P Deutermann - Darkside

Jim finally recognized the name. Tommy Hays, the ex-boyfriend. Branner leaned forward. “If she knows something about the Dell case, then you’ll declare an honor offense?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. If she tells me something, I’ll take that to the chairman here.” The DCI looked over at the chairman, sending a silent message, Jim thought. “The first thing he’ll do is to take it to you and Mr. Hall. Then it would be up to you to come before the Honor Committee and make an accusation that she lied to you. An action constituting an honor offense. Then we’d formally appoint a BIO, and handle it as an ordinary honor offense.” He stopped for a moment. “Assuming that’s what you really want,” he added.

Jim sat back in his chair to consider what Hays was saying. If he understood the subtext, Hays was letting him know that if they let him do it his way, they might get what they needed without tagging Julie Markham with an honor offense.

“Deal,” he said, looking sideways at Branner to confirm that she was going to go along. Branner nodded but said nothing. “But time is of the essence. You need to have that discussion today. This afternoon.”

“No problem, sir,” Hays said. He nodded at the recording secretary, who got up and left the room.

“Then we’re done here?” Branner said.

“Yes, ma’am, I think so, unless you’ve got something else for us,” Magnuson said. Jim sensed tension in the air, but he couldn’t be sure. The perplexed look on Rogers’s face made Jim think that Hays’s offer might even have been rehearsed.

The meeting broke up, and they followed Captain Rogers out of the room. The midshipmen remained behind. Rogers said that the chairman would be in touch as soon as they had something, and that he would have to brief the commandant on what had transpired. Branner had no problems with that.

Once Rogers left, Branner looked at Jim. “What happened in there?” she asked.

Jim explained what he thought was going on.

“Okay, I’ll buy that, unless, of course, she’s an accessory.”

“If she’s an accessory to a homicide, she’s got bigger problems than an honor offense. Those guys are pretty smooth, aren’t they? Let’s step outside.”

They went through the waiting room to the executive corridor, and from there to the rotunda. To Jim’s surprise, the big midshipman, Hays, was already there, obviously waiting for them.

“Yes?” Jim said as he approached them.

“Sir, I need to speak frankly?”

“Shoot.”

“Like I said, I know Julie Markham, so I’m not exactly, um, unbiased. I like her a hell of a lot is what I’m saying. Most of her classmates do, too. But here’s the thing: If what she knows is because somebody else has something he’s holding over her, would you go after Julie or the somebody else?”

Jim was tall, but he still had to look up to measure the young giant’s expression. Hays seemed sincere. Before he could answer, Branner chimed in.

“We’re not after Julie Markham, unless she threw Dell off the roof, or stood by and watched, okay?”

“No fucking way,” Hays said quietly. “Ma’am.”

“You sure?”

“She’s tougher than you might think,” Hays said. He frowned as he thought for a moment. “And she’s deeper than I thought. But she’s no killer.”

“Okay,” Branner said evenly. “Then we’re looking for who did throw Dell off the roof. Assuming someone did. Our target is not Markham, unless we see evidence-hard evidence-that she did something to Dell.”

The midshipman nodded, then exhaled. “Got it,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to some people. And exams start this week. Makes it harder.”

“Call this number,” Branner said, handing him a card. “And remember those pictures.”

“Yes, ma’am. Serious shit. And ma’am?”

“What?”

“The officers are always saying not to confuse the Academy with the fleet, the real world? You shouldn’t confuse the mids with the officers, either, okay?”

Branner looked at Jim, who nodded. “Got it,” he said.

“Yes indeed,” Branner added.

Hays nodded, squared his shoulders, and walked away.

“And thank you,” Branner called after him, her voice echoing in the rotunda. She turned to Jim. “That was interesting,” she said. “So they do know something?”

“I think he does.”

“Then why the hell hasn’t he come forward before this?”

“Because they’re so close to getting out of here. So close to achieving what they’ve all worked their asses off for these past one thousand four hundred and sixty days, and they do count them, every day. And up to now, they probably thought the investigation would find the answer.”

“So what’s changed?”

“Maybe now they’re sensing a cover-up in the making?”

“Why would the firsties care?”

“Because Dell, even if he was only a plebe, was a mid. One of them. Remember what I told you about the rules of the game here. This is going to get very interesting.”

By 3:30, Jim and the chief, accompanied by an elderly PWC engineer, were walking the ground behind the tennis courts, trying to match the tunnel maps with a possible location for the top end of the shaft that led down into the old ammunition storage room. Branner had gone back to her office to update her case file with her notes from their meeting with Captain Rogers and the midshipmen. Jim had scheduled a briefing for the entire tunnel surveillance team, including Branner, for 4:30 at the Academy police building over at the naval station.

“There’s nothing that we’re using that would go down that far,” the PWC engineer said. “This whole area was recovered from the river forty years ago and filled in. That ammo bunker’s gotta be thirty feet down.”

“Well, there was a ladder going up, but I couldn’t see how high, and I wasn’t going to climb up in there by myself.”

“Shit,” the engineer said, looking at the diagrams. “I won’t go down there at all. That old brickwork’s like marzipan. One good vibration, the whole damn thing would come down.”

“Well, there’s nothing around here that looks like a ventilator shaft or storm drain or any other thing,” the chief said. “I wonder if it connects underground to something that goes into Bancroft Hall.”

They studied the diagrams. There were no utility tunnels or even lines anywhere near where they were standing. There were only the eighty-foot-high light towers, which illuminated the courts at night.

“Okay, I give up,” Jim said. “That whole ammunition bunker complex should be beyond the eighth wing’s foundations. If that shaft comes up, it has to be around here somewhere.”

“Hold on a minute,” the engineer said. “The eighth wing is built entirely on landfill. The original Bancroft had six wings, and a street between the end of the fifth and sixth wings and the seawall. I was here in 1956. The seventh and eighth wings weren’t here, nor was the land they’re built on.”

“Which means this diagram’s wrong,” Jim said. “Fort Severn couldn’t have been where this diagram shows it. It would have had to be back alongside the-what, sixth wing, right?”

The PWC engineer nodded. The chief was confused by the wing numbering. Jim explained that the wings were numbered second, fourth, sixth, and eighth on one side of Bancroft, and first, third, fifth, and seventh on the other side. “Like channel buoys used to be-right side were even numbers, left side were odd numbers. Naval tradition stuff.”

“Okay, then, if Fort Severn was back here,” he said, pointing on the map to the building right behind the eighth wing, “then that vent shaft would be coming up…very near the eighth wing. Not out here in the tennis courts. So we need to get into the basement of the eighth wing.”