Sigma Curse - 04 (7 page)

“We understand that you three men were with Corporal Fincher in the bar, and that you’re the last known people to have seen him,” Teller began.

The redhead, Craddock, answered. “Yes, sir.”

“Perhaps you’d take us through the evening,” said Teller. “An overview’s fine. Set the scene. We’ll fill in the details later.”

As if by unspoken agreement, Craddock took the lead. His voice was calm, confident.

“We’d planned forty-eight hours’ leave together. The four of us, Dale Fincher included. Tommy here –” he indicated the black man, Austin – “has an apartment in Manhattan, so we were going to use that as a base, sleep there at night. We decided to visit a few bars in Lower Manhattan, then take in a football game the next day.”

“You do that often?” asked Venn. “The four of you, I mean? Hang out together?”

Although the three men kept their eyes on Teller and Venn, Venn thought he detected a slight shifting in the atmosphere of the room, as if some wordless communication had passed between them.

“Sometimes,” said Craddock. “Not always the four of us. Other combinations, too.”

Venn wanted to ask if Fincher was usually included in those combinations, but he let it go for now.

Teller nodded for Craddock to continue. The corporal said: “We’d been to a couple of bars in Greenwich Village, limbering up, before heading for the Rococo. It’s a place we all knew and liked. We got there around... six thirty?” He glanced at the others.

“Sounds about right,” Austin agreed.

“Pretty early for your third bar,” Venn commented. He saw Teller glance at him out of the corner of his eye.

Craddock shrugged. “We take our leave seriously, sir. We make the most of it.”

Venn understood. He recalled his days as a Marine.

“So we’ve had a couple of beers, and we’re shooting the breeze with the bar staff. All good-natured stuff.” Craddock paused, remembering. “Then I notice Fincher chatting to this girl who’s sitting at the counter next to him. The place was crowded, so he had to lean close to her to hear her.”

“You get a good look at this girl?” asked Teller.

Austin answered this time. “Yes sir. She was a real stunner. Tall, blonde, in this clingy dress. Like she’d been out to carnegie Hall or somewhere. Classy, you know? Like that movie star.”

“Marlene Dietrich,” said Craddock.

“No, no,” said Austin. “Not her. Greta Garbo, that’s the one. Kind of – what’s the word? With a smokey look in her eyes. A little mocking.”

“Sultry,” suggested Nilssen, the blond man.

“Yeah.” Austin nodded. “That’s it.
Sultry.
We watched her and Dale talking, and none of us could really believe what we were seeing.”

“Why?” said Venn.

Austin said, “Because Dale wasn’t the kind of guy women usually went for like that. Sure, he wasn’t bad looking, I guess. And he was smart. But he didn’t have the gift of the gab. He came across as a little... distant. Like he didn’t really enjoy human contact. Especially when it was with somebody he didn’t know. But this girl just sat right down next to him and started coming on to him.”

“Describe her a little more,” said Teller. “How old was she?”

The men looked at each other. Nilssen said, “Thirties? Older than us. Maybe thirty-five. But she wore a lot of makeup, so she might have been older.”

“A lot of makeup,” said Teller. “You mean like, plastered on?”

“Uh uh,” said Austin. “It was classy, like I said. Not obvious. But it was there: lips like blood, dark eyes.”

“Brown eyes?”

“Yeah,” said Austin.

Craddock said, “No. I’m pretty sure they were green.”

Austin tilted his head to one side, unconvinced. “It was dark in the bar. The lights were low. Hard to tell, really. And none of us got all that close to her. Next thing we know, she’s taken Dale by the hand and is leading him away to the exit.”

“Did you go after him?” asked Venn.

“Hell, no,” said Craddock. “I mean, no sir. We just watched him go, elbowing each other in the ribs, you know, marveling at how he’d just got lucky.”

“And that was the last we saw of him,” added Austin.

“You didn’t try to call him later?” said Venn. “Ask him how it had gone? Stuff like that?”

“No. We just figured, let him enjoy himself,” said Nilssen. “We’d get all the juicy details the next day.”

