“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.”
Clare blinked. “She’s the one who’s here, investigating the missing funds.”
“She asks me to turn over everything I have on the case, which was weird, because I hadn’t put any other info on my request form. Then she says she’s taking over the investigation. I’m thinking I’m screwed, that somehow she’s been able to figure out I was the guy who looked the other way and let it happen. So I handed over my stuff and sat down to wait for the arrest. The next day-two weeks ago-I was reassigned to Fort Gillem. Courtesy of Colonel Arlene Seelye.”
Clare frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s what I thought. I went back and forth, trying to figure out the right thing to do. About telling Tally or not.” He propped his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor. “Up to that point, I guess I was still hoping there was going to be some way I could have my cake and eat it, too. Get the money back without Tally taking the fall. At the end, I called her. Told her I’d been working on an investigation. Told her what I found.” He glanced up at Clare. “I warned her that there was a CID finance investigator on her trail. The next thing I heard…”
“She was dead.”