by Zack Klika
Conn pulled the velcro straps from her bulletproof vest over her chest and took a deep breath to make sure it was not too tight. Duncan shot down the stairs into the open floor plan.
“Sorry I’m late,” Duncan said, flopping his gear down on an empty desk. He set to checking his equipment.
“You’re actually one of the first ones here,” Sanchez said with a smirk.
Conn let the comment slide. She had decided to bring Duncan along. It would be good for him to get some hands-on experience. Shortly after Duncan arrived, the tactical team started to trickle in. They clearly were taking longer than Sanchez liked. It wasn’t the type of tactical team someone like Sanchez would be used to, Conn knew.
Once the six-member team was accounted for, they left the police station. Conn drove the Crown Vic with Sanchez riding shotgun and Duncan riding back seat. The tactical team followed them in an up-armored MRAP that had been donated by the Army and came directly from Fort Campbell.
The orange glow of dawn peaked as Detective Conn pulled up to Buck Miller’s empty driveway. She got out of her car and slammed the door. A dog came from around back and stood on the porch barking at her. She saw the tactical team deploy and watched as one of the police officers raised his weapon to shoot the dog.
“Stop,” she said. “We’re not here to kill dogs.”
The police officer looked at her with contempt as he lowered his weapon and grinned. “Whatever you say.”
The element of surprise had flown the coop. Conn wasn’t even sure if Buck Miller was here, though. He didn’t have a car, and the distance between Danny’s crime scene and the speedway would take a few hours to reach if he had jogged. A lot longer to jog to this place, she thought. But Conn couldn’t see Buck sticking around the speedway. He probably called a friend to pick him up and then rushed home to try and gather some things to lay low with.
“Wait here,” the team leader said.
She recognized him, but didn’t know his name. The Clarksville PD was growing.
“All right,” she said.
The tactical team split up into pairs. Two groups went around the corners of the house, towards the back. The third pair went in through the front. Seeing the strangers descend onto the home, the dog dashed into the woods behind the house. Two minutes later the man Conn didn’t recognize came back out and waved them over.
Conn walked up the steps while pulling her weapon from its holster, keeping it at the ready, Sanchez and Duncan close behind. A few of the tactical unit guys shot one another odd looks.
“Everything’s clear in there,” the team leader said. No irritation in his tone. Just giving her the facts.
“Thanks,” said Conn as Sanchez walked past them and into the home with his weapon drawn as well. She wasn’t going to rely on a team of six who rarely got the chance to search a home to tell her a place was safe.
They swept the house again, room by room.
Nothing.
Duncan stopped in the living room and looked through the sparse bookshelf in the corner by the television.
“Where else would he be?” Sanchez asked Conn.
“Maybe the speedway,” said Conn, “but I don’t know why he would stick around there if he knows Lee escaped.”
“Maybe he didn’t think Lee would go to the police,” Duncan chimed in.
He had a point. Conn couldn’t think of a reason for Lee coming to the police, but he had. Finding protection wouldn’t be hard for someone like him, especially with the kind of friends he had. Maybe he really was trying to change his ways. She pushed her feelings for Lee as far away as possible. Nothing but trouble was in store for her if she kept up the dangerous game they were playing. Following rules in the military had come easily to her. Rules were cut-and-dry. Simple. You followed them or you didn’t. There was no in between. No matter how much she tried to rationalize her relationship with Lee, she always came back to the same conclusion: She was a rule breaker.
“We’re going to the speedway,” Conn told the team leader.
Twenty minutes later they were pulling up to the speedway. Lee’s Honda was the only car in the parking lot. An eerie feeling crept over Conn, like something bad was about to happen. She chalked it up to déjà vu from the prior night’s events.
“We’re coming with you this time,” Conn told the team leader when they had all gathered behind the MRAP.
He shrugged. “Fine with me.”
One of the guys cut the chains at the gate. Then silence surrounded the nine of them as they filtered in through the entrance. The team leader split his crew up into pairs again and had Conn and her men follow him through the warehouse entrance.
High-wattage lights from above radiated heat as the team leader stormed in with his partner and swept the area as quickly as he had swept the home. Watching the pair operate, Conn was impressed. The pair system worked well. They must have trained together extensively, Conn thought.
Conn wriggled a bit as her shirt stuck to her sticky back, the bulletproof vest acting as an insulator, trapping any and all friction. Otherwise, the warehouse was cool. She looked around on her own after the team leader gave them the go-ahead and stopped at the garage Lee had told her and Sanchez about. There was some blood on the concrete where Lee said he had been knocked out by Danny.
An image of Jennifer Carlson popped into her head. She shook it away, continuing her search. Too late. She began to consider the circumstances surrounding Jennifer’s death. How could someone like Jennifer get wrapped up with Buck? she wondered. They were two completely different people occupying this world. With an effort, she pushed Jennifer out of her mind, trying instead to concentrate on the situation at hand.
What was Buck’s next move? Where could he be? Would he go after Lee? Would he run away? There were too many possibilities. She and Lee had almost been free of each other. Now what? How long would the Clarksville PD have to provide him with a protection detail?
