Chase (5 page)

Chris came through
as we were getting into the car. He had been able to arrange a meeting for us at another office, on the other side of the Potomac.

A little after eleven thirty, Emily and I walked through the south parking lot entrance of the Pentagon. Two checkpoints, three massive endless corridors, and an elevator ride later, Air Force Colonel Kristin Payton greeted us by her secretary's desk.

Payton was an outdoorsy-looking woman of about forty-five, pale and raw-boned, with short blond hair. Unlike Chris Milne's office, hers was anything but austere. It had a thick Air Force-blue carpet, a beast of a cherrywood desk, and a comfortable-looking worn leather couch beneath a big double window. A framed article on one of her office's wood-paneled walls revealed that she was one of the first female pilots to fly an A-10 Warthog in combat.

“Mr. Milne has briefed me on what you found up in New York, Detective,” Colonel Payton said as she sat us down before her desk. “He also referenced the sensitivity due to the intelligence concerns. Just for the sake of argument, what would you be looking for?”

“Well, I guess finding out how Eardley was designated KIA would be a start. Were there any remains found in the crash?”

“Just off the top of my head, I would say no,” Colonel Payton said, folding her hands on her desktop. “Usually the crash of an aircraft as huge as a C-130 will completely obliterate any human remains. If there was an additional fuel fire, which I would assume there was, it would have been even more impossible to recover anything at all. But in all honesty, I don't know. We can't know until we receive and read the AFSC report.”

“AFSC?”

“That's Air Force Safety Center, at Kirtland in New Mexico,” the colonel said. “It's like the military version of National Transportation Safety. They have to do a report on any and all military aviation incidents.”

There was a buzzing sound.

Payton drew a phone from one of her uniform pockets and stood. “Excuse me, please, would you?” she said, and left the room. Emily and I shared a look.

Payton was gone for about three minutes before she hurried back in with a strange, worried look on her taut face. She wiped it off with a deep breath.

“I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but I'm going to have to cancel this meeting. I do not have the authorization to discuss this classified matter with you any further.”

“Wait, just like that? Are you kidding, Colonel?” I said.

“No, Detective,” she said, giving me a blank, obtuse look. “Do I come across as kidding?”

I took Luke Messerly's card out of my pocket and slid it across her bigwig executive desk.

“Recognize the type there, Colonel? Take a good, hard look at it. Because your name is about to be emblazoned on the front page of the paper that made it famous. I'm not an ancient alien theorist asking for a pass to Roswell, ma'am. I'm an NYPD homicide cop working a homicide. You're the face of an organization that has just goofed up big-time. ‘That's classified' isn't going to cut it. You guys need to get in front of this.”

“Detective,” she said with a stiff smile. “There are channels for this kind of thing that we have to abide by. Your request has been made. First, it has to be reviewed, and the information declassified after due process. Or feel free to try to get approval from the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Otherwise, I can't help you. Now, if you'll excuse me.”

I looked at Emily. She seemed as pissed as I was. I couldn't believe this bull.

“One last question, Colonel. Do your superiors wind you up in the morning, or—like with drones—do they use WiFi control nowadays?” I said.

“Now, is that necessary, Detective? Please leave now or I'll have you escorted.”

“Eardley was murdered,” Emily said. “A pilot, a fellow airman, murdered. Thrown off a roof! You don't care about that, Colonel?”

“Of course I care,” Payton said, maintaining a blank expression that said the exact opposite. “It's sad. I know lots of pilots, lots of dead ones, too. They get killed in combat. They commit suicide. Some of them get drunk and fall off buildings up in New York City after they go AWOL. Make sure to hand your security passes back when you get to the downstairs desk.”

“Well, we gave
it a shot, at least. That's what really counts, right?” Emily said with mock cheeriness on the ride back to Union Station.

Even after she stopped the fed car, I sat there saying nothing. I looked out at the columned facade of the station, the people walking back and forth. When I spotted the wedding-cake white of the hovering Capitol dome off to the right, I felt like punching the dashboard.

