No Man's Land by David Baldacci

  But that didn’t happen. The van kept going. And so did Puller.

  The two vehicles reached a main road.

  Puller snatched his camera and fired a few shots at the rear of the van.

  They turned onto another road.

  It was nearly five in the morning now and early-rising commuters were out in full force. This was a military community and those folks worked varying shifts, but the one coming up now was one of the biggest.

  The van sped up and got on the entry ramp for Interstate 64 heading east.

  Puller had to fall back because of the volume of traffic. It was still dark and now all he could see in front of him were winking red brake lights. He counted ahead to where he thought the van was located.

  Soon he went through the Hampton Roads tunnel. It was lighted inside and he thought he could see the van far ahead.

  By the time he came out of the tunnel and the overhead lights vanished, all he could see were taillights. And there was a white van right in front of him and one next to him. Neither was the van, because they both had stenciling on the sides and rear. One was a plumber, the other an electrician.

  Puller looked up ahead. There were exits and the van could take any one of them, or none at all and keep going.

  He decided to stay on the road.

  He had driven many more miles, and traffic had gotten heavier as more and more cars piled onto the interstate. Finally, he gave it up and exited. He reversed course and headed west. He drove back to the hotel where he had stayed before and got a room.

  He got out his camera and checked the pictures. He zoomed in on the shots of the van. He could just make out a license plate.

  He wrote it down. It was a West Virginia plate. If he’d still been with CID, running the plate would have been no problem.

  Had he just blown an incredible opportunity? Had the guy in the van been the killer thirty years ago, checking out his dumpsites at the very same time Puller had decided to do that too?

  He was thinking what to do when his phone buzzed. He checked his watch.

  Early call.

  Puller didn’t like calls this early. They usually portended bad news, and he’d already had enough of that lately.

  “Yes?”

  It was his lawyer friend, Shireen Kirk.

  “Puller. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

  “About what?”

  “No, about who.”

  “Then who?” he barked, his nerves frayed near their breaking point.

  “Your father.”

  Chapter

  36

  FOR A MOMENT Puller thought that his heart had stopped.

  Instantly appearing in his mind’s eye was the image of his father in a coffin dressed in his blues and stars, he and his brother in full dress uniform standing off to the side while folks came to view their dad for the very last time.

  “He’s…dead?”

  She said quickly, “No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it that way.”

  “What the hell is going on, Shireen?” he shouted into the phone.

  “Okay, just calm down. I can tell you’re already having a bad day, though it’s still morning.”

  “Is my father okay?” Puller snapped.

  “Yes. And no.”

  Puller closed his eyes and with a massive effort willed himself to remain calm. “Just tell me.”

  “Your father got a phone call. I don’t know how it got to his room or why it wasn’t screened out. I mean, the personnel at the hospital know his condition.”

  “Who was the call from?’

  “Lynda Demirjian.”

  “What!” barked Puller. “Did my dad answer the phone? How could he?”

  “No one knows how he could, but apparently he did.”

  “What did she say to him?”

  “Well, we couldn’t ask your father that, of course. But we talked to Stan Demirjian. He told us. He didn’t know that she was going to do that. But she told him afterwards what she’d done.”

  “Wait a minute, why ask Stan? Why not just talk to his wife?”

  Puller could hear Shireen let out a long breath. “Because she’s dead. She died right after telling her husband about the call.”

  Puller put his head in one hand and rocked back and forth on the bed. “And what did she say was my father’s reaction to what she told him?”

  “He started screaming things at her. Unintelligible, or so she said. And then he hung up.”

  “Well, that’s great,” said Puller. “How did you find out?”

  “I’m your father’s lawyer. I started my work. I called Stan Demirjian to get a statement from him before I talked to his wife. That’s when he told me.”

  “And how was Stan taking it?”

  “His wife had just died, so there’s that part of it; the man was grieving. Plus he was sort of caught between a rock and a hard place—his wife dead, the man she had accused of this terrible crime a person Stan revered.”

  Yeah, I get being caught between a rock and a hard place, Puller thought. “Did you tell my father’s doctors what happened?”

  “As soon as I got off the phone with Stan. But they had already given him something to calm him. He was so agitated, they just didn’t know why.”

  “Thanks for doing that.”

  “There’s something else, Puller.”

  “What?” he said wearily.

  “CID has dropped their investigation. Ted Hull—”

  “Has been reassigned, I know.” Puller paused. “Shireen, I want you to just drop the whole thing.”

  “What? Why?”

  “The CID’s been called off. So just drop it, Shireen.”

  “But I thought you wanted to find the truth?”

  “I just…just forget I ever called you.”

  “Puller!”

  He clicked off and tossed his phone down on the bed. He hoped that Shireen heeded his advice.

  His phone rang. It was Shireen. He didn’t answer.

  It was then that he noticed the piece of paper on the floor. It was over by the door. He automatically pulled his M11 and skittered across the room, keeping low, halfway expecting the door to be kicked in at any moment. He slowly reached down and picked up the paper.

  The note was handwritten.

  Meet me outside in ten. VK

  This could be a trap. His first instinct was to climb out the window, make his way down, bypass the parking lot where an armored Humvee might be waiting, and hoof it on foot for a few miles. But then he looked at the note again.

