One Was a Soldier (29 page)

“Having you on my
arm
is not what I’m looking forward to on our wedding night,” Russ said into her ear.

“Hold that thought.”

Stephen beckoned to them. “We have a couple of guests eating breakfast, so we’re just going to walk through the dining room and then on to the kitchen. We can collapse the dining room table by a few feet, but we can’t remove it from the room, so the plan is to have the desserts and coffee served from here.” He opened one door. “Excuse us, folks. We’re just doing a wedding walk-through.” He led them into the elaborately paneled room. “We’ll take the chairs out, of course, and put the tea service on the sideboard—”

Beside her, she could feel Russ stiffen. He was staring at the other end of the mahogany dining table, where a forty-something woman in a starched shirt was buttering toast and a young black man with very little hair was working his way through eggs and sausage. The woman’s eyes opened wide. She put her toast and her knife on her plate. “Chief Van Alstyne.”

*   *   *

“I see you decided not to head all the way back to Fort Drum. You hoping to become better acquainted with our little town?” Russ’s tone triggered Clare’s early alert system. This wasn’t some tourist whose purse had been returned by the police department.

The woman’s nose pinched in and her mouth thinned. “I did a little research and became better acquainted with
you
last night. Twenty-two years in the army, twenty of them as an MP, retired as a CW5. Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Presidential Commendation with Valor. Investigator in chief for the 6th Military Police Group, Fort Lewis, training command at Fort Leonard Wood…” She steepled her fingers. “So what was the Deputy Dawg act yesterday?”

His service records,
Clare thought. The only place that information was accessible—and then only by authorized military personnel.

Russ crossed his arms. “Why don’t you tell me why you really came here looking for Tally McNabb?”

The woman’s eyes flicked toward Clare and Obrowski. Clare would go if Russ asked her, but she was damned if she was going to back down for anyone else. The innkeeper was another matter. “Stephen,” she said, “can we meet you in the kitchen in a few minutes?”

“Absolutely,” Stephen said, with the gratitude of a man whose job made him privy to more dirty laundry than he wanted to hear. He headed for the door. Paused. “I’ll have Ron make a fresh pot of coffee.” That thought seemed to make him happy again.

When the door swung shut behind him, the woman stared at Clare with a gaze like a dissecting knife. “Who’s she?”

Instead of answering her, Russ pulled a chair away from the table. “Clare?” She sat. “I’d like you to meet Lieutenant Colonel Arlene Seelye of the U.S. Army Finance Command.” He gestured toward Clare. “The Reverend Clare Fergusson.”

She wasn’t sure what was going on, but since it looked like Russ had already taken the role of bad cop, she figured she ought to be the good cop. She smiled, showing many, many teeth. “Hello!”

“This isn’t a matter for a civilian, Chief. Even if she is a priest.”

“Didn’t I mention?” Russ took the chair next to her. “This is also Major Clare Fergusson of the 142nd Aviation Support Battalion.”

The private, who had stopped eating when it was clear Russ wasn’t going to keep moving along, straightened in his seat.

“I don’t care if she’s commander of the Big Red One. I’m not going to—” Seelye slapped her napkin down. She looked at Russ. Despite the heat in her voice, her gaze was cool. Assessing. Whatever she saw, she decided to change tactics. “Mary McNabb, a.k.a. Tally McNabb, was under investigation for peculation.”

Russ cocked an eyebrow. “She had her hand in the battalion cookie jar?”

“We believe she made off with a considerable sum.”

“I have a feeling the army and I probably have different ideas as to what constitutes a considerable sum.”

Colonel Seelye paused. “In the neighborhood of a million dollars.”

Russ whistled.

“Nice neighborhood,” Clare said. Seelye looked at her as if she had just spat chewing tobacco on the table. Clare tried not to let her cheeks pink up.

“That’s a hell of a lot of money to sneak off with under the army’s nose,” Russ said. “Didn’t she have any oversight?”

“McNabb altered the records. Destroyed data. She was very skilled. And the chief financial officer of her unit was … lax.”

Clare nudged Russ’s thigh. He nodded to her.
Go ahead.
“Tally had been stateside since March,” she said. “Her discharge came through in May, and she’s been living openly in Millers Kill since then. How come you’re only now showing up to investigate her?”

