Chapter 14

The sergeant hadn’t been exaggerating when he said it was out in the desert. He lead them, Chenier, and some conscripted soldiers from one of the training units several miles out into the desert, eventually ending at a series of poorly camouflaged pits containing a variety of crates and containers. Of course, this far out in the middle of nowhere, poorly camouflaged was still hard to see until you were on top of it, which explains why no one ever stumbled on it.

They’d brought the soldiers and several trucks to reclaim as much of the stolen goods as possible, but looking at the condition of the stuff he could see and considering how long some of it had been out in the elements, Taylor would be surprised in more than a third of it was going to be salvageable. Of course, he’d watched the Army time and again abandon millions of dollars of equipment when abandoning or repositioning bases over the years, so he figured the loss wouldn’t actually affect the military in any way. At least with it recovered they could say with a straight face that nothing was actually stolen when an oversight committee ended up asking about the situation.

Taylor didn’t stay long on the reclamation. Now that he had the answers to what was going on with the phony black market ring, there was only one thing outstanding they needed to take care of. Lane was out there and his picture had been distributed enough that he wouldn’t have gotten far if he’d actually made a serious run for it. Lane struck Taylor as a planner, especially after learning how well he’d arranged for a cover for his murders, to the point that he’d killed for three years with more or less impunity before anyone twigged to his involvement.

Whitaker had stayed behind at the base, working out of the general’s former office since its previous occupant no longer needed it.

“General Leland was good to his word. They just sent over Lane’s psych profile and I’ve gotta say, you people are terrible judges of character.”

“Yeah. They let me in, after all. What does it say about Lane?”

“That they knew he was a whack job and ignored it, since they didn’t see him as being internally dangerous. This was done while he was still deployed and his boss appended a note that the psychologist had taken too civilian a viewpoint, misinterpreting a necessary military zeal with personally dangerous attitudes. He then wrote a long list of Lane’s achievements and commendations as a counter-rebuttal. Apparently whoever read it agreed, because they gave him the promotion over the psychologists’ recommendation. I’m just surprised it took until he was being cleared for his first star before someone noticed.”

“Remember that Lane was a career man. When he got in, no one took this kind of thing seriously. When Lane went to West Point, they were just coming out of Nam and the Army was really unpopular. They weren’t having people breaking down their doors to be the next generation of leaders.”

“Well, they missed big on this one. I’d bet the Iraqi civilians weren’t where he started. The only reason he got caught was because he moved stateside and started killing Americans instead of civilians in third world countries.”

“There’s some stuff in here about difficulty empathizing with others, but nothing helpful for actually finding him.”

“That’s not surprising. These psych interviews aren’t therapy. They aren’t there to get to the root of a problem or solve anything. They’re just looking to see if someone’s fit for command.”

“Which they said he wasn’t.”

“Well, they’re mostly advisory, especially at Lane’s level. This would probably be enough to wash out a recruit just going into boot, but generals have too many connections for that.”

“So where do we go from here? Was there anything in the dumped supplies that would suggest where he went?”

“I don’t know yet. They dug trenches, dumped the stuff in and, when it got full, buried it. Chenier’s going to do an inventory of it against the list of missing supplies and see if anything’s missing, but that’ll take a few hours.”

“We can keep interviewing people he was blackmailing for the fake black market ring,” Whitaker said, frustration in her voice. “Maybe he made a mistake and let one of his contingency plans slip out around them.”

“I really doubt that. Lane’s been very thorough. He thought through this whole thing pretty well. He knew he got too close in Iraq and he couldn’t pull the same thing here that he did there, and worked out this scheme pretty fast.”

“It eventually ended up getting him caught.”

“Yeah, but it was close. Before the new secretary got involved, there was talk of just transferring everyone off base and separating them to shut down the black market ring. Hell, all but three of the murders weren’t even being connected to the base. He was pretty close to walking away and setting up somewhere new. It only unraveled on him because they brought us in. Any internal investigation would have done anything they could to keep the investigation inside the Army and avoid locals. It wasn’t until we started listening to the sheriff that things went off the rails.”

“I don’t know, we had a shot at Corporal Evans. He should never have sent them against the money, knowing we were watching it.”

