Darkside (52 page)

He looked around the empty room. There was a single PC on the right-hand desk, plus a reading lamp and four textbooks. A large Marine recruiting poster hung over one of the beds, indicating that was the one Booth used. The other bed was tightly made up but had no pillow. The room was spotless and entirely squared away. He opened one closet door. There was a full-dress Marine Corps uniform encased in dry cleaner's plastic. It was fully rigged, right down to the gleaming second lieutenant's bars on the shoulders. A curving sword case standing on end to the right of the uniform contained the Mameluke dress sword. He studied the uniform, the same one he'd worn with such pride for six years.
Booth must be a really big guy. Better and better. He closed the closet door.

He was tempted to search the room, but he had no authority to do so, nor the training to do it right. In fact, he didn't really rate being in this room at all. He took the tennis ball out of his pocket and put it squarely on the keyboard of the PC. Then he had an idea. He picked it up again and went to the washbasin. He ran just enough water over the tennis ball to get it wet, but not enough to obliterate what was written on it,
YOU'RE ON
. Some ink ran into the sink. He smudged out the signature HMC on the basin mirror. Then he went back to the desk and tapped the keyboard. The monitor came to life, giving him a log-on screen. He typed in “You know where” and then put the damp ball back on the keyboard.

The lights had been on when he'd come in. He turned them off as he left the room. If Booth was as situationally aware as Jim expected, that would be yet another warning cue. He walked back down the corridor and pushed the button for the elevator. There were no midshipmen wandering the halls. They must really make them study these days, he thought, then remembered exams. The door opened immediately and he stepped in and pushed the button for the basement.

Three minutes later, he was back in the truck with Branner. “Anyone see you?” she asked.

“One plebe, bound for the head,” he said, snapping on his seat belt. “But I don't think I registered. I doused the lights when I left, so Booth should know the moment he steps in that someone's been there.”

“Now what?”

“I'm going to call the chief and see if we can get some backup on the grates. Then I propose to wait here until we see that light go back on.”

“Can the chief do that?” she asked.

“He can't get extra people out. No time to plan that, and besides, the overtime wouldn't be authorized, not for this,
especially not after what the dant said earlier. But we can get the guys who are out on Yard patrol, and maybe a truck from over at the naval station.”

“You gonna tell him we're off the books on this one?”

“The chief? Absolutely. No point in getting him in trouble. He'll probably be the security officer pretty soon.”

She grunted. “You know,” she said, “if Booth is really smart, he'll chuck that ball out the window and stay home tonight.”

“Absolutely,” Jim said. “But I think he'll take the challenge. Unless, of course, he tries for Julie Markham. Hopefully, she's safe in her room, with Hays under the bed somewhere. One assumes the roommate will be cool with that.”

“Melanie Bright? From Cali
for
nia?”

“Oh. ‘Ya-a,'” he replied. “Hell, they'll think it's a game. Better let me get things set up with the chief. There's a pay phone right over there. I need to stay off the radios right now.”

 

At eleven o'clock, the bells rang for plebes' lights-out. They watched as the room lights blinked out in plebe rooms all along the facade of the eighth wing. The chief had understood the new situation right away. Acknowledging that they couldn't roust out off-duty people, Jim had asked him to have the on-duty Yard cops go to all the Academy grates and block the lower-level steel doors from the outside, beginning now, and then for the cops on the morning shift to unlock them when they came on duty. The chief said he'd take care of it. He asked Jim to call him when he and Branner went down into the tunnels. Jim gave him a general description of Booth, and told him to alert the Yard cops to call central dispatch if they saw a firstie who looked like that loose in the Yard after taps. The chief still had that radio retransmitter set. He said he'd set it up just inside the Mahan Hall grate entrance, and leave two radios with it for them to use. He'd be topside, starting at midnight, with a radio tied to that fre
quency. They knew Booth could listen to that frequency, but it was better than nothing, and Booth probably did not have jamming equipment.

“That's mighty good of you, Chief,” Jim had said. “But that's getting directly involved. I mean you on the radio.”

