Snapped (18 page)

Jonah thumbed through the papers, frowning. “How’d you get all this?”

“I’m resourceful.”

He glared at her.

“Alex Lovell helped me.”

“How did
she
get it?”

She gave him a baleful look. “You don’t really want to know that, do you? It’s like you said about the sausages.”

She shoved the door open and started to climb out, but he caught her elbow. “Want me to follow you home?”

“Don’t bother. You need to get going.”

He watched her grimly. “Keep a low profile.” He released her arm. “And try not to get in any trouble while I’m gone.”

Colonel William Fowler was rumored to be a hardass, and that was pretty much what Jonah found when he arrived on time for his meeting at Fort Benning and was left waiting without explanation for more than two hours. When the colonel finally showed up, his gaze zeroed in on the only person in his entire office wearing civilian clothes.

“Detective Macon, this way.” He directed Jonah past his assistant’s desk and into his private office. “Sorry to put you on hold.”

“No problem, sir.”

Fowler was tall, slim, and had the super-erect posture of an army lifer. Jonah waited for him to sit and took a plastic chair on the other side of a gray metal desk. The colonel’s desktop, like his uniform, was immaculate.

“All the way up from Texas.” Fowler leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “What do you think of Benning?”

“Same as I remember it.” Jonah was playing the veteran card here, and both of them knew it.

“Long trip. Wish I had better news for you.”

“How’s that, sir?”

“You’re here about James Himmel. I’m afraid I don’t remember a damn thing about him, besides what I read in his file on Friday. Believe we sent you guys a copy of that.”

They had. Jonah had found it to be amazingly lacking in any detail that would help his investigation. The file had been scrubbed clean of anything that might reflect negatively on the army.

“The file was pretty thin, sir. I’m here to get more. For example, the paperwork says Himmel’s commanding officer refused to reenlist him, but it doesn’t say why.”

Jonah waited for an explanation, but it didn’t come.

“I also need more on his shooting skills. I’d like to talk to someone who worked with him here at the base. I understand you were one of his instructors when he went through sniper school? That would have been nine years ago this summer.”

Fowler smiled. “Not bad, Detective. You’ve obviously done your homework. Problem is, we get more than twenty-five thousand new soldiers a year through here, and I don’t remember this one. ’Fraid you’ve wasted your trip.”

Fowler stood.

Jonah stood, too, and set his jaw. He hadn’t spent fourteen goddamn hours on the road and two hours sitting in a chair to be dismissed after five minutes.

“With all due respect, sir, I’m not finished yet.”

Fowler’s eyebrows tipped up. “Finished?”

“I’m investigating a triple homicide committed by one of
your
soldiers, and I have some questions I need answered.”

Fowler gave him a long, hard look, and Jonah could tell he’d just gained some ground.

“You were here in ’04, if I’m not mistaken,” the colonel said.

“That’s correct, sir.”

“How about a tour of the base? For old times’ sake.” Fowler crossed the room and opened his office door. “Get me Wolchansky,” he told his assistant. He turned and gave Jonah a crisp nod. “Master Sergeant David Wolchansky’s your man. He’ll get you what you need.”

The speed with which the master sergeant responded to the summons told Jonah two things: first, that he’d passed some sort of litmus test, and second, that this hand-off had been planned all along.

Jonah rode alongside the man now in a doorless Jeep with the windshield flipped down. The base was just like he remembered it—from the sound of rounds popping off on the small-arms range complex to the stifling humidity. Jonah watched a line of new recruits with their faces in the dirt and remembered the hell of physical training—the push-ups, the flutter kicks, the mountain climbers, the cherry-pickers. He remembered thirty-second showers and meals wolfed down on the way to more PT. He remembered running and ruck-marching hundreds of miles and then collapsing into his bed at night and getting up to do it all over again. He remembered days spent in shoot houses, and the cuts and bruises on his body from the clay simulation rounds. And he recalled thinking at the time that it was hard, but then realizing months later that none of it even compared to the brutality of real combat.

Wolchansky pulled over at an empty firing range and
ground to a stop beside a wooden cabinet. Jonah climbed out of the Jeep and surveyed the area as the soldier unlocked the box and pulled out some gear.

Jonah had noticed the M24 in back and figured he was in for another test. He peeled off his jacket and tossed it over the passenger seat, then rolled up the cuffs of his white oxford shirt.

“You still shoot?” Wolchansky asked, handing him a pair of earplugs.

“Here and there.”

He nodded at the range. “I was out here this morning with a team of Rangers. One guy hit the T-zone on a target from six hundred yards.”

Well, shit. The T-zone was forehead and nose on a human silhouette.

Wolchansky handed him the rifle. “See what you can do with that five hundred.”

Any doubt Jonah had that these guys were fucking with him was long gone. He took the rifle and looked it over. It was painted a flat desert camo and had a Leupold scope.

Wolchansky grabbed a pair of binoculars off the floor of the Jeep and started walking toward the range. “I’ll be on glass.”

Jonah followed Wolchansky across the turf and tried to get in the zone. The air smelled like spent ammo and CLP oil and dirt. Jonah breathed it in and let it sit in his lungs. He found a good, flat shooting position and crouched down to look around from the lower vantage point.

The range went to a thousand yards, with signs marking each hundred. The sole target at the moment
was dead center in the field at the five-hundred-yard mark. It had a red flag on top, giving him wind direction as well as another hint that this was all part of the colonel’s plan.

Jonah turned to Wolchansky. The man was typical army—thin, muscular, confident. He had the cool look in his eye of an experienced operator, versus the new Ranger recruits Jonah had seen on the way in. Those guys were hyper-aggressive and amped up on ego and adrenaline, but Wolchansky had a maturity about him that told Jonah he’d seen his share of combat. Jonah pegged him for Special Operations.

