M-9

by Marvin J. Wolf

  Will filed that away. Kendra had found something that made her suspicious about thefts from the base, and then she was warned off by her boyfriend. A few weeks later, she changed their trip from Baja California to Costa Rica. That was interesting.

  Will said, “While you were in Costa Rica, did Kendra have access to a computer?”

  “She brought her laptop.”

  “Do you recall if Kendra bought any cosmetics?”

  “Cosmetics?”

  “Face cream, powder, lipstick, eye shadow, stuff like that?”

  Alter shook his head, no. “She spent about twenty minutes in a beauty store, but I don’t think she bought anything.”

  “Where was this store, if you remember?”

  “Sure, I remember. It was in that office building. After she wasted all that time talking to the desk people and they wouldn’t let us upstairs, she went into that store.”

  “What did you do while she was in the store?”

  Alter shrugged. “I walked around inside the atrium, did some window shopping. I bought a copy of The Wall Street Journal and a copy of Wired at the newsstand. I got a cold drink from a sandwich place.”

  Will said. “What about banks? Did you visit any banks that day?”

  “Not that day. But when we were downtown, Kendra asked me to take a picture of her in front of a bank,”

  “Which bank?”

  Alter shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe it was an insurance company?”

  “Was the picture about Kendra or about what was behind her?”

  Again Alter shrugged. “I didn’t think much about it. She handed me her phone and said, ‘Take my picture,’ so I did.”

  The waitress returned, and they ordered: a chef’s salad for Alter, a burger, and fries for Will. When the waitress left, Will gave Alter a hard look.

  “Tell me what you did with Kendra’s mail,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Her mailbox is empty. I have the key. What did you do with her mail?”

  Alter looked at the table.

  “It’s in a box in my closet.”

  “How did it get there, Mr. Alter?”

  Alter raised his head to look at Will. “When she disappeared, at first I was sure that she was just blowing me off for a few days. We had keys to each other’s mailboxes—actually, it’s the same key—and sometimes I’d go down and bring her mail up for her, and sometimes she’d bring mine. But when she’d been gone a few days, I noticed that her box was almost full. I started bringing her mail up when I got my own.”

  “It’s evidence, Mr. Alter.”

  “I meant no harm. I was just being... neighborly, I guess.”

  “I’ll come by this evening and pick it up.”

  Alter nodded his head. “Sure, no problem.”

  Ninety-four

  Chelmin parked the battered Subaru in front of the NCIS building, went inside, then down the corridor to the security door. He rang the bell.

  A few seconds went by before he was buzzed inside.

  Brenda looked up from her desk and beamed Chelmin a little smile.

  “Agent Malone is out, but he should be back soon. Would you care to wait in his office?”

  Chelmin nodded. “Sure,” he said and went in and took a seat near the desk.

  A minute later, Brenda entered, carrying a steaming cup of coffee, a carton of half-and-half, and a small bowl filled with packets of sugar and artificial sweetener.

  “I just made this, Agent Chelmin,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Chelmin said.

  “Just black,” he said, taking the cup and resting it on the desk.

  “Marc won’t be very long,” Brenda said and left the office.

  Chelmin picked up the cup, sniffed it, took a small sip, and smiled. He took another sip.

  “Good coffee,” he said, loud enough for Brenda to hear him, and she smiled warmly.

  He felt good, relaxed. He took another sip of coffee.

  Ninety-five

  Will drove back to the Police Department, where he checked his voicemail, then tried to call Chelmin. The call went directly to Chelmin’s voicemail.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon trying to contact more of Kendra’s friends, from a list culled from her Facebook and Twitter accounts. No one was available when he called, so each time he left a brief message explaining that he was investigating Kendra’s murder, and to call him back at the Barstow Police Department.

  Around 4:00 p.m., he called Chelmin again, and again the call went to voicemail.

  At 6:00 he drove a squad car to 40 Desert Mirage Drive and again parked in the red zone in front of the building. A minute later, he got off the elevator and knocked on Alter’s door. After several seconds, the door opened, and Alter wordlessly handed him a cardboard box almost full with unopened mail.

  Will said, “That’s all of it? Every piece of junk mail, every bill, everything that was in her mailbox?”

  Alter said, “Yes.”

  “You’re certain that nothing fell out, that there’s not even a single piece of Kendra’s mail anywhere in your house?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Thanks,” Will said.

  After stowing the box in the squad car’s trunk, he pulled out his phone and dialed Chelmin’s number. Again the call went to voicemail, and again Will left a brief message.

  Will drove back to the station, where he carried the box inside and secured it in an evidence locker.

  When he returned to his desk, he found two messages, one from Agent Malone, and one from Agent Blair.

  Will dialed Malone’s number and got the “sorry, we’re out of the office” recording. At the tone, he left his name and cell phone number.

  Then he called Blair, who answered on the first ring.

  “Tom Blair,” he said.

  “Will Spaulding, returning your call.”

  “Are you in touch with Chelmin?”

  “Nope. He called me about noon, while I was on another call, and left a message. I’ve called him back a couple of times, but my calls go straight to voicemail.”

