Never Back Down

by William Casey Moreton

  Caspian ran the tip of his tongue along his lower lip, but said nothing. Sweat was in his eyes now. The heat in the concrete room was almost unbearable.

  Smith waited a full minute, then he again squatted with the bolt cutters in his hand and squeezed until the bone popped.

  61

  They turned north onto Maroon Road and followed a muddy Jeep Wrangler all the way to the highway. Maggie drove into town as Coburn glanced up at Aspen Mountain. The lifts were shut down and the chairs hung motionless against the early afternoon sky.

  “Lunch?” Maggie asked.

  “Absolutely.” Coburn glanced behind him at Sabrina.

  She nodded. “Starving,” she said.

  Thunder boomed over the mountains. Wisps of cloud had moved in. The sky threatened rain but managed to provide only a few light sprinkles.

  Maggie parked beside a Saab with police markings. It was Aspen’s version of a squad car. They went inside and sat at the bar and ordered burgers. Maggie was friends with the owner and introduced him as Pete.

  Coburn placed the photo of Brian Ripley flat on the bar.

  “What do you make of it?” Sabrina asked.

  “He was a Marine. Special Ops.”

  “Does that answer any questions?”

  Coburn nodded. “But it also deepens the mystery. He was Special Ops, no doubt about it. So, does that have anything to do with why he disappeared fifteen years ago or why he showed up in New York and killed the girl? Maybe and maybe not. But my gut says absolutely. My gut also says there is a reason he never told Gabriella he was a Marine. Whatever kind of work he was involved in had to have been classified.”

  “Surely Ripley’s family in Nebraska would have known he dropped out of school and joined the military,” Sabrina said, talking around a mouthful of burger.

  “You’d think,” he agreed, “unless he completely cut himself off from them. Maybe they never even knew he married. I didn’t think to ask Gabriella if she’d met his parents. It’s interesting to note that the article in the Aspen Times Weekly didn’t mention anything about his military service. Doesn’t appear to have been common knowledge. Perhaps no one knew outside of the Marine Corps.”

  Coburn used Sabrina’s cell to call Gabriella Goldman at home. The conversation was brief. He asked about Ripley’s parents.

  “Never met them,” she said. “Brian never talked about them.”

  Coburn ended the call and set the cell on the bar. He pushed it toward her with the tip of one finger.

  “Well?” she asked.

  Coburn frowned and gave a quick shake of his head.

  “What are the odds his parents are still in Omaha?” she asked.

  “Probably pretty good.”

  “Remember a name?”

  “His mother and father?”

  She nodded.

  “Hell no. I’ve slept once or twice since college.”

  “You could Google them and hope to find a number listed in an online directory.”

  Coburn’s plate was clean. He drained his unsweetened tea down to the ice.

  “That’s one option,” he said. “But I think ultimately that’s a dead end. If his folks know he joined the service after college, that’s likely all they’ll know. My suspicion is he never mentioned it to his wife for a reason. I doubt he was close to his mom and dad. They probably found out he was dead from a clipping in a paper or from a friend or family member who’d spotted the mention in the AP piece.”

  “The other two,” she said, “Rooney and Valentine. Pieces of the puzzle?”

  He nodded. “Pieces of the puzzle for sure.”

  “Can we find them?”

  “We can try.”

  “Do you like our odds?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “If we don’t find them, what do we have?”

  “More questions than answers. Same as before.”

  62

  Maggie’s friend Pete had an office bumped out back of the building past the kitchen. Coburn had asked if there was a computer he could use and Pete offered the PC on his desk. The office was tiny. There was barely enough space for a small desk and a stiff wooden chair, both of which had obviously been salvaged from someone’s basement. Shelves on the walls held books and binders and a few framed photos of Pete with friends, family, and assorted local celebrities. Coburn stood in the doorway to give Pete some privacy while he entered his code to log on. Pete moved the mouse around and clicked, then typed his password and moved out of the way for Coburn.

  “Take your time,” Pete said.

  Coburn nodded and thanked him.

  Sabrina folded her arms over her chest and stood against a wall by the door. Coburn eased down into the chair behind the desk. He moved the mouse and opened the Internet browser. The hard drive chattered and hummed as the window filled with the Google homepage.

  Coburn typed inside the blank search field: KYLE ROONEY, UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS, and hit enter. The results were random and unhelpful.

  Coburn frowned. He glanced up at Sabrina.

  “We don’t know a thing about either of these guys. And from the photo, we don’t even know who is who. Wouldn’t know what I was looking for if I found it. All we have are names, a couple of faces disguised with mud and dressed in what I’m guessing to be Marine Corps gear.”

  He cleared the search field and this time typed: DUSTIN VALENTINE, UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS. And again the results seemed to be a random mishsmash of the six words he had used for the search.

  “A world of information at our fingertips, and nothing we can use,” he sighed.

  “What about military records?”

  Coburn nodded and again typed in the search field.

  The Google window redrew and he saw a link to a government archives page. The heading at the top of the page read How To Request Military Service Records or Prove Military Service.

  His eyes did a quick scan.