“You a Ranger?” Jonah asked him.

“I am.”

“How long you been an instructor here?”

“Two years,” he said. “I train spec ops, mostly.”

Jonah had confidence in his shooting abilities, but he wasn’t stupid. He wanted to get some info up front, just in case he failed this test.

“You ever meet Jim Himmel?”

The Ranger pulled a few rounds from his pocket and handed them to Jonah. “Worked with him in Ramadi, back in 2005.” Jonah loaded the rifle as Wolchansky gazed downrange. “He was on one of the sniper teams. Back then, our guys were clearing a hundred IEDs a week. Our mission was to find the people placing them and take them out.”

“How’d you do?”

“We got the job done, for the most part.”

Jonah examined the weapon. It was slightly heavier than the Remington he had at home because of the more sophisticated optics.

He laid the rifle on the ground and settled on his stomach beside it. From there, it was a ritual. He zeroed the scope to five hundred yards, then pulled the gun in and adjusted the butt snugly against his shoulder. He lowered the bipod to the ground, shifted his hips and his legs, and dug his toes into the dirt. Then he tucked his cheek against the stock.

He peered through the scope and was sucked into a world five football fields away.

Wolchansky settled prone on the ground beside him and picked up the binoculars.

“It was a hot area,” he continued. “We were busy round the clock. I remember in training they told us only stay on scope forty-five minutes at a time, but back then, we couldn’t stop. It was an obsession. Those crosshairs get burned into your brain, even when you close your eyes. And you don’t want to close your eyes because you think, What if I miss someone? How many of our guys are going to die because I wasn’t paying attention?”

Jonah could relate to what he was saying. He felt that way about being a cop. He thought a lot about not just the rapists and murderers and gangbangers he took off the streets, but also the ones he missed, the ones who would go out someday and hurt someone.

“First cold-bore shot, just get the splash,” Wolchansky said.

The man was giving him a warm-up shot. Jonah knew he needed it. He practiced all the time, but law enforcement snipers focused on shorter ranges—typically under a hundred yards.

Jonah settled in. He looked at the flag and got wind direction. He did some mental adjustments for drop and
spin, and shifted the crosshairs up and to the left of the target.

Then he relaxed and got his heart rate down. Three deep breaths. He waited for the natural respiratory pause—the most relaxed point in the breathing cycle.

Then he stopped thinking about breathing. He stopped thinking at all. He squeezed the trigger.

The gun jerked against his shoulder.

“You’re low, about four o’clock.”

Jonah peered through the scope again. He adjusted the crosshairs. Three more breaths. Three more pauses. He squeezed the trigger.

Another kick in the shoulder.

Wolchansky whistled. “That’s a hit.”

Jonah took a moment to absorb what he’d done. He didn’t know whether it was luck or skill, but he was glad he’d done it.

He let go of the rifle and kneeled beside it.

“Not bad.” The Ranger picked up the gun and got to his feet.

Jonah stood and dusted his hands on his pants as Wolchansky gazed downrange. The sun blazed down on them, but Jonah stood there and waited because he knew he was about to get what he’d come for.

“I remember this one day with Himmel, back in Ramadi. We were in two teams, both of us on overwatch while some of our guys were out looking for IEDs. We get intel there’s this group of insurgents approaching an alley. They’re loaded down with RPGs.” The Ranger looked at him, and Jonah pictured the band of insurgents toting rocket-propelled grenades. “Finally, one of them darts across. I watched Himmel thread the needle
on a sprinting target from eight hundred fifty yards.”

Jonah stood there in his dirty civilian clothes and knew he’d passed the test. And his prize was this Ranger’s information. He absorbed the words, along with their implications.

The guy had made a head shot from almost half a mile away. A
moving
target, no taller than ten inches.

Himmel was a sniper. A force multiplier. A deadly weapon. He’d taken fifty-three shots last week and missed most of them. And Jonah knew now what he’d only suspected before.

James Himmel hadn’t missed a thing.

Allison was finishing the remnants of her very late lunch when someone tall, dark, and handsome walked into the shop and peeled off his shades. He looked straight at Allison and approached her table as she swallowed the last bite of her soggy Italian sub.

“This seat taken?” He pulled out the chair across from her and flashed a smile.

Make that tall, dark, and arrogant. And young. Holy crap, he was young enough to be—well, not her son, but maybe a nephew.

Still sporting the smile, he sank into the chair and stuck his hand out. “I’m Tyler Dorion. And you’re Detective Doyle, if I’m not mistaken.”

She wiped her fingers on a napkin before shaking his hand. “How’s it going, Tyler?”

Was he here to report an on-campus theft? Maybe a car break-in? She took in his pale blue oxford and clean-shaven face. Or maybe he was with the Young Republicans and looking to make a sales pitch.

“I saw you at the scene.”

“Scene?”

“The crime scene. Last Wednesday.” His smile dimmed a bit—but not enough for Allison’s tastes—as he pulled a business card from his shirt pocket and slid it across the table. “I’m with the
Bee
.”

“The who?”

He smiled. “You’re familiar with our local paper?”

She glanced down at the business card.
Tyler P. Dorion
.

Beneath the name was a list of Web sites, none of which belonged to the
Bee
.

Allison crumpled her sandwich trash into a neat ball. “What can I do for you, Tyler?”

“It’s Ty.”

“What can I do for you, Ty?”

He leaned forward on his elbows, suddenly somber as he looked up at her. His eyes exactly matched his shirt, and she wondered if he practiced that earnest look in the mirror.

“Listen, Detective Doyle. Can I call you Allison?”

“No.”

He nodded. “All right. Detective. It’s come to my attention that your task force is investigating a conspiracy angle in connection with the Summer School Massacre.”