The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (76)

She did the landlord’s rep, who was nice enough, a thin, pale man with a tentative smile, who’d always been polite with her, the favor of emptying out the refrigerator, taking anything that might spoil to the garbage can, pouring two quarts of milk down the sink. When she was done, she stood in her bedroom, moving back and forth between windows on opposite walls, looking up and down the street.

No sign of a cop, or any unknown car, or the Explorer.

When she was satisfied, she took a last turn around the house, looking for anything she might have missed. She didn’t bother to try to wipe out fingerprints, or any of that. The Feds would figure out soon enough who she was, and the Army not only had her fingerprints, they had samples of her DNA.

Turned one last time at the garage door: she’d lived in the house for three years, felt no affection for it at all. Shook her head, ran the garage door up, backed out, and a minute later, was gone for good.



* * *





“Her name is Jane Jael Hawkes and she has no criminal record at all,” Greet told Letty. “But she’s your girl. How many women you know with a middle name like Jael?”

Letty was sprawled on her bed, her phone set to “speaker.” Kaiser sat on a corner chair, immersed in a beat-up copy of Alan Furst’s novel Red Gold, which Letty had loaned him. “She was in the Army until twelve years ago, clean record there. She’s really invisible, no presence on social media, at least, none we can find, no mentions in the local newspapers. Military records show she used the G.I. Bill to go to college at UTEP. Don’t have her tax records yet.”

“Army—stationed at Fort Bliss?” Letty asked.

“No, Fort Polk, Louisiana.”

“Is Fort Bliss a place where you might get some military C-4?”

“Oh . . . heck, I don’t know,” Greet said. “I wouldn’t be surprised, I guess.”

Letty said, “Hang on for one minute . . . I need to check my computer.” She did that, then came back to Greet: “Billy, the commanding general at Fort Bliss is named Thomas D. Creighton, he’s a major general. Could you give him a ring and ask him if we could come over to chat with him?”

“Two-stars are pretty important,” Greet said. “I mean, I’m pretty important, and I’m only the equivalent of a colonel.”

In the corner, Kaiser looked up from the book and raised an eyebrow.

“Could you call him?” Letty asked. “Tell him you’re a three-star and if he doesn’t talk to us, he’ll be a one-star by dinnertime.”

“I’ll get back to you on that,” Greet said.

“Billy—this is important.”

“I know.”



* * *





From the corner, Kaiser said, “I hope nobody stole it from Bliss.”

“It’d help to know that,” Letty said.

“Yeah, but if that stuff is gone, some poor bastard is going to get cornholed—excuse the expression—and it’ll most likely be the wrong guy.”

Greet called back a half-hour later: “General Creighton will see you at two o’clock. Please be on time.”

Kaiser stood up and said, “I’m going back to my room to read this book for a while. We’re not that far away, but if we’re talking to a two-star, we should be early—I’ll see you downstairs at one o’clock.”



* * *





The Fort Bliss headquarters building was impressive enough, done in a faux southwestern style. They were early, but Kaiser had a long amiable chat with a sergeant major about employment opportunities after the military, and the sergeant major did them the favor of taking them into Creighton’s office early.

Creighton, a tall, watery-eyed man with a permanent sunburn, pointed them at visitor chairs and said, “DHS. Are you guys bad news?”

“I hope not, sir,” Kaiser said. “We’re tracking some people, we think right-wing militia, who we think are up to serious no-good. We followed them out into the mountains back east of here, almost to I-20, and they found themselves a crack in the terrain and they used some C-4 to cut an I-beam in half. We weren’t in a position to challenge them, so we don’t know where they went. We think a bunch of them operate out of the El Paso area.”

Letty had taken her cell phone out, called up a photo with the C-4 wrapper they’d found at the site of the C-4 test, and passed it across the desk to Creighton. He looked at it and said, “Damn.”

Kaiser nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Creighton called, “Sergeant major!”

The sergeant major stuck his head in the office. “Yes, sir?”

“I want to talk to Captain Colin sometime in the next two minutes. Can you make that happen?”

The sergeant major said, “I believe so, sir.”

“And could you tell Roxanne that we’d like three cups of coffee in here . . .” He looked at Letty and Kaiser. “Or soft drinks?”

Letty said, “Coffee’s fine, thank you.”

The sergeant major disappeared, and the general turned to Kaiser. “So you were out there, snoopin’ and poopin’, with nothing but your dick in your hand . . .”

“Yes, sir, and while it’s a beautiful thing in itself, it ain’t worth a damn in a fight.”