“He didn’t have a choice. We kept everyone BUT him out of the loop. He knew we were looking for the leak in the previous investigations and he was probably worried that we’d start looking at him if our trap was avoided. Besides, he had contingency plans. Hell, he got to Evans and then the tech before we could get anything out of either of them. When he killed the tech, he killed our last lead, so it basically worked. It was only ‘cause we listened to the Sheriff and started talking to the coroner after finding the tech that he panicked. Killing the Sheriff was his big mistake, but he was improvising by that point.”

“I guess.”

“Interviewing the rest of the people he was blackmailing is a good idea. I want to get a list of what they dumped and confirm where they dumped it. The only thing not sitting well with me yet is why he picked some of the things he did to steal, and some of the timing.”

“The timing?”

“Most of the thefts happened sporadically, with weeks or even months in between them, which was why it took so long for the Army to come to the conclusion that it was an organized effort and not just mismanagement or someone acting alone. That makes sense, because Lane wanted it as a scapegoat for murders and to give the Army something else to look at, but he didn’t want it big enough to get a serious response. There are a few thefts that happened right on the heels of the ones before it. When we looked at this originally, we thought the timing was based on either opportunity or orders from end buyers. Now that we know it was Lane behind everything and that there were no buyers, it changes how we look at that timing. Why did he double up on thefts when he did? It only happened a few times, so it wasn’t part of a plan, I don’t think.”

“So you think he needed something for his contingency plan and stole the items for that, and it won’t be in the stuff abandoned in the desert.”

“Pretty much. We won’t know until Chenier finishes his inventory and we see what’s missing, but I think that’s more likely than him accidentally letting something slip.”

“Okay, so we interview everyone again, this time specifically concentrating on what they know to be stolen and where it was dumped.”

“At least until we hear from Chenier.”

The second round of interviews didn’t go any better than the first. None of the people they talked to the first round would talk to them, even knowing how much the Army had on them. The sergeant had named names, which meant it wasn’t just documentation gathered by Lane hanging over their heads anymore. The problem Taylor and Whitaker faced, however, was that most of them had been blackmailed for crimes much more serious than the thefts they committed against the Army. Now that the information was out there, they had those additional crimes to face once the Army was done with them.

They did get two more soldiers to confirm the sergeant’s story and point out things they knew to be stolen and where it was dumped, but it wasn’t enough to paint a good picture of everything they should find in the desert. One of the men did agree to also provide testimony against other soldiers he knew were involved, but Taylor wasn’t worried about that. The Army already had JAG officers on the way to start setting up courts-martial and the FBI was also sending out agents to deal with soldiers whose pre-Army crimes were big enough to warrant investigation. Now that they had it all figured out, Taylor was fine to let someone else deal with them and focus on just catching the general.

When they had run through all the incarcerated soldiers again, Taylor and Whitaker both had a chance to get some sleep they missed out on the night before. Whitaker had wanted to push on, keeping at the blackmailed soldiers while they waited for Chenier, but Taylor pointed out that when they figured out what items Lane might have stolen for himself, they’d have a lot of work ahead of them. They’d already been pushing themselves hard over the last week, trying to track down a fictitious black market ring, and they’d be no use to anyone completely exhausted.

Colonel Simmons had given them the use of one of the smaller, unused barracks, to get some rest. Small for the Army meant a barrack that could hold thirty men, and felt cavernous with just Whitaker and him in it. But that didn’t keep him from passing out within minutes of his head hitting the thin pillow. It was a sign of how exhausted he really was by how long it took Chenier to shake him awake hours later.

“Finished?” Taylor asked groggily, looking up at the captain leaning over him.

“Yes, and you were right.”

“Whitaker,” Taylor yelled at his partner one rack over, startling her awake, focusing in on Chenier. “Some of the items are missing?”

“We think so. Some are pretty obvious, like the pallet of MRE’s. Others, most of the pallet was there, although one or two items were missing. It’s possible those got dropped while being delivered out to the desert or it got buried further down than we checked, but I don’t think so. Most of those pallets were shrink-wrapped up, and we can see where the shrink wrap was cut away right next to the missing items. Also, once we started listing out all of the missing stuff, it paints a pretty convincing picture.”