Highest Law: A Gripping Psychological Thriller

by R. J. Pineiro

  Shrugging, Mia—whom, as Beatriz had pointed out, does not seem to play well with others—says, “Then make it worth my while, Harry, and make it quick. I haven’t had a smoke in over an hour. What do you have for me?”

  Yanez then points the scalpel at the large cut above the corporal’s lower abdomen and says, “Cause of death is traumatic laceration of the liver and massive intraperitoneal hemorrhage.”

  He sets the instrument down, reaches into the body with both hands, and lifts the liver, a large black and heavy mass. He hands it to Purplehair, who is looking the other way while checking his phone.

  Yanez sighs and shakes his head while mumbling, “Damned Millennials.” But Purplehair seems oblivious to what’s going on.

  Mia calmly steps over to the kid, snatches the phone out of his hands, and tosses it onto the adjacent pedestal table.

  “Hey!” he protests. “That’s—”

  “My cut time you’re fucking with, kid. Text your fucking girlfriend or boyfriend on your own goddamned time! Now, do your job!”

  The kid blinks, then quickly takes the liver from Yanez and weighs it on a scale hanging from the ceiling next to the table, then drops it into a stainless-steel tray, which he hastily carries to a nearby workstation. Lastly, he fishes his phone from the table and puts it away, before returning to Yanez’s side while sporting the wide-eyed stare of a deer caught in the headlights of a semi.

  I think I like my new boss.

  Mia sizes me up for a moment, apparently to see how I’m handling the gore, before replying, “Well, Harry, that doesn’t explain why a decorated marine decided to break into the records department of the Hampton VA hospital yesterday and steal the paper copies of the autopsy reports of eighteen fellow Marines and—”

  “Hold on,” I interrupt. “Did you just say the Hampton VA, as in where the shooting took place yesterday?”

  “You didn’t know?” Mia asks.

  I shake my head. “I left afterwards so Beatriz and her team could do their thing.”

  “Well, we’re guessing that Dawson here used the distraction to grab the files, though we still don’t know why he would want them. But when we stormed his apartment in Virginia Beach at three this morning, we found him dead and without the files. So, the hope here’s that Harry finds something useful.”

  “If he stole the files at four in the afternoon yesterday, shortly after the shooting, and you found him dead at three in the morning, when was he killed?”

  Before Yanez can reply, Mia says in a hurried voice, “Harry established TOD at eleven o’clock last night when he examined the body at the apartment before bringing it here.” Then she looks at Yanez while tapping her watch with the Marlboros. “Tick tock, Harry. What else?”

  And I get her not-so-subtle message: stop asking catch-up questions because that slows her down. I guess with Mia I need to catch up on my own time, especially when she’s in apparent dire need of a nicotine bullet.

  “We’re testing his blood now,” Yanez says. “But all I can tell you with certainty is that the rupture viscus in his abdominal wall is consistent with being struck repeatedly with a—”

  The doors to the morgue swing open and Beatriz storms in. She’s wearing blue jeans, a dark turtle neck sweater, and a pair of intense dark eyes.

  “Harry?” she asks, ignoring Mia and me. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Hush, Li’l B. The adults are talking.”

  I almost choke at that, too. Beatriz is my height, so taller that Mia.

  “Goddammit, Mia. My cut was next.”

  “Chill,” Mia answers. “Priority change. Shit happens.”

  “Dammit, quit messing with the goddamned schedule! And my name is BE-A-TRIZ!”

  “Good for you. Now go be a busy little bee in Hampton until you’re called.”

  “Fuck you. I don’t work for you anymore, and—”

  “Know the way to San Ledet? You can catch up to Lil’ T. He’s probably on his way there now. Maybe you two can synchronize your whining.”

  Beatriz just stands there a moment. “Damn you!”

  And in the middle of this team-building exchange, my phone beeps twice in my pocket. I risk a quick glance at it while making sure Mia can’t get to it.

  It’s Murph. Says we need to talk about last night.

  Not a good time, buddy.

  Mia frowns at me and my phone before waving Beatriz away with the pack of cigarettes while rolling her brown eyes, as if she were dealing with an insolent child. And that makes me think of Ponytail Jones outside Compound 35.

  Then she turns toward Yanez. “Harry? Being struck repeatedly with what?”

  Yanez does a double take on Mia, looks at Beatriz, then back at Mia, and finally returns to the apparent safety of his cadaver. “Ah… some sort of blunt object.”

  Beatriz waves both hands at Mia in a go-to-hell kind of way while shaking her head. Then she says to me, “Good luck with her.” And she marches back out.

  “So, Harry, you think he was kicked?” Mia asks.

  “Ah… could be, but that’s for you to interpret. Also, the bruising on both hands, and in particular, the scrapes on the knuckles of his left hand, are consistent with the victim having been in a fight. We’re testing them, and also the residue under his fingernails, to check for someone else’s DNA.”

  He then points to the victim’s neck, where he had made several incisions to peel back various layers of tissue and muscle. “Although there’s no discoloration of the dermis, there’s visible damage to the laryngeal inlet, which is indicative of manual strangulation.”

