Jack and Joe: Hunt for Jack Reacher Series (The Hunt for Jack Reacher Series Book 6) (14 page)

CHAPTER 19

We got into the Crown Vic and headed back the way we came. We sat with our thoughts for a while. He wasn’t much of a small talker, which suited me fine. About halfway back to the Nashville airport, he said, “Are you going to call or should I?”

He meant that one of us was going to have to open the padded envelopes in the back seat and fire up the Boss’s cell phones. The phones were tracking us now, no doubt. But if I wanted an appointment with General Matthew Clifton on the base at Fort Herald in Dallas—and if I didn’t before, I certainly did now—I’d need some heavy-duty help to make that happen.

The Boss could easily pave the way if he was so inclined. The FBI can go just about anywhere these days. And Gaspar was an Army veteran with a veteran’s card, which sometimes allowed him access to military installations without prior notice, depending on the threat level each day. But it made no sense to travel all the way to Dallas before solving the administrative issues.

The other option was to accept Major Tony Clifton’s offer to intercede with his brother for us. Gaspar’s question meant that he had considered Tony as an option and rejected it.

“There’s an exit up ahead. Let’s stop for coffee,” I replied, which was a way to let him know I wanted to discuss the options away from the Boss’s ears and before we went any further.

Gaspar glanced at me and returned his gaze to the road. “Whatever you say.”

We never assumed we were truly under the radar. Usually, someone was watching and listening and manipulating. Usually, that was the Boss, but other eyes and ears were on us, too. Some of them, we were by now well convinced, were connected to Reacher. When we wanted privacy, evasive maneuvers were required.

Listening to conversations in the open air is doable, but it’s harder than monitoring inside a vehicle. Roadside restaurants are typically busy. There would be lots of conflicting cell phone traffic. It was complicated to isolate particular conversations amid dozens of others and it required extra time, more equipment. Which gave us small windows of privacy when we could manage to immerse ourselves in crowds.

At the next exit, Gaspar chose a parking lot surrounded by a clump of restaurants, gas stations and a strip mall knotted together by concrete. He parked the Crown Vic in one of the lot’s busier areas. We left our personal cell phones in the car, too, and walked fifty yards away before either of us spoke again.

Gaspar’s limp slowed us down, but we weren’t headed anywhere in particular so it didn’t matter. He had popped at least two Tylenol already when he thought I wasn’t looking.

“We can agree that Tony Clifton sent us to Lesley Browning for a reason.” His voice held a question although the words did not. “Did you hear the reason from her?”

“Not exactly. But the connection is there,” I said. “Jack and Joe Reacher and Joe’s ex, Lesley Browning, were all connected to General Matthew and Major Tony Clifton because they were all friends. They lived in the same neighborhood and the four men went to West Point. Colonel Summer was connected to Jack Reacher and Tony Clifton because she worked with them both.”

“Summer was connected to Matthew Clifton, too. Because she’d worked with him prosecuting the events in the old JAG report, if nothing else. Senior officers are a small and exclusive club. They all know each other.”

I smiled. He really was beginning to understand how I think. Which was a little scary, but more convenient than having to explain all the time. “And how about Lesley’s husband?”

He gave me the side-eye. “Possible. We know Thomas O’Connor signed off on that old corruption case as the junior JAG with Matthew Clifton. But he’s been out of the Army for a long time.”

“Chico, in my book, being a defense contractor is
not
being out of the Army.” He raised an eyebrow. “The Army is his one and only customer. You’ve never worked as a civilian and I have. I’m here to tell you, customers are king.”

We walked and he thought about it a bit. “Let’s say you’re right. Where are you going with this?”

I’d been hunched into my blazer and now took a deep breath and stretched the tension from my shoulders. “I think I’m still going to Fort Herald. But the question is whether we should go to O’Connor’s office before or after.”

“Cuts down on the plane travel if we do it now.”

“Exactly.”

“Are you going to tell him?” He meant the Boss.

“He already knows. The question is why he wants us to interview O’Connor. What he wants us to find out that he doesn’t already know.”

We turned and walked back toward the car.

“You get the coffee and I’ll make the call,” Gaspar said.

“10-4,” I replied and he grinned.

I chose the busiest of the fast food joints and the longest line waiting to order.

Gaspar could bring the Boss up to speed. I had no intention of joining any conversation with him just yet. The man was using me as a gun dog to serve some purpose he refused to disclose. More than once, his secrets had almost gotten me killed, and Gaspar too. He showed zero remorse for that and zero interest in changing the dynamic. Which meant I had zero interest in chatting with him except when communication was essential.

I ran the events through my head again. Somehow Jack Reacher was at the center of this thing, whatever the thing actually was. He had not been to Fort Bird since 1990. Yet, one or more of his actions in the few days he was there had caused ripples like dropping a stone into an ocean. Only Reacher’s effect was more like dropping a boulder into a puddle.

Motives for murder were not much debated in law enforcement circles. The FBI manual limited the options to four classes and a bunch of sub-classifications, but they boiled down to six motives: profit, revenge, jealousy, to conceal a crime, to avoid humiliation or disgrace, and homicidal mania. In the case of
The Lucky Bar
shooter, homicidal mania was the clear favorite. But it didn’t sit right with me. And the motive for killing Summer? Could have been any of the others.

My turn at the register finally came. I ordered black coffee for me and coffee with a quart of cream and half a cup of sugar for Gaspar. I added a couple of fried apple pies and paid the bill and carried the paper bag toward the Crown Vic.

The thing that I’d been worrying around in my head since
The Lucky Bar
shootout was a single question: What could Reacher have possibly done that would cause a long-dormant situation to erupt into murder all these years later?

