by Dan Ames
Why?
Pauling was no expert on the inner workings of the army, but it didn’t take long to track down the unit in charge of handling the Halbert murder case.
Eventually, she was able to find a phone number for the special investigative team within that unit and make the call.
A woman answered.
Pauling explained who she was and that she might have evidence regarding the Jessica Halbert murder case.
“Please hold,” the woman said.
Eventually, a man picked up on the other end of the line. He spoke in a clipped, officious tone that conveyed he’d been interrupted.
“This is Watkins,” he said. “With whom am I speaking?”
“I’m Lauren Pauling, former FBI agent working as a private investigator,” she said. Pauling knew she had to tread carefully and avoid mentioning that she had a copy of their murder file. “I’d like to speak to the person handling the Halbert case.”
“I’m handling the case,” Watkins said, his tone altering slightly. “What can I do for you?”
“Oh,” Pauling said. “I was told Jack Reacher was working the case.”
“Reacher?” Watkins asked. “I’ve heard of him, but no. He’s not involved. He left the army a long time ago, I believe.”
Then why is his name on this file? Pauling wanted to ask, but knew she couldn’t.
“How can I help you, ma’am?” Watkins broke in on her thoughts. “Do you have information pertaining to the case?”
Pauling made a decision to cut her losses.
“No, I was simply trying to get ahold of Jack Reacher for something else. I apologize for the intrusion.”
“Yes ma’am,” Watkins said and broke the connection. A bit quickly, Pauling observed.
She stared at her phone.
This is all wrong, she thought.
She set the file aside and went into her home office where she fired up her desktop computer.
Using the search terms of Jessica Halbert, murder, army and investigation, she read through the results.
It was a disappointing effort. There was virtually no information other than the original news articles reporting the murder.
What was interesting to Pauling, though, was what wasn’t included.
Namely, there was no mention of anyone named Watkins. No mention of Reacher. And most telling of all, no contact information provided for civilians to come forward with evidence.
All of which was highly unusual.
Finally, frustrated, Pauling picked up the phone.
It was time to call Michael Tallon.
Chapter Eighteen
“Sorry buddy, no can do.”
Tallon listened to his friend’s voice on the other end of the line. His name was Vogel and he’d spent some time investigating the email sent to Tallon containing Jessica Halbert’s photo.
“I figured,” Tallon responded. “It looked like it would be tough to trace.”
“Yeah, that thing went straight into a rabbit’s hole.” Vogel was extremely talented at what he did and if he couldn’t find the source of the email, then most likely no one could. “Anonymity is so easy these days, with private servers and public Wi-Fi. If you add in someone who actually knows what they’re doing and how to mask certain maneuvers, it’s virtually impossible.”
“And that’s what was done here?”
“Absolutely. That email came from behind a wall. But even worse, there’s no way to know which wall. You get me?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Vogel let out a breath, and Tallon knew he was smoking. A bit of a rarity these days, but Tallon had never seen the man without a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“The photo was interesting, though,” Vogel offered.
Tallon’s ears perked up. “How so?”
“Every piece of digital matter has code,” Vogel explained. “Some visible. Some not. Even if you work to clear metadata from a file, there is always code because that’s what digital entities are made of.”
“So what did the code tell you?” Tallon asked. He knew Vogel had something and was trying to draw it out.
“That photo was not a publicly available file.”
“You mean it was classified?”
“Not exactly.” Tallon heard Vogel suck in some nicotine and then blow it back out. “That code had a very specific lineage that was never produced elsewhere. It was fairly simple to trace and determine that it could only have come from one location. Now, unfortunately, that location was behind a wall.”
“Just like the email.”
“Yep, but unlike the email and its address, at least I know which wall it is.”
“And that would be?” Tallon was losing his patience.
“The US Army.”
At first, Tallon was tempted to dismiss the information. Of course it was an army photo. Halbert was in the army.
But the more he thought about it, the more he realized what Vogel was saying.
“So what you’re saying is that if the photo could only have come from within the army’s network, the email was probably sent from someone with access to it.”
“Mostly correct,” Vogel hedged. “In my line of work, we never make absolute statements because as soon as you do, someone will work to create an exception.”
“Hackers love challenges,” Tallon said.
“It’s what they live for. Back to the photo, though, I would caution you to not assume only army personnel have access to army records. I would expand your conclusion to include anyone in the government. Because I’ve been in their systems before and it’s like a hoarder’s living room. There are servers, firewalls, back doors, trap doors and everything in between….everywhere. Only the federal government could create such a mess.”
Tallon was afraid of that. His search window now consisted of a group of people that numbered in the millions.
He thanked Vogel and disconnected. Tallon put his phone on the kitchen table and was about to start making himself breakfast when his security system alerted him to the presence of a vehicle entering his driveway.
