Chapter 6

The brig was a small concrete building not far from the front entrance of the base, with an MP corporal on the door, and no windows. It actually reminded Taylor a little of the sheriff’s office, with its handful of cells and room with desks for the officers on duty. The only thing missing was the front counter.

The MP lieutenant was already inside, working on the thing that really kept the Army in business, paperwork. Taylor had managed to never wind up in the brig during his time, but he’d had plenty of his friends find their way into one for some minor offense or another. He knew enough to know there’d be intake form, forms for tracking personal possessions, reports for JAG, and probably more he’d never heard of.

“Ready for him,” the Lieutenant said when he looked up and saw them.

“Yep. Do you have a room for us?”

“Yeah, we have an interrogation room. It’s a single room though, no partition or anything.”

Some of the bigger bases’ brigs would be full-on police stations whose interrogation rooms would have attached observation rooms with one-way glass. This wasn’t that kind of place though. Any real trouble makers were usually held here long enough to be shipped out to somewhere like Fort Hood, where they were better equipped for prisoners.

“That’s fine, we were both going to go in anyway.”

The Lieutenant showed them to the interrogation room and then left to retrieve the prisoner. Taylor and Whitaker had done this enough times they didn’t need to discuss their strategy. Instead they just sat in silence, each thinking over what their steps would be, comfortable that the other one would do their part.

Taylor had been preoccupied with catching the guys who got away and then finding out why the guards on the door had been pulled off to get a good look at the guy before. He was amazingly average-looking, a little shorter than Taylor himself with short, close-cropped brown hair and a clean shave. He wasn’t disheveled or borderline on the grooming regs like a lot of the guys Taylor had seen end up in trouble with the MPs. Had Taylor walked by him on base, he wouldn’t have thought about the guy twice, he was that average looking. Of course, since he started working missing person cases and then with the FBI, Taylor had learned, time and again, that the worst offenders rarely looked like it.

He wasn’t in uniform, but he and Whitaker had already looked over the man’s file and knew he was a corporal. His military file and the civilian records Whitaker had pulled up of the man’s life before the Army showed no indication that he’d be involved in something like this. Other than a few tickets for speeding and non-moving violations, he’d never really crossed paths with law enforcement, in the service or on the outside.

His military record was about as bland as possible, with a couple of decent but not overly glowing performance reviews and the standard unit merits. He was currently assigned to logistics, driving forklifts and loading things into and out of warehouses, which could be why he’d been brought into the ring in the first place. He’d at least know where things were and help locate items to steal beforehand. Taylor had checked and he hadn’t been involved in the offloading of the cash, but since pretty much everyone in the base knew where it was, that wouldn’t have been the reason.

Taylor’s second thought was that maybe they’d used him on this because they needed his code to get into the building, but they’d had Chenier pull the access records for the building, and the man’s code hadn’t been used for that warehouse since the money showed up. More troubling was the fact that at the time of the break-in, no one’s code had been entered into the locks to get into the building. According to the computer security system, no one had entered the building before Taylor and Whitaker went in using the MP’s passcode.

“So Corporal, do you want to tell me about the break-in?” Whitaker said.

She was using her ‘I’m your friend and not the person trying to put you in jail’ voice. Although most of the people on the other side of the table never actually believed she was on their side, it did set her apart for Taylor’s more direct, some would say asshole, approach. If the interrogations went long enough, they sometimes started to see her as an ally against Taylor, which was the point of their version of good cop, bad cop.

That of course, assumed the person on the other end of the table talked, which the Corporal wasn’t doing.

“Corporal Evans ... Can I call you Victor,” Whitaker continued. “You were trying to steal a large amount of money from the US Government and you’re looking at some serious charges.”

“Once the JAG lawyer gets here and starts laying out your article 121, things are going to go downhill fast,” Taylor said, taking over. “Considering the amount of money you were trying to steal, it’ll be Leavenworth for sure. Of course, that’s assuming they don’t try to tie all those bodies to you. It’s been sixty years since the Army executed anyone, but this might be the case that pushes them over the edge.”

Again, no response from Corporal Evans, who just sat staring straight ahead.

“Those were some pretty gruesome murders,” Whitaker said. “I didn’t serve, but I’ve looked into enough courts-martial to know they take the severity of the crime into account.”

“Do you think they’ll still go with the firing squad?” Taylor asked.

After a pause where Evans still didn’t reply, Whitaker tried to change tactics. “I understand you might have friends involved and don’t want to implicate them in all this. I don’t think I’d want to get my friends in trouble either, but anything you give us will help you when it comes time for sentencing. I’m not asking you to give up your friends, but you really do need to work with us a little bit. Tell us about how you got into the building?”

No answer.

“You know, if you really wanted to protect your friends,” Taylor said, “you’d tell us who they are. If we can pick them up in the barracks, it’ll be easy to do it safely, get everyone to come along peacefully. If we catch them in the middle of a job, like how we caught you, things can easily go south pretty quickly. I’ll tell you now, if we move in on them and they pull a piece, well, I’m still planning on going home after we finish this investigation. If it’s them or me, I’m telling you now, it’ll be bad for them.”