Conn was looking around the garage one last time when she heard some commotion coming from the main floor of the warehouse. She rushed back to where the others were.
“Over here, Detective Conn,” Duncan shouted, waving an arm for her to hurry.
Conn rushed over and saw Sanchez shaking his head by Duncan and the rest of the team. They were all looking behind some crates. She stopped next to them and stared at the worst-case scenario. Nausea spread throughout her stomach as her line of sight followed the brain matter surrounding the bullet hole on the gray metal siding. It looked like art. Bad art.
Buck was propped against the crate, his right half covered in blood and his head angled forward. The bullet that had killed him came from a Smith & Wesson Model 627 that he still gripped tightly in his left hand.
“Looks like a suicide,” Duncan said.
Sanchez slowly shook his head left to right. “Coward.”
Clenching her jaw, Conn tried to remain calm. The uneasiness she had just felt made way for anger. The kind of anger she liked to unload onto the heavy kickboxing bag at her house. She had wanted to take Buck in alive. He died and took all the answers with him. Where was he getting the weapons from? Who was he selling them to? Why did he kill Jennifer Carlson? Jennifer had old bruises and new bruises all over her body. She had been beat up something awful before being killed. Was she participating in Buck’s fights? Conn didn’t agree with Riley’s theory that Jennifer had been killed for being a woman in the military. There was something else going on here. Something she couldn’t piece together this early in the morning with as little sleep as she was running on.
“Call Johnson,” Conn said to Duncan, “and tell him to get forensics over here when they wrap up with Danny Smith.”
Duncan turned to make the call. Conn stopped him.
“And don’t make it sound like an order please.”
Chapter 28
Tim Pate was up by 7:00 a.m. Hints of French vanilla filled his nostrils as he strolled down the floating wooden stairs in his midcentury home. In the time it
took to walk from the master bedroom to the kitchen, he had decided to skip going into the office in favor of spending the day in the park with his wife. They usually visited their son and his family in Nashville on the weekends, but they were on vacation at Disney World, so the weekend was free.
All of the editing was done for Monday’s online issue of the Fort Campbell Daily. Filled with stories about the great things the base had been up to: food drives, classes on how to handle a spouse fresh from a deployment, local school visits teaching children about the meaning of patriotism. No one to police the negative side of things, he thought. Like how those classes on dealing with a returning soldier did no good when shit hit the fan in the middle of the night during a nightmare.
If he had gone into the office, it would just have been to reorganize the placement of certain articles he had decided were good in their current spot the last time he changed them. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Something he had been dealing with most of his life. He couldn’t remember the last time he could just walk by a stack of magazines and not straighten them. The OCD had become worse now that the Fort Campbell Daily hadn’t printed an actual paper in months. It was too easy to switch things around on a whim in an online issue. Switching to a strictly online platform had been tough for everyone in the office, but they decided saving trees was more important. Plus, costs were reduced drastically, opening up more funds for raises, new hires, and newer equipment.
The blankets and food were methodically packed inside the hand-woven picnic basket and ready to go when his phone chimed. An email from his friend in records at Fort Campbell was sitting in his inbox. Tim let out a deep breath, hovered the cursor over the email, and clicked on it. No message inside. Just a PDF. He downloaded the document to a password-protected folder on his laptop and then opened the file.
Andrew Brown’s base records popped up. He shook his head as he pressed print. The base was hiding something—he was sure of that—but what that was eluded him. Riley was a lot smarter than he had been at her age. Letting her take charge on the story was a no-brainer. He grabbed the papers off the printer and told his wife he needed an hour.
Riley was late, as usual. One of her few faults, Tim thought. He had her meet him at a local diner near the main gates of Fort Campbell. He watched as she pulled in and took her time coming in. After getting comfortable in the booth, without an apology for being late, she ordered a coffee and a plate of bacon, eggs, and hash browns. Tim ordered a coffee in a to-go cup.
“I got Andrew’s files this morning,” said Tim, sliding a folder to her.
“Good,” she said, tucking the folder into her purse, which lay beside her. “I had an interesting night.”
“Were you able to get ahold of the detective at the police station?” Tim asked.
The waitress came back and set two mugs and a handle of coffee down on the table and then walked off. Tim shook his head as Riley filled his mug to the rim. She left some room in hers for cream.
When the waitress was out of earshot, Riley said, “Yes. He told me Jennifer was beaten to within an inch of her life. Then she had her throat slit and was stabbed eighteen times.”
Tim mulled that over. Had he gotten Riley in too deep? He’d known she would dig when he first told her about Jennifer Carlson. And he wanted her to. His job was simple: produce news and make sure it wasn’t bad-mouthing the Army. This story had the potential to do just that. But he wasn’t one to let a soldier’s death go by unnoticed. Helping Riley behind the scenes seemed as natural as breathing.
Having been around military bases for a majority of his career, Tim knew that the military liked to deal with things internally. When CID investigated a crime that happened on base, they figured out who was to blame and put the case to bed, without a peep to any news agencies or local newspapers. If a soldier murdered a fellow soldier, which happened more often than civilians knew about, details almost never made it out. If a soldier killed a civilian, or vice versa, details were there if you knew where to look. And Tim knew where to look. The paper trail.
