The Escape (John Puller, #3)(41)

He left his room and got into his truck and drove back to Leavenworth. He found the motel, passed by it, and noted the military guards posted out front to secure the crime scene. The motel was like the one he was staying in right now in KC. Cheap, run-down, as well as off the beaten path.

A one-star’s travel allowance would have paid for a much nicer place. Puller also knew Daughtrey could have stayed, as a professional courtesy, in officer quarters at Fort Leavenworth. The various service branches were nothing if not hospitable to each other, if only to show off what they had.

He parked on the street and doubled back, walking slowly past the motel’s entrance before heading on. He reached the corner and stepped partway into an alley, keeping the place under observation. He felt his heart beating faster and knew that being out in the open like this was still a new thing for him. He had been on twenty-three and one at the DB: solitary confinement for twenty-three hours before being allowed out of his cage for a single hour. Now to be freely walking the streets and filling his belly in a diner in the middle of dozens of people was a heady change. He refocused on the motel, and moments later his decision to come here paid off in a way Robert Puller could never have imagined.

A white Chevy sedan pulled up to the curb in front of the motel. Puller locked on this ride because the make, model, and color screamed military. A man and a woman got out.

When Robert Puller saw his brother emerge from the car, he froze, yet only for a second. Then he inched more deeply into the alley, but kept his gaze squarely on his younger brother’s tall, imposing physical presence.

What the hell was he doing here?

This wasn’t a CID case. And even if it were, the Army would never have allowed John Puller to work on it, if only because it might have a connection to his brother’s case. The military not only disliked appearances of impropriety, it loathed them.

But there he was, in the flesh, and he was heading past the guards after flashing his creds. The woman with him was tall, slender, and auburn-haired, but Puller did not get a good look at her face.

So my brother is investigating this case. And I wonder what else he’s investigating?

Would the military really let one brother go after another?

Robert Puller had thought a lot about his brother and what he would make of his older sibling doing a bunk from the DB and leaving behind a dead body. But never once, with all his brilliance and built-in paranoia from working so long in the intelligence field, had he imagined his brother working an investigation whose one goal would be to bring Robert Puller in, dead or alive, as melodramatic as that sounded.

And certain people might very well prefer me dead.

He waited for his brother to disappear from his line of sight and then left the alley and quickly made his way back to his truck. He was confident of his new face and altered appearance. But he had learned that his younger brother’s powers of observation were far beyond the norm. Sometimes they were even scary. So he was taking no chances.

He reached his truck, climbed in, and then just sat there.

His thoughts were now totally focused on one thing, and they had nothing to do with a dead man in a prison cell.

His brother was here.

And Robert Puller did not even want to think about where things might end up.

Things were already complicated enough.

Now? What he was trying to do seemed impossible.

Because his little brother might be standing right in the way.





CHAPTER





21



JOHN PULLER SAT in his motel room staring at a wall. He and Knox had slept in after their late night. Then they had driven back to the motel where Daughtrey had been found. Puller didn’t know what he expected to find there the second time around. And ultimately he had discovered nothing new or helpful. Then he and Knox had spent the entire day running down more leads, but absolutely nothing had popped on any of them. Now it was night again and their investigation hadn’t progressed one iota.

And something Knox had said was sticking in his head like a Ka-Bar knife driven into his skull.

Or do you not want to know if your brother is really guilty or not?

Do I want to know? Or not?

He slipped his phone out of his pocket. It felt like a brick.

He thumbed through his contacts list until he settled on the one he wanted. He checked his watch. It was late and even later on the East Coast, but the person was a night owl. Puller knew many such night owls; he tended to be one himself.

He listened to the phone ringing. On the third ring he heard the gruff voice.

“Yeah?”

“Shireen?”

“Who the hell is this?” The gruff had moved on to annoyance.

“John Puller.”

Puller heard a thump, like a book had been dropped, and a clink, like a glass with ice in it had just been set down. And knowing Shireen as he did, the glass was not filled with water. More likely gin with a splash of tonic, and ice cubes, because as she had once told him, it was important to keep cool and hydrated.

A few moments of silence were followed by, “John Puller? What are you doing with yourself these days?”

Shireen Kirk—her full name, Puller knew, was Cambrai Shireen Kirk—was a Judge Advocate General, or JAG, attorney. She’d had her professional shingle out for nearly twenty years and had been involved in several of the cases that Puller had investigated. Each of those cases had resulted in a conviction. She was now forty-four years old, petite and thin, with reddish-blonde hair cut in a bob and bangs that still showed plenty of her freckles—Irish sprinkles, she had called them once. She was based in D.C. and had a reputation for being brilliant, scrupulously honest, diligent, fair-minded, and a woman who would kick your ass if you lied to her, regardless of military rank. And she could drink anyone of Puller’s acquaintance—and that included many large male beer lifters of prodigious capacity—under the table.