  That’s when he saw there was faint writing at the bottom.

  Not the Fort.

  He had to smile. This was a line he had given her when they had been working together on his brother’s case. He had called her “Fort Knox” because she seemed impenetrable. This was her way of confirming her identity.

  But still, it could be a trap.

  The Vice President’s warning came back to him.

  Don’t trust anybody.

  Knox was in the clandestine world. Puller had found they were the toughest people of all to trust, because it seemed they could never, ever tell you the complete truth.

  But Knox had risked her life to save his several times. She had helped to clear his brother and been nearly killed in the process.

  He kept his M11 out and checked his watch. His musings had burned five minutes of the ten.

  He went to the window that looked out on the front parking lot. Dawn had come and it was light enough to see clearly.

  What he didn’t see was a mass of black SUVs waiting to snatch him away. The lot was quiet. There were many parked cars because the hotel was large, but he only saw a couple of people there.

  One was a man in military uniform carrying a briefcase. He got into his car and drove off.

  The other was a woman who had just gotten out of her cab and was walking to the front entrance, rolling her suitcase behind her.

  Puller looked at his watch.

  Two m
inutes to go.

  He grabbed his bag and pulled it over one shoulder. He had a feeling he wouldn’t be coming back here. He slid the gun in the other pocket of his windbreaker but kept it gripped in his hand. He hit the elevator and made his way down.

  The lobby was empty except for the woman he’d seen earlier checking in and the sleepy-looking front desk person helping her.

  He eyed the doors leading out. If Knox was outside he wondered why. He also wondered where she had been.

  He crossed the lobby and walked outside. It didn’t take him long to find her. That was because she drove up in a black sedan.

  She rolled down the window as he looked at her.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “At the present moment, saving your ass. Get in.”

  “My duffel’s in my car.”

  “No it’s not. It’s in my trunk.”

  “The key is in my pocket.”

  “I don’t need a key,” she said. “Just get in.”

  “Why not take my car?”

  “It’s tainted goods, Puller.”

  “You mean they’re tracking it?”

  “I’ll explain. Get in!”

  He threw his bag into the back and climbed into the passenger seat.

  She hit the gas and they shot out of the parking lot.

  “What the hell is going on, Knox?”

  “I’ll tell you what I know, but you’re not going to believe a word of it.”

  Chapter

  37

  ROGERS HAD KEPT checking the rearview all the way back to where he was staying.

  There had been a car back there. It had been at the first dumpsite, and then he’d spotted it at the third and the fourth sites. Then he had driven straight to the interstate.

  He cursed himself for going to where the bodies had been. But the thing in his head had made him do it. And the thing in his head, he had found, could make him do anything.

  He was now sitting on the bed in his motel room thinking all of this through.

  Who could have been back there?

  The thing was, the person had been at the first dumpsite before he’d gotten there. Now, that might have been a coincidence, but to be at the third and fourth too? And maybe he was at the second, but Rogers might have left by then.

  Was it the police? Were they investigating the murders once more? They had never been solved. It might be one of those cold case investigations.

  And I might have stumbled right into the middle of it.

  He pulled out his phone and checked the newsfeeds.

  What he expected to see wasn’t there.

  For all the world knew, Chris Ballard was still alive and well behind his fortress walls. Certainly by now the police would have been called and an investigation commenced. And the news outlets certainly would have been informed.

  Rogers had tried to make it look like suicide. Even if Ballard couldn’t walk, he could have crawled to that window and levered himself through it.

  But with either murder or suicide there should have been something about it in the news by now.

  For the next two hours he kept flipping through all the late breaking news sites.

  Zip.

  It was fully light now. He changed clothes and went down to the motel diner and had some breakfast while checking his phone constantly.

  There was still nothing, which could only mean one thing: They were covering it up. Either the police hadn’t been called or they had been and higher-ups had put a stranglehold on any leaks to the media. Perhaps they were trying to figure out if this really was a suicide or murder.

  And if they concluded that it was a murder they might conclude that he was back to deliver his revenge.

  And more to the point, she would know of it.

  Claire Jericho’s brainpower had been something to behold. But she had a dark side too.

  Rogers no longer had compassion. It had been taken away from him, along with many other things. She, on the other hand, apparently never had any compassion at all.

  This was the person who had created him. Perhaps in her own image. He lacked the capacity to dig any deeper into the psychology of it.

  He went back to his room, lay on the bed, and closed his eyes. But he didn’t sleep.

  His mind went back thirty years and then stopped on five women.

  He hadn’t chosen them at random. They had something in common.

  Me.

  It had taken a lot of work on his part, but he had gathered the necessary information and then done what he had set out to do. It was all he had thought about for the longest time.

  And right before they died, they knew exactly how I felt about what they had done to me.

  And with that thought he fell asleep. He didn’t wake until it was time for him to go to work. He got ready and drove to the Grunt.

  Helen Myers greeted him in the back hall of the bar.

  “Did you have a good night off?” she asked.

  “It was pretty uneventful,” replied Rogers.

  “Nothing too exciting, then?”

  “No.”

  Rogers was telling the truth. There had been absolutely nothing exciting about throwing Chris Ballard out a four-story window and watching his head smash into the cobblestones.

  “I wanted to let you know that Josh will be in tonight with a party,” Myers went on.