Julia Spencer-Fleming - One Was a Soldier

Clare nodded. Cleared her throat. “Chief Nichols. I’m…” Surprised didn’t begin to cover it. “What are you doing here?”

“It is you.” He relaxed, which wasn’t the relief it might have been, since he seemed to be all muscle. He was in mufti-khakis and a turtleneck sweater. “You look different.” He touched his throat. “I mean, beyond the collar and all.”

“I’m growing my hair out.” Idiot. The man was a possible killer, a probable thief, and likely absent without leave as well. And she was talking about her hair. “There are several people here. In the offices. And I’m expecting a visitor any moment.”

He held up his hands. “Whoa. I’m not gonna hurt you.” He took one step, two, and as Clare rocked onto the balls of her feet, ready to run, he sat in the first pew. At the far side of the aisle. He spread his arms across the back of the pew and rested his hands over the smooth, dark wood. “I need your help.”

Well. That, at least, was familiar. “Go on.”

“You knew Tally.”

“Yes, I did.” She relaxed enough to take a more comfortable stance. “I don’t know how you knew that, though.”

“She told me about her therapy group. The doctor, the cop, the Marine and Episcopal priest.” He shrugged. “I Googled ‘Episcopal church in Millers Kill.’ When I saw your name, I figured there’s no way there are two woman priests who were also vets. Leastways not in a dinky town like this.”

“Tally told you about her group.”

“We talked, yeah. A couple times. I was-” He shook his head. “It’s complicated. I don’t know where to start.”

“How about where you helped her steal a million dollars?”

“I didn’t! I mean, yeah, I guess in a way I did.” He looked ahead, at the stained glass triptych behind the high altar. Christus Victor. Christ, victorious over death and sin. “I didn’t mean to.”

This, too, was familiar. A person sitting opposite her, talking around and over and between the problem, taking his time because getting to the point meant getting to the pain. She sighed. Sat down in the pew on the near side of the aisle. Faced Nichols, her hands relaxed and open. Listening. “Tell me about when you met Tally.”

He smiled a little. “It was my second tour. Hers, too. I was stationed at Balad. After the insurgency took hold, it was the most secure airfield in the country. Crazy busy. Planes flying in from everywhere, day and night. Everybody in the world passing through-reporters and security contractors and politicians. I saw that guy from The Daily Show once. Anyway, Tally’s company was staging out of there. They had a construction project going, shoring up some old buildings. Tally told me it was going to be the in-country version of a Federal Reserve Bank. She was going back and forth between Balad and Camp Anaconda, which was stressing her big-time.”

Clare nodded. Ground travel was tense. Taking long trips over the same highways, you figured every time you didn’t get blown up just brought you closer to the time you would.

“We met at the club. She asked me if I knew where she could get some booze, and she just about died when I told her I was a cop.” He glanced at Clare’s collar. “We, um, started spending time together. You know.”

“Uh-huh.” She wondered where Wyler McNabb fit into the picture. “Did she ever mention her husband?”

“She said he was a civilian.” He shrugged. “At the start, I didn’t care. I mean, people were jumping in and out of the sack all the time. Nobody checking for rings. By the end”-he tilted his head back-“I pretty much convinced myself he was history.” He looked at her. Smiled humorlessly. “To look at me, you wouldn’t think I could get played so bad, would you?”

“She asked you to do something for her.”

“Oh, yeah.” He heaved a breath. “She did. Asked me to keep my patrol away from a storage building. Tell my team anything they saw around one of the hangars was authorized. For one day. That should have been the tip-off it was something big. People smuggle in booze or dope or other contraband, they’ve got drops. Regular customers. A supply chain. One-off, that’s got to be something big.”

“You didn’t know what was going on?”

“I didn’t want to know.” He bent over, resting his elbows on his knees. “Jesus help me. She could have been smuggling those WMDs out of the country. I didn’t want to know.”

“So then what happened?”

“Nothing. The finance building got finished, and she went back to Anaconda for good. We e-mailed and IM’d back and forth as much as we could.” He gave her a challenging look. “It wasn’t just sex. She was really easy to talk to. I felt like-like she got me, you know? Even though she was from this pissant little town in upstate New York and I’m from Chicago. Like those differences didn’t matter at all.”

“I know.” Did she ever. “When did you start to think there was something more than just a romance going on?”

“When she shipped home. All of a sudden, she’s not answering my e-mails, she’s not taking my calls. I knew she was separating, and I thought maybe the readjustment to civilian life was hitting her hard. I had leave after I cycled back stateside, so I decided to come out here and talk to her in person.”

“Which is where you and I met.”

“Yeah.” He paused for a long moment. “After that’s when I started looking into what actually happened. It took a while, because I wasn’t officially investigating and I wanted to keep things on the down low.”

“To avoid incriminating yourself?”

“Hell, yeah. She already made an idiot out of me. I didn’t want to lose my career, too.”

“So you found out she had gotten away with a million dollars.”

“The building I was supposed to keep my patrols away from was a transshipping facility, right next to the airfield. Usually, any cash coming in would have been secured, but this stuff was transiting, off one Herky Bird and onto another within a few hours.”

“Do you know how she moved it?”

He shook his head. “There were quite a few finance people at the base. She might have gotten help there. Or who knows, maybe she had a string of guys she was playing along. One with a forklift, another with a truck.”

Clare rubbed her arms. “That doesn’t sound like Tally.”

“Yeah. Well. She had friends. It was her second tour. She knew people.”

“I take it you don’t know where the money is right now?”

He gave her a look. “Would I be here asking for help if I did?”

Clare spread her hands. “What sort of help are you looking for, Chief? What do you want? The money? Revenge? You want to find out who killed her?”

He frowned. “I thought she killed herself.”

Clare made a noise. “Officially, yes.”

“You think-oh, God. Yeah. If somebody was trying to get her out of the way.” He closed his eyes. Opened them. “Will I sound like a sick bastard if I say that would be a relief? I called her just a couple days before she died to tell her the investigation had been taken away from me. I thought maybe the news-”

“Wait. She knew about the investigation?”

“That’s why I’m here. I was putting together the pieces, slow, like I told you. I had a pretty good idea of what she’d done. I figured she doctored the manifests, so the paperwork that came from stateside matched the paperwork from inside the theater and the numbers all lined up. Nobody checks against the originals if they think they have authentic copies in hand, right?”

“I guess.”

“I needed to see the original invoices. The ones that were generated stateside. U.S. Army Finance Command has a small group of MPs and CIDs attached-specialists in fraud and financial crimes and all that. I made the request through them. A week goes by, and then two weeks. Then I get a surprise visit in person from Colonel Arlene Seelye.”