Name Not Given (Jack Widow Book 6) Read online

  She asked, “What more do you need?”

  “I don’t believe that Pawn would’ve gone to arrest the son of a decorated and influential former secretary of defense on just her eyewitness testimony.”

  “She’s a federal agent.”

  “I know. But she also just saw her husband get shot.”

  Talbern said, “They didn’t just go on her account. There’s another witness who connected Dayard to one of the girls.”

  “Another witness? I didn’t read about that?”

  “Did you even read any of the report?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Details, Jack. Details are important.”

  I yawned again. This time I covered my mouth because I saw it coming.

  I spoke in a yawning voice.

  “I should get to bed. In the morning, we’ll go see Marksy. You can tell me about the witness tomorrow.”

  She nodded and stood up from the bed. She walked casually by me. Talbern had quite a strut. She had soft features in the front, but hard in the back. Like she was a woman who tried to look like a woman, but still maintained her muscle tone for work in a man’s profession.

  My mother taught me to be a gentleman, a southern thing. But she didn’t teach me to be a monk. And monks are celibate, not gentlemen. So, I did as any man would do when a woman like Talbern walks past him.

  I watched.

  She stopped at the door, turned back to me, and said, “Get some sleep, Jack.”

  No one ever called me Jack. I preferred to be called Widow, but I didn’t correct her. I liked the way she said it.

  “Good night.”

  She walked out and I kicked my shoes off, crashed on the bed.

  CHAPTER 26

  I SLEPT A FEW HOURS before I woke straight up and stared at the ceiling.

  Everything in the Hotel George was top-notch. Even the ceilings had crown molding. The FBI treated its guests like VIP. Then again, they did arrest me and fly me against my will over nine states.

  I wasn’t too mad about it. The way I lived my life was literally going with the flow. But sometimes, there were things that called for me to go against the flow, to swim upriver.

  Potentially I was looking at an innocent man on death row, who was about to be executed. I was looking at a missing woman, who might still be alive. And I was looking at a serial killer who was getting away with it.

  I woke up because I couldn’t sleep any longer. I kept thinking of Karen Dekker.

  What if the real AWOL killer was still out there? What if he had Dekker?

  If she was still alive, I wanted to find her before it was too late.

  I thought about the killer.

  The FBI report stated that the AWOL case was closed over a year ago. Calculating the length of the trial and the last victim found, I would estimate that AWOL hadn’t killed in twenty-two months, almost two years.

  Why would he start killing after all that time?

  Why did he move to Florida?

  If this was a real AWOL murder case, then I could guess that the reason he stopped was because he knew that they had captured someone else. He saw an opportunity for the FBI to pin the whole thing on James Dayard.

  I’m sure he wanted to throw the FBI off his trail.

  On the other hand, maybe he never stopped. Maybe he simply adjusted his targets or moved to another country.

  I recalled a theory about the infamous serial killer called the Zodiac. Some so-called scholar proclaimed a theory where the real killer was diagnosed with cancer and he moved to Mexico to live out his days with cancer therapies. DNA was just coming up at the time and the guy didn’t want his DNA to be on file somewhere in the US.

  I didn’t know about any of that, but I knew from living a life of going with the flow, that shit happens.

  Maybe shit happened to AWOL and he stopped for a while.

  Next to the bed, on a night stand was a lamp, a slick portable phone, and an alarm clock. The clock was digital with soft-lighted numbers.

  The time was seven in the morning.

  I groaned looking at it and turned over to look at the open doorway to the bathroom.

  Closed my eyes again.

  I MANAGED TO SLEEP almost two hours before waking up at ten past nine in the morning. I got out of bed, showered, and got back into my own clothes. I folded Kelvin’s up neat and made the hotel bed. I left the clothes there, took the tablet that Pawn had given me, and went down to the lobby.

  There wasn’t a restaurant, but there was a complimentary breakfast station set up. There were only two other people there. Both older than me by twenty years. Both were male and both sat separately, reading newspapers.

  I didn’t see the employee who set up the station anywhere in sight.

  I looked over everything. It was the most disappointing thing about the hotel. It was all pretty standard American breakfast foods, minus eggs and bacon, which was what I was hoping for. Instead, there was nothing but on-the-go foods, like cereal and doughnuts and bagels.

  I grabbed a blueberry bagel and a cup of coffee.

  The bagel was pretty good. I ended up eating two of them and drinking four cups of the coffee because the cups were small to-go things and not those bucket-sizes that Starbucks serves.

  To be honest, I wasn’t sure which I liked better because I grew up seeing the value of good things coming in small packages. But then again, I was a big guy and I liked coffee. More seemed better to me than less.

  I sat at a table alone and looked over the rest of the case reports on the tablet.

  I finally found the so-called witness. It was the husband of the victim that Dayard had been linked to. Her name was Becci Scarpone.

  Her husband said that he saw Dayard hanging around their home after she had broken the whole thing off.

  The husband claimed that Dayard was texting, calling her for weeks. He said that in her final days, she seemed scared to go anywhere until one day she vanished.