“Washington is really something,” I said. “It's one thing to not be able to find out something, quite another to be told it's being hidden from you on purpose—and don't let the door hit you in the ass.”

“It's a disgrace,” Emily said. “Did you contact Eardley's family yet?”

“No,” I said. “That's one of the main reasons I came down here. Silly me. I thought I might find out what the hell happened so I'd have something to tell them. Imagine? Now I have to call this guy's mother and say, ‘Good news, ma'am. Your son didn't die in a crash in '07, but, bad news, he died falling off a building last week. And no one in the military cares why.'”

“What really drives me crazy,” Emily said, “is how stupid this is. The truth will come out eventually. These idiots can't see that?”

“They're bureaucrats, Emily,” I said. “Bureaucrats by nature aren't the deepest of thinkers, or they wouldn't be bureaucrats. I'll tell you, the first thing I'm going to do after I contact Eardley's family is urge them to get a lawyer to sue the crap out of the Air Force and find out what the hell happened.”

“You know what, Mike?” Emily said, drumming her fingers on the wheel. “Is it possible to hold off contacting the family one more day?”

“I guess I could ask the Medical Examiner to delay a little longer,” I said. “But I want to get a move on so that Eardley's family can have a real burial. Why? What are you thinking?”

“That Air Force robo-witch was an ass, but Chris Milne truly is good people,” Emily said. “Give him some time.”

“Okay, Emily. I'll delay it a couple of days, but I won't hold my breath,” I said, as she finally gave me a peck on the cheek good-bye.

A minute later
I almost bumped into a handsome ponytailed college kid in jeans and a plaid shirt, playing the classical violin on the polished marble floor of the stunning Beaux Arts station.

Normally, positive things like classical music and grand architecture put a smile on my face, but I guess I wasn't in the mood. After my encounter with its power, the majestic polish of DC had really left a bad taste in my mouth. Like the robotic Air Force colonel's office, it was pleasant but seemed all veneer. Just something nice and distracting to look at while who-the-heck-knew-what went on behind the scenes.

My train wasn't due to leave for another half hour, so I decided to do some shopping. I was in the upper mezzanine level of the station in a cool old-fashioned general store called Union General, buying some gifts for the kids, when a woman bumped into me.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said, reaching down and picking up a plastic bag off the floor. Gray-haired and middle-aged, she wore green nursing scrubs. “Here, sir. You dropped something.”

“No, you're mistaken, ma'am. That's not mine,” I said.

“You dropped this,” she said again, and gave me a look. Then she turned and quickly left the store without looking back.

What the—?
I stared after the woman as she disappeared into the crowd.

Inside the bag was a bottle of Coke and the
Washington Post.
Inside the
Post
was a folded piece of paper with a typed name and address.

Under the name and address was a one-sentence message, also typed.

“How do you like that? Manna from heaven,” I mumbled. I put the note back into the bag and headed quickly for the store exit.

An hour later,
supplied with a huge coffee and a turkey sandwich from a DC deli, I was behind the wheel of a silver Chrysler 200 rental car. When I looked up Marble Spring on my phone and saw that it was only about four and a half hours from DC, I decided to find this guy, Haber, immediately—before the Air Force shut him up, too.

So I was riding up Interstate 270 through northern Maryland with no idea what I would find. A Google search of the name had yielded a frustrating lack of information, but a potential hit: one Paul Haber had been an Army platoon sergeant.

Okay, I was intrigued. But how had he found me? Did someone in DC tip him off? I thought back over the day—the security checkpoints at the Air Force base, the stonewalling at the Pentagon.

Had Payton had a change of heart? No way, I thought, remembering her expression after the phone call. She had too much to lose. Whoever was on the other end of that line wanted Eardley buried for good.

Chris Milne? No, he wouldn't bother with the cloak-and-dagger, the cryptic note.

My phone buzzed in the cup holder—Emily Parker. I picked up.

“It's been too long.”

“Ha,” she answered. “I'm guessing you're not on that train back to New York right now.”