They kept at him for almost four hours. Questions, statements, threats, nothing seemed to work. They worked on him as a team, they switched off and let each work on him individually; they even gave Chenier a crack at him. Nothing they tried got them anywhere, which was a little surprising. While Taylor didn’t do a whole lot of these kinds of things, Whitaker was one of the better interrogators in the Bureau.

Even guys who remained tight-lipped in these situations usually said something. They asked for legal counsel, they denied their guilt, they cursed at their interrogators. What they didn’t do was sit completely still, not uttering a sound. He hadn’t even asked for a bathroom break yet.

“We’re not getting anywhere,” Taylor said outside of the interrogation room.

“No kidding. I can’t figure out what his deal is. Do you think he’s afraid of someone else in the organization? They threatened that other guy’s family member, right? The one they caught in the earlier investigation. Maybe they did the same here, told him ahead of time if he was caught so-and-so would be killed?”

“That guy started talking and then they got to him to threaten him. This guy just clammed up right away. Do you think they’ve started threatening everyone, working out each member’s weak point and letting them know what’s at stake if they talk? It’s pretty ruthless.”

“It also doesn’t make sense. They’ve been successful, but if you look at the tally of things taken, there haven’t been any huge scores worth that kind of thing. Hell, look at the file again. This went on for almost a year before anyone worked out there was a serious problem, because the thefts were so low value. If they were coming down that hard for this little gain, someone would have come forward. That kind of tactic always backfires eventually.”

“So we’re missing something still. That doesn’t really help us get this guy to talk.”

“Not yet, it doesn’t. I want to look into his background and see if I can figure out what they’ve threatened him with. If we can do that, we might be able to take that piece out of play and get him to open up.”

“You do that. By now the general will have heard about all the commotion, and will want an update.”

“Okay, meet me back at our quarters or whatever they are when you’re done.”

Taylor gave a nod and headed out, leaving Whitaker to deal with the Lieutenant. Of the two of them, she was the one more experienced with the actual day-to-day business of law enforcement.

“You certainly have stirred up my base, Sergeant,” the general said when Taylor was shown into his office.

“Not on purpose, General.”

“I know that and I approved the plan, I just wish it would have worked better and caused me fewer headaches.”

“I’d argue it worked exactly how we wanted it to. The bait worked and we managed to grab one of them in the process of trying to steal the money and the money is secure and will ship out tomorrow without a problem. Sure it could have gone better, but any plan has its challenges.”

“How goes it with the prisoner?”

“So far he hasn’t said a word, not even to ask for his JAG lawyer. He just stares ahead or at his hands and acts for all the world like a statue. We think he may have been threatened like the last witness. Whitaker’s going through his records now to try and find out what leverage they have on him and see if we can take it out of the equation and get him to talk.”

“That’s a long shot.”

“I know, but it’s what we have. Now that we have one of them, we’ll get something out of him eventually, even if he doesn’t mean to give it to us. These people may be good, but they don’t operate in a vacuum. They will have met together at some point, someone will have talked to a family member or girlfriend, the money they’ve been making will show up, something.”

“You certainly are optimistic, that surprises me. I’ve checked around on you, and from what I’ve heard, that’s not the word people would use to describe you.”

“No, it isn’t and I don’t think I’m being optimistic. I’ve worked a fair number of cases by now and my partner has worked a lot more than that. What both of us could tell you is that no criminal enterprise is water-tight. Something always leaks. All we need to do is figure out what that something is.”

“Well, then I guess we’ll just have to wait until you find a way to get this man to talk then.”

“No, we have other avenues to work on as well.”

“Really?”

“Yes. The attempt gave us two additional pieces of information. One, it tells us they have someone who has access to the other investigations, somehow. Maybe one of the MPs, maybe someone on your staff, I don’t know yet. They skipped every piece of bait we handed out until now. No matter how big the prize was, they wouldn’t have gone after it if they knew for sure it was a trap. I’m pretty sure the only reason they didn’t was because only you, I and Whitaker knew what was happening. Knowing that, we know we can start looking at everyone who had access to the previous investigation, and find the leak.”

“That makes sense I guess. Chenier had similar thoughts and put a lot of manpower into finding the leak, but he hasn’t had much luck yet. I’m not sure what you’d do that he isn’t.”

“Maybe nothing, but that’s also where the second point comes in. The warehouse was secured! They got in anyway, but no one’s code was entered. We can start by finding out how they did that. Then there’s the call to the men stationed outside the door, ordering them to head to the gate. It was made using someone else’s voice, and it was convincing enough that none one the men questioned it. There are half a dozen things in that worth investigating. As far as I’m aware, Chenier hasn’t had that kind of specific avenues in his investigations yet, just a general feeling that someone is talking.”

“Okay, so you’re not at a dead end.”

“Not yet, but the best way is still to get to Corporal Evans. The other things will get us a new name, but Evans is a part of the ring. He’ll be able to tell us specifics we won’t get unless we pick someone else up. I’m still pretty confident we’ll break him.