  I sat back and turned off the tablet. I wasn’t going to get any more from reading it.

  The witness they used was the former husband of one of the victims and a man cheated on. I could see a strong defense at least being able to say his testimony was circumstantial.

  He didn’t see Dayard kill his wife. All his testimony did was paint a very bad picture of James Dayard.

  I imagined that his testimony, combined with Marksy’s and the notes of a dead FBI agent, were enough to seal Dayard’s fate.

  Just then, Talbern and Kelvin appeared from the elevators.

  Talbern smiled at me. She looked a lot more rested than I did, I was sure of that.

  Kelvin didn’t smile, but he nodded. He was wearing the same clothes from yesterday. I did have his spares, after all.

  Kelvin went to look at the breakfast food and Talbern came right to me. She sat down.

  I said, “Aren’t you going to get some coffee?”

  And just then, she showed me the first thing about her that turned me off.

  “I don’t drink coffee.”

  “What?” I said. I couldn’t see my own expression, but I was sure I had genuine shock on my face.

  She smiled, hard and asked, “Does that offend you?”

  “No. Not at all. Just surprising.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I just never met a cop who didn’t like coffee.”

  “I didn’t say that I don’t like it.”

  “Why don’t you have some then?”

  “I’m allergic.”

  “Say what?”

  “I’m allergic to caffeine.”

  I stayed quiet.

  “It’s a rare thing, but it happens. So I don’t drink soda, coffee, or energy drinks. Can’t even have tea. It sucks.”

  “You’ve never had coffee?”

  “Nope. Never,” she said, then she thought for a moment and said, “Well one time. That’s how we found out.”

  “That’s just about the worse thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” />
  She shrugged and said, “It’s not that bad. At least I’ll keep my youthful skin.”

  “Not sure if coffee causes premature aging. Think that’s just something that tea makers want us to think so they can sell more tea.”

  “Maybe. At any rate, I can’t have it.”

  I said, “They got juice.”

  “Kelvin’s grabbing me some.”

  I nodded, took another pull of my coffee.

  “Did you tell him about last night?”

  She nodded.

  “What did he say?”

  “He was shocked about it, but didn’t say much.”

  “We should speak to Marksy and this witness too.”

  “Okay. We’ll see her at the office.”

  I nodded.

  Just then Kelvin’s cellphone rang. He put down a plate with a doughnut on it and answered the phone.

  Talbern looked over at him. She watched his face like she knew all of his expressions enough to get the gist of the conversation.

  He talked for a moment and then clicked off. He left his doughnut and walked over to us.

  “We gotta go.”

  Talbern asked, “What’s going on?”

  “They found her.”

  “Dekker?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Is she alive?” Talbern asked, but I already knew the answer from Kelvin’s demeanor and I guessed that Talbern did too. But she asked out of concern and reflex.

  “No. She’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 27

  BEFORE I KNEW IT, we were back at JFK Airport. Same private hangar area, same plane that the FBI had flown me in on coming from Florida.

  The flight crew was different this time around. Instead of the guy from yesterday, we had a female flight attendant and a female pilot with a male copilot.

  The flight attendant went through all the same motions, saying hello to us as we boarded the plane.

  Everything was basically the same as the flight to New York from Florida. Except this time, I wasn’t in restraints, and the crew was different, and Marksy was waiting onboard to greet us.

  Despite the news that Dekker was found dead, she was more polite to me than the day before.

  I sat at a window seat and Talbern sat next to me.

  Marksy got up and moved to our row.

  Before the pilot started to taxi to the runway for takeoff, Marksy said, “Widow, I’m sorry for the way I behaved to you.”

  That was big of her, I thought.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You know what it’s like having someone show up out of the blue with evidence that reopens your case?”

  “I don’t actually. But I can imagine.”

  “It throws a monkey wrench into everything.”

  I stayed quiet.

  “Did you look over the case?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you can understand my position?”

  “Of course.”

  She paused briefly.

  She said, “It’s been twenty-two months and thirteen days since he killed him.”

  Her voice was part emotion and part professional FBI, in that Elliot Ness sort of way. She sounded like a tax accountant, with a very matter-of-fact sort of tone.

  I nodded.

  “Dayard’s guilty. I know it. He shot my husband. And murdered those women.”

  I said nothing.

  “I’m not sure who’s doing this. But he killed those others.”

  She said it with more than conviction. She said it as if she was certain of it. It was true no matter what. Which was a dangerous thing, in my opinion.

  A cop who knows a perp is guilty, even though the evidence wasn’t one hundred percent, was a cop who had a grudge.

  Marksy had every right to have a grudge. I understood one hundred percent. No question. But her grudge was against the man who killed her husband and that man wasn’t necessarily the man they arrested for it.

  I didn’t say anything else about it. Just repeated, “Don’t worry about it.”

  The airplane finished taxiing to the runway. We sat back and waited.

  The engines bellowed and the plane shotgunned toward the sky.

  CHAPTER 28

  WE LANDED back at the same airport in Orlando and took the same SUV back to Graham.