“What radio?” the chief had replied blandly.

Jim deliberately had not told the chief about the storm drain entrance on the seawall. Booth was possibly using some as-yet-unknown entrance to the old Fort Severn magazine rooms, but there was an equal chance he'd use that big storm drain tunnel. The grating he'd seen was at least five feet in diameter. Even someone Booth's size could move quickly up that big pipe and into the main utility tunnels, and it wasn't as if there would be sewage or anything truly unpleasant in the storm drain.

As they waited in the truck to see if Booth would return to his room, Jim asked Branner why she was risking her job.

“Because you need some adult supervision?” she asked.

He sighed and she laughed. “Okay,” she said. “Try this. I'm the supervisor of the Naval Academy NCIS office. It's my supervisory judgment that there's new and important evidence regarding what happened to Special Agent Thompson. Nothing to do with Midshipman Dell, of course.”

“Ah.”

“So I'm not disobeying orders here so much as exercising initiative. About Bagger. Not Dell.”

“It sounds good,” he said doubtfully.

“Look,” she said. “We catch Booth in the tunnels tonight, we'll have enough to open the whole thing back up, SecNav or no SecNav. Especially if I can have five minutes alone with him.”

“Just by catching him down there?”

“We have the unexplained Dell death, linked by Markham to Booth. We have the missing college girl, who went into the tunnels, most probably with Booth. We have Bagger's fatal assault case, plus some other assault cases over in town, linked to some guy in vampire drag—whom
you
saw in the tunnels. We have various destruction derbies
down there since you've been looking for this guy, linked to a tag with a shark logo. Booth calls
himself
‘the Shark' on the Navy swim team.”

“Okay, so lots of circumstantial. But if Booth remains silent, we've got jack, right?”

She gave him a wolfish smile. “Like I said, Mr. Naval Academy Security Officer, I'm along to provide some adult supervision. By now, Booth has probably figured out that you know more than you should. And you've directly challenged him to meet you in the tunnels. If he's been watching Markham, and I think he watches pretty good, he's probably aware that she bolted out to her lawyer's office earlier today. He'll be more than prepared to meet you down there. One-on-one denotes personal combat, don't you think?”

“Absolutely. Especially to a Marine recon wanna-be.”

“Okay, then. It's probably going to get interesting down there—that's more his turf than ours. What he doesn't know is that
I'm
going to be down there. You two get together, you need to talk a little trash, provoke him into some boasting. Something that I can hear. I'm the arresting officer here. That'll do it.”

He just looked at her for a moment. “He won't do that unless I'm in the corner,” he said.

She smiled at him. “‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright,'” she said.

“Bleated the goat,” he replied. “The one tied to the stake.”

“Got any better ideas? Like you said, it's not like we have a bag full of evidence here. Tell you what: As soon as he admits doing Bagger, I'll just cap his ass, and then it'll be just us chickens testifying at an inquest about an accidental shooting. That would get the balance of justice about right.”

“C'mon.” He laughed. “You can't just go shooting the guy.”

“Watch me. In my book, that's better than having some Communist defense lawyer get him off.”

He shook his head. Wyatt Branner at the O.K. Corral. She
probably would do it, too. He glanced up. The light was on in Booth's room.

“Yo, Houston,” he said, switching on the engine. “I believe we have contact.”

 

They drove to the back of Mahan Hall and parked the truck in the Alumni Hall parking lot. The chief materialized out of the darkness as they approached the grate.

“Decided to hang around and give you these personally,” he said, handing over the radios. “Plus a message—from a Mr. Harry Chang?”

Branner stepped forward. “That will be for me,” she said.

“Yeah, sounded like it. Mr. Chang was in a bad mood. Says he thinks you and my boss here are up to some wild-haired shit, to use his words. Says he has it on best authority that Mr. Hall has been told to cease and desist in regards to the Dell case, and that you have been similarly so instructed. Asked me to pass that along, should I happen to see you out and about the Yard.”

“And you said?”

“I said that I didn't know anything about any police operations, and if
I
didn't know anything, there weren't any. That I had no idea where either of you was, but if you were together, it was probably not business.”