Craddock: “And next day, we’re crashed out at Tommy’s place, nursing hangovers. I start texting and calling Dale, because we’re scheduled to head out to the football game at three that afternoon. He doesn’t answer. I leave voicemail messages, but he doesn’t call back. We got worried. Maybe he got so drunk he fell over or aspirated on his own vomit or something. Who knew? So we call base here.”

“Next thing we hear, he’s been found dead in a hotel.” Austin stared down at his hands, as if hearing it for the first time. “I just can’t believe it, man.”

Teller and Venn glanced at one another. Venn shrugged slightly. No more questions, he was saying.

Teller said, “Did Dale Fincher have a lot of girlfriends, gentlemen?”

This time the shift in the room’s tone was unmistakeable. The three soldiers all but looked at each other. Venn was aware of their legs shifting uncomfortably beneath the table.

“No, sir,” said Craddock and Nilsson, almost simultaneously.

Venn looked from one to the other. “You know this for sure?”

Craddock met his eyes. “Like I said, sir. Dale was a loner. Sure, he hung out with us, but he lacked confidence. If he had a girlfriend, he kept her quiet. Which is not the normal thing to do, when you spend a lot of your time living and working with a bunch of guys.”

Venn noted the reactions of the other two on the periphery of his vision. They appeared tense, as if waiting to hear what Craddock was going to say. As if he was about to reveal something awkward.

Teller placed his hands on the table. “You’ve been helpful, guys. Thanks.”

“You back on duty now?” said Venn.

“Yes, sir. We cut our leave short when... when we heard,” said Nilsson.

“We probably won’t need to talk to you again,” Venn said, before Teller could interject. “Thanks.”

When the three soldiers had filed out, Teller stared at the door for a long moment.

“What was that about?” he said.

Venn wasn’t sure what he was referring to. It could be one of a number of things.

Teller said, “That last remark of yours. ‘We probably won’t need to talk to you again’. What the hell?”

“Psychology,” said Venn.

He glanced round the room again.

No reason it should be wired for sound. Even so...

He stood up. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go talk out in the car.”

*

“T
hey’re hiding something,” said Venn.

They sat in Teller’s Lexus in the parking lot. Teller hadn’t started the engine yet, and the raw cold outside was beginning to seep into the vehicle’s interior.

Teller said, “Yeah. I got that, too. You think they followed Fincher? Or that maybe he told them where he was going, and they’re lying because they feel guilty now that they didn’t go find him sooner?”

Venn gazed through the windshield, where dribbles of sleet were forming on the glass. The heavy snow wasn’t far off, he thought. Maybe a day or two away. A week, tops.

“I don’t think so,” he murmured. “My gut tells me they’re telling the truth about what happened in the bar, and subsequently. They were more relaxed when they were talking about that. But you notice how uncomfortable they got whenever we asked a question about Fincher himself? About his personality, his relationships?”

“Mmm.” Teller frowned, considering. “What does it mean?”

“I need to talk to them again. That’s why I told them we were done with them. To lull them into dropping their guard. If I show up again unexpectedly, it’ll rattle them.”

“You’re talking about ‘I’,” said Teller. “Don’t you mean
‘we’
?”

Venn shook his head. “No offense, Mort. I don’t doubt your skills. But you’re not military. I am. It’ll be more effective if I go one on one with them, one soldier to another. It’s psychology, once again. They’ll be scared of me and respect me at the same time.”

To Venn’s surprise, Teller hesitated for only the briefest second before he said: “Okay.” He peered at Venn curiously. “What do you have in mind?”

Venn told him.

V
enn sat behind the wheel of the Jeep and waited, hoping he hadn’t misjudged the timing.

It was six p.m., and darkness had fallen almost two hours earlier. The sleet had continued throughout the day, always threatening to thicken but never quite doing so. Overhead, the cloud cover was thin, not the pregnant bulge of incipient snow.

A couple of days yet, at least
, he thought.

He watched the gates swing open again and two cars pull out into the glare of the arc lights before turning onto the road and passing him by.

Neither was the one he wanted.

Venn had carried out more stakeouts in his career than he could recall. Ordinarily, this would have been a straightforward one. But it was different this time. Staking out the entrance to a military base was problematic. A car parked outside for any length of time would arouse suspicion before very long.

