or sticking his fingers into the investigation like so many others Taylor had seen panic during a crisis.

It was all too common for mediocre leaders to take action because they wanted to be seen to be doing something rather than because it was the right thing to do, ultimately causing more problems down the line. Lane, thankfully, didn’t seem to be this type of commander. Although he didn’t start assigning blame, he voiced his dissatisfaction and made sure Taylor and Whitaker still had a direction to go with their investigation. That confirmed that he wished them luck and got out of their way.

Taylor couldn’t help but marvel at the poor decision-making the army always seemed to have. He’d seen several one stars who’d panicked and sent men into places unprepared, getting good soldiers killed, still serving in combat commands, while men like Lane, who seemed to have the right temperament for the job, got shuffled off to training posts in the middle of nowhere. He wasn’t surprised, since that was par for the course, but it still bugged him even though he’d been out for several years.

“He said to let him know if we need anything,” Taylor said, hanging up the phone.

Whitaker was scrolling through records, her face pushed into one hand, looking angry and frustrated.

“What we need is to go see the IT guys on base. If we were in Washington, I’d get someone from Quantico to explain what we’re looking at and make sense of it for us.”

“Can we trust someone on base to help us? We know the ring has someone in tech services, right? It’s the only way they’ve managed to pull this off. Without having a guess who that is, anyone we talk to could end up leading us on a wild goose chase or destroying the info as soon as we start asking questions. I’m not a fan of talking to them without knowing more.”

“I know what you mean, but what other choices do we have? We could get someone from outside to come examine their systems, but they’ll figure out what we’re looking for and start destroying evidence.”

“That is a problem. I’d hoped you’d know a guy.”

“Not really. When we need someone connected to intel, or who can tell us about explosives, I can dig up a guy; but someone to dig into computer systems? Not so much. Do you know who might have access to this kind of thing? Chenier.”

“I thought we’d already agreed that his office was hopelessly compromised, since every single investigation he’s run got compromised.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think he’s the problem. If we can convince him to play it close to the vest, though …”

“We can’t talk to him in his office.”

“I know. Invite him to dinner in town. Let’s get off base. We’ll pick someplace noisy enough to not be overheard, and explain what we need.”

The invitation was harder to manage than either Taylor or Whitaker imagined it would be. Chenier was instantly suspicious why they’d suddenly decided to ask him to go have dinner, and doubly so when they insisted that it be in town.

Like any investigator worth their salt, he started instantly probing, trying to find out what he was missing. Finally, Taylor had to come out and tell him it was important and he needed to stop asking questions. To his credit, Chenier picked up on it and agreed, showing up at their temporary offices a few minutes later.

The three of them drove into town in silence. Whitaker and Taylor were quiet because they didn’t trust the car they’d been assigned, and Chenier because he was taking the lead from the two of them.

Taylor headed to the opposite side of town from the base until he found a little bar damn near the edge of town. It was barely a step above a broken-down shack and didn’t look to have anything in the way of a military presence, which was exactly what Taylor had wanted.

Inside there was nothing but locals, who collectively eyed the three of them suspiciously. Even if they hadn’t worked out who Taylor and Whitaker were, it was hard to miss Chenier in his BDUs. The local’s response was exactly what Taylor wanted, since it was unlikely anyone here was connected with someone on base. Besides, the music was loud, which Taylor had also wanted.

Since this wasn’t the kind of place that had waitresses, the three of them headed to the bar and ordered beers before finding a table in the far corner of the small building to sit at. With the loud music and cautious-looking locals, this didn’t seem like the kind of place where being overheard would be a big issue, but Taylor still wanted a buffer.

“Okay, what’s this all about?” Chenier asked when they were finally seated.

“We need your help, but we need to keep it to just you. No one on your staff can know what you’re doing,” Whitaker said.

“You can trust my staff!” Chenier said, sounding offended.

“No, we can’t,” Taylor said. “You’ve had leaks in every investigation. This only happens if someone inside your house is compromised. You should be happy we don’t think it’s you.”

“I should, should I?” He asked, still sounding annoyed. “I take it that’s why we’re in this dive right now?”

“Yes. Whoever these people are, they’ve got their fingers into everything on the base. They shouldn’t have been able to get in and out of your brig like that, and we want to know how they did it.”

“So do I. What do you think we’re doing?”

“Chenier, if your team is compromised, how likely do you think it is that they’re going to find something? If there is someone dirty, they’re going to know where you’re looking and know what to cover up.”

“What do you expect me to do, run the investigation by myself?”

