Darkside (14 page)

“I'm wondering if that's what happened to Dell. Julie called him ‘weak.' Right from the first, during that plebe summer. She says he appeared to be struggling. If someone combined that opinion of him with an innuendo that he was also a homosexual, he could end up feeling really cornered.”

Ev nodded. “But that would imply suicide, not homicide.”

She shook her head. “I just don't know. From an outsider's perspective, all I see are lots of windows, but I can't see anything inside. But the civilian system's saying there might be a murderer in there.”

“I can't see that,” Ev said, shaking his head. “When I was there, there were some plebes who got through plebe year who shouldn't have. We all knew it. Guys with no moral fiber. Liars. Shirkers. Some ex-enlisted who knew how to get by. Guys who held the system in visible contempt. But we also knew that the system would eventually catch up with them: They'd cheat on an exam, or lie, or do something else that would get them sideways with the honor system. And that's what happened.”

“You're implying that most midshipmen believe in the ‘system,' as you call it.”

“Basically, they do. We do. I think West Point says it better than we do: Duty, honor, country. Midshipmen are proud to be there. They want to serve their country. They hold the profession of arms to be an honorable endeavor. They'll bitch and moan about the red-ass nature of daily life in Bancroft Hall, but down deep, they believe in it.”

“And yet we have a homicide investigation in progress. We think, anyway.”

He sipped his coffee and tried to think of a way to explain what it was like inside Bancroft Hall. The hivelike relation
ships among the upperclassmen, the plebes, the commissioned officers of the executive department, the companies themselves. A civilian just wasn't going to understand all that. Liz was looking at her watch.

“Tomorrow's a workday, unfortunately,” she said. “I'd better go.”

“Thanks for sharing that tape with me,” he said. “Or most of it, anyway.”

“She meant well, I think. I'll call you as soon as I hear anything.”

He saw her out, then went back into the kitchen to clean up. The evening had not gone the way he'd envisioned it. He paused over the trash can, his hands full of pizza wrapping. Liz suspected that Julie was holding something back. Surely his daughter understood the danger of that.

He dropped the stuff into the trash can and put the silverware and coffee mugs into the dishwasher. What he hadn't said to Liz was that there was another explanation possible in the Dell matter: that this wasn't a case of a consensus decision on the part of the upperclassmen to drive out an unworthy plebe, but perhaps the work of a single upperclassman, some secret bastard who'd managed to fool the system long enough to rise to firstie status. As much as he would defend the Naval Academy, the midshipmen, and their sense of pride in being part of that duty, honor, country ethic, he knew as well as anyone who had actually been inside that the kids were very different today from when he'd gone through. He'd met enough of Julie's classmates to know that they had experienced more of life than he ever had at that stage. If an evil kid, evil in the Columbine sense, was smart enough to get through the academic program without having to lie, cheat, or steal, he could play havoc in the military school culture of Mother Bancroft. The system was, after all, based on trust and expectations, and Ev had encountered a couple of midshipmen in the past few years who occasionally dropped the mask of military subservience long enough to reveal quite another attitude. What had happened to Brian Dell might have been the work of one of
those gifted, smiling psychopaths who live in plain sight and fool all the people all the time until they do something truly unspeakable.

He shook his head to drive away that unsettling thought. With four thousand talented American kids in there, of course it was possible. It was just not likely.

You hope, he thought.

 

Jim Hall reached the grating entrance behind Mahan Hall at just after eleven o'clock Thursday night. He'd told only the chief that he'd be going into the tunnels tonight, not wanting to alert Public Works. Bustamente had asked Jim to page him once he came back out, but he had not seemed otherwise concerned.

The grating was at the right-rear edge of Mahan Hall, beneath an embankment of grass. During the winter, it exhaled a column of steamy air into the Yard, with the thickness of the column a function of how many steam leaks there were down there. Tonight, the column was visible but not very dense. The windows of the nearby academic buildings were illuminated, in contrast to those of Alumni Hall, which was pretty much at darkened-ship. The difference being in who was paying the lighting bills, Jim thought. The night was misty, with no wind and a promise of real fog later on. The light at the top of the chapel dome was already framed in a halo of moisture. The midshipmen were, theoretically anyway, bedded down in Bancroft Hall for the night.