  “But that’s not what killed him,” Mia says.

  “Right,” Yanez replies. “That injury isn’t lethal.

  “What else?”

  “That’s all until the lab results come in, and I can also look in here.” He points the scalpel at the side of the corporal’s head. “Although he was diagnosed with PTSD, his friends indicated that his behavior grew more erratic in recent months, so there’s a chance a scan might show something.”

  Mia frowns. “So, what does it all mean? Somebody breaks into his apartment. There is a struggle. A fight. Somebody perhaps tries to choke him, and when that doesn’t work, he’s hit or kicked to death. And then he’s robbed. On the surface, it looks like a home burglary. He’s missing his wallet, his watch, and they also stole his TV, his phone, and a few other electronics that can be easily hocked. But then whoever assaulted him also took the files we know were in his possession—files that don’t have any value to the average home burglar. So, what’s the real motive behind Corporal Dawson stealing them? And what’s the motive of those who killed him to steal them from him?”

  Yanez shakes his head. “Mia, my job isn’t to offer opinions or interpretation, but to be objective and factual while—”

  “Blah, blah, blah. I get it, Harry. OCME does the cutting and NCIS does the thinking. How long before you have results from his noodle, blood, and DNA?”

  He checks his watch. “Probably four hours, if you can keep your fellow agents out of here.”

  Mia produces a phone, which looks tiny in her hands. She fat-fingers it for thirty seconds, then says, “Done. Just used my Lil’ Bee repellant to buy you four hours of alone time. Make them count.”

  Then she looks at me over the calculated mess that Yanez has made of Corporal Dawson. There’s blood and tissue everywhere, including his fully open chest and abdominal cavities, exposing a host of organs and entrails, minus the hole where the liver used to reside. Bodily fluids are still seeping onto the inch-wide gutters around the table and draining somewhere inside the pedestal base. And the overhead extractors can’t keep up with the stench.

  Although I’ve been pretty much to every armpit of the world and have seen more than my fair share of carnage, I feel a cramp in my gut.

  “Hey, so who are yo
u again?” she asks.

  I look up. “Excuse me?”

  “Your name, pal. I’m sure your mother gave you one. Or maybe she didn’t.”

  “Commander Lawson Pacheco.”

  “Well, Commander Pacheco, you hungry?”

  I check my G-shock. It’s past ten in the morning, and she was just finishing an extra-large breakfast burrito two hours ago when—

  “Good,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 14

  We reach a joint called The Big Kahuna Diner on Colley Avenue, a fifteen-minute drive from the morgue. We took Mia’s car, a new black Mercedes G-class SUV that, unfortunately, already reeked of cigarette smoke. In that short time, she managed to consume three Marlboros, before dropping the butts inside a half-filled bottle of greyish water in the center console cup holder sloshing with ashes and swollen cigarette filters.

  Gross, I know, but I guess it’s better that flicking them out the window.

  But at least her music selection was respectable. Mia is into Neil Young and Stephen Stills.

  Oh, and Murph texted me again. Said it was pertaining Adanna. I’m betting it has to do with his marriage proposal, which can certainly wait.

  As I make a mental note to call him later, Mia selects an outdoor table along the front of the establishment. She immediately claims the metallic ashtray between us, next to the salt and pepper shakers, pulling it toward her with an index finger.

  There are a dozen other tables outside. Half of them are occupied with people eating and smoking. And almost as if the establishment knows she’s here, the old tune, Teach Your Children by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young starts streaming from a pair of outdoor speakers.

  “One of the few places left in this sad world of ours where you can actually light up without people judging you,” she says. “Plus, they have decent music.”

  Before I can reply, the waitress, a redhead in her sixties with a face full of freckles and a nametag that spells JOLENTA presents me with a menu, but I just order black coffee. The power bar I had before my meeting with Ledet should hold me for a while.

  “The usual?” Jolenta then asks Mia.

  “Thanks, Jo. But add an S.O.S. toast. I’m starving.”

  “You’ve got it. Music too loud?” She points at the speakers.

  “Just perfect,” Mia replies.

  The moment the waitress leaves, Mia pulls out a cigarette from the pack, flicks her fancy lighter, produces a flame, places it under the tip of her smoke, and draws deeply. Her nostrils flare a moment later as she exhales through them while dropping her thick eyebrows at me.

  I’m about to ask what’s an S.O.S. toast, but a woman at the table next to ours screams.

  We turn toward her, and I notice a bee buzzing by her head. The woman is trying to wave it away with a napkin while her male companion, cigarette in hand, blows smoke in its direction to scare it off.

  The bee then decides to venture over to our table, where Mia sets the cigarette on the ashtray and just claps her big hands as the insect wings in front of her, just hard enough to stun it. The bee falls on the table cloth, and Mia proceeds to flick it off with an index finger onto the patch of grass between our table and the exterior wall of the restaurant before returning to her smoke.