“Actually,” Taylor said. “That’s exactly what we’re expecting.”

“How the hell …?”

“We’re not talking about you running the whole thing by yourself,” Whitaker said, shooting Taylor a look. “What we need is someone who can look into the code used on the door locks at both the warehouse and the brig. Whoever got in left no trace either time, and we want to know how, and why. Clearly, they have someone in tech services who is opening doors for them. We’re hoping they’re leaving a trace behind them when they do it.”

“And how exactly do you expect me to find that out without letting this person in tech services know about it.”

“You’re a smart guy, Chenier,” Taylor said. “I’m sure you’ve got contacts or people somewhere off base who’ll know how to get that for you. Bring in whatever help you need, just make sure it’s not on base and no one on base knows they’re doing it.”

“You don’t ask for much, do you?”

“Only what’s needed. Now, while you’re …” Taylor started to say before his cell phone rang, interrupting him.

“This is Taylor.”

“Agent Taylor, this is Sheriff Martin. We’ve got another body I think you’re going to want to look at.”

Taylor left Chenier back at the base to find what he could about the hole in base security systems while he and Whitaker followed the Sheriff’s directions heading through town and out the other side, into the desert. They found the Sheriff and one of her deputies in a small dip two-hundred feet off the road, just hidden from view by the small rise that preceded the drop-off.

They’d had a long day and both Whitaker and Taylor were exhausted, but both of them knew they were at a precipice. They’d played their hand with the cash and lost their only lead from it, outside of the mysterious security loopholes. If they didn’t get another one, things were going to start getting very difficult very quickly.

“What do you have?” Taylor asked as they walked down the slope towards the body.

“One of yours,” she said, standing a few feet back from the body, which looked to still be how’d they’d found it.

Animals had been at the corpse and the face was a mess, but everything else was still pretty fresh and supported the Sheriff’s statement. The victim had on army BDUs and the one shoulder Taylor could see did suggest the uniform had come from the base, based on the arm patch. The body was on its side and he couldn’t see if the name tape was still in place, but unless the uniform was stolen and stuck on this poor guy, it was one of theirs, or at least the army’s. Taylor did note that, aside from the animals, there didn’t look like there’d been much damage to the body. He bet that, once the MPs finished processing the scene and rolled the body, they’d find the throat slashed just like the realtor.

Taylor opened his mouth to ask a question when his phone rang again, “What?”

“I think I found a guy that can look through the computer systems here, but we might not need to go that far. A corporal assigned to tech services was UA this morning. I sent the guys to check out his rack, and it doesn’t look slept in. Usually, that means he got lucky in town and lost track of time, but considering what we’re looking into …”

“Who is he?”

“Andy Deteau. He transferred to the unit about a year ago. No flags in the record, but he’s been here long enough.”

“Brown hair, fair complexion and on the short side, like five-five or five-six.”

“That was a frighteningly good guess.”

“Wasn’t a guess, I’m pretty sure I’m looking at his body. We’re going to have to wait for prints or maybe dental if his hands are in as bad shape as his face, but it’d be a wild coincidence if this were someone else.”

“So they knew you were looking into him after all?”

“Maybe, although after two miraculous entries so close together, the second one into the brig where a prisoner was murdered, they might have just figured that we’d get here eventually.”

“So call off my contact?”

“No. I still want someone to go over the base’s systems. Someone else might be involved and I want to know what other systems they might have gotten into. I don’t want any more people slipping in and out of areas without us knowing about it.”

“I’ll get him working on it.”

“Send Whitaker his file.”

Taylor hung up and looked at the Sheriff, “I think we’ve got an ID. Did you call the base to come pick up the body?”

“Yep, right after calling you. Sounds like this guy was part of whatever’s going on up there?”

“He was a person of interest in an unrelated investigation,” Whitaker said.

“That sure sounded like a ‘yes’ to me. While you two are down here, I have someone I’d like you to come see.”

“We really need to …” Whitaker started to say before being interrupted by Taylor.

“Sure. I guess your deputy here can stay with the body until the MPs get here to retrieve it.”

“Yeah. Fred, you got this?”

“Sure, Cristina. Y’all go on.”

“You two follow me then,” she said, walking back up towards her car.

“You don’t think we should be running down this guy?” Whitaker asked when the Sheriff was out of earshot.

“I do, but I think we should get someone at the Bureau to look into this kid’s background. I still feel like we’re missing something, and maybe the Sheriff’s thing will help point us in the right direction.”

“Is that the only reason you want to follow her?”

Taylor stopped and looked at her, eyebrows raised in surprise, “Are you jealous?”