  “Says most veterans and their next-of-kin can obtain free copies of their DD Form 214 by submitting a request online or by snail mail.”

  “Are you going to make me ask what the hell that is?”

  “DD 214?” he asked.

  Her expression remained flat.

  “Discharge papers,” Coburn said. “It’s basically a summation of your active service. Like a life history, except only for the time served in the military. There are all kinds of goodies in there. Date and place of entry into active service, home address before and after entry and separation, last assignment, rank, citations, foreign service, reason for separation, and on and on.”

  “Separation?”

  Coburn shrugged. “Why you left.”

  “So that’s what we need,” Sabrina said.

  Coburn nodded. “One problem. It’s secure. These records are available only to veterans or their families, and I have no idea how long it takes to process a request.”

  “So we are back at square one.”

  “No, I think we have finally moved past square one.”

  “All we have is a photo and a couple of names. Tell me how that gets us anywhere.”

  “Have you ever been to D.C.?”

  “No.”

  “If we leave now we might be there before dark.”

  “What’s in D.C.?”

  “It’s not what, but who.”

  “Ok, who’s in D.C.?”

  “Elvis,” Coburn said. “We’re gonna talk to Elvis.”

  63

  It was a quick and painless goodbye. Coburn wrapped Maggie in a bear hug and planted a kiss on her cheek. Maggie, in turn, grabbed him by the neck and pulled his head down low enough so she could kiss his lips.

  She got misty when she looked into his eyes.

  “They’re calling for record snow this year. It’s going to be an awesome winter. I want you to make first tracks with me.”

  Coburn smiled. “Save me a spot in the lift line.”

  Maggie watched from the edge of the airfield as the Cessna taxied up the run
way and grew smaller and smaller in the Colorado sky until it winked out of view behind a razor’s edge of mountains.

  Sabrina spoke into her headset. “She likes you.”

  “Who?”

  “Mountain Girl.”

  Coburn grinned. “She’s an old friend.”

  “She’s cute.”

  “Her brother would skin me alive.”

  “Why did you ever leave?”

  “Aspen? It’s a playground. Sooner or later everyone has to grow up.”

  “Ever miss it? Miss the life?”

  “Every damn day.”

  64

  Detective O’Shannon was sweating through his shirt while standing in a third-floor apartment somewhere in Chelsea. It was a studio apartment with a mattress thrown on the floor with a lifeless body of a nude male lying face down on it. The mattress was soaked through with blood. The shotgun blast had removed half the skull and misted the walls with blood and brain matter. The weapon had come to rest at the dead man’s side, half on and half off the mattress. One of his fingers was still hooked through the trigger guard. The corpse had needle marks up and down both arms.

  It looked like a suicide and maybe it was. Maybe the twelve gauge was the guy’s only escape from heroine, or maybe he just couldn’t make rent that month and figured he’d check out before the super changed the lock on the apartment door.

  O’Shannon saw all he needed to see and turned toward the door. There was a photo he kept folded in his wallet. He had ripped it from a magazine twenty years earlier. It was a photo of an island with white sand beaches and sapphire water and palm trees. He stood in the corner of the apartment that served as a kitchen and opened his wallet and stared at the photo for a moment. A ten second vacation from reality.

  He heard Weaver talking.

  She was studying angles and blood splatter patterns and measuring the exact distance from the corpse to the wall that had been repainted when the gun discharged. O’Shannon heard her comment on the smell of nitroglycerin from the spent shell.

  O’Shannon wandered into the hall.

  The building super was out there talking to a uniformed officer. O’Shannon walked past them to the top of the stairs and his cell phone rang.

  “O’Shannon,” he answered.

  The call was from the precinct. A message had been left for him at the front desk by an anonymous caller. “Sounded like a woman,” the desk sergeant said. “But she wouldn’t leave a name, just a cell number.”

  “What did she want?”

  “She said she had information on where to find someone named John Coburn.”

  65

  They sat in a parked car and watched traffic and stared at people moving on the sidewalk. The anonymous voice on the phone had told them where to meet. The voice was female. No name, and no specifics about Coburn had been given over the phone. O’Shannon had protested. He didn’t have time for games. He wasn’t amused by people wasting his time or leading him around by the nose, but the caller had mentioned Ripley, and that was enough to get O’Shannon’s attention.

  Weaver was with him, but conversation between them was minimal. They watched the streets, but they weren’t a hundred percent sure what they were watching for.

  Ten minutes passed.

  Then fifteen.

  Then twenty.

  Detective O’Shannon tugged at his sleeve to see his watch, then he glanced at the digital clock in the dash. The two timepieces were off by about a minute. They always had been, but that was close enough. He reached for his coffee. He watched the sidewalks over the cup. Weaver was busy with her BlackBerry. The morgue was sending her notes on the body from the apartment. The suicide. The heroine junkie.

  “Thompson is pretty certain the gunshot was self-inflicted,” she commented, scrolling with her thumb.

  O’Shannon noticed a flash of movement in the mirror on his door and then suddenly they heard one of the back doors open and close. Weaver turned in her seat and O’Shannon watched in the mirror mounted above the dash.

