Danger Close (John Taylor #7) - Chapter 12

Taylor was still coughing from smoke when Chenier ran up. The fire was mostly out, but it would be hours before everything cooled enough to investigate the scene.

Waving off the medic who was checking him out, Taylor said, “I want the base locked down. No one comes or goes. I also want some of your men to do a sweep of the fence, all the way around, just in case they’ve found another way in or out. If you need manpower, use men from the unit that’s about to rotate out, no one stationed inside the base. I want this whole place locked down. Also, shut down any laundry facilities and start going through soldiers’ belongings. You can’t start a gasoline fire like this without leaving some traces on yourself.”

“I can get it started, but for something like this, we’re going to need approval from the general.”

“I’ll deal with that, just start getting this place locked down. Call the gate guards and have them stop all traffic right now and let us know if anyone left recently.”

“Do you have anyone trained in arson investigation,” Whitaker asked when she walked up, dressed in her borrowed clothes.

Despite everything that had happened, Taylor couldn’t help but smile at her appearance. She looked so out of place in the bare fatigues, with just U.S. Army over one breast pocket and no other insignia, non-regulation hair, and in clear discomfort in her new clothes.

“I’ve taken a course, but nothing beyond that. Is it really necessary though? It’s pretty obvious what happened here. Look,” Chenier said, pointing at small burn trails in the dirt. “You can still see where he threw the gas on the door, and you can definitely smell it.”

“Gas burns out pretty fast if just splashed against the wall. Unless he had a pool of it against the floor, something to burn a little longer, or something else in it, it wouldn’t have had time to really catch the wood through this paint.”

“Maybe it was avgas?” Taylor offered.

It was academic to him, but if Whitaker was right, it would make it easier to trace than if he’d just used gasoline, which would have been readily available all over the base.

“Maybe. I’m not an expert, and maybe just splashing the walls with gas would have been enough, but I’d like someone who knows what they’re doing to look at the scene and tell us. If there is something else, it’ll help us track down the perp.”

“We have time,” Chenier said. “The metal is still scorching hot. They can’t really start until the scene cools.”

“I’ll make a call to the Bureau and see if they can get someone nearby to fly in from Dallas or El Paso. Rope off the scene and don’t let anyone mess with anything until they get here.”

“Have one of your men do it,” Taylor said. “This can all wait. We need to get this place locked down. Now!”

“I’ll take care of it,” Chenier said, walking off, already barking orders into his handheld radio.

“Do you really think we’ll catch him on the base?”

“Yes. His clothes would have stunk of gas and probably been covered in soot. He would have had to ditch them and change before he could get out of the gate. Even if he did, we know the window.”

“He could have had another way out of the base.”

“Maybe, but if Chenier gets men out now, he wouldn’t have had time to cover his tracks well. This wasn’t planned out. We started getting close and asking the right questions. He’s panicking, which means he’s made mistakes.”

“They look good on you,” Taylor said, giving her a once over.

“I doubt it. I know you’re fine with clothes from the Salvation Army, but I spend a lot on mine. I don’t find them getting burned up very funny.”

“You gotta find the humor in situations like this or you’ll let everything get to you.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “We should go get approval from the general.”

She’d never been able to get her head around the army way of looking at things, Taylor thought.

“Chenier will get started without approval, but yeah, it’s best if we talk to him. Then we continue what we were doing before this mess. He wouldn’t have tried to kill us if we weren’t getting close.”

“All of my notes got burned up,” she pointed out.

“Sure, but you were able to make the list once, we can do it again. Let’s go see the general.”

It was still dark, but lights were on all over the base, including the admin building. An unscheduled fire was a big deal, and a lot of people would be up already, trying to figure out how this was going to mess up their day. A case in point was that the general’s aide was in the outer office, looking panicked.

“Corporal, we need to see the general.”

“He’s not here, sir,” the younger man said. “We can’t find him.”

“What do you mean you can’t find him? Have you checked his room?”

“Yes, sir. He isn’t there and the room doesn’t look slept in. I checked with the gate guards to see if he went off base, but they said they have no record of him leaving.”

That wasn’t good, Taylor thought. When he’d left the evening before, the general looked exhausted and had said he was heading to bed.

“Shit. Do you think …?” Taylor asked, looking at Whitaker.

“Maybe, but why? If he killed the general, there’d be a body. He hasn’t been trying to hide anyone before now. And when would he have the time?”

“There was a couple of hours before he set our billet on fire.”

“I don’t know,” Whitaker said, thinking.

The corporal looked back and forth between them, his concern building as he realized what they were talking about.

“I should call Captain Chenier.”

“The captain’s busy,” Taylor said. “Where’s the base XO?”