“No. I just can’t help but notice that you normally don’t listen to anyone else’s theories, mine included, and just kind of barrel along doing your own thing. Now you’re ready to go ‘find out what she has’ without even knowing what she wants to show us?”

Taylor thought about taking another shot at Whitaker’s newfound jealousy, but thought better of it. For one, she could kick his ass if she wanted to, and for the other, she wasn’t wrong. This was a little out of character for him.

“Normally, we have some thread we can follow. We’ve had people on the inside of our investigations before, but they’ve never been this thorough in blocking us. I’m hoping that, if whatever she has is connected, it’s not something anyone on the army base knows about. I’d hoped playing it close and only you and me knowing what we were doing was going to be enough, but it wasn’t. We need to find a way to do an end-run around these guys, or we’re going to end up just like Chenier. A bunch of failed investigations and nothing to show for it but more bodies.”

“Fine. Well, I hope it’s good, because we don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

“We do if we can’t find a new lead, ‘cause we’re quickly running out of paths to investigate. Call your people and have them start looking into this guy. Hopefully, they’ll have something for us when we finish with the Sheriff.”

The Sheriff’s thing turned out to be a drive back towards the police station, or around behind it, more specifically. Through a side door, They found a small room not much bigger than a very large walk-in closet with medical equipment and a few locked freezer drawers against the far back wall.

Taylor recognized a morgue, although this might be the smallest one he’d ever seen, and seemed to double as an autopsy and storage room all at the same time. An older man in a doctor’s coat was standing by the far wall next to the cold storage, one of the drawers open, looking over a body while making notes on a clipboard.

“This is Doc Ashton. He actually covers the whole county, but I called him to make an extra swing through here while I still had you folks in town.”

“I’ve been making a lot of extra stops here, lately,” the doctor said. “You two must be the FBI agents she’s told me about.”

“You’re not based from here?” Taylor asked.

“No. I’ve actually based out one county over, since there isn’t enough work out here for a full-time medical examiner, even for the entire county. Although if this keeps up, that might have to change.”

“So the Sheriff said you had something to show us?”

“I do,” he said, shutting the door to the cooler.

He walked over to one side of the room and picked up a large cardboard crate that looked filled with folders. Setting it up on the examining table in the center of the room, he proceeded to pull out several files from the top and lay them out across the table, each one opened.

“Like I said, if this keeps up this town might have to get its own full-time medical examiner. I’ve actually had to have a college take over some of the work in my home county to cover cases there, since I’ve been here so much. I say that to clarify that I’m the one who has examined every single case over the last three years. These are the two cases the Army has said it accepts as connected to an ongoing investigation on the base itself. You’ll notice these are copies, which I’m glad I made, since the Army confiscated all of my original files on these cases.”

He held his hand over two files that were sitting separately from the other files. After a beat, he moved his hand over the other five files.

“These are five of the nine murders that happened in this period that the Army declared were completely unconnected to those two murders.”

“I thought the sheriff said there were nine murders in that time period in addition to the two the army claimed,” Whitaker said.

“There were and I’ll get there in one second, if you’ll bear with me.”

When Whitaker twirled her hand in a ‘continue’ gesture, the doctor picked up one of the files and handed it to her.

“This was Cynthia Garcia. She was a dancer at the County Line where she performed under the name Stardust. I’ll leave it to Sheriff Martin to explain the forensic similarities between her case and the two the army accepted, although I understand there were numerous things that matched both crime scenes. What I wanted to address was the physical evidence on the body and that of these two cases. The victim died by a single, swift cut to the neck in all three, with the blade cutting the carotid artery. There are no defensive wounds on the body. In fact, the only other damage that was done was when the body dropped to the ground after the killer released the victim. He didn’t set the person down, just let go and stepped away, letting the body drop and bleed out where it fell.”

“So she was efficiently killed,” Whitaker said. “I’ve worked a lot of murder investigations over the years, and it isn’t like that’s unheard of.”

“True, it does happen, although it’s not all that prevalent. For one, it takes someone confident in what they’re doing and comfortable with the act to do it this efficiently. There’s no hesitancy. The blade doesn’t get stuck on the spinal cord from cutting too deep. It’s a single, pull, made in one fluid motion. That takes practice.”

“So maybe he’s in a trade that works with knives. We’re not that far out of a good deal of ranch land. Butchers, ranchers, and serious hunters have the skill to bleed out a kill,” Taylor said.