Jim smiled in the darkness, especially when he saw Branner's expression.

“Anyways, he also said there were some people coming down tomorrow morning from headquarters to…lessee, this guy used a lot of code. Oh, yeah, he said there were some people coming down to ‘collate the available evidence, compile the final
official
report, and to review some recent management concepts with Special Agent Branner.'”

“Tomorrow morning?” Branner asked. “Definitely not tonight?”

“That's what the man said,” the chief replied. “The retransmitter is in place in the main tunnel. I got guys physi
cally securing all the grates from the outside. You want me to seal the one over on the Johnnie campus?”

“Can you?”

“Leave it to me. You're trying to catch this vampire runner, right?”

“Right. We think we know who he is.”

“Why tonight?”

“Mr. Hall left him a little invitation,” Branner said. “Plus, another mid has given us reason to believe this guy had something to do with the Dell kid's flying lesson.”

“Man, oh, man. This is definitely not my father's Naval Academy.”

“Chief, I need one more favor,” Jim said. “Will this radio reach all the way over to the public works center?”

“Sure,” the chief said. “That's a ten-watt transmitter.”

“I need you to go there, tell the utility watch officer that we're in the tunnels, and listen for a code word:
lights-out.
This guy has had a couple years to put his own surveillance network up, and I think he gets electrical power for it by tapping into local lighting circuits. If I speak that code word, I need all the juice in the tunnels turned off. When I say, ‘lights on,' turn it all back on, okay?”

“I can handle that,” the chief said. “You going along, Special Agent?”

“Wouldn't miss it, Chief,” she said, patting the bulge where the Glock lived.

“Watch out using that thing down in the tunnels, Special Agent. That's one big ricochet chamber.”

“Only if I miss his criminal ass, Chief,” she said with a sniff.

The chief gave her a two-finger salute and they went down the steps and through the steel door. They heard the chief lock it behind them, then brace the door with a metal bar. It was five minutes to midnight.

 

Ev and Liz picked Julie up in front of Dahlgren Hall. She carried a small overnight bag. She got in the backseat with
out a word. Tommy Hays had walked her out to the car. He waved and she waved back as Ev made a left turn and drove up the circular drive in front of the chapel.

“Any problem signing out?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

Ev looked sideways at Liz, who arched her eyebrows as if to say, Told you so. He went out the Maryland Avenue gate and drove up to State Circle, where he let them out by the gate to Liz's house. He tried to think of something to say to Julie, but he couldn't come up with anything, so he told Liz he'd be at home for the rest of the evening. She nodded and took Julie through the iron gates.

As if I had anywhere else to go, he thought as he circled around the old Weems estate and headed back down in front of the St. John's College campus. There were a few students out and about among the giant old trees on the front lawns. He stopped to let two oddly dressed girls cross the street. They looked like they were going to a Halloween costume party. Okay, he thought, so Julie's pissed off at me. And at herself, because now the onus is on her to solve the honor problem. Ev wondered if the NCIS team had picked up Dyle Booth yet.

He tried to visualize Julie dating a guy like Dyle Booth but couldn't quite do it. They had nothing in common except the swimming. Julie came from a very traditional family background; Booth from the white fringes of a Baltimore ghetto. Liz might have been right: The acerbic way Dyle could verbalize things didn't square with a verbal skills problem. Had the kid been manipulating him in order to get at Julie?

Ev parked the car and got out. The night was very still now, with enough humidity in the air to give nearby lights a soft penumbra. Not quite fog yet, but soon, he thought. He went up to the darkened house and let himself in. He turned on the porch lights behind him, then turned them off. No point in porch lights—no one was coming to see him tonight. He walked down the darkened hall to the kitchen, through whose windows he could see the dock lights, which
came on automatically at dusk. The furniture was all gray in the dim light. He stood at the kitchen sink and considered what he'd done this evening: alienated his daughter, and very possibly Liz as well. Could he have phrased it differently? Been more diplomatic? Explained it to Liz first, and not said anything to Julie? Yes.