  “Same here.”

  “Are you still in San Francisco?”

  “At the airport. I’m now a grandpa—Sean Michael Blair has red hair and weighs a healthy eight pounds, four ounces.”

  “Congratulations. Agent Blair, I’m a little worried about Chelmin. He’s always been very good about returning calls.”

  “I’m a little worried myself. Why don’t you go out to the base and see if you can at least find his car?”

  “I’ll leave right now,” Will said.

  Ninety-six

  Will grabbed a filet of fish sandwich at the McDonald's on Main Street and ate it as he cruised the darkened streets of the Marine base. He drove up and down each of the dozens of streets in the Yermo Annex the administrative part of the base He drove until he was almost out of gasoline, without seeing Chelmin’s battered white Subaru.

  Before leaving the base, he stopped at the MP station at the main gate, and found the desk sergeant. He showed his CID badge and explained that his partner had disappeared and that he might be on the base.

  The MP sergeant said, “It hasn’t been twenty-four hours. All I can do for now is take a report.”

  Will gave him a description of the car, a description of Chelmin, and his phone numbers.

  After gassing up the squad car, Will drove to his parents’ home, where he found his father enjoying an after-dinner drink in front of the television set.

  Will said, “Dad, Chelmin is missing.”

  Chief Spaulding said, “Since when?”

  “Sometime after lunch. I’ve spent the last three hours driving around the base, looking for his car. Agent Blair, of the FBI, is worried, as well.”

  “First thing in the morning, I’ll call the MP commander—we’re good friends—and ask them to initiate a search. And right now, I’ll call San Bernardino Sheriffs and see if they can give us a chopper. First thing in the morning, we’ll get
them to fly up over our desert arroyos, looking for his car.”

  Will said, “If he’s been taken, they might try to smuggle him out of the area. We need roadblocks on all the freeway onramps in and around town, and on the other highways. And we need them tonight. It might be too late already.”

  Chief Spaulding said, “You’re right.” He got up and went into the kitchen, where he called the Sheriff’s Substation in Phelan, about twenty miles away. He spoke to the captain there and, after ten minutes on the phone, hung up.

  “The Sheriff will send a 'copter tomorrow and cover the roads tonight. If someone tries to smuggle him out, they’ll have to get by roadblocks. And the CHP will stop Interstate 15 and I 40 traffic just before the Nevada and Arizona borders, and just before Victorville.”

  Ninety-seven

  Chelmin awoke, shivering, with a splitting headache. His mouth was dry as sandpaper, and he needed to pee.

  He opened his eyes and saw nothing.

  His head spun; disoriented, for a moment he wondered if he was dead.

  He took a deep breath, exhaled, listened.

  He heard a faint, tantalizingly familiar hum.

  He tried to sit up and realized that his wrists were tightly bound in front of him.

  He moved his left leg, then his right. The leg moved only a short distance—something was wrong. Leaning forward as if doing a sit-up, his fingers probed down his right trouser leg until he found what he feared: His prosthesis was broken. Snapped almost in half.

  How the hell did that happen, he wondered.

  He lay back down, thinking. The photo from Abuela. Malone’s office. The coffee.

  “I was drugged,” he said aloud.

  Silently, he cursed himself for a fool. Why hadn’t he taken Will with him? He’d been too anxious to get this over with, he realized. In a stupid hurry to close his case and get back to start a new life with Cheryl.

  He was chilly, he realized with an electric jolt of terror, because that hum was a compressor. A refrigerator’s compressor. He was in a giant refrigerator.

  The same place, he now knew, where Kendra and Bainbridge had died of exposure.

  Ninety-eight

  Will was waiting at the airport when the Sheriff’s helicopter landed.

  When its engine shut down, he walked across the Tarmac to the pilot, holding his CID badge up.

  “I’m Spaulding,” he said.

  The pilot nodded. “Deputy Jackson. My partner is the mission commander, Sergeant Northup. We’ve got fuel or about two hours. What are we looking for?”

  “My partner, Chelmin. We think he’s been abducted. His car is a 2005 Subaru Outback, white.”

  “That’s the one that looks like a station wagon?”

  Will nodded. “I’ll come with you. I grew up here, and I know the desert around here pretty well.”

  Jackson nodded assent, and Will pulled the passenger door open, climbed in and slid over to the left side. As he strapped himself in, the co-pilot handed him a headset with a lip mike.

  “Speak normally into the mike. It uses noise-canceling to block out most of the engine and rotor noise.”

  As Will slipped the headset over his head, the pilot started the engine. The rotors began to turn, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

  “Where do you want to start?” Jackson’s voice asked in Will’s ears.

  “I’d like a slow pass over the Marine base.”

  “We’ll have to stay above 500 feet,” he replied. “FAA minimum.”

  “Fine. We’re looking for his car. I drove around there last night, but I couldn’t find it. I’m thinking that it might be out of sight from the ground but maybe we could see it from above.”

  “We’ll give it a shot,” Jackson said, then switched to the tower frequency and went through the process of requesting permission to take off.

  “As slow as you can fly safely,” Will said, and Jackson gave him a thumbs up.

