Darkside (2002), page 43
“Yeah. Just until we know something more about what the hell’s going on. Now that I remember Booth, I’m a little worried.”
“I don’t know that Julie would want to do that, not after your reaction tonight. Like you said, that sounded like good-bye.”
“Well, maybe to your house, then? Would you take her in?” He looked over at the lighted outline of Bancroft Hall, which now looked faintly ominous to him. “I just don’t think she should be in Bancroft tonight.”
“Certainly, if she’s willing to come. How would we manage it?”
“I’d get her to sign out for town liberty. She just wouldn’t come back. I think we can sort out any problems with that tomorrow, once we get the commandant into it. I’m assuming NCIS is looking for Dyle right now. There’s a phone in the car. Let me make a call; then you talk to her.”
“Why don’t I make the call and just ask her to get out of there? I don’t think she’ll do it if you ask her.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Let’s just hope Agent Branner and Mr. Hall are working on getting Dyle Booth into an interview room.”
Just after 9:00 P.M., Jim entered the doors on the ground floor of the eighth wing. He went down to the basement, then walked along the corridor of darkened activity rooms until he found the elevator. He pushed the call button and waited. He was dressed in khaki slacks, a short-sleeved shirt, and black shoes. He was also wearing a dark blue Naval Academy windbreaker with the Academy logo and a dark blue ball cap with USNA stenciled on it in gold letters. From a distance, he might look like one of the company officers. As the Academy security officer, he had a right to be in Bancroft Hall, although normally he would have checked in with the watch officers in the Executive Department. As it was, he didn’t intend to spend a lot of time in the eighth wing. The elevator arrived and opened. He stepped in and pressed the button for the fourth floor. The door slowly slid shut and the elderly elevator started up.
He had left Branner outside in the truck, where she could see the window of Booth’s room on the fourth deck. If he actually encountered Booth, he would keep the midshipman in the room and flick the room lights on and off several times. That would be Branner’s signal to come into the building and join him in Booth’s room. She knew the room number. They would then interview him and take him into custody if warranted. But he didn’t expect to encounter Dyle Booth. Unable to raise the lawyer, he had called in to the battalion office and asked if he could speak to Midshipman Booth. After an interminable wait on hold, the mate came back on and said that Booth was signed out for study hall. That meant he could be anywhere in Bancroft Hall or even in an academic building. As a firstie, he would be able to go almost anywhere he wanted. But taps was approaching. He would have to be back in his room at taps, so this was the time to leave the message. Julie had said that Booth did not have a roommate, which was unusual, although not unheard of. The mate had given him the room number.
The door opened on the fourth floor and he stepped out. The corridor was empty. He could hear the familiar sounds of Mother Bancroft during study hour. Some voices were audible, as well as some music and the sounds of a shower going in the room right next to the elevator. Riding the elevator was a firstie privilege. The only other people using the elevators would be the watch officers. He hoped like hell he didn’t run into the real OOD, because that would become truly awkward.
He glanced at the nearest room number and then turned left and headed toward the bay end of the building. The rooms were small and entirely uniform. Most doors were closed. The floor in the hallway was highly polished, and the place smelled of floor wax and cleaning agents. The doors to the men’s bathroom were open and the pungent odor of urinal disinfectant seeped out into the corridor. A plebe came out of his room in his bathrobe, hands rigidly at his sides, eyes in the boat, squaring every corner and walking briskly down the channel, or center of the passageway. He said “Good evening, sir,” as he passed the big man in the windbreaker. If he was curious about Jim, he did not show it. He was obviously trying to get to the head without running into any upperclassmen.
Jim arrived at room number 8424. Eighth wing, fourth floor, room twenty-four. The nameplate read D. BOOTH, 2002. Name and class. There was light showing through the frosted pane in the wooden door. Jim didn’t hesitate. He knocked twice, making sure his Naval Academy ring hit the wooden frame in two solid raps, a familiar sound in Bancroft Hall. To a plebe, it meant jump up into a brace and prepare to sound off, because there was at least a firstie outside, or maybe even a watch officer. He pushed the door open.
There was no one inside. It was a standard room: single-tier bunk on either side, two desks pushed back-to-back in the middle, an aluminum chair placed squarely in front of each one. The beds had been made up with military precision. There were no clothes strewn about, nor any other personal gear adrift. No shoes, clothes, coats, notebooks—nothing. The windows overlooked Lejeune Hall, the physical education center and home to the Marine detachment, appropriately enough. The dark bulk of Dahlgren Hall was visible to the right. He could see Branner’s white face peering up under the streetlights from the parking lot below. He turned off the room lights, waited ten seconds, and turned them back on. That was the second signal: I’m in and there’s no one here. She had wanted to come up, but he’d pointed out that if this worked, Dyle would think it would be just Jim waiting for him. Especially if Booth asked around and was told there had been one stranger on deck earlier, not two.
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 California?”
“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 frequency. 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 physically 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 without 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.