“We don’t have one at the moment. Colonel Williams was deputy garrison commander, but he transferred out last month. We were scheduled to get a replacement, but someone put a hold on all transfers right after he transferred out, so we’ve been shorthanded.”

“Is that usual, leaving a place like this short-staffed?”

“It’s more common than you’d think, especially in places like this. Units being deployed into the field would get priority and we’ve had a decade of constant combat operations. I’ve served in some units that were almost at half-strength for a while, although I don’t think that’s what happened here. I’d bet this was the new secretary, as soon as he found out about the mess here,” Taylor said to Whitaker. “Probably trying to keep everyone in place until he could get his own people down here to fix this problem.”

“Well, it screws us now.”

“I know. Who’s senior?”

“The headquarters CO, Lt. Colonel Simmons is CO of the headquarters group. He’s senior at the moment.”

“Get him and your command sergeant major and get them up here now.”

The man nodded and quickly walked to the door to the office, almost bowling over Davis, the DOD investigator.

“What the hell is going on around here? Everyone’s running around like chickens with their heads cut off and someone said something about a fire?”

That statement proved to Taylor that Davis had never actually served. During moments of excitement, it could seem to someone who didn’t know what they were looking at that everyone was running around pointlessly, but all of the men on this base would have trained for a wide range of scenarios, fire being one of the big ones. What Davis had seen as confusion Taylor had recognized as men rushing to do what they were supposed to do. The modern army wasn’t one where everyone waited for orders to act. In a crisis, NCOs wouldn’t wait to be told what to do before getting their men into action. Places like this only got chaotic when there was nothing to do, which was why they were drilled so much. Boredom, not crisis, was the worst thing that could happen to a unit. Once the shit hit the fan, the men would focus on their jobs.

“There was an attempt on our lives tonight. Someone set the building we were staying in on fire.”

“Or you did it by accident. Where’s the general? We need to get this place under control.”

“At the moment, he’s missing.”

“What?” Davis said, shocked.

“They can’t find him at the moment.”

“We need to …”

“They’re doing what they need to do. The next in command and the command sergeant major should be here in a few minutes.”

“This crisis is beyond some lower-level officer without an understanding of the delicate nature of what’s happening here. The national news is already sniffing around the town. Do you think they’re not going to find out about the fire or that the commander of this base has suddenly gone missing? As a representative of the DOD sent here to investigate these events, I can’t allow you to take this any further.”

“That’s not how the army works. Just because you’re from the DOD doesn’t mean you can circumvent the chain of command. The men here don’t answer directly to you. If you don’t like what’s happening, then you can feel free to call your bosses and have them talk to someone in the chain of command. Until then you can just shut up and let us deal with this.”

“That applies to you, too,” a voice said from behind them.

Taylor turned around to find a man with silver palm leaves on the collar of his BDUs, flanked by an older man with sergeant major chevrons and rockers on his sleeve.

“I wasn’t presuming to tell you how to handle the situation Colonel. I’m Taylor and this is Whitaker …”

“I know who you are, all three of you. You’ve been making enough noise around here this week it’d be hard to miss you. The corporal said something about the general being missing?”

“Maybe not missing, but we can’t find him, and we need his assistance. I’m sure you’ve noticed the fire. We need to get orders to lock down the base to keep the perp from running. Captain Chenier already has a plan that involves using squads from the training regiment, since we know they aren’t involved with the thefts on base, but he needed orders from the general.”

“Corporal, get men out looking for the general. Check everywhere he normally goes and make sure he isn’t hurt somewhere people aren’t looking. Contact Captain Chenier and tell him he has tentative approval to lock the base down, barring us finding the general.”

“Yes, sir,” the corporal said, looking relieved to have actual orders to follow.

As he moved to his phone to start following those orders, the Lt. Colonel turned back to Taylor and said, “I’m only generally aware of what’s going on here, so I need someone to bring me up to speed. Is the general’s disappearance connected to the thefts or fire? Is there a chance something could have happened to him?”

“I thi…”

“Wait, Lieutenant Colonel, you can’t be thinking of listening to this man. We’ve got a serious situation here and we need to get on top of it now. As the DOD …”

“Sir, you can feel free to do whatever it is you need to do, but you need to do it elsewhere. I know the agents here have been in and out of the general’s office, working with him on the investigation into the murders and the thefts, so I’m going to assume for now that they know more about what’s going on than anyone else. My main priority right now is to find my commander and get this base under control until I hear from my superiors. Now, if you’ll excuse us.”

“I … you can’t …”

“Sir, you can either leave this room or I’ll ask Sergeant Guzman to escort you out. I’ll promise you now, you’d not enjoy the experience.”

