“Agent Branner here was the one on the end of the rope,” the sergeant said. “She was the lightest one up there, so she hung out there to tie the harness on while you kept him busy.”
“Thank God you guys could hear us talking.”
“Yeah. And it was all recorded down in the ops van. We catch his ass, he’s DA meat.”
The radio squawked out a relay call from the perimeter cops. “Suspect broke the perimeter,” someone yelled. “Academy cops say he’s going into Lejeune Hall.”
Jim looked at Branner. “He’s trying for his lab access.”
“No way-that’s all flooded,” she said.
“Not anymore-they drained it, remember?” Jim said. He turned to the TAC sergeant. “Tell them to get people into the basement, down where the swimming pool piping is. There’s a storage room, where they keep the chemicals for the pool. That’s where he’s been getting into the tunnels.”
The TAC cops got on it while Jim and Branner started trotting down the hallway. “Can he make it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, turning down the cross corridor, suddenly aware of his burning back again. Funny how that. 45 had taken the pain away, he thought. “If the approach tunnels to the magazines did collapse, then the magazines still ought to be flooded-nowhere for the water to go, right?”
They ran down the stairs and outside, Branner flashing her badge as they raced through the perimeter of police vehicles and watching cops. When they finally got to Lejeune Hall, there were more cops milling around outside. By the time they worked their way down to the basement and found the storage room, the door was open and there were TAC squad guys poking flashlights down into the access hole. The big metal plate was still hanging askew, dimpled with bullet holes.
“Is it flooded?” Branner asked.
“Nope,” one of the cops said. “Can’t really see shit down there, but it doesn’t look flooded. Somebody better call Public Works. They’ve got crews down there.”
“So,” a TAC cop asked no one in particular, “who’s volunteering to go down there after his ass?”
Before anyone could answer, there came a deep sustained rumbling sound from beneath their feet, with the clatter of individual pieces of falling masonry echoing up from the access hole. Then it became very still. The access hole exhaled a small cloud of damp cement dust out into the storage room.
“May be a moot point,” Jim said, staring at the hole. “With any luck, that right there was bye-bye, Dyle.”
Just after sundown, a subdued Ev Markham was staring out into Chesapeake Bay from the fantail of the Not Guilty. Liz and Julie were down below, doing something in the galley, and he was sipping some scotch and reflecting on the day’s events. The boat was back alongside its moorings at the Annapolis Yacht Club after a two-hour cruise out on the Severn and its estuary. Ev was very proud of the way Julie was bearing up after her ordeal at the hands of Dyle Booth. She’d been virtually uninjured, unless you counted some bad bruising around her midriff and knees from hanging out the window and a small knot on her head from the rescue exertions. He was mostly relieved that the whole thing was finally over, and that they now knew who’d been behind all the awful things happening at or around the Academy. He heard footsteps approaching out on the floating pier and swung around in his deck chair. It was the security officer, Jim Hall, and Agent Branner. He got up and unlatched the railing gate.
“Come on aboard,” he said. “Liz is down below. I’ll get her.”
The two came up the plastic steps on the pier and walked onto Not Guilty ’s pristine deck. Hall was wearing a gray business suit, and Branner was wearing a form-fitting blue blazer over a gray skirt. She kicked off her low-heeled leather shoes as she stepped aboard, in deference to the shining deck. They both looked tired, and Ev offered them a drink, but they both declined.
“I’d love one,” Hall said, “but then I’d probably fall asleep right here on the boat. We just came by to give you and Julie a quick sitrep. She is here, isn’t she?”
“Here they are now,” Ev said as Liz and Julie came up the companionway and out onto the stern lounge area. Liz repeated Ev’s offer of a drink, but they again politely declined. Everyone sat down. Ev noticed that Hall was being careful not to rest his back against the curved Naugahyde sofa.
“I imagine there’s been some paperwork to do after all this,” Liz said.
Branner smiled. “Many trees’ worth,” she said. “Many trees. With all those cops out there this morning, there’s paperwork about the paperwork. Plus, the Bureau got into it.”
“When will they want to see Julie?” Liz asked.
“With any luck, they won’t,” Hall replied. He told them about a three-hour meeting with the commandant earlier that afternoon, after some semblance of order had been restored in Bancroft Hall. With the exception of the room that had been flash-banged, and several bullet holes and lots of broken glass up and down the fourth-deck corridor, the actual damage had been minimal. The mids, disciplined as ever, had reoccupied their building, cleaned everything up, and returned to their routine.
“We went over the entire case with the supe and the dant during that meeting. I did the part about the tunnel runner, Branner here did the Dell case, and we jointly went over the parts where the two came together. Then we had a separate meeting with our cops, the town cops, and the Bureau people.”
“So it was Booth in the tunnels?” Liz asked. Ev noticed that Julie still appeared to be distracted, as if she were mulling something over. She’d been very quiet ever since they’d picked her up at the dispensary earlier.
“Yes,” Branner said. “And it was Booth terrorizing the back alleys of Annapolis with his vampire act. Mr. Hall here managed to get him to talk for the record, as it turned out, because the TAC squad always records its radiophone network anytime there’s an incident.”
“We’ve been laying low all afternoon, Mr. Hall,” Ev said. “Liz suggested the boat because we could get away from any media and at least the landline telephones. We did call into Bancroft to tell them where Julie was, but no one seemed to want her back right away. Thanks to you, I assume?”
“What really happened to Brian Dell?” Liz asked.
“As best we can tell, Booth was hazing him, late at night. He made him do some bizarre things, such as wearing women’s underwear, and perhaps even sexually assaulted him. Our best take on the matter is that Dell did in fact commit suicide after being humiliated one time too many. I suspect that Booth saw it happen, or even egged him on. But that’s all we know, and, of course, that version came from Booth.”
“So it wasn’t Dell who was gay, but this Dyle Booth?”
“I think Dyle Booth was just your basic sadist, as well as being someone who hated everything the Academy stood for. He was never really accepted by his classmates, so he ended up holding the entire program in contempt. If I can indulge in a little amateur psychology, I think all this violence at the end, these increasingly outrageous acts, was an indication that he knew he’d never make it in the Corps. He wasn’t homosexual. He was just very badly bent.”
“But he did do this to Brian to get back at me,” Julie said in a small voice, speaking for the first time. Ev wanted to reach out to her, but she had been so withdrawn all day that he’d been afraid to make the first move.
A yacht rumbled into the marina from the outer harbor and blatted its horn for a line-handler. A young man came trotting down the pier from the clubhouse. “I think he did this to Brian Dell because he could,” Hall said, casting what looked to Ev like a quick warning glance at Branner. “The fact that Julie had pulled Dell under her wing probably made Dell a better target, but he was already a qualified target for the likes of Dyle Booth.”