  Going through the gate, I had the feeling that I would see Coresca working the gate. Of course, he was.

  Kelvin drove us. When he pulled up to the gate, the first thing that Coresca did was to ask to see Kelvin’s ID. Then he recognized him. He looked at Marksy, who was in the passenger seat. Then he looked back to see Talbern and me.

  His eyes locked on me.

  In one second, he had had his hand out, waiting for Kelvin to hand over his ID. The next, he stepped back and reached for what I thought was his gun like he was suspicious that somehow I had escaped FBI custody and taken all of these agents hostage and forced them to return me to Graham base. Maybe he thought it was to return to murder him for treating me like crap when I was here.

  To tell the truth, I wasn’t happy to see him. But I was happy for him to see me, returning, not in handcuffs, but as a temporary consultant to the FBI.

  He continued to stare and reach for something that was out of my view.

  I stared back at him. I smiled, but didn’t react otherwise.

  Of course, he didn’t draw his gun.

  He pulled up a radio. He clicked the button and asked for Hamilton to respond. He didn’t use any radio codes.

  “Go ahead,” Hamilton’s voice said.

  Coresca said, “They’re here.”

  “The FBI?”

  “Yes. And they brought him back.”

  “Good. Send them through.”

  Coresca paused a long, long beat, like he was pondering how much time in prison an Army tribunal would give him if he shot me dead.

  Hamilton asked, “Coresca?”

  “Ten-four,” he said and placed the radio back down on his belt.

  He said nothing to me. He turned back to the gate. We waited for a long minute and finally, Marksy asked, “What the hell is his problem?”

  Kelvin reached up and adjusted the rearview, looked at me.

  Talbern didn’t budge.

  Marksy sensed something was amiss with them. She looked at me.

  I shrugged and said, “Think that guy’s got a brain problem.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Maybe he was dropped on his head as a kid,” Talbern added.

  I smiled.

  “Guess so,” Marksy said.

  Coresca returned with a tag to hang from the rearview mirror. He handed it to Kelvin and then pointed north.

  “Head straight. The medical building is a two-story building on the end.”

  Kelvin nodded and drove forward, stopping at the gate for Coresca to open it.

  We passed through and drove straight. Kelvin performed a couple of California stops at two intersections.

  He pulled into a parking lot behind the medical building and parked near the front.

  We got out and walked up a hill to a sidewalk. There were no stairs. We walked right in.

  A female sergeant behind a desk greeted us and escorted us through a set of double doors and down a short hallway. We stopped and went through an unmarked door with chipped, green paint.

  On the other side, she stopped at another desk in a small office.

  A wiry guy sat behind it. He didn’t wear an army uniform. He was in green scrubs. Which meant that he was a doctor, but I didn’t know what kind.

  In the military there is a medical corps, which means that most doctors are designated a certain title such as flight surgeon. I wasn’t sure what his would’ve been. In the civilian world, he was simply a coroner.

  Since, Graham was such a small base, I was sure he probably was some sort of general practitioner. Maybe the only MD on post, which explained his tired look.

  He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He was
drinking a cup of coffee, which I immediately noticed, but didn’t ask for any.

  He stood up and asked, “Is this them?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dismissed, Sergeant,” he said.

  The desk sergeant turned and smiled at me with something behind the smile, like she knew who I was and the whole story about Coresca and my getting detained.

  She walked out of the room.

  The guy said, “I’m Dr. Shpoik.”

  It sounded a lot like Spock, from the Star Trek TV show. Obviously, he knew that because he wasn’t surprised when Talbern giggled at it.

  I looked at her.

  “It’s okay. I’m used to people laughing. My parents should’ve changed it back in the sixties.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Kelvin said, “We’re here to see the body.”

  “Sure. Which one of you is in charge here?”

  Marksy stepped forward and said, “That’d be me.”

  Shpoik nodded and said, “Good to meet you. Listen, we don’t have a real morgue, just a cold storage room. It’s pretty small. We’re not all going to fit.”

  Kelvin said, “I’ll wait out here.”

  Marksy looked at me and Talbern. She said, “Talbern you should stay out too. Widow, I guess it’s going to be just you and me.”

  I shrugged.

  We followed Shpoik out of the office and back down the hall to another door. We walked through what looked like a small critical care unit and past some nurses and one patient. Then he stopped and pulled open a heavy door with rubber around it, sealing it shut. The door sucked open and we walked through.

  Shpoik flicked on an overhead light from a switch on the wall and waited for us all to enter the room.

  He closed the door behind us.

  “That’s her,” he said without pointing, but she was obvious.

  Karen Dekker lay on one of two metal tables in the center of the room.

  Marksy asked, “You’ve positively IDed her, right?”

  “Yes, it’s Dekker. No doubt in my mind.”

  Silence fell over the room.

  Shpiok said, “I just saw her a month ago.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s a small base. She came to me for a checkup.”

  I asked, “Physical?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “She was leaving. She got orders to go overseas. SOP is for every soldier to get a checkup before they fly.”