Julia Spencer-Fleming - One Was a Soldier

“Army property. Stolen in Iraq. No way it’s our case.” Lyle buffed his nails against his pants. “Officially.”

“It’s definitely not our case.”

“So there’s no call for us to do any investigating.” Lyle looked up at him again. “Officially.”

“Nope.”

“It sure is interesting, though.” Lyle grinned at him.

Russ found himself grinning back at his deputy chief. “It sure is that.”

Russ picked up and put down the telephone three times after Lyle left. He had been an MP for a long time, but he was a civilian cop now, and he knew the kind of runaround he would get if he tried to trace Colonel Seelye through the usual channels. If he was going to ignore his good sense and pursue this, he had to figure a different way in, but it was getting late, and his brain kept stalling out. The mental snapshot of Clare in his truck had become a motion picture, complete with interesting sound effects. He’d have thought after all those years of holding himself in check, he’d be able to do without for a few lousy weeks, but Jesus, he was going cross-eyed from wanting her.

The hell with it. He shelved the problem of the out-of-his-jurisdiction theft in favor of loading the pickup with quilts and driving over to Clare’s place.

Unfortunately, when he got home he discovered a dead furnace, a rapidly cooling house, and a mother who had been waiting for him to play handyman.

“I’m sorry, Russell, but you know the repairman charges sixty dollars just to come out, let alone the cost of fixing up the old beast.” His mom fussed around him as he disassembled the pilot light, looking for the problem. “You didn’t have any plans, did you?”

“No, Mom, it’s fine.” He managed a quick call to Clare between flushing out the draw line and his trip to Tim’s Hardware for new spark plugs. She commiserated with his oil-stained, thwarted lust, told him he was a good son, and then hammered the nail in his coffin when she said she was headed out the door to the Foyers’ dinner, and no, she didn’t expect to be home before ten or eleven.

As a result, he went to bed as frustrated physically as he had been mentally, and he woke up like a man who had been bitten by bedbugs, his involuntary abstinence transformed into an itch to find out the truth about Arlene Seelye.

It was an itch he didn’t have a chance to scratch until after he had given the morning briefing and taken an A.M. patrol. He got back to the station at lunchtime, shut the door to his office, and tossed his lunch bag onto his desk.

He needed a favor. Who did he know who could help him? He had been out of the army for a decade now, an eternity in an organization where twenty years meant a career and the unwritten law was up or out-rise in the ranks or leave. He flipped through his ancient Rolodex, passing on one name and discarding another until he came to the card for Major Anthony Usher.

Tony Usher had been a raw WO1 when Russ took him under his wing during the brief, intense days of Desert Storm. Impressed by Usher’s combination of careful attention to detail and sheer smarts, he boosted him into the ranks of the CID. After several years of solid investigative work, Usher decided his true calling was on the other side of the aisle. He applied for and was accepted to OCS and from there went on to law school. He’d been with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps for three years now, and if he didn’t know everyone involved in army law enforcement, he knew someone who knew someone.

Russ had copied Usher’s latest contact information from the annual Christmas letter he got. He figured it was a fifty-fifty chance the man was at the same posting, so he felt he’d already accomplished something when the private who answered put him through.

“Major Usher.”

“Tony? It’s Russ Van Alstyne.”

“Chief Van Alstyne! Well, I’ll be damned. How are you? Hey, Latice and I were so sorry to hear your news about Linda.”

“Thanks. I appreciated the card. I’m doing well. I’m actually getting married again. End of this month.”

“Well, hush my mouth. Good for you. Let me guess, high school sweetheart?”

“Nope. She’s an Episcopal priest from southern Virginia who’s fourteen years younger than me.”

Usher roared. “Damn, Chief, you always could land in a pile of horse shit and come up smelling like roses.” His laughter died down to a wheeze. “So. Sweet as your life is, I don’t think you’re calling me just to brag.”

“Got a favor to ask.” He outlined the situation with Seelye, what he knew about her so-called investigation, what he had heard about Quentan Nichols, and what he suspected, based on the events of the past week and a half.

“Hm-mm. It does sound like sloppy police work, to say the very least. Can I ask your part in this? I’m not seeing where you have a duty to investigate.”

“I don’t. Which is why I’m calling in a favor instead of going through official channels. There’s been no crime in my jurisdiction-yet-but several persons of interest live in my town, or worked in my town, or keep popping up in my town. I want to be prepared, and for that, I need more info.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do. Might take me a while. I’ll try and get back to you before the end of the day.”

As it turned out, Russ had logged out and swapped his uniform for jeans and a flannel shirt and was headed to the parking lot before Usher called again. He checked the number on his cell phone to make sure it wasn’t his mom-if her furnace acted up again, she could start a fire and wait till he got home. He was looking forward to an entirely different sort of hot date tonight.

“Van Alstyne here.”

“Hey, Chief, it’s Tony Usher.”

Russ climbed into the cab of his truck to escape the cold wind blowing off the mountains. “You know, Tony, you can call me Russ. You outrank me now.”

Usher laughed. “Right. How many people you know in that little burg of yours call you Russ?”

“Well… the Episcopal priest does, but I call her ma’am.”

“Mm-hm. That’s what I call Latice. You know the three little words every woman wants to hear? ‘Right away, honey.’”

Russ laughed.

“Okay, I got the skinny on this lieutenant colonel of yours. She’s U.S. Army Financial Command, attached to the 10th Soldier Support Battalion, but you probably knew that already. Her specialty is financial fraud and loss prevention, which makes her a logical go-to person when you’ve got a theft of this size. She has a good record, nose clean. Married, with two kids in college.”

Russ started up the truck’s engine. “That must call for some money.”

“Tell me about it. The schools Kanisha’s looking at run to fifty thousand a year. I may have to rob a bank next fall to pay for it.”

Russ twisted the temperature control to hot and turned the blower on. “What about the investigation?”

“Well, that’s the real interesting part. I asked a JAG who’s prosecuted several fraud cases to talk to her contact in FINCOM. As far as she could tell, no one in that office has seen a major theft investigation come across the transom. Now, Seelye is high enough up there to take a case without having to run it by her colleagues, but regs state everything must be logged and a file started, both hard copy and electronic.”

“Let me guess. There’s no record of the missing million or Tally McNabb.”

“You got it. No log, no file, no nothing.”

Quentan Nichols had told Clare that he was the one who had started the investigation, and when he went looking for more help from FINCOM, Colonel Seelye had shown up and taken the case away from him.