Darkside

7

Jim rolled over and pushed the light button on his Timex. It was 5:45. Saturday morning, if he remembered correctly. He groaned and rolled back over. He could hear the wind rising outside and the first patter of rain on the deck above the master’s cabin. The boat was beginning to move around a little, and he could hear the rubber fenders compressing and then exhaling against the hull. He mentally reviewed the mooring lines, then decided to go back to sleep. At which point he heard the railing gate open and then slam back into place as someone very definitely stepped on deck from the pier. He remembered he hadn’t reset the alarm. He tried to listen harder, but a blast of rain swept across the harbor and drowned out the sounds from above. He had a bedside light on and was reaching for his bathrobe when the door to his cabin swung open and Special Agent Branner was swiping her hand along the bulkhead, looking for the overhead light switch, which she found much too quickly.

“What did you do with Bagger Thompson?” she demanded.

“And a brilliant good morning to you, too, Special Agent. What are you doing aboard my boat and in my bedroom at this ungodly hour?”

He could focus his eyes now, and he saw that she was soaking wet, her normally perfect hair bedraggled and her skirt plastered to her thighs. She saw him looking at her body and swore impatiently. “Get your ass out of that bed, Hall. I want to know what you and Thompson were up to last night.”

Jim, who slept naked, sighed audibly and obliged her. He walked over to the head without looking at her and went in and closed the door behind him. When he came out, she wasn’t there and the lights were on in the main lounge. He put on his bathrobe, grabbed a dry towel, and went through to the lounge. She was sitting in his favorite chair, looking like an angry wet hen. He tossed her the towel and walked through to the galley to fire up the coffeemaker.

She’d made some superficial repairs when he came back out into the lounge and handed her a mug of coffee. She’d taken her soaked suit jacket off, and he manfully tried not to stare at her very wet blouse. Jupiter started bitching under his cage cover.

“Sorry,” she muttered into her coffee mug, not looking at him.

“Start at the beginning,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Bagger turned up at Anne Arundel General this morning at around zero two hundred,” she said. “Someone cracked his skull. He’d been drinking, apparently, which, I can tell you from personal experience, he should not do. He’d told me earlier that he was going out with you on some kind of ‘recon mission,’ as he put it. Your turn.”

“Shit,” Jim said, and then gave her an abbreviated summary of the night before. He left out the part about the Goth girls.

“Guinness? You fed him Guinness?”

“He fed himself Guinness. Hey, he’s an adult, okay? He’d had two and was talking about a third as I was leaving. I actually warned him about that stuff. How bad’s he hurt?”

“Bad enough that he hasn’t surfaced yet. Thanks to you.”

“Oh, screw that noise,” Jim snapped. “How would you react if I told you how many drinks you could have, huh?”

She started to say something, stopped, blew a long breath through pursed lips, and then relaxed. “Sorry,” she said again. “My partner gets whacked around and I wasn’t there to protect him. That’s on me, not you.”

He crossed the lounge and took Jupiter’s cage cover off. The rain was really pounding now, one of those April line squalls that comes sweeping down the Severn to flush the Annapolis harbor from time to time. The boat had stopped moving as the rain beat the harbor waves flat. Jupiter began to bob and weave, trying to get a look at Branner. Jim sat down in the chair across from her. “There’s more,” he said, and then he told her about the Goth girls.

She shook her head in wonder. “And you think Bagger was lured out of the bar by those girls?”

“I do now. The proof will be when he can talk.”

“This is the vampire crowd?”

“Yup. This sounds a lot like another one. I should have stayed with him.”

Branner got up and looked out a porthole. The rain was letting up topside and the first streaks of light were painting the eastern horizon over Eastport. Jim admired her wide, strong shoulders, and the unconscious way she let her body jut this way and that. Definitely a female.

“I need to get back to the hospital,” she said, standing. “I want to be there when Bagger comes up.”

“I’ve got to file a report this morning on that rocket business. The fire department’s probably put one in already. You want me to say that NCIS is going to get into this one?”

“We normally would,” she said, turning back around. As if suddenly aware of her semitransparent blouse, she folded her arms across her chest. He noticed that she had green, faintly lupine eyes. Branner as she-wolf. Worked for him. “But this Dell thing has us running,” she was saying. “I’ve been trying not to ask for additional resources. But with Bagger down…”

“Why not?” Jim asked. “Calling in a crowd is the government’s biggest advantage, especially in a homicide.”

“Who said it was a homicide?” she asked, those green eyes flashing.

Jim didn’t answer, and then she realized he’d been talking to Bagger. She came back to the chair and flopped down. “Actually, it could go either way,” she said. “Something’s not quite right with Markham’s answers. On the other hand, the ME’s report is ambiguous. I’m still trying to decide.”

“So it’ll be your call?”

“Pretty much. The dant’s hating life right now, just wants it all to go the hell away. Here comes all the commissioning week bullshit, the vice president, the Board of Visitors, and they have mids flying off the damned roof.”

“Anybody putting the pressure on you to call it a suicide and move on?” he asked.

“Not in so many words,” she said slowly. He could see that she was unsure about trusting him. “They’re sensitive to the command influence problem. But I’ve been here long enough to read between the lines.”

