Danger Close (John Taylor #7) - Chapter 10

Not all of the families were cooperative. The parents of the second victim didn’t want to talk to them. In small towns like this, gossip traveled fast. They’d heard there were people from the army investigating the murders and clearly held a grudge against the military for denying their involvement for so long.

Taylor tried to convince them that they were taking it seriously now, but two of the families took one look at the army-issued car they were driving and refused to even speak to them. Thankfully, the husband of the fourth victim was willing to talk, sort of.

Mary Taggart, the fourth victim, was a stripper at one of the clubs off main street. She was from Virginia originally but married a soldier who was stationed at the base for a while. As is unfortunately common among young couples where one spouse is enlisted and the other is a civilian, the marriage didn’t last. When her husband transferred out to another base, Mary had stayed in Silver Plains. She’d already started working at the strip club and eventually started dating a local, Doug Taggart. He didn’t have a great work record, mostly doing odd jobs around town and sometimes traveling out to farms several hours away to work fields during harvest seasons, but the couple seemed to do okay. Whitaker did searches on him and couldn’t find any records suggesting domestic trouble or really anything beyond a few moving violations over the years.

She had been murdered outside the club a year and a half ago. Taylor called Deputy Morris to see what he remembered of the murder, which was pretty much everything. He’d been the responding officer and said they inventoried the body but he couldn’t remember what valuables she had on her, since it hadn’t seemed important at the time. Besides the similarities to the other murders, it had been clear from the start this wasn’t a robbery. Her purse hadn’t been touched and it was still full of cash when they found her, mostly ones and fives she’d earned dancing that night. Her throat had been cut, from behind, and she didn’t have any defensive wounds, like the others.

Morris did admit that, unlike the others, most of which had happened in well-lit areas, there were other explanations on how the killer had caught her unaware. The back of the club was unlit that week, since the only light behind the club had its bulb broken several nights before the murder. There was still a little light from the street, but there would have been enough dark corners for the killer to hide in. Plus, the club itself was still open when she left, meaning there would have been enough noise to hide the attacker’s footsteps. Morris said it was possible, even probable, that the killer just lay in wait and surprised her as she left the club.

Since it was already getting late, they first tried Taggart at his trailer, but no one answered. He lived in a rundown trailer park at the far end of town that looked like it was one step from being reclaimed by the desert. Taylor doubted Taggart was out doing late night work as a handyman and was about to call Deputy Morris again when a woman in a fuzzy pink bathrobe and slippers stuck her head out of the neighboring trailer.

“You two cops?” she said, eyeing them up and down.

“FBI, ma’am,” Whitaker said, holding up her badge.

“Thought so, you look like a cop. What do you want with Doug?”

“We just want to ask Mr. Taggart a few questions. Do you know where he might be?”

“Probably at the Tumbleweed. He’s there most nights … days too.”

“The Tumbleweed?” Taylor asked.

“It’s a shitty bar one block over on Austin Street. If he ain’t there now, wait ten minutes and he will be. Poor man drinks himself blind every night before stumbling back here.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Taylor said.

“Uh-huh. You should leave him alone. He’s been through enough, he don’t need anyone else reminding him about Mary.”

Taylor gave her a wave as they walked away. She kept muttering under her breath until they were out of earshot, but Taylor ignored her, worried more about what they’d be able to get out of Taggart.

“You know, it’s going to be tough to question him if he’s hammered,” Whitaker said as they got in the car.

“He’ll remember the details of his wife’s death. You can’t get drunk enough to forget it, no matter how much you try.”

Whitaker gave Taylor a look, but he ignored it, looking out towards the desert instead. His trauma had been different, but he understood the desire to crawl into a bottle and shut the world out. He’d tried to do the same thing in Florida after he got discharged from the army. It was only chance that’d taken him in another direction. Whitaker knew where his head had gone, but thankfully she didn’t press him about it. She knew he didn’t like to talk about it, despite more or less putting it successfully behind him.