The answer teased me like a mouse hiding in the dark. I could hear it scurrying around, but every time I turned on the light, I couldn’t find it. All I saw was evidence that the mouse had been there.

CHAPTER 20

When I returned to the car and we’d divided the gourmet meal, Gaspar reported. “He says he’ll arrange the meeting. He’ll call back when it’s scheduled.”

I shrugged, took a bite of my apple pie, and hauled out my laptop.

After a few minutes work with the court-martial report and Internet searches, I found the information for the second JAG officer. Thomas O’Connor, Lesley’s husband. His current employer was Dynamic Defense Systems, located south of Nashville. I programmed the address into the GPS and Gaspar pointed the Crown Vic in the right direction.

We had both read the old JAG court-martial report. Even on the surface, the situation was bad. Three senior officers convicted of crimes serious enough to have carried the death penalty.

“Only fourteen crimes carry the death penalty under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. At the senior officer level, crimes like that are rare,” I said, dusting off and donning my lawyer hat briefly.

“I checked,” Gaspar said. “We’ve got only five convicted servicemen awaiting execution now, out of all the military branches. All five were guilty of premeditated murder or felony murder.”

“Right. But none of those five were officers. And no convicted serviceman has been executed since 1961.”

Gaspar glanced over at me. “So you think that Reacher was in charge of the investigation that led to the prosecutions in the JAG report? Or he was involved in the crimes and got himself busted instead of prosecuted?”

I nodded. “Which one do you put your money on?”

“I don’t see them letting an MP Major like Reacher avoid Leavenworth with the others if he was involved with the same crimes.”

“Why not?”

“Because they prosecuted the bigger fish. Why would they let the smaller one go?”

I had my theories on that, but my gut said Gaspar was right. Reacher’s crimes were different in kind and degree from the officers who were prosecuted. “Summer was his number two on the case. Fairly chivalrous of him to let her take the credit for the bust, don’t you think?”

“I figure it was the times. The Army was on the cusp of some major downsizing right then.” He shrugged. “She was probably at the decision point. Go, or stay. If she got promoted, she’d stay.”

“The names of the officers were redacted from the JAG report.” I closed the laptop. “But if you were looking for the names, how would you find out who they were?”

“The paperwork would tell you if you had the time and the energy to sort through it. There weren’t that many officers on either the infantry or the armored side, even back then.” He drained his coffee and tossed the empty cup over his shoulder into the back. When we turned in the car, there’d be a pile of trash back there. “You could get lists of all the officers and trace what happened to each one around that timeframe. It wouldn’t take long to find the right names by the process of elimination.”

I nodded. It was the kind of grunt-work we had a team of people to do on normal FBI assignments. But we didn’t have the luxury on this one. “Summer had been ordered to tell me everything about what happened with Reacher back then. I’m guessing that’s the part that got her killed.”

“Because she knew things she had not revealed before?”

I nodded again. “And because someone else was aware of what Summer had previously kept out of the files.”

“What we need to find, then, are the others who knew what Summer knew.”

“As the first step. The second step is to find out why they didn’t want her to tell me.”

“And Lesley Browning’s husband can help with the first step?”

“He might be able to help with both. JAG officers are lawyers. Lawyers usually come in after the fact. Whatever Summer told Matthew Clifton and O’Connor about Reacher at the time should have become part of the report.” I paused. “And it’s not there. At least, it’s not in the unredacted portions we’ve been allowed to read.”

“So you think O’Connor wasn’t involved in the original incidents, but he knew what they were and he knew the underlying facts. And he kept them buried.” Gaspar nodded as he worked things through. “That tracks.”

“He knew at least enough of the facts to secure the confessions from the three officers and put the matter to bed quietly without airing dirty laundry in public at a sensitive time in Army history.”

“It’s Army SOP,” Gaspar said. “Keeping things on the down low would have been at least as important as exacting justice for the underlying crime.”

Which was the problem. Summer had died a colonel. She’d made her career on the old case, sure. But she must have performed well afterward to continue advancing.

On paper, she seemed worthy enough. No record of disciplinary action that I’d found. She would want to protect the Army’s reputation from what happened back then, and her own reputation, too. In fact, she’d have wanted to keep all of her investigations under the radar, which was very hard to do in the information age.

“Why kill her now?” I asked.

He shrugged, his all-purpose response.

The GPS led us directly to Dynamic Defense Systems after about twenty minutes’ driving time. The building was a five-story mirrored cube. Reflective coated glass, they called it. Energy efficient because it reflected the heat in the summertime. Office towers in Sunbelt states like this one were uninhabitable without it.

The cubed building was almost invisible. Trees planted around the cube were reflected, too. It seemed like a small forest sitting amid the asphalt instead of a building full of classified government secret weapon systems.

At the front gate, Gaspar showed his badge. “FBI Special Agents. We’re here to see Thomas O’Connor.”

The guard made a phone call, prepared two visitor passes and directed us to park in the visitor parking area near the front entrance. The lot was packed. Gaspar found an empty slot at the end of the row.

We parked and entered through double glass doors that parted in the center automatically like a supermarket’s. Except these also probably performed a full body scan of every visitor on the way in and on the way out.

The floor inside was carpeted and probably laced with tracking grids that gathered biometrics like weight and shoe size from which height and sex were extrapolated and matched with the body scans.

Leather chairs and tables seemed carelessly tossed around the lobby. A square reception desk that echoed the building’s exterior design squatted in the center of the room. A youngish woman sat inside the square. She looked like Dolly Parton’s granddaughter. This was Nashville so she might have been an aspiring country singer, too.