  The couple next to us stare at her in apparent awe. I look down and see the bee back on its feet apparently getting its bearings, before buzzing away haphazardly from the dining area.

  “It lives,” I say.

  She shrugs. “Lil’ bees… always in need of guidance.”

  Before I can reply, Mia asks, “Tell me, Commander, why in the world would you go for a gig like this? I mean, I love my job, don’t get me wrong, and I was in the Corps for a while. But even then, I loved detective work and quickly joined the CID during my last year before switching over to NCIS.”

  The comment makes me think of Adanna.

  Leaning forward, she adds, “Running investigations is in my blood. It’s what I was trained to do. You SEALs, on the other hand, are trained to…”

  “Kill?”

  “By sea, air, or land… and even at VA hospitals, right?”

  I think of yesterday’s shooting but instead I ask, “Where?”

  “Where what?”

  “Where did you serve?”

  “First Marine Division,” she replies. “Iraq. Oh Two to Oh Four. Then Helmand Province Campaign. Oh Four to Oh Six. Plus a year with CID.”

  “Impressive,” I reply.

  She shrugs as if it’s not a big deal, then says, “It seems all I did was jump out of fucking planes in the middle of the night to go chase some HVT in some dipshit place. But at least I made it with my ass in one piece.”

  “Oorah,” I reply.

  She grins, says, “Oorah,” and then adds, “Anyway, I talked to Li’l B. last night,” the Marlboro wedged between the index and middle fingers of her left hand. Although it’s a Marlboro 100, it looks diminutive in her hand. “She told me all about the shooting.”

  “It was a team effort.”

  “That’s what she said.” She takes another draw and exhales skyward through the right side of her mouth to try to keep the smoke away from me. But it doesn’t really matter with everybody smoking around me.

  “My point,” she continues, “and it’s a critical one, is that NCIS work isn’t about going all gun-ho blasting away like you did in country, or at that hospital, which was good CQB work. But it wasn’t NCIS work. Do you understand the difference?

  I think I do, but since I remain silent, she thinks I don’t, so she adds, “Your service weapon is to be used as a last resort, and even then—unless someone’s life is at stake—we shoot to wound, not kill, because we want to capture them alive so we can then question them. Makes sense?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good.”

  “Beatriz,” I say. “She told me you trained her.”

  “Couldn’t wipe her ass when I took her under my wing. Clueless, just like Lil’ T.”

  “You also trained Special Agent Rossi?”

  “The line goes around the corner, Commander,” she says, before looking away and adding, “But the Lil’ Bees are still growing up. Whining like ninny bitches when things don’t go their way.”

  I try not to grin at that.

  “Anyway, she’s also annoyed I pulled you into my realm. Got pissy on the phone, just like at the morgue. I guess she wanted you all for herself.”

  I shrug. “We got along well.”

  “How well?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shows me her massive palms in an isn’t-it-an-obvious-question way, then says, “I mean, as in, were you fucking her?”

  “Wait—what? No! Of course, not! And what kind of question is—”

  “Good answer, Commander. Keep your dick where it belongs. Next question: do you resent getting yanked over to Norfolk overnight? Without notice.”

  I’m still getting over her first question. Inhaling deeply, I say, “I do as I’m told by those who sign my paycheck, which comes from Norfolk. So…”

  “Damn, Commander. An even better answer.” She draws from the cigarette, then, “Don’t shit where you eat and follow orders. We’ll get along just fine.” She exhales through her nostrils again while nodding approvingly, but it isn’t at my response. Her eyes have gravitated beyond me towards Jolenta, who arrives with our order, setting a ridiculous breakfast platter in front of Mia. It makes me think of Dix back in the day, only this feisty woman is nowhere near his former size, except maybe for those damn hands.

  Mia crushes the cigarette on the ashtray and removes her jacket, which exposes a gold Cartier watch hugging her left wrist—probably worth at least ten grand—and a Semper Fi tattoo on her right forearm.

  Her fork and knife strike the stoneware oval dish with a zeal that confirms he
r hunger claim at the morgue, and it adds to the choir of cutlery and the hum of conversation amidst the haze swirling along the front of the establishment.

  Her “usual” is a stack of pancakes served with a small container of maple bourbon sauce that comes with three fried eggs, a slice of country ham, and three strips of crispy bacon. There’s also a thick slice of toast loaded with sausage gravy, which solves the S.O.S. mystery, plus a tall glass of O.J.

  The smell of bacon somehow makes it through the cigarette layer, tingling my nostrils. I decide to stick with black coffee, which, I have to admit, is pretty damn good, hitting my system like a high powered nine mike mike—that’s a 9mm Parabellum bullet.

  As I stare at her and wonder where the hell all that food is going to go on top of that burrito, Mia looks up and asks, “I understand from Roy that you were wounded in combat?”

  “Not exactly. Friendly fire… if there’s such a thing.”

  “But I take it you’re fine now?” She uses her fork to draw an imaginary circle around me. I notice, like the cigarette and the phone, how small regular size cutlery looks in those hands of hers. “Everything working properly?”