It didn’t take them long to find the Tumbleweed and when they did, Taylor thought the neighbor had been generous when she described it. It was a small, standalone building not much bigger than the shack they’d been assigned on base and looked like it should be condemned any day now.

A few cars sat outside the building, all looking almost as run down as the bar itself. Taylor imagined that people with more means went to one of the less run-down bars on main street instead of slumming it here.

The inside of the bar was almost as dark as the nighttime outside and smelled of stale beer on body odor.

“Doug Taggart?” Whitaker said, holding her badge up to the bartender.

For a moment, Taylor thought that the man might not answer, the way he glared at Whitaker, but finally, he tilted his head in the direction of a man in dirty, rumpled clothes sitting at the end of the bar.

“Mr. Taggart,” Whitaker said as they walked up to him. “Could you come outside for a minute? We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“I don’t wanna answer any questions,” he said in a slurred voice.

“Please, Mr. Taggart. This won’t take long. We just want to ask you a few questions about your wife.”

“God damnit, I said NO!”

“Why don’t you two leave him alone,” the bartender said.

“Please leave this to us, sir,” Whitaker said.

“Mr. Taggart, was your wife wearing her wedding ring, that day?” Taylor asked.

Whitaker gave him a look. She always thought it best to take witnesses away from others when questioning them. She said it was the best way to get real information, since a witness in earshot of someone else might alter their story. She said they did it to not look bad to people that might know them and other times it was because someone nearby had some kind of investment in the situation that might cause the witness to lie.

Taylor could see the looks on the people in the bar with them. None of them looked too comfortable with cops, which Whitaker clearly was and they’d probably spent the last year hearing Taggart drunkenly talk about his wife’s death. Taylor would bet they weren’t going to get him out of the bar without a fight.

“What?” he said, sounding surprised.

“Her wedding ring. You’re still wearing one so I assume she had one too. I know you don’t like talking about her and what happened, and we’re not going to ask any questions about that. We’re trying to find her killer, and I think it might help us catch her killer. We just need to know this one thing, and we’ll leave you alone.”

Taggart looked at the bartender and then back at his drink, sighing deeply, like a man giving up.

“Yeah, she always wore it. Never took it off.”

“Are you sure she had it when she left the club? I know some girls wear jewelry into the club and they’d put it in their locker, so they didn’t lose it or get it damaged when they worked. Do you think she might have done that and forgotten it? It’s important to know if she had it.”

“I don’t know,” Taggart said. “She wore it when she worked, I know that. She and the manager got into fights about it all the time. He said guys didn’t want dances from a married woman, but she wouldn’t take it off. Mary said, the day I gave it to her, that she’d never ever take it off, and she meant it.”

His voice was quivering when as he talked.

“Was it ever returned to you by the police?”

“No. I looked. I looked a bunch of times, but it wasn’t there. I think one of the cops kept it. They probably thought someone like me would never notice. Well, I did. I noticed it was gone. The sheriff said it wasn’t there, but I know Mary was wearing it. She said maybe she’d left it in the club or one of the other girls had taken it, but Mary woulda never taken it off and woulda never forgotten it.”

The man fell apart by that point, his words becoming blubbers as he put his face in his hands, his whole body shaking.

“You two need to leave,” the bartender said.

“Sir …” Whitaker started, but Taylor put a hand on her back and started guiding her towards the door.

“We’re leaving,” he said, hustling the two of them out of the door.

“Okay, spill it. What’s with the rings?” Whitaker said once they were outside.

“I …” Taylor started to say when movement caught his eye.

There wasn’t much light in the parking lot, so he hadn’t seen them until they appeared out of the shadows. Four men came towards them from the end of the parking lot, spreading out as they got closer. They were all looking at Whitaker and Taylor hard, making it clear they weren’t just trying to go into the bar.

“Can we help you, gentleman?” Whitaker asked, backing up a step and putting her hand on her weapon.

“You’re the army people, right?” the guy in front said.