That was odd, no one ever visited his home. For one thing, it was remote, and for the other, he had a post office box so not even the postal service delivered.
Tallon went to his office and looked at the security screen.
A big black SUV.
Two men were getting out.
They looked like they worked for the government.
And their hands were inside their jackets, clearly getting ready to draw their weapons.
Chapter Nineteen
He’d done a good amount of killing in just a day or two.
First, he’d euthanized the big guy in the hospital and dumped his body in the swamp.
And then he’d hacked beautiful Dawn into little pieces.
Now safe and sound in his new hotel room, he was watching the television with great enthusiasm.
The television reporter announced, “It appears to be a murder-suicide.”
The man in the hotel room clapped his hands together and laughed. “You’re exactly right,” he said to the television screen and the reporter standing just outside the area where they’d found the butchered body of Dawn and Doug Franzen, the victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“It does appear to be a murder-suicide.”
He snorted with laughter.
It was always like this. Riding high after a killing, and then he knew the road ahead was pointed downward with the potential of hitting a very dangerous low point if he didn’t regain focus.
But now, he was on a high. Adrenaline. Mania. Whatever the psychologists might call it, he didn’t care.
He’d had his fun and gotten to kill another one of them.
That’s what mattered.
Along the way, he’d taken full advantage of the opportunity to do what he really enjoyed, too. All of his life he’d fantasized about tying up, raping and killing women. When he’d read about the real-life serial killer
in Wichita who called himself BTK for Bind, Torture, Kill, he’d recognized a kindred spirit.
He got up off the bed and walked into the bathroom. He wore no shirt, and studied himself in the mirror.
It was an ugly sight.
His upper body was deformed with dozens of scars. There was scar tissue everywhere, and most of it was from burns. Great pink swatches of saggy, plastic-looking skin that resembled nothing human hung from his body like a crooked quilt.
His face bore the results of a severe beating. A jaw that didn’t work correctly. An eye that had never healed and hung slightly at half-mast. He wore his hair slightly longer to hide the fact that one of his ears had been completely cut off.
The skin on his face? Well, that wouldn’t win any beauty prizes, either.
He turned away from the mirror and walked back into the bedroom. Glancing down, he looked at his left foot, which was missing all of its toes. They’d been hacked off one by one.
It was a minor miracle that the mob had failed to cut off his genitals. He still remembered that local tribeswoman who’d looked eager to start the job with a big butcher’s knife.
She was the one he most often saw in his nightmares.
Thankfully, he was still a man with all of the glorious body parts God had given him.
But he wasn’t just a man.
He was a man beyond the law.
It was the role the universe had assigned him, he’d decided. That woman with the butcher knife had been stopped not by a drone strike or a bomb dropped by an American aircraft, it had been a miracle delivered directly from forces more powerful than man.
It wasn’t God who’d sent it, he knew.
It was the devil.
His devil.
Saving him from death, giving him life. And with a life, came a quest for a life’s work. He’d found his the first time he’d killed.
Soon, he realized he could combine his passion with his incredible thirst for revenge.
A win-win.
Or a kill-kill.
He smiled again.
This time, the rigid scar tissue on his face, which he disguised when he went out for a kill, turned the smile into something else.
Something not quite human.
Chapter Twenty
Feeling negligent, Pauling left her condo and went to the office.
There, she first tended to seemingly endless details of running a company. She worked furiously for several hours meeting with her subordinates, answering emails, submitting invoices, and arranging her calendar.
Only when she was caught up with her firm’s work did she take a moment to consider the Jessica Halbert case.
She had to decide. Was she in, or was she out?
Pauling drummed her fingers on her desk. She thought about Reacher but quickly realized this was not about him. His name was what had drawn her into the case, and certainly merited the trip to the veterans hospital. But now it was about more than that.
It was about a cold case involving a murder.
And try as she might, she was struggling to separate it from the offer to buy her firm. The obvious move was to sell her company and make the Halbert case her first “personal” investigation.
Still, she didn’t have to work it that way.
Besides, the process of selling the company, submitting all of the paperwork to lawyers, and actually disentangling her role from the firm would take time. Plenty of time to work on the Halbert case, if she so chose.
Plus, the idea of selling an organization she had built from scratch outweighed the recent arrival of the mysterious file from a hospital patient who then promptly disappeared. It would be foolish to rush the decision on something that had literally just come across her desk.
Pauling wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she leaned forward in her chair and tapped out a message to her assistant.
Clear my schedule for the next few days.