Which was why he hadn’t arrived early, drawing up instead at just five minutes to eight. Even so, he expected to have to wait a while, and every minute he sat there increased the chances that the closed-circuit cameras he knew were covering the gate would flag him up as a potential threat, a terrorist or a spy or something. If he got busted, he’d be able to get out of the situation without too much difficulty. But it would take a long time, perhaps hours, and he’d lose his advantage.

On the drive back to Manhattan, he and Teller had worked out the details. Teller would use his FBI clout to obtain a detailed roster of the duties of the three corporals, Craddock, Austin and Nilssen. He’d do so on the quite plausible pretext of wanting to confirm that the three men had in fact been on leave when they said they were.

Teller said, “No problem,” and put a call through to the office on the East River. When a female voice answered, he said: “Meredith. It’s Mort. I need you to do something for me.”

He told her to call Colonel Masterson and ask for the rosters. If the colonel stonewalled her, she was to call Teller. Venn didn’t think Masterson would have any problem with the request. He’d given the impression of a man eager to cooperate, and to be seen to cooperate. After all, one of the men under his command had been murdered.

Twenty minutes later Teller’s iPad, which was propped in a holder on the dashboard, pinged. Teller nodded.

“Check it out.”

Venn picked up the tablet and saw a new email had arrived. Attached was a spreadsheet detailing the duties of the three corporals. It covered the entire week from Wednesday to Tuesday, including today and the two days after.

Nilssen was on guard duty at the base tonight. Austin and Craddock, on the other hand, had shifts that ended at six in the evening, and were listed as off-duty afterward, until eight tomorrow morning.

“Okay,” said Venn. “The next part might be a little tricky. Can you find out where these guys live? Are they resident at the base, or do they go home when they’re off?”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” said Teller, punching the office number into the phone once more.

“Also, can you get their car registrations? Particularly Craddock and Austin.”

“That’s an easy one.”

Venn kept the iPad on his lap. The delay was a little longer this time, forty minutes, and the skyline of the city loomed ahead by the time the second message came through.

Austin had an apartment in Manhattan, just as he’d said. But he was quartered at the base most of the time. Craddock, on the other hand, rented a house with a couple of other soldiers, in Fallsburg.

“He’s the one,” said Venn. “Craddock.”

“Going to need a lot of luck,” said Teller drily. “You’re assuming he’ll head straight home. Even if he leaves the base after his day’s over, which is another assumption.”

“He doesn’t need to go home,” said Venn. “I just need him to get out of the base.”

*

T
he Chevy Impala pulled through the gates at six-thirteen. Venn was starting to get seriously antsy by then, and was thinking of driving away and returning to watch the gates from a different angle. He’d just started the engine when he saw the Impala.

Its color wasn’t distinguishable under the glare of the lights, other than that it was light. But he glimpsed the license plate, and knew it was Craddock’s.

Two other cars followed the Impala. Venn was thankful for that. It meant he’d be less conspicuous as he eased in behind the Chevy.

He kept the two cars between his jeep and the Impala for around a mile, until one of them turned off. The Impala was headed in the direction of Fallsburg, three miles away. Maybe Craddock was going straight home after all. Venn didn’t know if he lived alone. He hoped so.

But he saw the Impala’s indicator signalling a left turn up ahead, and slowed. The Impala turned into a parking lot, scattered with cars and trucks. At the far side stood a low, long building with a neon sign above it:
Arturo’s
.

A roadside bar.

Venn was a little surprised. Craddock had been out drinking just two nights earlier. Venn knew from his time in the Marines that military guys, particularly those below officer rank, liked to party hard, and could hold their drink. But you also learned quickly to pace yourself, otherwise you wouldn’t last. Craddock had looked strong, fit. Not like a boozehound.

Venn pulled into the parking lot and found a space several rows away from where the Impala had parked. He killed the engine and sat watching the rearview mirror.

Craddock got out of the car, no longer in uniform. A moment later Austin got out of the passenger side. Venn watched them head for the bar.

Austin, too.
Well, that might make things easier. Might make them harder, though.

Venn sat in the Jeep for ten minutes. It wouldn’t hurt to let them get a drink or two in before he made his approach. It might lower their guard further, and loosen their tongues.