Martinez cautiously put the list down and looked at the angry sergeant major. "I'm not really sure what I can do with this."
"Then get someone who knows," Dublowski growled.
"Hold on while I get the shift commander," Martinez said.
In the next hour, Dublowski told his story and showed the list to three CID personnel of increasing rank. Thorpe stayed in the background. He felt that they were getting somewhere as the rank went up. At eight he found out exactly how far. The full colonel who was the regional CID commander finally came in. He listened to Dublowski's story, then took the list with him into his office and shut the door. Twenty minutes later he came back out.
"Where did you get these names?" he asked.
Thorpe stepped forward and explained his part.
"Do you know what you did is illegal?" the colonel asked.
"Not exactly illegal, sir," Thorpe hedged. "I was just—"
"Exactly illegal!" the colonel snapped. "You're lucky I don't bring you up on charges, Major."
He turned to Dublowski. "Sergeant Major, I am sorry about your daughter, but the official file on your case shows that CID-Germany investigated and ruled that there was no foul play involved. The case agent's notes suggest that your daughter most likely ran away. It happens all the time." He shook the list. "In fact, I'm amazed there are only twenty-four names on this list for a time period as long as two years, given the numbers of soldiers who rotate through Germany. I would have guessed the number to be much higher."
"Do you know how many people disappear every day? And they aren't all victims of foul play. In fact, relatively few are. Even in our modern society, people can hide if they want."
"Wouldn't it be rather hard to do that overseas?" Thorpe asked, sensing the brewing volcano next to him and trying to avert an eruption.
"Not necessarily," the colonel said.
"My daughter didn't run away," Dublowski said.
"Sergeant Major, your friend here" — he pointed at Thorpe—"committed an illegal act when he used the computer at SOCOM to get these names. Those personnel files are restricted and can be looked at only on an official need-to-know basis. How would you like it if someone was looking through your personnel record for some reason of their own whenever they felt like it?"
"Sir," Thorpe began, "I understand what I did was—"
A female voice cut him off. "No, Major Thorpe, I don't think you do." Lieutenant Colonel Kinsley was standing by the door. She looked very unhappy to be at CID headquarters at nine-thirty in the evening. Her battle-dress uniform wasn't as crisply starched as when Thorpe had seen it earlier in the day. She turned to the CID colonel. "Are you done with them, sir?"
The colonel walked over and handed the printout to Kinsley. "Yes, I am." He looked at Dublowski. "I'm sorry, Sergeant Major, but the case is closed."
Dublowski didn't budge. "What about all those missing girls?"
"Every one of those cases was investigated and closed," the colonel said. "Linking them together is not sufficient to cause us to reopen them. It's like saying every crime committed in North Carolina is linked. There's just no evidence. I hate to say it" — the colonel lowered his voice—"but the biggest problem with all of this is that of these twenty-four, not a single one has been recovered as a body. If your theory of a serial killer was true, then surely some bodies would have been found."
The colonel was warming to the subject. "The fact is that most serial killers want the bodies to be found. They want the world to know what they're doing. CID-Germany did as much as they could, given what was there in the case file and the limits of operating overseas in another government's jurisdiction."
"I'm sorry, but the case is closed. I will contact the CID office in Germany and check to see if anything new has turned up, but unless there is further evidence, there is nothing we can do here." With that, the colonel turned his back on them.
Thorpe put a hand across Dublowski's chest, restraining him. "Let's go, Dan. We've done all we can here." He kept the physical pressure on Dublowski, herding him out of the CID building.
Lieutenant Colonel Kinsley walked with them to the parking lot. Her last words to Thorpe weren't very encouraging. "Major Thorpe, I will see you in front of my desk at exactly 0900 hours tomorrow morning." She was in her car driving away before Thorpe and Dublowski reached the older man's truck.
"I'm sorry I got you into this, Mike." Dublowski had calmed down.
"It's all right. I've had my butt chewed by experts. What's she going to do, send me to a team and make me carry a rucksack?"
Dublowski started the truck and they headed back toward the BOQ.
"What do you think of CID's reaction?" Dublowski asked.
"I hate to say it, Dan, but it's pretty reasonable," Thorpe said. "When I first saw the list, I thought twenty-four was a lot, but if you divide it by two years and the vast number of U.S. personnel going through Germany, then it's really a very low percentage. And the CID colonel was right: Most of those probably are runaways."
Thorpe could see the muscle on the side of Dublowski jaw clenched, but the sergeant major didn't say anything. Thorpe knew he was treading on thin ice, but he also knew what Dublowski was capable of and he felt he needed to defuse the situation right now.
"There was no evidence, no connection between the names," Thorpe continued. "Until we get that, we don't have anything. It was something I went off half cocked on, and we got caught on it."
"Yeah," Dublowski reluctantly said, "I guess so."
The truck pulled up to the front of Moon Hall and Thorpe got out. "Thanks anyway," Dublowski said.
"I'm not going to give up on this," Thorpe said.
"What can you do? That colonel you work for sounds like she'd love to have your ass for breakfast tomorrow."
Thorpe laughed, indicating what he thought of that fate.
"I'm going to call someone I know," Thorpe said, leaning back in the truck seat.
"What for?"
"We might not be able to do anything, but she might. She's got access to a lot of information and she's probably smarter than the two of us combined."
"Some smarts would help," Dublowski acknowledged.
The original CIA headquarters building was built in the mid-1950s by the same firm that had designed the UN building in New York. The then-director of Central Intelligence who oversaw the design directed that it be built like a college campus, perhaps a subconscious attempt to camouflage the mission of the organization even to those who worked there. The original building contained over 1.4 million square feet and was the hub of the nation's foreign intelligence gathering for the bulk of the Cold War.
A new addition of 1.1 million square feet was built in 1984, and consisted of two six-story modern office buildings attached to the original headquarters. Despite being less than eight miles from the center of Washington, CIA headquarters was set on 258 acres of rolling countryside in northern Virginia that made Washington seem much farther away.
The CIA was formerly founded by the National Security Act of 1947, which also established the National Security Council. Before that time, the organization traced its lineage through the Central Intelligence Group founded in 1946, and before that to the OSS, Office of Strategic Services, of World War II fame. The OSS had been led by Colonel "Wild" Bill Donovan, who had been awarded the medal of honor in World War I.
During the Second World War the OSS had been a bastard stepchild to the British's SOE, Special Operation Executive, which had far more experience at the nefarious art of espionage, but by the end of the war, under Donovan's guidance, the American OSS had earned its spurs. Not only did it give birth to the CIA, but it was also the same unit that army Special Forces traced its lineage to.