The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (77)

The two men laughed and then the general apologized to Letty, saying, “Sorry about that, young lady. Old, old joke. I spotted Mr. Kaiser as a former NCO . . . what rank, Sergeant?”

“Master sergeant,” Kaiser said. “Task Force Green.”

“Really? Hell of an outfit. And now you’re DHS . . .”

The two ignored Letty as they talked Army, the general probing Kaiser’s background and assignments, until they heard hurried footfalls in the outside hallway and then the outer office. The sergeant major stepped in and said, “Captain Colin, sir.”

Captain Colin was a gawky young man, bespectacled, a heavy ring on one hand, who carried what might have been a permanent worried look. “Yes, sir?”

“Are we missing any C-4?”

The worried look intensified. Colin glanced at Letty and Kaiser and said, “We better not be. I can get an instant audit done in fifteen minutes or so.”

“Do that,” Creighton said. “I’ve got about twenty minutes to spend with these folks from the Department of Homeland Security, and I need the answer before they have to go.”

“Sir!” Colin disappeared.

“West Pointer,” Creighton said. “He’ll have a few stars someday, if he doesn’t foul up.” He turned his watery eyes on Letty. “So they tell me you shot that poor man three times all by yourself, and the last shot in the head. Is that true?”

Letty nodded. “It seemed like a reasonable thing to do, at the time.”

They spent fifteen minutes talking about the investigation and the theft of oil, and the general said, “Now you’ve got me worried. What are they going to blow up?”

“Something with I-beams,” Letty said. “A building.”

“Lord help us,” Creighton said.

Colin walked back into the office without ceremony, nodded at Creighton, and blurted, “Sir, I need to talk to you privately.”

Creighton turned to Letty and Kaiser, then back to Colin and said, “Okay.” To Letty and Kaiser, “Could you excuse us?”

They went to sit in the outer office. Letty said, “They’re missing some C-4.”

Kaiser nodded: “Yup.”

Fifteen minutes later, the sergeant major took a phone call, then came over and said, “I’m afraid General Creighton was called away. He, uh, went out to his car, out the back entrance.”

Letty spread her hands: “You’re telling me he isn’t going to talk to us anymore?”

“That’s . . . what it boils down to,” the sergeant major said.

“Tell him to go fuck himself,” Letty said.

She turned away as the sergeant major muttered, “I don’t think so.”

Letty turned back: “We’re the people on top of this. If he doesn’t cooperate, he could have a heck of a lot bigger problem than he has now. What’s he gonna do, investigate? Find these people? Stop them from blowing up a building somewhere? Or is he gonna try to hide the fact that his C-4 got stolen?”

“I can’t help you,” the sergeant major said.



* * *





Letty and Kaiser walked out the front door, into the heat. Kaiser said, “We’ve got to . . .”

Letty held up a hand, pointed down to the end of the building. “Isn’t that the Colin guy? The captain?”

Colin was standing just off the street, talking urgently on a cell phone, facing sideways away from them, as if waiting for a ride.

Kaiser, “Yeah, I think . . .”

Letty was already jogging toward Colin. He didn’t see or hear Letty coming until she was almost on top of him. When he realized that somebody was running up to him, he turned, saw her, and frantically waved her away.

“I can’t talk to you,” he said, holding the cell phone against his chest to muffle the microphone.

“You better,” Letty said. “Creighton has screwed himself. Kaiser and I are the only people who can stop this.”

“The FBI . . .”

“The FBI is in meetings and will probably be there for a week. We have reason to believe something is already under way. Tell me what you found out. I’ll put in a good word for you at your court-martial . . .”

“My court . . . Go the fuck away.”

“If a building blows up, you and Creighton could be in deep trouble for not helping us out. If we stop it and it’s nothing more than a theft that went nowhere, who’s even to know? But we need to know what you know,” Letty said. “Creighton said if you stay in the Army, you’ll eventually be a general. You want to stay in? Or do you want to be the guy who blocked an inquiry into what happens with a bunch of stolen explosives?”

Colin looked down at his phone, then punched the end button.

“We don’t know anything, not for sure,” he said. “We sent the guy in charge over to the dump. After a quick look, he came back and said we might be missing some C-4. Where it went and who took it, he doesn’t know. We’re going to get our own investigators involved. If we can find the thief, that should help stop . . . stop whatever might happen.”

Letty asked, “How much was stolen?”

“I got a car coming, I got to get out there,” Colin said. He looked down the street, and then said, “Go away, I don’t want anybody to see me talking to you.”