He was dressed in a one-piece engineering-maintenance jumpsuit, with a black knit watch cap on his head, tropical-weight Marine combat boots, and black leather gloves. He hadn't bothered bringing his cell phone or pager, because the reception in the tunnels was nonexistent. He did carry a Marine combat knife strapped to his right leg, two Maglite flashlights, one large, one small, on his belt, and a Glock strap-holstered in the small of his back. He wore a small lightweight backpack, in which he had a bottle of water, a
battery-powered motion-detector box, a compact first-aid kit, and one can of black spray paint.

He lifted the grating that covered the slanting steel ladder, slipped underneath, and then let it back down. He descended the ladder into a concrete pit that ended in a steel door. He had the series key to this and the other Yard entrance doors, courtesy of the chief. For fire-fighting purposes, one key opened all the grating access doors. It also meant that anyone who could get a copy of this key would have free run of the tunnel system, although Jim knew that some of the main communications centers had additional locks. He suspected that there might be other access points inside Bancroft Hall, but he had not found them yet.

He closed the door behind him and looked around. He was standing in a small vestibule facing the main passageway in a
T
junction. He looked both ways down the tunnels. There were sixty-watt bulbs encased in steam-tight globes every twenty feet, and their yellow light seemed to accentuate the subterranean atmosphere. The only bare concrete visible was on the floor, as the sides and the overhead were covered by cable bundles, various-sized conduits, water pipes, and thickly lagged steam pipes. There was a hum of electricity in the air, audible against a background of hissing steam and the occasional clank of thermal expansion in the pipes. The air was humid and smelled of ozone and old pipe lagging. The pipes were marked at intervals with their contents and pressures. A ribbon of corrugated steel deck plates ran down the center of the five-foot-wide floor, under which ran the main sewage-pumping system.

He consulted his map and turned right, going fifty feet or so to the first dogleg turn to the left, toward the town of Annapolis. The walls being sufficiently covered by the utility lines, there was no room for any graffiti, but he checked anyway, probing the overhead and electrical panels with his Maglite for any signs of spray paint. The tunnel along this branch was one of the modern ones. It was eight feet high, but all the cables and pipes slung along the ceiling made it feel smaller than it was. Behind him, the main tunnel
stretched back toward Bancroft Hall, where it branched out into several different loops and legs to the academic buildings nearer the river.

He stopped at the dogleg and listened. He had been careful to walk on the concrete and not the deck plates, but the only sounds came from the steam lines. He stepped around the corner and came to a major telephone vault, a concrete room that branched off the main tunnel and held a bank of signal-relay cabinets, as well as power amplifiers and hundreds of junction switchboards. Its steel door was framed by two large fire extinguishers. The regular keys to the vault were held by the fire department and the telephone company's contractor, with a firefighters' master override box superimposed on the regular locks. Jim did not have the keys to the vaults with him tonight, although he had been into every one of them in the past. Any midshipmen who came down here probably wouldn't want to get into them. They would have other things on their minds.

His objective tonight was to check out the tunnel leading to a steam and electrical junction chamber beneath the St. John's College campus. It was reached by taking this tunnel to the area underneath the senior captains' quarters surrounding the Worden Field Parade ground, then getting through a security door into a branch tunnel that led out under King George Street, where the main telephone trunk lines and two six-hundred-volt power lines entered the Academy grounds from the city's utility vaults. A runner would have to get through the Academy's security door, then turn right into the municipal tunnel and go down about a block, where a similar city security door opened into a branch leading up to the college campus. From there, it was a quick but dangerous climb to the grating access point behind Pinkney Hall on the St. John's campus. Two dangerous six-hundred-volt power lines were lurking in elderly wire conduit cages in a tunnel that was so narrow that any good-sized runner would have to touch the cages to get through. The high-voltage lines were insulated, of course, but they
were also old, prompting the power company to spray-paint
DANGER
—600
VOLTS
on signs every six feet to warn its own workers. The final branch line onto the St. John's campus was also unlighted, just to add to the excitement.