“You need a statement from me about our little op last night?”

“I guess I do,” she said.

“How much you want me to say about the booze?”

“Could you just say what you had to drink?”

“Can do,” he said. “How about the Goth girls?”

“Yes, you should mention them. My bosses know Bagger.”

“I’ll have a draft over to you this morning,” he said. “You chop it, and I’ll smooth it. I don’t want to cause him any trouble.”

“Appreciate that,” she said, holding the jacket out at arm’s length like a wet cat. “You and your people pursue the runner. I think this Dell thing’s going to come to a head in a few days. Then we’ll look into whether or not your runner is connected with Bagger’s getting mugged. Then maybe we’ll both kick his ass.”

“Is that a date?” he asked, just for the hell of it.

She raised her eyebrows. “You asking me out, Mr. Hall? At this hour of the morning?”

“Well,” he said. “I guess we are going about it bassack-wards. You having already been to my bedroom and all.”

She cocked her head and gave him a speculative look. She was standing now with one hand on her left hip, the other holding the jacket out by one finger, as if she were going to twirl it. He saw a flash of amusement in her eyes. Good morning, America: Maybe there’s a real girl in there after all, he thought.

“It was just a thought,” he said finally, remembering that he had paraded in the buff earlier. He got up. “Seeing as we might be kicking a little ass together in the future, that is.”

“Everyone likes a little ass,” she began, glancing at his for an instant. “Or so I’m told. Say, you have an umbrella I can borrow?”

“Is that a yes?” he asked. The rain came down even harder.

“Let me call you,” she said patiently. “An umbrella?”

Jim waited in line to refill his coffee cup at 10:30 that morning. Saturday mornings were regular working days, and most of the headquarters staff people were in the building. He had already spent a half hour with the fire marshal working up the report on the rocket incident, and he had just finished bringing Chief Bustamente up to speed on the night in the tunnel and what had happened to Bagger Thompson afterward.

Commander Michaels, his boss, joined him at the coffee mess table. Jim back-briefed him on the tunnel business and asked if he wanted a written report. To Jim’s surprise, Michaels shook his head.

“Verbal’s good enough right now,” he said, looking out into the hallway to make sure no one was listening. “But look: This Dell thing is turning into a real media firestorm. The possible homicide angle has leaked. Dell’s parents have their congressman into it, and he, for our sins, is on the House subcommittee that has Academy oversight. The supe’s so happy, he could just shit.”

“And the dant?”

“Lotsa Dant Dance, last time I saw him. He’s ready to Class-A Dell’s corpse for causing all this shit.”

Jim got the picture. “In other words, nobody wants to hear more bad news about a mid going out into town and beating up on locals just now?”

“Especially if he’s dressing up as a frigging vampire. Frame that as a breaking story on CNN. So, you’re the security officer. See if you and your cops can catch this guy, preferably on federal ground. Keep the story in government channels until we get this other thing squashed. You know, one fire at a time, if we can manage it.”

Jim almost told him about the dant’s order to get inside the NCIS investigation, but he stopped himself. The chain of command for that had been very specific. “So, I keep you informed?”

Michaels nodded. “Yeah. We don’t know this is a mid doing this shit, do we?”

“Just a hunch right now.”

“Okay, maybe we’ll get lucky on this one. We’re overdue.” He looked around the hallway again and lowered his voice. “Look, we’ve got two weeks left in this academic year, and then all the firsties become enswines, and the rest of the little dears go off to the seven seas for their summer cruise. If we can just get through this Dell mess, we can maybe get things back to normal around this damned place.”

“Whatever normal is,” Jim said. Michaels raised his eyebrows.

“Well, I mean, shit,” Jim said. “A mid gets himself killed; another one is out there consorting with witches and mugging drunks in back alleys. Is this what normal means here now?”

Michaels, who’d been a carrier pilot until a catapult accident had damaged his neck, was also an Academy graduate. He shook his head. “Gee-go,” he muttered. He filled his coffee mug and left for his office.

Jim stirred his own coffee. GIGO was one of the not-so-secret code words around the office. Garbage in, garbage out. Given all that the Academy had accomplished over the years, it wasn’t fair that the 1 percent that was garbage could absolutely demolish the reputation of the 99 percent who were gold. It reminded Jim of his time in the Corps-he had spent 90 percent of his personnel admin time on 5 percent of his Marines.

He went to his own cube to find out the commandant’s schedule for the day. Saturdays were more flexible than regular workdays, and he wanted to back-brief him on what he’d learned about the NCIS investigation. Then he wanted to call the hospital and check on Bagger. He still felt bad about the Guinness. He should have been paying more attention.

He wondered if Branner would really call him to go out. That might be more of a thrill than he could stand at his advancing age.

Ev had spent Saturday morning in the Nimitz Library, doing some research on the Uniform Code of Military Justice and its bible, the Manual for Courts-Martial. The academic offices in Sampson were only about half-occupied for Saturday classes, especially as the academic year drew to a close. Ev taught mostly seniors, and they were definitely slacking off at this stage of the game.