With one decision made, Pauling immediately went to her computer and launched her browser. With a few clicks of her mouse, she arrived at the portal to the FBI’s database. It was a point of entry she should no longer have access to but with the help of a contractor she frequently employed, it was arranged for her credentials to remain intact while also leaving no breadcrumbs from her coming and going.
Once in, she worked her way through the system and managed to get into shared military files that included counterinsurgency operations in Turkey. Pauling narrowed the search to documents that matched the timeframe of Jessica Halbert’s murder.
While the server processed her requests, she thought hard about what she should be looking for.
One, the primary investigator. He or she would have the essential details of the case and the suspects. She had the files, but it was the information not in them she needed. It was the kind of detail only available by talking to the primary detective in person.
Or at least, on the phone.
Once she had that name, she could see if there were any updates on the suspects. Had any of them been cleared? Died? Come up with an alibi?
Finally, her screen blinked to life and she saw a subset of folders matching the criteria she had input. She clicked and dragged them onto her desktop, but still left the window to the FBI’s server open.
Just in case she quickly learned something, she could go back in and do a second search. For insurance, though, she tended not to linger on the server. Pauling figured the more time she spent digging through the files, the greater her chance of being discovered.
She minimized the server window and clicked on the first of the files. She was disappointed to find hundreds of subfolders and files. There was a lot of information.
Pauling began to open them one by one, and soon discovered a pattern to the naming conventions of the files and was able to separate them by category. Eventually, she had separated the folders that pertained to criminal investigations within the army during the time of Jessica Halbert’s murder.
It was a start and soon, she was working much faster and efficiently.
Eventually, she found what she was looking for.
The mystery patient had sent her a stack of copied files and although the top document had carried the name of Jack Reacher, the rest of them had been redacted.
Now she was looking at the original files and they showed no signs of Jack Reacher’s name or involvement.
It quickly became apparent that the primary army special investigator was a man named Thomas Wainwright. Some of the documents were emails directed to “Tom” and other statements were signed with the initials “TW” or just “W.”
Pauling opened up a new browser window and Googled the terms Thomas Wainwright and army investigator.
A series of articles appeared.
It seemed there was a meteorologist in Utah named Thomas Wainwright. As well as a 12-year-old chess prodigy with the same name.
Pauling clicked instead on an image search and halfway down the results page, she spotted him. It was a photo of a man wearing shorts and a T-shirt with the word Army across the front. He was smiling toward the camera, and holding a trophy of some sort.
And he was huge. Massive shoulders. Long arms thick with muscle, and a rugged, if not overly handsome face.
He looks like Reacher, Pauling thought.
A dead ringer, in fact.
Suddenly, Pauling knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Thomas Wainwright was the man in the hospital. He was the one who had copied the file and sent it to her, signing his name as Reacher.
Why?
Had someone in the army known Reacher and pointed out to Wainwright that he looked just like him? Or had he found out about Pauling’s past connection with Reacher and decided to reach out to her for help but instead of signing his own name he signed it as Reacher. Either to deceive Pauling, or to keep his name out of it.
If it was the latter, why?
She closed the image file and was about to close the search results when she found an article at the very b
ottom of the page.
It detailed an explosion near an army base that had been earmarked as a possible terrorist attack. There had been one victim critically injured who was fighting for his life in intensive care.
Thomas Wainwright.
It explained why he was in the hospital.
And it maybe even explained his need for secrecy.
The only thing it didn’t explain: what exactly the whole thing had to do with her.
She glanced down at her phone.
Why hadn’t Tallon responded yet?
What was he doing?
Chapter Twenty-One
Having spent the better part of his adult life in the company of both military men and law enforcement, Tallon knew what he was seeing.
Or, more accurately, what he wasn’t seeing.
In the case of the two men, he knew immediately they weren’t military, and they certainly weren’t cops.
In Tallon’s line of work, small details often made the difference between life and death.
As he quickly took stock of the images on his security monitor, a few things immediately leapt out.
For starters, the black SUV was definitely not military-grade. It reeked of private contractor. Tallon could tell by the way the vehicle sat, and the quality of the tint in the windows that it certainly wasn’t reinforced with armor and the windows were not bulletproof. This vehicle had been driven directly off a car dealer’s lot.
The suits the men wore were clearly of a higher quality. Tallon could tell they were tailored, which made spotting their shoulder gun rigs all the easier. Another big tell – most in law enforcement had off-the-rack suits that were roomy enough to camouflage their weaponry. Real plainclothes cops made a habit of not advertising their hardware.
These two clearly didn’t follow that protocol.
Not to mention, the kind of suits they were wearing required a budget well beyond typical law enforcement or standard government salaries.
This, too, spoke to private security.
Finally, the fact that they had already begun to draw their weapons was another clear sign of rogue actors. It spoke to being overly aggressive, as opposed to following standard procedure.