He wasn’t stumbling but it was clear he was very drunk from the moment he started speaking. His words slurred together, making it hard at first to even work out what he was saying.

“Guys, I don’t know what you think’s going to happen right now, but you know we’re FBI agents and we’re armed, right?”

“Ohh, big FBI agent. You’re out here covering up for the army and you think you can just get away with it. Going around bothering people’s families and now we hear Sheriff Martin got murdered too. You people are ruining our home.”

“They’re drunk,” Taylor said, his hand on his weapon.

“Guys, I’m only going to warn you about this once. Turn around and go home, or this is going to go very badly for you.”

“We aren’t afraid of you,” one of the guys on the right said.

“You should be, dumbass. We have guns. You get that, right?”

They were too drunk to care, it seemed. They continued edging closer, apparently unconcerned that both Taylor and Whitaker were armed. The men were starting to get close enough that they were going to force them to pull their weapons.

“Wait,” Whitaker said as Taylor’s hand gripped his weapon. “We don’t want this to go sideways.”

Taylor didn’t have time to question her. He’d barely opened his mouth to ask what she was talking about when she started moving. He’d forgotten how fast she was. In the gym, at least against him, she always took it easy, since when it came to hand-to-hand she outclassed him pretty badly. In the field, things rarely ended up needing to put hands on someone. Usually, when things went bad out here, they ended in gunfire, and not thrown fists.

She’d closed the distance between her and the guy in the middle before any of them knew what was happening. He hadn’t even put his hands up, leaving his chest wide open as her foot connected center mass, sending him flying backward, sucking air. The next closest guy to the right was sluggishly just realizing things were not going the way they expected them to when she was on him.

Taylor didn’t watch what she did next. There were still two others and he didn’t want to give them time to work out what was happening. To their credit, they didn’t just stand there staring stupidly. Unfortunately for them, they were both just as drunk and didn’t think through what they were doing. Both men turned and started for Whitaker to help their friend, apparently completely forgetting that Taylor was standing right there.

Taylor took one step forward and swung out with his right arm, cloths-lining the guy furthest to the left. In his drunken state, he hadn’t even seen Taylor moving towards him. Taylor caught him unexpectedly, right in the neck. The guy wasn’t going fast, so he wasn’t seriously injured, but Taylor had put force into his swing. He crumpled backward, hands going to his throat, gasping for air. Taylor turned to deal with the last guy standing, but Whitaker was already there.

He tried a wild punch that she easily pushed aside before catching him with an elbow to the face. He joined his friends, writhing on the ground, holding his face as blood dripped through his fingers. Taylor couldn’t see his face but it was a good bet his nose was broken from how Whitaker had caught him dead center. He might have lost some teeth, too.

Whitaker wiped his blood off on the guy’s shit before stepping over him.

“What the hell was that about,” Taylor said, hurrying to catch up with them. “There were four of them. You could have gotten hurt.”

“Did you see how drunk they were? There was no way they were going to touch me.”

“Sure, but why even chance it?”

“One, we’re already having issues with the townspeople. They blame the army for what’s happening and as word gets out about the sheriff, things like this will start happening more to army personnel. I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire by shooting a couple of the locals. We really should talk to the general about confining his people to base until everything is settled. This place is about to become a powder keg.”

“Probably.”

“Reason two is that the news media is already sniffing around for a story. They saw us at the sheriff’s house. If we turn up a few hours later having shot several locals, how will that look? We don’t need to make this any more of a story.”

“Fine, so we didn’t want to shoot them. Maybe next time let me know what you’re going to do before you go out swinging.”

“Because announcing what you’re about to do to the person next to you is good strategy? Besides, I was never going to be in danger. Even if you hadn’t taken down the fourth guy, they would have never touched me.”

Taylor had to agree with her assessment. If they’d been sober it might have been a different story but the four of them were so hammered even Taylor would have been able to take all of them. Knowing that didn’t keep it from feeling wrong though.

“Okay, fine. I’m not crazy about it, but I’ll accept it,” he said as they pulled out of the parking lot.