Seelye crossed her arms over her chest. The private stared at the eggs congealing on his plate. Clare looked at Russ.
What did I say?

“I don’t think it’s because they’ve been taking their own sweet time. I think they didn’t know about it before now.” He twisted in his chair and propped an elbow on the table, for all the world as if he and Clare were having a postbreakfast chat over the paper. “Tally McNabb may have been a damn good bookkeeper, but she wasn’t any sort of criminal mastermind. I think she had help covering the theft up. From the inside.” He glanced toward Seelye, then back to Clare. She frowned. From the inside? The whole Army was one big “inside.” “From another MP,” he clarified.

Quentan Nichols.
Clare’s mouth formed an O. Russ swept his lashes low in acknowledgment.

Seelye didn’t react. “I need to search that house, Chief.”

“That house is the property of a civilian who isn’t here to give his consent. You take what you have to a judge, you get a warrant, and I’ll be glad to help you execute it. Hell, I’ll have my whole department pitch in.”

“This case is not in your jurisdiction.”

“Maybe not, but Tally McNabb’s death is.”

“Your people searched their house.”

“With probable cause, post death by gunshot.”

“I want to see your files.”

“You want a lot, don’t you?” He stood. “C’mon, Clare. We have some faxes to decipher.”

Clare rose to her feet. A hundred questions were screaming in her head, but she smiled and nodded at the soldiers. “Colonel. Private.”

“Ma’am,” the young man said.

Seelye shot him an icy look. She steepled her fingers again. “This isn’t over, Chief. If you try to play hardball with the United States Army, I will have your ass hanging from my company flagpole. That’s a promise.”

Russ flattened his hands against the table and leaned forward. “I was playing hardball with the army back when you were still buffing up your butter bars and trying to memorize the ten-code.” He straightened. “Get a warrant, and we’ll talk. Until then…” He flipped his hand open.

He gestured Clare ahead of him. She felt as if she had a gun sighted between her shoulder blades as she walked to the kitchen door. As soon as the door had swung shut behind them, she opened her mouth.

Russ held a finger to his lips and dragged her around the industrial-sized center island toward Ron and Stephen, who immediately stopped talking. Ron twisted around and moved a stovetop percolator off the enormous gas range. “What was that all about?” Stephen asked.

“Police business,” Russ said.

Ron rolled his eyes.

Russ ignored him. “How long have they been here?”

“They checked in late Wednesday night,” Stephen said. “They were complaining about not being able to get a room at any of the motels.”

“They were damn lucky
we
had a party cancel. The Adirondacks during peak foliage?” Ron blew a raspberry.

Stephen frowned at his partner.

“Don’t give me that Mrs. Grundy look,” Ron said. “I told you they weren’t here for antiques and cider.” He pointed to Russ. “Is there anything we need to worry about? Seeing as they’re involved in
police business
?”

“No. They’re cops. Military police.” He turned to Clare. “I’ve got to get back to the station. Do you mind handling the rest of the wedding hoopla without me?”

“No-o-o. I would mind the walk back to town, though.”

Russ made a frustrated sound. “Sorry. I forgot. Okay, let’s go.” He took off toward the hallway.

“Uh—” She looked helplessly at Stephen and Ron.

“Go, go.” Stephen flapped his hands at her. “Call us when you’re free. We can set up another time. Just don’t leave it too long!”

“Unless you want to think twice about the whole thing.” Ron indicated the door Russ had disappeared behind. “As I recall, Prince Charming is supposed to chase after Cinderella, not the other way around.”

Russ had already backed the truck onto the drive when she caught up to him. She swung the door open and jumped in. He started down the road before she had finished buckling her seat belt.

He unhooked the mic from its mount. “Dispatch, this is Van Alstyne, IOV.”

The radio cracked. “Chief, this is Dispatch, go ahead.”

“Is Lyle or Eric in?”

“Eric’s out interviewing friends and family. Lyle just headed to the courthouse with a warrant request. He’s fixing to get into McNabb’s bank account. The rest of ’em are in the seat.”

“Anybody not on patrol yet?”

“Hadley. She got in late.”