“And miss my date with Paul Haber?” I said. I'd texted her about the note, asking her if she could find anything on the mystery man.

“So I thought. Well, I have something interesting for you. I ran his name and he comes up clean in Army records, nothing unusual, spotless performance records—”

“And that's interesting?”

“So you don't want to know?”

“Know what?”

“That he served in Iraq, and his service overlapped with Eardley's. Both worked in special operations. And what's more, I also turned up a photo. Dated 2007.”

Marble Spring was a blip on the map in rural Pennsylvania, up in the Allegheny Mountains. I now knew, thanks to Wikipedia, that it's four miles north of the west branch of the Susquehanna River, and has a population of 112. I practically have more people in my family.

I hooked a right on US 15 into Pennsylvania about an hour and twenty minutes later. Off the interstate, I got on State Route PA 144, then crossed over onto PA 150 and started heading up into the Alleghenies. Stunning ridgeline views opened up as I crossed remote rusting bridges. Down in the distance was a patchwork of farms laid out along zigzagging rivers deep-cut into the heavily forested land.

It had stopped raining when I got out of DC, but around three o'clock it started to rain again. As I came down into a mountain valley alongside a railroad bed, thunder cracked what sounded like a foot from the car. The pelting rain began speed-drumming off the top of the Chrysler.

Five minutes later, I stopped before Marble Spring's single blinking yellow stoplight. Since there wasn't another driver to be seen, I paused to look around. Main Street, without even a bank or a post office, redefined the phrase “not much to look at.” By my observation, the town consisted of a dollar store across from a Gothic-looking red brick church, and some sketchy-looking row houses rising up into the woods.

Behind these few structures, in fact all around them, stood the hills, dark and looming, the tops hidden in mist.

Still stopped at the light, I tried my email again. Service was spotty in the hills, but finally the photo from Emily had come through.

It showed our John Doe—Eardley—young and handsome in uniform. And looking very buddy-buddy with the guy next to him, who had an arm slung over Eardley's shoulder. Tall, also handsome, and apparently Paul Haber.

I found Lincoln
Lane about two miles west of the town. It was a narrow, steep strip of crumbling blacktop, more driveway than road. I counted three residences as I came up the long slope of the valley. Each was a trailerlike home set back under the trees, with old cars and jacked-up trucks in the front yards.

200 Lincoln Lane was the end of the road. I stopped the Chrysler and stared at the mailbox, which had the address but no name, and the dirt and gravel drive beside it curving still higher, back into the trees. You couldn't see any sign of the house.

The driveway was unbelievably long—three miles, if not more. You could hardly call it a driveway, since it wasn't paved. I thought I had made an idiotic mistake and was now driving on a state park hiking path. The Chrysler almost got stuck around a steep muddy curve but regained traction to make the top of the hill, where the road ended at a gate.

I stopped the car in front of it and saw that the gate was attached to a chain-link fence, with razor wire running along the top. There was a sign attached to the fence:

Must be Haber's business, I thought. Through the wire, I could see the shooting range about half a football field away. It was very professional-looking, with covered shooting booths and macadam strips to shoot from one knee or prone, along with marked-off firing lanes. It seemed built for long-distance shooting, as the space between the booths and the gravel bullet stop—with hanging steel sheet targets—was immense.

Beside the range were wooden supply buildings and a raised range master booth. Off to the right, closer to the locked fence, I saw some small cabins, a storage container, and three new-looking double-wide trailers.

When I got out of the Chrysler I was greeted by a dog barking from inside the closest trailer—a vicious, rarely fed one by the sound of it.

Spotting a radio box next to the fence, I walked over and buzzed. There was no answer, and after a minute, I buzzed again.

Hmmm, I thought. No clients today, but there was the dog. This Haber guy must have gone somewhere but might be back soon. So I decided to wait.

There were no bars on my phone or any WiFi signal. I looked at the GPS on the car. There was no town on the screen where my blip was. Not even the road registered. I was just a blip in the middle of nowhere.