They could see the guys still on the ground as they pulled away. The door to the bar opened and the bartender checked on them, so they’d probably all be fine. Even if he hadn’t seen what had happened, it wouldn’t be hard to work out. While he agreed shooting locals would make things worse, beating them up wouldn’t be that much better.

Taylor was debating whether or not it was worth it to continue arguing with Whitaker’s decision when his phone rang.

“Please hold for the President,” an officious sounding voice said.

Taylor put it on speaker and said, “It’s Caldwell.”

She nodded. They’d only had a couple of calls from her since she took up the new position, but they both understood the drill. As President, she had way too many things to deal with to call people that might not answer or might be busy, so they always had a secretary call and then connected the call to the President, so she could go from one task to the next with the least amount of delay.

“John?” Caldwell’s voice said through the speaker.

“Yes, ma’am. Whitaker’s with me. What can we do for you, ma’am?”

“We have a problem, John. You had a small confrontation with some local news people down there. Something about the murder of the sheriff?”

“Yes, ma’am. We were looking into her murder, since we believe she was killed by the same person as the other murders connected to Fort Chilton. They were there when we returned to our car after interviewing neighbors. Since we’re driving a car from the base motor pool, they knew we were connected and tried to talk to us. We did not give a statement.”

“Yes, I saw that. Our problem is that, with an army vehicle at a murdered sheriff’s house, this became a big enough story that it got picked up by their parent network and made it to the national news. People are starting to ask questions and look into what’s going on down there, which is what we were hoping to avoid. It won’t take long till someone who wants the spotlight takes a fact-finding mission down there.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. We realized it was a problem, but we couldn’t avoid being seen by them, and there was no way we could keep from being at the scene. We were actually the ones who found the body. She’d called shortly before and told us she had some information that could help us get a handle on these murders, but when we arrived she was already dead. It’s why we’re pretty sure it was connected. They wanted to silence her before she could give us whatever information she found.”

“I’m also hearing that we’ve had more murders in the base itself, connected to the operation you set up.”

“Yes, ma’am. We managed to grab one of the culprits using the money as bait, but whoever these people are, they’ve managed to completely compromise the base’s computer systems, and were able to get in and get to our prisoner.”

“John, I’ll tell you I’m getting a lot of pressure to pull you out of there, shut the base down for now and disperse everyone stationed there to different bases. I’m not one for sweeping things under the rug, but we’re up against the wall now. A lot of future plans we have for the army rests on getting this budget through. I have to think about our national security here.”

“Ma’am, I don’t think that will solve your problem. It’ll just move the problem to a new base.”

“I’m not sure I understand. You’re saying these people have connections to enough bases to function even if split up? I can’t believe we’ve been compromised that badly by a group of petty thieves.”

“I don’t think it has, ma’am. Honestly, I think everyone’s looking at this thing the wrong way. I think the situation here is completely different.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

Whitaker was staring daggers at him. He hadn’t been able to tell her yet what he was thinking, but as he listened to Caldwell, it started to click. He couldn’t prove his theory yet, but he was almost certain he was right. Of course, he’d have to prove it before he could stop it, but he felt confident he was looking in the right direction now.

“Ma’am, I think all of the murders are unconnected to the black market ring, except for the detained prisoner and the computer tech. Those two clearly are tied back to the thefts, but the other ones, I’m pretty sure the murder is someone completely different.”

“I don’t understand, John. How could they be unconnected?”

“I can’t explain that fully yet, ma’am. Right now, I’m going off a hunch, but I’m pretty sure it’s the one the sheriff had, which is what got her killed. I promise you we can shut this all down, but I need time.”

She was silent for several seconds, and Taylor knew she was thinking about it. He could only imagine the pressure she was getting. She might be President, but they didn’t operate in a vacuum. They had to negotiate and bargain with everyone, people on their side and people on the other side of the aisle. It was the curse of democracy.

“John, I can give you till the end of the week, but that’s it. After that, I’m going to let the Secretary go with his plan.”