  §

  Two hours and ten minutes later, having flown over the entire base twice and finding no trace of Chelmin’s car, the pilot set his aircraft down near the Daggett Airport’s fueling station. While the co-pilot pumped Type A jet fuel into the helicopter’s tank, Will and Jackson huddled in the shade nearby, looking over a road map of the Barstow area.

  Will said, “Now I’d like to search to the east and south of the Interstate. There are quite a few small houses, mostly on private roads, where somebody could hole up for weeks and never see another soul.”

  He traced the area on the map.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Jackson said. “If that doesn’t work out, we can move a little farther south and fly a pattern back toward Barstow.”

  Ninety-nine

  He was back in Kuwait, and the morphine the medic had given him was wearing off. His whole body hurt. He was conscious of the pain, and he understood that he was dying. Despite the tourniquet on his stump, he was still oozing blood. What kind of a life could he have with only one leg? What woman would want him? And where were his buddies? Had they just left him here on the ground? He would have to die, Chelmin decided. It was the best way.

  Then, very faint, he heard the sound of help. The whup whup whup of chopper blades. They were coming for him. Maybe he had a chance. Maybe he could find a way to walk again.

  Whup whup whup whup.

  Chelmin opened his eyes. It was still pitch dark, he was shivering with cold, his bladder was about to burst. He’d wind up like Bainbridge, like Kendra. Dead of exposure, dehydrated. They’d find him in the desert somewhere if they even found him.

  Whup whup whup whup.

  It was a chopper! Chelmin felt a jolt of hope. The helicopter was low enough that he could hear it, and from the sound, it was circling.

  They were looking for him!

  Maybe he’d get out of this, after all.

  But he had to do something, and soon.

  He had to do something now.

  §

  After what seemed like hours of trial and error, Chelmin had raised his body temperature a little through the efforts of learning how to navigate his lightless prison. He estimated that it was about four feet deep and twenty feet wide, and as he inch-wormed his way toward the distant end, he encountered what felt like clothing on the smooth metal floor. He rolled to one side of the space, and resting on his right side, extended his bound arms, maneuvering a few inches closer with hip and shoulder, until he could grasp the item. Holding it with both hands, he rolled away until he was on his back.

  He explored the item with his fingers and concluded it was made of stretch fabric, and that it was probably a pair of woman’s panties.

  Kendra’s panties.

  He dropped the panties, rolled back on his side and reached out, exploring, until he found another piece of stretchable fabric with some kind of wires embedded.

  Kendra’s bra.

  Beneath the bra was something larger, heavier. He found a zipper on one side, then its mate—a dress.

  He searched around the floor, expecting to find her stockings and shoes, but instead found something still heavier, of much coarser material than the underwear. Starting at the bottom—unless it was the top—he worked his way up, feeling the material until his left hand grasped something round and smooth.

  A button. Above it, he felt another.

  He was holding Kendra’s overcoat.

  He rolled to balance on his only knee, awkwardly gathered all the clothing to make a bundle, the underwear within the dress, the dress within the coat.

  No hat, no shoes, no stockings.

  Tottering on one knee, he lost his balance and toppled slowly a short distance to his left. His shoulder hit the wall, and the left side of his head banged against something projecting from the wall. Supported by his good leg and his left shoulder pressed against the wall, he rose and searched the wall with his bound hands at just below belt height, until he found a narrow shelf that appeared to run the length of his prison.

  He felt frigid air blo
wing on his head.

  Pressing his back against the wall and standing on his leg he raised his arms until they were a few inches above his head and his fingers encountered a vent.

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  He lowered his arms and turned until he could grasp the shelf with both hands for support, then hopped a short way to his right. Still grasping the shelf, he leaned to the right until his right shoulder found the far wall.

  Now he could locate himself in the space: he was in the far-left corner. Below a vent blowing near-freezing air into his prison.

  Searching for the bundle, he slid his foot along the floor until he found it.

  Now he dropped to his one knee, then rolled sideways until the bundle was close enough to his hands to search. He found the bra, then the panties.

  Clutching them in both hands, he rolled to the wall, moved to a sitting position, then hoisted himself up on his good leg. Left shoulder and hip pressed against the wall, he hopped to his right, and again and again until the vent was just above him and to the right. He hopped to the right one more time.

  Still clutching the underwear, he raised his hands over his head to the front of the vent. Grasping the bra in his left hand, he used his stiff, freezing fingers to poke the panties into the first and then the second openings in the vent. Then he switched the bra to his right hand and poked as much of it as he could into the third and last opening.

  The flow of frigid air continued, but there was less of it. Much less, Chelmin thought.

  Then he turned around, one hop at a time, and pushed the remaining clothing a short distance to his left, then hopped to his left, regained his balance by grasping the shelf, and pushed the bundle again.

  Another left hop.

  Then he put his left shoulder against the wall and pivoted on his good leg until his back rested against the wall and his hips against the shelf.

  Awkwardly, using two hands, he found his fly zipper, pulled it down, then aimed a heavy stream of urine at what he hoped was the far corner.