Finding nothing more of value inside, Riggleman hauled the box out to the Ford and began scouting the perimeter for a radius of roughly two hundred yards. It was hot, dry work, and the only signs of life were more coyote prints, which seemed to be everywhere, plus some empty cans that they must have carried off from a charred garbage pit behind the trailer. What a way to live.
By the time Riggleman got back to Nellis there was a box sitting on his desk that looked a lot like the one from Cole’s closet. It was the complete record of the court-martial. And when he signed on to his desktop computer there was an email from the legal office, which, based on the time signature, indicated that they’d sent over the box by courier within two hours of receiving his request.
Well, that was certainly a pleasant surprise, enough so to make him slightly uncomfortable. Once again he wondered how many people above him knew what he was up to.
He took the two sets of documents out of their boxes and stacked them side by side, then methodically arranged each set in chronological order. Each stack contained the same number of documents. He then compared the two versions of every document. Everything matched up there as well until he got to the depositions. The official version of the one taken from Cole’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Sturdivant, was lighter and thinner than the copy from the trailer.
Riggleman counted the pages. Twenty-two were missing from the official copy. As if to hide this, whoever had made the duplicates for the legal office had placed the originals in the copying machine in a way that cut off the page numbers from the top. The gap was further disguised by the way one of Sturdivant’s answers ended at the bottom of the last page before the gap, and then a question from a lawyer led off the first page afterward. If he hadn’t known about the missing pages, the document would have appeared to be seamless.
But when he checked those twenty-two pages in Cole’s set, nothing leaped out at him as something the Air Force would want to keep secret. Part of it was a dry discussion of Cole and Sturdivant’s chain of command. Part was a section in which Sturdivant read into the record a chat exchange from one of Cole’s recent Predator missions, in which the only two participants apart from the ones you’d normally expect were two code-name handles — Fort1 and Lancer.
The names were meaningless to him, but he filed them away for possible further consideration. More disturbing was the way in which the missing pages reinforced his nascent sense that there was something eerily different about this case. Enough so that he began to view the subject — Captain Darwin Cole — in a different light.
On the surface Cole was a drunk, a loser, a hermited fuckup in the desert who, by all appearances, had lived in barely human conditions and had disappeared with little regard to the mess he was leaving behind, literally and figuratively. Yet his first moves once he was beyond the squalor of the trailer had left virtually no trace. None that Riggleman had yet found, anyway. That suggested a deceptively careful man, a challenging quarry.
It brought to mind one of Riggleman’s opponents from a wrestling match long ago, a big-eyed boy from the Corn Belt who’d stepped onto the mat looking decidedly flabby for his weight class. Ponderously slow in his movements, too, the kind of slack-jawed victim that Riggleman usually made short work of by employing a few deft moves. A feint, a pivot, and a leveraged throw, leading to a takedown and then a pin as he slapped the poor fellow onto his back like some bug for a specimen jar. Match over.
But from the moment the match commenced this boy had proven to be almost impossible to budge from any angle, no matter how easily Riggleman was able to outmanuever him. It was as if his feet were welded to the mat, and by late in the second round, Riggleman grew so exasperated that he let down his guard for the briefest of moments to rethink his position. The flabby boy responded in a flash, and within seconds had achieved a takedown. Riggleman avoided being pinned, but lost the match on points, and he still remembered the boy’s eyes as the final whistle blew — a fleeting flash of triumphant intelligence, a mild taunt that challenged anyone to ever underestimate him again.
Maybe Cole was that kind of adversary. Deceptively dangerous. A shrewd opportunist.
Riggleman picked up the shortchanged deposition from the pile on his desk. He picked up his phone and began punching in the number for the legal eagle who’d sent him the copy. Time to ask a few delicate questions.
Then he stopped and hung up. It was too soon to be setting off any alarms in high places.
He swiveled back toward his computer, interlocked the fingers of both hands, and stretched them until his knuckles cracked, making a noise like a string of firecrackers. Then he got down to business, already determined not to underestimate anyone from here on out.
He would work fast, work late, and leave no avenue unexplored.
He would get his man, come what may.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Steve’s IntelPro source always insisted on meeting at Tark’s Grill, a watering hole where the happy hour crowd made enough noise to cloak any conversation. He demanded that Steve wear a jacket and tie so they wouldn’t look like such an unlikely pairing. Steve, who’d made the mistake of revealing this detail to Barb and Keira, now kept a blazer and tie in his car rather than tip them off every time he had a rendezvous.
The ground rules for these meetings were simple. Steve could use the Source’s information however he pleased, but it could never be attributed in any way, shape, or form to IntelPro. In other words, under the journalistic rules Steve and his colleagues played by, it was fit to print only if they verified it elsewhere. In addition, whenever possible in these public conversations they avoided using each other’s names, or those of their colleagues, favoring instead a rough code of initials and euphemisms.
Tark’s was just north of the Baltimore Beltway, a long drive from Middle River and a short one from Hunt Valley. Yet it was Steve who was always punctual, while the Source invariably arrived exactly five minutes late, as if he’d been sitting in the parking lot eyeing his Bremont chronometer until just the right moment.
On entry he never failed to convey an air of having reached the southernmost limit of his tolerance for all things urban, as if this was as close to the city center as he ever cared to travel. That was the vibe Steve got from most of Tark’s clientele — old-line locals who had grown up in Baltimore’s best neighborhoods, then migrated to the ’burbs to raise families in exile, comforted by the county’s lower taxes, safer streets, and neighbors who looked just like them. He guessed that at least half the males present had once played lacrosse for a local private school.
This time Steve was running late. He pulled up the parking brake and rummaged in the glove compartment for his tie among maps and repair invoices. Some of the paperwork was from more than a decade ago, when the car was new and so was his marriage. Jill, his ex, lived in Takoma Park with a new husband. Steve sort of kept up with her on Facebook, while wondering if she did the same. Not that he ever posted anything.
The hostess took him to a pedestal table near the bar, where a “Reserved” placard staked out their usual spot in the middle of a yammering mob. The music was deafening. The Source always made a reservation under the name Langley, his idea of a joke. And there he was now, coming through the door with a smile for the hostess, greeting her by name, the amiable and silver-maned Mr. Langley, in a pressed gray suit, white shirt, and red tie, shooting his cuffs as he approached the table. He slid onto the facing chair, ordered an outrageously expensive single malt Scotch — which Steve would have to pay for from his meager budget — and got down to business.