“So then what happened?”
“Nothing. The finance building got finished, and she went back to Anaconda for good. We e-mailed and IM’d back and forth as much as we could.” He gave her a challenging look. “It wasn’t just sex. She was really easy to talk to. I felt like-like she got me, you know? Even though she was from this pissant little town in upstate New York and I’m from Chicago. Like those differences didn’t matter at all.”
“I know.” Did she ever. “When did you start to think there was something more than just a romance going on?”
“When she shipped home. All of a sudden, she’s not answering my e-mails, she’s not taking my calls. I knew she was separating, and I thought maybe the readjustment to civilian life was hitting her hard. I had leave after I cycled back stateside, so I decided to come out here and talk to her in person.”
“Which is where you and I met.”
“Yeah.” He paused for a long moment. “After that’s when I started looking into what actually happened. It took a while, because I wasn’t officially investigating and I wanted to keep things on the down low.”
“To avoid incriminating yourself?”
“Hell, yeah. She already made an idiot out of me. I didn’t want to lose my career, too.”
“So you found out she had gotten away with a million dollars.”
“The building I was supposed to keep my patrols away from was a transshipping facility, right next to the airfield. Usually, any cash coming in would have been secured, but this stuff was transiting, off one Herky Bird and onto another within a few hours.”
“Do you know how she moved it?”
He shook his head. “There were quite a few finance people at the base. She might have gotten help there. Or who knows, maybe she had a string of guys she was playing along. One with a forklift, another with a truck.”
Clare rubbed her arms. “That doesn’t sound like Tally.”
“Yeah. Well. She had friends. It was her second tour. She knew people.”
“I take it you don’t know where the money is right now?”
He gave her a look. “Would I be here asking for help if I did?”
Clare spread her hands. “What sort of help are you looking for, Chief? What do you want? The money? Revenge? You want to find out who killed her?”
He frowned. “I thought she killed herself.”
Clare made a noise. “Officially, yes.”
“You think-oh, God. Yeah. If somebody was trying to get her out of the way.” He closed his eyes. Opened them. “Will I sound like a sick bastard if I say that would be a relief? I called her just a couple days before she died to tell her the investigation had been taken away from me. I thought maybe the news-”
“Wait. She knew about the investigation?”
“That’s why I’m here. I was putting together the pieces, slow, like I told you. I had a pretty good idea of what she’d done. I figured she doctored the manifests, so the paperwork that came from stateside matched the paperwork from inside the theater and the numbers all lined up. Nobody checks against the originals if they think they have authentic copies in hand, right?”
“I guess.”
“I needed to see the original invoices. The ones that were generated stateside. U.S. Army Finance Command has a small group of MPs and CIDs attached-specialists in fraud and financial crimes and all that. I made the request through them. A week goes by, and then two weeks. Then I get a surprise visit in person from Colonel Arlene Seelye.”
Clare blinked. “She’s the one who’s here, investigating the missing funds.”
“She asks me to turn over everything I have on the case, which was weird, because I hadn’t put any other info on my request form. Then she says she’s taking over the investigation. I’m thinking I’m screwed, that somehow she’s been able to figure out I was the guy who looked the other way and let it happen. So I handed over my stuff and sat down to wait for the arrest. The next day-two weeks ago-I was reassigned to Fort Gillem. Courtesy of Colonel Arlene Seelye.”
Clare frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s what I thought. I went back and forth, trying to figure out the right thing to do. About telling Tally or not.” He propped his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor. “Up to that point, I guess I was still hoping there was going to be some way I could have my cake and eat it, too. Get the money back without Tally taking the fall. At the end, I called her. Told her I’d been working on an investigation. Told her what I found.” He glanced up at Clare. “I warned her that there was a CID finance investigator on her trail. The next thing I heard…”
“She was dead.”
“Yeah.”
They both sat with that in silence for a while. Finally, Clare said, “I still don’t understand Colonel Seelye’s actions. If she knew you were involved, why not place you in custody? And if she didn’t know, why didn’t she ask you to back her up, since you knew about the investigation? The only other guy she’s got here is a buck-green private.”
“Huh.” He sat up again. “I figured at first she wanted the cred for the discovery all to herself. Policing in the army isn’t all that different than policing on the outside when it comes to being judged on the number of collars you make or the cases you clear. Then I got to thinking. Nobody else in my chain of command knew what I was doing, and if she’s the one who fielded my request for information, nobody else in her unit knows about the missing money, either.”
“That sounds consistent with not wanting to give anyone else credit for the arrest.”
“Yeah-but I think she’s after more than a nice write-up from her superiors. I think she’s after the money.”
“You mean… for herself. To keep.” Clare sat back in her pew. She stared at the reredos behind the high altar, at the dozens of saints and angels carved into the fine-grained mahogany. “Tally died last Wednesday.”
“Yeah?”
“Stephen Obrowski, the innkeeper at the Stuyvesant Inn, said Colonel Seelye checked in Wednesday evening. He said she was upset there hadn’t been any other accommodations available.” If she had thought about it before, she would have passed it off as the normal annoyance of someone who was going to have to explain blowing her travel budget to the quartermaster. She would have missed the other implication. “Her trip was so spur-of-the- moment, she didn’t take time to make any reservations.” She turned to Nichols. “What if she came here to confront Tally? To see if she could force the location of the money out of her? Maybe she went too far. Or maybe she scared Tally into telling her and then decided to get rid of her.” She stood up. “You stay here.”
Nichols got up from his pew, frowning. “Where are you going?”
“To tell the chief of police that he can’t rule Tally’s death a suicide just yet.”
Entering the Kreemy Kakes diner, Russ spotted Clare in what he thought of as her usual spot, the red vinyl banquette against the wall, the wide window behind her showing the granite-and-marble facade of Allbanc and an unusual number of pedestrians on Main Street. Tourists, enjoying the last week of prime fall foliage.
She was in her clericals, of course, rosy-cheeked in the heat from the crowd. She was finally putting on some weight again, and it looked good on her. Real good.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
He reached across the red-tiled table. “I’m sorry.”
“I am, too.” She took his hand. “Friends?”
He grinned. “Among other things.”
Erla Davis appeared at his side, menus in one hand and a pot of coffee in the other. “Well, howdy, strangers!” She beamed at Clare, then at Russ. “It does my heart good to see you two back in the old spot. Reverend, you still partial to a cup?”