“What else?” Tim asked.
Riley stirred the creamer around in her coffee.
“The police seem to be working with CID now,” she said. “Someone came forward with information about her murder. I was there when he showed up. Said he knew who killed Jennifer Carlson.”
“Where is he now?”
“The hospital. MPs are standing guard. They’re not letting anyone in to see him.”
“I’ll make some calls. If reporters start showing up to the hospital, the police department will have to hold a press conference. The last thing they’ll want is for reporters to go around making up their own stories about what happened. What’d you find out about Andrew Brown?”
“He worked with an ammo squad helping check out weapons and run ammo to training exercises. Word is, no one knew anything about a training exercise the night he died. I still can’t figure out why he was off base doing training either. The next morning the company commander, Captain Holt, asked if anyone knew who Andrew was with the night of the training exercise. Wouldn’t the commander of a unit know exactly who was running training exercises?” Riley said, then looked out the window.
“Yes,” Tim said. “They would.”
The waitress showed up with Riley’s food and set it down in front of her.
“Need anything else?” asked the waitress.
“No, we’re good,” Riley said and watched her mosey back behind the long diner counter. “I just can’t figure out how Jennifer knew him.”
“You have his information now. Find the connection. I’ve looked over his files and Jennifer’s. And I keep drawing blanks.”
Riley took a sip of coffee. “So I’m just supposed to roll solo now?”
“You’re not by yourself,” Tim said. “You have my number if you need me, but I’m not an investigative reporter. I lack the imagination to make the leaps and connections between seemingly irrelevant details that can crack a story wide-open. I just put the stories together when they’re figured out. Over the past four years, I’ve been teaching you a lot of the basics on how to dig deep for information, but to go past the details that are in files and photos and interviews takes a special kind of person. Someone that can make those leaps and connections without even realizing they’re doing it.”
“And that’s me?” Riley asked. Tim could see the doubt in her eyes.
“I wouldn’t be helping you if I didn’t think you could figure this out.”
*
The drive home provided Tim with more time to think about what Riley had told him. Jennifer’s death didn’t sound like a crime of passion to him. Jennifer’s mutilation was too extreme for that. And there were no complaints lodged against anyone in Jennifer’s file. Lovers quarreled relentlessly in the military. Sometimes those arguments turned into murder. The murder was usually a surprise to CID, but not to people in the soldier’s unit. A large portion of domestic abuse victims would contact a friend in their significant other’s unit. From that initial phone call, the friend might intervene and try to sort things out. Sometimes the friend would get the soldier’s platoon sergeant involved. If the platoon sergeant couldn’t handle it, it was taken up the chain of command and the company’s first sergeant was called in. If a complaint made it past the first sergeant, military police were contacted. The issue was that once military police were involved, the company commander was informed. If military police did document anything, it usually wound up in the company commander’s hands and then was given to the company’s first sergeant to handle. A record was always kept on file by military police just so they were covered. But the complaint, in effect, never really made it out of the company. A vicious pattern that never helped the victim in the end.
In all honesty, Tim had no idea why someone would have killed Jennifer in that way. But if anyone could find out, it was Riley, with a bit of help. He scrolled through his phone’s list of names, stopped on his contact at the Clarksville Times, an
d hit the call button.
Chapter 29
Any guilt Lee had felt about the soldier on the bridge was long gone. He had gone to the police and done his part. Done what he knew he should have done as soon as he saw the article about the dead solider. Maybe things would have been different now if he had. Maybe Buck and Danny would be in jail and Lee wouldn’t be in the hospital. Even jailed, Buck would still be a threat. A lose-lose situation no matter which way he looked at it. Lee had tried talking to the MPs stationed outside of his hospital room a few times. They just ignored him. That was fine, he thought. He didn’t want to talk to them anyway. He was still pissed at Conn. She was ready to throw him under the bus if need be. She knew where the hell he was Wednesday night. She was right there with him. But she didn’t speak up. Wouldn’t speak up. For whatever reason, he had thought she actually cared about him. She didn’t. At least they left a few guards with him.
The hospital wasn’t all bad. He wondered where they got beds that were this comfortable. His nurse was an older, frumpy woman who sounded Russian or Ukrainian. He couldn’t really tell. But she loved sneaking him in extra ice cream. And on one of her rounds into the room he mentioned how cold it was in the hospital. “You poor thing,” she said and rubbed his forearms to heat him up. Her hands were as soft as warm butter.
He was told he wasn’t allowed to have visitors. That made sense to him. He did kill someone after all. It was self-defense, though. Simple as that. He didn’t even think he had it in him until it actually happened. The initial plan was to run, but his phone chimed right when he was about to make an attempt at running for it. So he had killed someone. He shouldn’t feel bad about it. Danny had been going to kill him. He wondered if that’s how soldiers felt. It’s you or me, but one of us isn’t going home today. Probably wasn’t that dramatic in a time of war.