Taylor looked over at the older sergeant major and thought that the colonel had probably made an understatement. Men who made it to one of the highest NCO ranks in the army and placement as a command sergeant major were not men you wanted to tangle with. Luckily for Davis, he didn’t tempt fate, instead, huffing once or twice before storming out of the office.

“Do you think something’s happened to the general?”

“Maybe. They’ve resorted to murder more than once, so I wouldn’t put it past them, but I don’t see an actual reason for it at the moment. Right now, I’d recommend assuming he’s just missing, and not jump to any conclusions.”

“Davis isn’t wrong,” Whitaker said. “This is going to draw attention, especially if we take this all the way. I know what you said, but enough time has passed for the killer to get off base. For this to really work, we’re going to have to ask the locals to close off the two roads out of town. This far out in the middle of nowhere, I can’t see the perp walking their way out, so it’s the only way to be sure. We’re going to start getting serious press if that happens.”

“Let’s do it anyway. This isn’t even about the thefts anymore. The body count is starting to ratchet up, and …” Taylor paused, glancing at the colonel.

He was about to say, ‘and having the murderer transferred off base will just get more people somewhere else killed,’ but he didn’t want to mention the threatened solution around anyone else. Even if was just the colonel, the sergeant major, and the admin corporal in the office with them; word would leak out, which they didn’t need right now.

“Don’t mind us,” the colonel said, misreading the look Taylor had given him. “I don’t care about anything that happens off the base.”

“Fine. Then we’ll get the locals to set up roadblocks and start looking for both our arsonist and the general.”

“I’ll make sure the corporal here can reach me. If you’re going to leave the base or have thoughts on where the general is, please let me know. Right now, finding him is my top priority, so I’m going to manage the search here on base personally.”

“Good luck, Colonel.”

“You too, Agent Taylor,” the man said.

Taylor and Whitaker didn’t stick around, leaving the office and making their way out of the admin complex. Whitaker already had the phone to her ear, talking to the locals about setting up roadblocks. While she dealt with that, Taylor paced, thinking. He was still pacing when Whitaker finally got off the phone.

“Could you stop doing that?”

“What?” Taylor asked, before he realized what he’d been doing. “Sorry, I was just thinking.”

“They’re setting up roadblocks; hopefully, they’ll catch our guy trying to leave town.”

“Let’s go check out the general’s billet. The more I think about it, the more I don’t like the timing of the attempt on us and the general’s disappearance.”

“It’s bad, but like you said, everything this guy has done has been out in the open. The murders, the attempt on us, and especially Corporal Evans. At no time has he tried to hide bodies. If he got to the general, he would have left his body where someone would have stumbled across it.”

“Unless he needed the general for something.”

“Or unless it’s the black-market ring and not the killer, assuming they’re not the same. That tech’s body did get hidden.”

“Not really. It wasn’t out there for a day before a local stumbled on it. He was already off base, so they got him where he was. It wasn’t like they dragged him off base and did it.”

“Fine, I’m just worried we’re now carrying too many assumptions. Let’s go look and then I want to start working my list. If we still think the killer is separate from the black market, it’s our best chance to find him. He’s managed to go unnoticed till now, which means there’s a good chance the base lockdown won’t catch him. If he hasn’t run by now, he’ll be hunkering down and relying on anonymity.”

The general’s quarters, which was in fact a small, nicely furnished house, was close to the administrative complex, which made sense. Even in the army, power had its privileges.

There was already an MP and one other soldier inside, going through paperwork when Taylor and Whitaker walked inside. Luckily, the MP was one that they’d worked with already.

“Anything?” Taylor asked.

The MP paused for a second, probably thinking over if he should be sharing any information, before saying, “Not yet. It doesn’t look like anyone’s been here since this morning. No calls and some paperwork that had been dropped off for him in the morning was still sitting on a stand just inside the front door.”

“When was the paperwork dropped off, and are we sure he didn’t leave it until tomorrow? I talked to him when we got back to base, and he made it sound like he’d gone home and come back in.”

“I’m just telling you what we’ve found, which isn’t much.”

“Sure.”

He and Whitaker started poking around, going through papers and drawers. It was all incredibly mundane. It was really light on personal correspondence, but that was becoming the norm these days, since everything would have been done online. While not quite as squared away as Taylor would have expected, there was nothing notable. He was just starting to look behind furniture in the bedrooms when Whitaker called from the closet.

“The floor here is weird.”

“What do you mean, weird?”

She had pulled out a couple of boxes that Taylor assumed had been on top of the now cleared section of the flooring off to one side of the door.

“There’s a give to this area, almost like it’s hollow. I was looking for some kind of loose board, but there isn’t one.”

She pressed down in the center of the board, and it flexed down slightly. Had he not been looking directly at it; he probably wouldn’t have noticed. It would have probably creaked if someone stepped on it, but off to one side, which wasn’t likely.