“Maybe, but butchers don’t normally slaughter living subjects that are moving around. Now, maybe you’re going to say the murderer worked in a slaughterhouse. Aside from the fact that there are no slaughterhouses in this area, I’ll also point out that even if that was the case, he did it in such a way that the victim never had a chance to respond. He pulled the head back, exposed the neck, and sliced, quickly enough that the victim never reacted. They weren’t held in locks, necks exposed, ready for the kill.”

“What about hunters? I’ve had to finish off downed deer before, and even the wounded ones can put up a fight. You have to get in there and bleed them fast, without getting kicked or cut up.”

“I still don’t buy it. Look at the curve to the cut. High here, sloping down, and then back up with the motion of the arm. Hunters reach down and cut in a motion that pushes away from the body. This requires a pulling in motion, which is the opposite, and without the leverage you get when you’re above the victim. Also, none of that takes into account the time factor. For there to be no defensive wounds at all, it would have happened in a split second. The attacker stood behind the victim and in one motion they moved in, grabbed, lifted the knife, cut, and stepped away. That takes training.”

“What, so you’re saying it was a soldier?”

“Maybe. You people are trained in this kind of thing and there’s an army base at our doorstep. Occam’s razor and all that.”

“You understand the only people stationed at the base long term are administrative staff, right? The units rotate in and their officers run them through the exercises, then they rotate out. These murders have happened over three years and most units are there for a few weeks or a month on the outside.”

“Administrative staff must still get some of the same training.”

“We don’t learn this kind of thing in basic. When I say administrative staff I mean motor pool, cooks, and logistics personal. They’re not SEALS. No one’s teaching them to sneak up on a target and take them down with a knife from behind.”

“Fine, that’s all beside my original point.”

“Which was?” Whitaker asked.

“The cut was the same across these two cases, the ones the Army has taken credit for. Each case is nearly identical. If you wanted to say one, maybe two of these other cases were just coincidences, I’d have to accept that, but across nine murders? That stretches all belief.”

“It’s not just the murders themselves,” the Sheriff said. “I’m assuming you’ve seen everything the Army has on the two murders they’ve admitted were connected?”

“Yes,” Whitaker said.

“Do me a favor. Let’s walk back to my office. I know Captain Chenier didn’t want to look at what we had, but I think you need to. Sit down and read through everything we have on these nine. Not just the autopsies, but the whole thing. I think you’re going to find they share more things than just the way they were murdered. It’s easy to write off as a coincidence when you look at just one case, like the Army’s been doing, but all together? Like the doctor said, it stretches all belief.”

“I don’t …”

“Fine,” Taylor said, interrupting Whitaker’s objection.

“Go ahead, we’ll catch up,” Whitaker said.

As she walked out the door the Sheriff said, “Just come by and look at the files. It’d be nice to have one person from the base listen to me for five minutes.”

Taylor had to assume she’d gotten the brush off a lot over the last three years. He also knew what Whitaker was going to say. She was a good investigator, but she had a bad habit of writing off any opinions by locals as amateur and a waste of time. That went doubly for cops who got elected to their positions like sheriffs, who she considered little more than uninformed politicians.

“You think we should just go back to the base, right?”

“Yes. They’re frustrated and looking for something to pin this on. I get what the doctor said, but I’ve seen a lot of cut-throats that look like that. You don’t have to be trained by the army to know how to do it. Every scene we’ve seen so far, the victim was clearly talking to the killer before they were killed. He didn’t have to sneak up on anyone, just make them comfortable enough to turn their backs. Besides, we know they did Corporal Evans and his body was a completely different MO. This isn’t someone with a signature, it’s a criminal enterprise. They’re not killing to fill some kind of sick void.”

“Then why are all the murders besides Evans like this? Isn’t it weird for a criminal enterprise to kill every victim the same way?”

“Sure, but that could just be them sending a message. Maybe the cut-throat is part of the threat, like ‘this is what happens when you talk.’ The cartels use repeating methods all the time to send messages.”

“I still think it’s worth a look. The Sheriff’s right, having all these murders with the same cause of death is weird, especially in a small town like this. You said it yourself yesterday, we’re missing something.”

“I didn’t mean more bodies. We need answers, not a bigger caseload.”

“Let’s just hear her out. Even if we agree they may not be connected, we don’t have to tell her right away, all right? We can save that for the army once we’ve worked everything else.”

“Fine, but let’s make it fast. We both know the dead tech was the guy we were looking for, which also means they’ve effectively killed every lead we have so far. Right now, we’re dead in the water.”

“Maybe this’ll give us something new to go on.”

Whitaker’s look made it clear she didn’t buy his optimism.