CHAPTER
53
SHE FOLLOWED HIM UP and they found a quiet spot and sat down in worn leather chairs. When she didn’t seem inclined to begin the conversation he said, “I obviously got your text, Lieutenant.”
“Please, just call me Barbara.”
“You can call me Puller. So I got your text.” He let this dangle.
“I know you’re investigating Matt Reynolds’s death.”
“Are you one of his coworkers? If so, someone forgot to tell me.”
“I’m not one of his coworkers. But I knew him. I knew him well.”
“So you were friends?”
“More than that. He and my father served together. He was a mentor and one of the main reasons I joined the service. I was a friend of his wife’s too. And I knew his kids. In fact, I babysat them when they were younger.”
“Then you have my condolences.”
“Was it as bad as… I’ve heard?”
“What did you hear?”
“That the whole family had been slaughtered.”
“Who told you that?”
“It was scuttlebutt. I’m not sure who told me.”
“It was pretty bad,” replied Puller.
“Okay,” she said shakily. She pulled out a tissue and dabbed at her eyes.
“As you noted, I’ve been assigned to find his killer.”
“I hope you do,” she said firmly.
“And I need all the help I can get.”
“I… I might be able to assist you.”
Puller opened his official notebook. “I need to know everything you can tell me.”
“It’s not too detailed. I knew that Matt and Stacey had been going back and forth to West Virginia to care for her ailing parents. They took the kids too. They hated it, of course. They were away from their friends, spending their summer in the middle of nowhere, but family is family. And Stacey was very close to her mom and dad.”
“I’m sure she was.”
“Matt commuted there on Friday and came back on Sunday to go back to work on Monday. He did that most weeks.”
“I know that. I talked to his commanding officer, General Carson.”
Strickland’s face flushed at this comment, but she hurried on. “He called me up about two weeks ago and said that he’d come across something in West Virginia that was really puzzling him.”
“In what way?”
“He wouldn’t go into detail, but from what he said he had stumbled onto something that was really serious.”
“Like maybe a drug operation?”
Puller didn’t normally like to interject anything into the conversation when questioning a witness, but his gut had told him to do it this time.
She looked at him strangely. “No, I don’t think it had anything to do with drugs.”
“What, then?”
“Something bigger than that. That involved other people. I could tell that he was a little scared, uncertain of what to do.”
“How did he stumble on this, as you said?”
“I think he learned about it from someone else.”
“And that person had stumbled onto it?”
“I’m not sure. It might have been that the person was already looking into it.”
Puller’s pen hovered over his notebook. “You mean like the police?”
“No, it wasn’t anyone in authority. I’m pretty sure of that. At least Matt never mentioned it.”
“Who, then?”
“Well, I think it was like someone working undercover.”
“But you just said it wasn’t the police.”
“Well, don’t the police sometimes use civilians in undercover operations, particularly if they have some inside connection to a target?”
“I guess they do. But then you’re talking drugs or maybe gunrunning.”
“I don’t think it was that, because I don’t think that would have scared Matt so much.”
“He had his family out there. He might have been nervous for them.”
“Maybe,” she said uncertainly.
“He ever tell you a name or give a description of this ‘undercover’ person?”
“No.”
“Did he say how he met the person?”
“Ran into them one day.”
“Why would they confide in him?”
“Because he was in uniform, I believe.”
“But if the person were working undercover they presumably would have already been working with the police. So why go to some guy in an Army uniform?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Strickland. “But I do know that Matt was involved somehow and he was really worried.”
“Where are you assigned?” he asked.
“I’m an analyst at DoD.”
“What do you analyze?”
“The Middle East, with an emphasis on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
“Ever been there?”
She shook her head. “No. I know you have. Many times.”
“It’s okay, Barbara. Some people make good analysts and some don’t.”
“And some people are good in combat. Like you.”
“Would you like to analyze a situation for me?”
She looked surprised but nodded gamely.
“When I was assigned this case I was told that it was unusual. Four bodies in another state, one of them a DIA colonel. Normally, we’d bring the heavy artillery on something like that. Multiple CID agents, tech support, even bring folks up from USACIL. But they sent just me because it was termed unusual. You got any idea why that would be the case?”
“DIA involvement?”
“But General Carson said nothing Reynolds was involved in would have been connected with his murder, so they couldn’t have been concerned about that. But the SecArm’s office even called down to the lab in Atlanta about the case. They seemed to think it was some hot stuff going on, and more than just the DIA angle. Why would they have thought that?”
“Because someone from DIA told them it was hot stuff and wanted to keep a close lid on it?” suggested Strickland.
“I was thinking the same thing. When I earlier mentioned General Carson your face changed color.”
Now Strickland turned pale.
Puller said, “It’s just stuff I tend to notice. Don’t take it personally. So tell me about the lady.”
“I don’t know her all that well.”
“I think you know her a lot better than I do. Tell me, would Reynolds have confided in her the same concerns he did to you?”
“Matt was a soldier’s soldier.”
“Meaning he followed chain of command. So he would have told her. And maybe she saw an opportunity to score a victory. An unexpected one that might get her the second star, especially if what Reynolds had stumbled onto had to do with national security matters. Is that plausible? Or am I barking up the wrong tree?”
Strickland bristled. “I think Julie Carson would crawl over the body of her dead mother to make major general.”
“So she’s that ambitious?”
“My experience in the military is that everyone who gets at least one star is that ambitious.”
“So she tells Reynolds to stay on the case. Interface with this undercover person. She smells that second star. But instead Reynolds and his family get wiped out. Now Carson’s sitting on a potential bomb. If the truth comes out not only will she not get the second, but the first star might get stripped.”
Strickland nodded. “She has to play cover-up. But she told you that Matt’s work at DIA had nothing to do with his death. That he wasn’t working on anything sensitive.”
“What else would she say? He headed up J23. That alone is enough to believe his work got him killed. He helps prep the Chairman’s daily briefing. And if someone called Carson on it, she’d just say she was walking the ‘need to know’ fence. Stonewall me, but count on the fact that Reynolds being DIA will be deemed to be the cause of his death. And she probably is hoping against hope that whatever really got Reynolds killed never comes out. Then she’s safe. Otherwise, she’s looking at a lot of explaining if it’s discovered that she kept the lid on something big in order to score professionally. She went for the home run and popped up to the shortstop.”
“It that’s true, she’s in real trouble.” Strickland looked almost gleeful.
Puller said, “My job is to nail a killer, not knock off a one-star from her chosen career path. She might have screwed up, and if she did she might have to pay the piper, but that’s not my goal, okay?”
The gleeful look fled Strickland’s features. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Have a second conversation with a certain one-star,” said Puller. “I appreciate your help, Lieutenant.”
Strickland again turned pale. “You won’t tell her it was…”
“No, I won’t.”