“It could be the substrate wasn’t laid properly when they floated the flooring, or the adhesive is coming up.”

“Yeah, but that usually means the hollow section is part of one plank and part of another. This exactly follows one board. All of the ones on the other side are solid.”

“Let me look,” Taylor said.

Whitaker backed out of the closet and Taylor got on his knees, feeling around. She was right that it seemed to follow just one board. Pressing down on it like Whitaker had done Taylor could feel it flex, except for the small sections on each end to give it something to set to. Pressing on the boards on either side showed no give at all. They were solid and didn’t move at all.

“This has to be intentional, like someone carved out a section right here. There’s no way it just happened to have that one spot.”

“So, a hiding spot,” Whitaker said, more as a statement than a question.

“Yeah. Of course, it could have been here before the general got stationed here.”

“Maybe, and I don’t know how old this house is, although the flooring doesn’t look that old. He might have heard a creak when he sat the boxes on it, but in older houses you hear those everywhere, so it’s easy to ignore.”

“Maybe, but how intentional it seems makes me want to see what’s under here. If it’s nothing, I’ll take the heat from the general about breaking his house up.”

Taylor went downstairs and dug around until he found tools in a closet. There wasn’t a crowbar, but there were some basic tools like hammers and screwdrivers, and helpfully, a chisel. The MP looked at Taylor strangely as he went back towards the master bedroom with the tool, but Taylor waved him off. He didn’t want to have to explain why he was about to destroy the floor of the general’s quarters. Taylor had always been more of a do now, ask forgiveness later kind of guy, and figured the general would forgive them for their over-eagerness, since it was all in aid of finding him, after all.

The thing that surprised Taylor the most was how easily the board came up. There was a small gap too big for the screwdriver, but the chisel was able to slide in easily, and popped out with barely a flick of his wrist.

They’d been right about there being a very deliberate hollow. It was several inches deep, and the sides had marks where someone had scraped through the floating compound and deep into the concrete of the foundation underneath. Only a small part of Taylors’ brain registered those details, however. The thing that really caught his attention was a set of envelopes. More concerning was that the envelopes didn’t look old or faded.

Pulling them out, a pit formed in Taylor’s stomach as he felt the weight of one of the envelopes and heard a slight clinking sound from the objects inside. Taylor already knew what he was going to find, but it didn’t keep that pit from tightening as he opened it up and found several rings, including one he definitely recognized.

“Mother fuck,” Taylor said, making sure not to touch even one of the rings.

“Don’t touch any of them. Set it back down and let’s get some gloves. If this is what it looks like, we’re going to need to preserve evidence,” Whitaker said, her face having gone white.

She left to go get gloves from the MP while Taylor rocked back off his heels, sitting all the way down. By the time she came back, he was fuming.

“What?” Whitaker asked, seeing his face.

“I can’t believe I fell for this shit again. Bennett, Graf, now General Lane. Shit’s going to give me a serious complex when it comes to trusting people.”

Bennett had been a US Marshal secretly working for a Russian mobster and Graf had been a German police officer secretly working for some kind of European wealthy crime syndicate. Taylor had assumed both were on the up and up, and both had almost killed him for it when they finally turned on him.

“We don’t know anything for sure yet.”

“Bullshit. There’s no way I’m buying the coincidence of this. Lane’s the fucking killer.”

“Considering the number of cases we’ve worked on, and the nature of a lot of them, it’s bound to happen occasionally.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got to stop getting blindsided every time,” he said, pulling on the pair of gloves she handed him.

Inside the first envelope were six rings. Not as many as there were victims, but there was a chance he had some of them with him when he ran, which Taylor was certain had happened at this point, or he could have not had luck with those rings. Besides the sheriff’s ring, he recognized a ring that matched the one the realtor’s husband had described.

The second was more of a surprise. Inside was a key and some documents. The key looked like one from a fairly traditional safety deposit box, but the documents were less clear. Taylor handed them to Whitaker to look at, leaving the key in the envelope.

“Any idea what this is?”

“Looks like IP records of some kind, and notes on files names, but I don’t recognize them. I’ll take a picture of them and send them to a friend in tech services, see if anyone knows what this stuff is.”

“There’s only one bank in town. After that, I want to go and see if this key goes to any of the safety deposit boxes there.”

“You’re going to need a warrant. No way a bank lets you just walk in and open someone else’s safety deposit box without one.”

“Talk to Chenier. Being in the Army, he’ll have fewer rights than your standard citizen. He might have an expedited way to get a warrant for the bank.”

“Okay, if he doesn’t I’ll start the process of getting our own warrant. What are you going to be doing?”

“I need to call General Leland and explain what’s going on. Lane being the killer has taken this to a whole new level.”