Jim tested the doors of the telephone vault before going on around the dogleg and heading up the sloping tunnel toward the parade ground. He crossed two more tunnels, one running under the Academy's Decatur Road, and a second under the portion of Hanover Street that paralleled the Academy's wall. At the top of the Hanover Street tunnel, just in front of the fire door to the city tunnel, he found the fresh tag. It was the Shark again. An exaggerated drawing showing huge, distorted teeth, one baleful eye, a dorsal fin, and the signature SR incorporated into the tail fin. Lightning bolts depicted the shark's wake, and a wide-eyed stick figure, arms and legs in an odd alignment, was directly in front of the gaping jaws. Jim sniffed the paint to see how fresh it was, but he couldn't tell anything. It had definitely not been here before.

Habitual graffiti artists, considered vandals by the weary municipal authorities who had to clean up after them, painted their designs in search of fame among others of the graffiti subculture. Gang graffiti marked gang territory, but this looked more like hip-hop work, the dramatic design crying out for recognition. Jim had to admit the guy was pretty good: The lines between colors were clearly delineated, with no dripping or smeared paint. The design was in proportion and there was even some perspective between the huge shark and the soon-to-be victim. Hip-hop designs normally displayed a three-letter signature, which was often code for the tag team's theme. This one only had two, SR, which probably stood for something really original, such as Shark Rules. But as he studied the design, he noticed two more letters, artfully embedded into the arrangement of the stick figure's arms and legs: WD. That was unusual, and he had no idea what WD stood for. The tag was painted on the only blank section of wall in the tunnel that was close to the entrance to the city's tunnels.
He'd seen other graffiti, but they looked pretty old. This was fresh. And maybe it was territorial. But was it a midshipman or a townie?

He fished the can of black spray paint out and went to work. He painted a large circle around the entire shark design, then drew a diagonal black line through it. A no-shark zone here. Then he drew in a crude fishhook that impaled the body of the shark at the midpoint, and tied that to a line leading to his own signature, an elaborate HMC. He'd spelled it out the last time, so this guy ought to know who was messing with him. He stood back to admire his handiwork. Two drip lines appeared to spoil his work. Not up to the unknown artist's ability, but the message was pretty clear. He restowed the paint can and then let himself through the metal fire door.

The city tunnel was not modern, as befitted a Colonial town old enough to have been the infant nation's capital city. The walls and arched ceiling were lined with oversized brick, and some of it didn't look all that substantial. With close to four hundred years of history, the Annapolis utility tunnels were a hodgepodge of sewer, water, and gas lines that bent down from the statehouse hill. Jim had not been into them except to locate the two most evident rising points for runners from the Academy. At least the Academy tunnels were reasonably dry; these were not, and he was careful where he put his feet. There was a distinct odor of sewage, and when he stopped to listen, he could actually hear the trickle of falling water somewhere, accompanied by the scrabble of little clawed feet in the darkness. He made his way carefully, trying to avoid contact with the badly rusted high-voltage cable cages on either side. He had to use his big flashlight, as there were overhead lights only at intersections.

When he got to the grating access under the St. John's College campus, he found that the lock on the access door had been rendered useless by a wad of putty in the bolt receiver slot. Technically, he had no right to be here, as this was the city's jurisdiction. But if this was a midshipman's
doing, he had every right to interfere. He pushed through the door to examine the grating pit, which was very much like the one back behind Mahan Hall. He tested the grating and found a padlock. He twisted the hasp and discovered that it, too, had been jammed open with what looked like some more putty. He then went back behind the access door and removed the wad of goop, pocketing it, while allowing the door to lock behind him. If whoever had taped it open had a master key and was out in town, he would have no problem getting back into the tunnels. If he did not, and he was a mid, he was now in for an interesting evening. There was every possibility that the lock had been gummed open years ago, depending on how often the mysterious runners were operating and how frequently the city crews came through.