  The patrol car’s new occupant was a woman with dark hair and big black sunglasses. She wore no makeup and her coat was long and buttoned all the way up to her chin. She had fine features and high cheekbones.

  Weaver made a quick study of the stranger.

  “The woman from the phone?” O’Shannon asked.

  “Yes. Detective O’Shannon?”

  “Yup.”

  “Who are you?” Weaver asked.

  Eva DuPont was overly warm under the dark wig and long coat. She was beginning to perspire. The mild discomfort didn’t faze her. She would be out of the car and out of the disguise in a matter of minutes.

  “Why are you looking for Brian Ripley?” Eva asked.

  O’Shannon’s dull eyes were still on the mirror. “We aren’t. Someone claims they saw him alive but that’s not possible.”

  “Impossible? Why?”

  “Because Brian Ripley has been dead a long time.”

  “How certain are you of that?”

  “I don’t argue with what the computer tells me. Life is too short. What is your name?”

  “Who else have you told about Ripley?”

  “What? Nobody. There’s nothing to tell.”

  “What do you know about John Coburn?” Weaver asked. She had an arm hooked around the headrest. “Take off the sunglasses so I can see your face.”

  Eva had both hands in the deep pockets of her coat. She didn’t move a muscle. She watched both detectives through the tinted lenses. Her mind was moving a million miles an hour. What mattered most to her was how much they actually did or did not know. She wanted them to focus on Coburn, not Ripley. But more importantly she needed to know how far beyond O’Shannon and Weaver this investigation actually extended.

  “Is the FBI involved?” Eva asked.

  Weaver snapped her eyes at O’Shannon.

  O’Shannon blinked at the mirror. His eyes, as always, were nearly hidden by the puffy flesh surrounding them.

  “That is not for you to know,” Weaver answered.

  “I want to see some ID, if you don’t mind,” O’Shannon said, “before we go any further.”

  “Certainly, in a moment,” Eva said.

  “Now would be a good time, actually,” Weaver snapped, eyebrows rising. “Who are you and what the hell is your interest in this case?”

  “I’m under the impression that you might think John Coburn is lying. My question is, are you interested enough in Coburn for the murder in Washington Square Park to have involved the FBI?”

  She saw the stunned look in Weaver’s eyes. But neither detective offered a reply.

  “What about Ripley? Are you interested enough in Ripley to have involved the FBI?’

  O’Shannon blinked, then replied calmly, “We don’t find it a good use of resources to run around chasing after dead men.”

  Weaver turned in her seat and opened the passenger-side door. “I’m done playing games.”

  Eva DuPont believed she had heard all she needed to hear. She watched Detective Weaver hurry around the rear of the car, then she focused on O’Shannon’s eyes in the mirror.

  “Thank you for your time, Detective,” she said, and smiled enough to show some teeth. Her next move was quick. She pulled her left hand from the deep pocket of her coat and pressed the muzzle of the handgun into the back of O’Shannon’s seat. She fired three times in rapid succession. A pink spray of blood misted the windshield directly in front of the steering wheel.

  Detective Weaver had already lifted the door handle. Her big error in judgment was that she had not kept her eyes on the glass. She hadn’t seen the hand come out of the coat pocket or the gun. If she had, there might have been a split second to react, but her eyes had been elsewhere, over-confident and perhaps even distracted by her flaring temper. O’Shannon was still seated upright when she opened the door. Eva turned the gun to the open door and fired without hesitation. A long metal cylinder was attached to the end of the muzzle. It served to s
uppress the pop of gunfire.

  Weaver reacted a half second too late. She saw the first flash from the muzzle, but the messages of alert to her brain were simply way too slow and far too late. The first bullet hit her in the lower abdomen. The blow halted her. Her expression shifted like someone had hit a light switch. The second bullet followed quickly. It landed north and east of the first, punching a hole in the top of her stomach. She rocked back on her heels. Her left arm flailed, hand extended, fingers spread, desperate for something to grasp. She slapped at the roof of the car, then swatted at the open door. There was no look of pain on her face, only utter shock.

  Eva came out of the backseat of the car and steadied Weaver on her feet. Blood gurgled in the detective’s mouth. Her eyes were wide in disbelief and horror. Eva spun her one hundred and eighty degrees and set her inside the rear of the car. Weaver struggled to speak, but she couldn’t catch a breath. Eva helped her gently recline until she was lying on her back on the back seat of the sedan. Then she leaned in, extended the hand with the gun and fired a round into the detective’s forehead. The detective went completely still and Eva folded her legs inside the car and shut the door.

  Then Eva stashed the gun inside the deep pocket of her coat and walked calmly away from the car and down the nearest subway entrance. Within minutes, she was on the other side of Manhattan.

  66

  Mr. Armstrong stood in the sand at the edge of the sea with a fat cigar clutched in one hand and stared at the horizon. There was rain in the distance over the water. The email from his contact at the CIA had arrived a few minutes earlier. The news was not what Armstrong had hoped for.

  They couldn’t find anything on Caspian. His photo had been useless. There was nothing on record linking him to Mohammad Al-Islam. Nothing pointing to the fact that he might be anything more than a successful businessman.