“I appreciate the confidence, ma’am.”

Taylor was not at all sure he could get it done in a week, but he didn’t have a lot of choices. It was either this or she shuts it down now. If he was right, then the killer would be shuffled off to another base and they’d have the same problem somewhere else. For as much as he disliked Davis, he did care about the army and he knew the little weasel was right, at least as far as the army getting a black eye from this goes. The service had some rough patches over the last few years.

“That week only counts if you can keep off the TV between now and then. Any more news coverage and I’ll have to pull the plug then and there.”

“I understand, ma’am. I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will,” she said and hung up.

“You’re going to explain all this to me, right? I’ve been with you the whole way, and I have no idea what you were talking about.”

“I think I know what the sheriff found.”

“This is about the rings, right?”

“Yes. I’m pretty sure that’s what Sheriff Martin worked out. One of the things that connected all of the murders was that nothing was taken. It’s how we knew it wasn’t just a routine killing for theft. That wasn’t right, though.”

“It was a killing for theft?”

“No, I mean there wasn’t nothing taken. The killer took a ring off of every person he killed.”

“Why? I’m really not following the logic here. They’re going out in the community to steel rings and, what, sell them. How much could they be worth? The realtor’s ring might have had a diamond in it, but I remember the sheriff’s ring. I’m not sure they would get much money for that and I really don’t understand why a black market ring would be going out and killing for some cheap rings to sell.”

“They wouldn’t. I think the killings are a completely separate thing from the black market. It’s the thing that’s been bugging me this whole time. The murders always stood out as out of place for a black market ring. I’ll give you the corporal and the tech guy. Those were definitely connected to the black market ring, and make sense. Both had to be silenced before they could talk. But even that didn’t really sit with the other murders. Those two were brutal and rushed. Hell, the corporal was practically ripped apart in his cell. Their murders didn’t fit the MO of the other murders over the last three years, and all of the murders here except those two and the bar fight did fit a specific MO. I would bet that, once we get hold of the families of the other murders, we’ll find they’re all missing a ring also.”

“So you’re telling me there’s a black market ring operating here that has stolen tens of thousands of dollars of government property and definitely killed two people is not involved at all with a half dozen murders or more in a small community, even when at least two of those murders can definitely be connected back to the base.”

“Basically. I still feel we’re missing something on the thefts, but this explains what was wrong with the murders. One, there have just been way too many murders in Silver Plains. A community of this size should have, at most, one a year. Even then, it should be more like overdoses, fights, or hunting accidents, not slit throats and wiped down crime scenes. That was one of the things that never sat right for me. Two is the trophy taking. Thieves covering their tracks would never take trophies like that. What they would have done is take all the money off the people they killed. The realtor and the girlfriend that the army agreed were connected, why did they still have their possessions on them. These are thieves. Thieves steal shit.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re thinking serial killer?”

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking. I’m also thinking the killer is enlisted and assigned to the base. He knows about the black market ring and was using them as a smokescreen for his murders. The town and the army were too busy bickering over who was responsible to look too close into the murders themselves. Not until the sheriff got someone who would listen enough to give her a chance to try and prove it.”

“I don’t want to hear this, I really don’t. I know you have these gut instincts, but it’s gone too far this time.”

“Maybe, but just think about it. Doesn’t it explain a lot of the issues we’ve had with this case? None of the murders, except for the tech and the corporal, who were both killed to directly cover up the crime, makes sense. Okay, maybe the girlfriend, but the realtor? You know her murder never made sense.”

“I can’t believe I’m even humoring you on this. You want us to call the President and tell her ‘Ma’am, instead of a black market ring to worry about, we think you actually have a black market ring and an enlisted serial killer.’ How do you think that will go over?”

“Not well, but I wasn’t planning on telling her. She gave us until the end of the week to deal with this, which means we still have four days until our time’s up. All we have to do is arrest both groups.”

“Is that all?”

“Have some faith,” Taylor said, giving her a smile before pulling up to the gatehouse.