“Good. Have her contact McNabb’s telephone carriers. Landline and cell. I want a record of all incoming calls for the week up to her death. She’s looking for out-of-state numbers, especially ones originating from a Missouri or an Illinois area code.”

“Roger that.”

“And Harlene? Do we still have the hard copy of the intake file for Quentan Nichols? It would have been late June.”

“Probably.”

“Find it and put it on my desk. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Van Alstyne out.”

He hung up the mic.

“You think she and Nichols stole the money together.”

“If she took it, she didn’t do it alone. Do you know anything about how you draw pay during deployment?”

“Um … I showed up at the quartermaster’s and signed for it. At the bigger camps, like Liberty or Anaconda, you could use a card at the CX or to get cash.”

“Where’s the cash come from?”

She blinked. “I never thought about it.”

“It’s just like a civilian bank. The army flies it in, shrink-wrapped on pallets. The cash is transferred under guard to a secure location, where it’s locked into a vault and disbursed as necessary.”

“Huh. So when Seelye said upwards of a million, she meant one million actual
dollars
?” Clare shook her head. “That’s gotta be a big amount. Physically, I mean.”

Russ flicked on his signal and turned onto River Road. “Yeah. McNabb was a finance company specialist. That means she only intersected with the cash at the end, when it was in a vault, under tight control. Or maybe not even then. It sounded as if she was in accounts management, not dispersal.”

“A bookkeeper, not a teller.” Clare scarcely noticed when they crossed the bridge. “She can cover up the loss, but not remove the actual loot from where it’s supposed to be.”

“That’s right. She would have needed an accomplice who had access to the money earlier. One of the ground crew. Or a truck driver.
Or
one of the MPs assigned to guard the cash.”

“Quentan Nichols. Do you think he gave Tally advance warning that the investigators were after her?”

“That’s why I’m having Knox pull the phone records.”

She stared out the side window. The sun made the autumn leaves look like they had been lit from inside. Almost too bright to look at against the white clapboard farmhouses and the October blue sky. She turned back toward Russ. “Maybe it wasn’t love that kept him coming back trying to talk with her. Maybe it was one million dollars.”

“Well, you know what they say. Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a cool million in the bank.” His mouth quirked. “Either Nichols had already gotten his cut, and he called to warn her in order to save his own skin, or she still owed him money, and he called to warn her in order to keep the cash flowing.”

“Or he showed up in person to collect.” She watched as he swung onto Church Street. The gazebo in the center of the park was still hung with red-white-and-blue bunting. Maybe one more concert this weekend before the town boarded it up for the winter. “Where does her husband fit in?”

“I’m sure he was happy to accept whatever money she gave him, no questions asked.” He braked to let a handful of shoppers cross the street. “I still want to question him, but unless there’s some evidence of domestic abuse we haven’t turned up yet, he’s dropped down several notches on my list.”

Clare could think of other reasons Wyler McNabb night have killed his wife. A million of them. Maybe she was going to break it off and take the money with her. Maybe
he
was going to break it off and he wanted it all for himself. Maybe only she knew where it was hidden, and his attempts to wring the location out of her went south. “Where do you suppose she stashed it?”

“That’s not my problem, thank God.” He drove past the church, past the boxwood hedge, and turned into her drive.

“What do you mean? A million in untraceable cash? If that’s not motive for murder, what is?”

He engaged the parking brake but kept the engine running. He turned, slinging his arm across the seat back. “You’re not seeing the whole picture. The McNabbs spent money like water in the past couple of years, buying cars, a boat, a swimming pool, and God knows how much in useless crap and rounds of drinks at the Dew Drop. Their relationship, by all accounts, was rocky. She was stressed by two tours of duty in Iraq, one of which included grand larceny. One of the guys in her group just tried to kill himself. Then she finds out the CID is about to show up. She’s looking at fifteen years’ hard time in Leavenworth and complete financial ruin from the restitution order.” He laid his hand over Clare’s. His voice gentled. “I know it’s hard to accept—but her .38 must have looked like her only friend in the world at that point.”

*   *   *

Eric McCrea knew that most cases were cleared with systematic, step-by-step investigation, methodical and well analyzed. Still, there was an element of luck to police work, too, and he didn’t know a single cop who’d disagree with him on that score.