With her boss, no less, an Air Force colonel with whom she often traveled on business. It wouldn’t have been that hard to find out, one way or another: He was an investigator, after all. Later, much later, he had realized that he must not really have wanted to know. When she finally announced that she had found someone else, he had been hurt but not totally surprised.
The arm came last, like some sick cosmic joke. His career was on the skids, Alice had kicked him out, and one night, as he waited for change at a gas station, a couple of kids tried a holdup and then panicked.
They pulled out automatics and started blasting everything in sight. The attendant had been killed and Stafford had been shot in the arm.
He sighed and looked at his watch. Now that he was finished feeling sorry for himself, maybe he should get back to business. DCIS procedures required that he check in with Ray Sparks, the DCIS supervisor for the southeastern region, upon arrival. Well, arrival had been this morning.
He went over to the desk phone and disconnected the line. He set up the portable PC on the desk, then hooked the phone line into the PC’s X jack. He worked on the beer while the PC booted up. Using the encrypted telephony program, he placed a call to the Atlanta DCIS office out in Smyrna, a suburb north of Atlanta. He appreciated modern technology, but it still felt weird to be talking to I a computer. The office manager got Sparks on the line.
“Ray, this is Dave Stafford. Go secure. I’m encrypted on my portable.”
There was a noise over the line. “I’m secure, Dave. Welcome to Atlanta, I think.”
“Yeah, I suppose I’m persona not so freaking grata just now, huh?”
“Yeah, something like that. We were told you were coming. How’s the broken wing?”
“Still broken.” He and Ray Sparks had been partners 1 on a case some years ago and had become pretty good friends. Sparks was also probably the only regional supervisor who would accept him at the moment. There was a moment of silence on the line.
“So what do you plan to do down here?” Sparks asked. {- “Not your normal ‘throw in a grenade and see what evidence comes back at you’ routine, I hope?”
“Nope. I’ve decided to leave the eternal search for truth and justice to Batman and Robin. Right now I plan to just roll with the punches, keep my head down, try to get my arm back, do this job, whatever it is, and try not to cause you or anyone else any problems. After these past eighteen months, I’m a born-again believer.” I.-7. “Bernstein had it coming,” Sparks said. “He was an I officious prick, as everyone in the whole DOS would be happy to admit. From the safety of the sidelines, of course.”
“Well I know, compadre. Those sidelines got pretty far away there for a while. My first name has been changed to Goddamn, especially after that FBI guy got reprimanded. But, yes, I promised the colonel no grenades.”
“That’s the smart way, Dave. The colonel knows how to work the web.
He’ll get you rehabilitated if anyone can.”
“Isn’t it fascinating that I need rehabilitation after exposing corruption?”
“It’s your career that needs rehabilitation, Dave. You embarrassed DCIS.”
“I would have thought it was Bernstein’s corrupt behavior that embarrassed DCIS, but never mind. I know what you’re saying.”
There was a fractional pause. “Well, good, Dave,” Sparks said. “That’s great. Barb said to invite you out, once you’re settled in. Maybe we’ll burn some beef.”
Stafford could hear the effort in Sparks’s voice, and wondered if that mythical barbecue would ever really happen. They both knew damned well that a DCIS supervisor socialized with a DCIS pariah at his professional peril. But it was nice of him to make the offer.
“I appreciate that, Ray, as well as the friendly reception. But look, you feel you have to shut the door on me to keep your own ass warm and dry, you just do it, okay? I’m told that I smell a lot like ozone these days. I don’t want to take anyone down with me.”
“Screw that noise,” Sparks protested. “Besides, we’re too far from Washington for anyone to care. So what’s with this DRMO thing?”
Stafford gave him a summary of the case file. Another investigator had been working the DRMO auction fraud case for two years, but it had deteriorated into one of those seemingly hopeless muddles. It had begun when a Lebanese arms broker in New York had been caught exporting some surplused Air Force missile-guidance radars. The components had been purchased at auction from a New Jersey DRMO. The Defense Logistics Agency headquarters had called in the DCIS, who promptly asked for the audit records on that particular DRMO. It turned out that serious audits were conducted only every five years, and, naturally, it had been four years since the last one. So of course the DCIS effort was stopped while DLA conducted an audit..
The DCIS investigation had revealed what looked like a perfectly legitimate auction, but there were aspects that smelled wrong. The first was, in fact, clearly wrong: Those components should all have gone through the derail process. The consigning agency had marked them improperly, or the receiving DRMO had screwed up, or someone deliberately knew what he was after and had removed the derail paperwork.
The second was what the indomitable Colonel Parsons called “a pattern problem.” Parsons maintained that fraud perpetrated by smart bad guys inside the system often manifested itself in patterns as opposed to single, discernible incidents. The supposedly obsolete missile components had been shipped to the DRMO in five different shipment lots, but they had been auctioned off as a single block of components, almost as if someone had arranged that whoever won the bid on that block got all the guidance assemblies. That was where the trail had ended. There was no evidence tying any identifiable persons definitively to the New Jersey DRMO’s auction process. The guy who had caught the New Jersey case reported back to his boss that he’d come up empty. Colonel Parsons had been less than sympathetic, and he had told the guy that if he couldn’t break the specific case, then he should examine the whole system for that specific pattern.
After three months of ploughing through mind-numbing DLA back records of DRMO auctions and audits, they had uncovered another sale manifesting the same pattern as the one in New Jersey, which is when they’d realized that the auction had been a sealed-bid auction, controlled from Washington — within the DLA headquarters. Checking back on the New Jersey case, they’d found it was a sealed bid auction as well. They’d been looking at the wrong target: Whatever was being scammed was being orchestrated in Washington by someone involved in the sealed-bid process. Another three months of going back into prior years had turned up intermittent evidence of the same pattern, going back several years, but in each case, it was impossible to determine precisely how the thing was being done in Washington.
Stafford pointed out to Sparks that the investigation had stalled right about the time the Bernstein corruption flap reached a crescendo, which was why Colonel Parsons, realizing that Stafford was probably not going to survive the political heat, had seized on the DRMO problem as a pretext for getting him out of town. So here he was.
He gave Sparks a debrief of the day’s events, including Carson’s fainting spell at the airport. Sparks was silent for a moment. “That’s medium weird,” he said finally. “Do you suppose Carson and that woman are involved with each other? And maybe the girl resents it or something? Some deal like that?”
“Don’t know. Probably can’t know, at this stage. Carson claims he didn’t even remember seeing them. Said he was feeling woozy, just getting over the flu. Like I said, I don’t know. The girl’s suitcase had a sticker that said graniteville on it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even know where to start to find them, assuming I ever had to. I did give the woman my card.”