The rainsqualls had quit just after sunrise and the morning dawned cool and clear, with eye-dazzling sunlight. Looking out the office windows, Ev could see the first clumps of weekend tourists filtering down from the Maryland Avenue gate. Now back in his office, he put a call into Liz at home, got voice mail. He tried her office number.

“Morning, counselor,” he said. “I talked to Julie last night. I think we have a problem.”

“Now what?”

“Julie wants to unlawyer. My fault, probably. I got clumsy, made one probe too many.” He filled her in.

“And it was the question about her getting up for early swim practice that set her off?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Did she actually answer it?”

He thought back for a moment. “No. So I’ve put a call in to the varsity swim coach to see if they’re still doing the prereveille sessions, and if so, whether Julie has been involved. But this business about her talking to the NCIS people without you being present…”

“You told her that she’d be going against my advice?”

“Hell, I told her you’d fire her as a client.”

“I won’t do that, not yet anyway. But now you’re definitely going to have to get into this, Ev. She obviously doesn’t want to talk to me just now, and she won’t until they scare her.”

“I understand,” he said. “Let me start with the coach. I think we need to establish whether or not Julie could have been out of her room that night-or early morning, I guess.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Oh, I ran into one of the marshals at the sub shop a little while ago. He’s heard a rumor that one of the agents from the Academy NCIS office apparently got into some kind of trouble out in town last night. The nice black guy. The word is, he’s in the hospital. It gets kinda fuzzy as to what happened, which means the local cops are probably sitting on something.”

“Well, maybe that will distract NCIS, vis-a-vis Julie,” he said hopefully.

“One can always hope,” she said. “But call me when you hear from that coach. I won’t do anything until I hear from you.”

“Thanks, Liz. For not jumping ship, I mean. She needs you. She just doesn’t know it.”

“Not to burst your bubble, Ev, but if she won’t do what I tell her to, I can’t represent her. But let her swim with the sharks for a while, see how she likes it.”

“Now there’s a comforting image for a father to hear.”

“Ev, Julie’s well out of the nest. All those kids over there are. Call me at home when you have something.”

Ev put down the phone and stared at the wall in front of his desk. It was now past noon, and the Academy weekend had officially begun. He’d changed into his running clothes, then sat back down at his desk to finish reading his notes on suspects’ rights. The leather of his chair was starting to stick to the backs of his thighs. Goddamn, Julie. This is the wrong time to get pigheaded. He decided to jog over to MacDonough Hall to see if he could chase down Coach Downing in his office or at the Nat. It being Saturday, he was probably going to fail, but he needed to do something.

He stepped outside, did his warm-up, and then broke into a gentle jog across Radford Terrace and down onto Ingram Field, where there was only the Saturday complement of midshipmen and officers out for their daily running exercise. Physical fitness was an integral part of Naval Academy life, for everyone-faculty, staff, and midshipmen. Even on a liberty day, people were still exercising. Being fat or even out of shape at the Naval Academy was a cultural offense, from the admiral on down to the lowliest plebe.

He made ten circuits of the track to kill some time through the lunch hour and then cooled down by walking over to MacDonough. He went upstairs to the coaches’ office complex, which was, as he suspected, already empty for the weekend. He asked a passing mid if he’d seen Coach Downing in the building. The coach was down at the training pool with some Class IV swimmers. Ev went back down to the Natatorium, where he found Downing in the water, finishing up a lesson on the basics of the survival breaststroke. The Class Fours, as they were called, were midshipmen who couldn’t swim either because they just couldn’t get it or because they were basically terrified to be in the water. The Nat was not designed with a shallow end, so there were several frightened young faces bobbing along the side of the pool. They had also missed the noon meal.

Downing, a sixty-year-old former national diving champion, launched the last two plebes from the side, one with each hand. They thrashed their way to the other side with all the style of a light-loaded ship’s propeller that is half out of the water. Then he blew his whistle and sent everyone to the locker room. The clinging plebes came out of the water like so many salmon trying to get up a dam’s spillway. Downing climbed out of the water in one graceful spring to the side, and Ev walked over. Because of Julie, the coach recognized Ev immediately.

“Hey, Professor: Come to do a tower jump for old times’ sake?”

“Not exactly, Coach. Had a question for you. It concerns the swim team. And Julie.”

To Ev’s surprise, he thought he saw a flicker of apprehension in Downing’s eyes. “Shoot,” Downing said, reaching for a towel.

“Is the swim team still doing the zero-dark-thirty practice sessions?”

“Prereveille? Negative. We’ve just finished up the regular competition season. We’re in the maintenance mode these days. And the firsties like your daughter, they’re just swimming for exercise, if they’re swimming at all. You know, graduation looms. They’re almost through.”

Ev thanked him, said, “See you,” and started to walk away.

“Ev?” Downing said. “This isn’t about that Dell mess, is it?”

Ev stopped and almost unconsciously glanced around to see if anyone was listening in, but the pool area was empty. Downing came over.

“I’ve heard some disturbing rumors,” he said quietly. “One involves Julie.”

“The underwear thing?”

“So you’ve heard about that? Well, of course she would have told you.”

“It’s true. Although Julie thinks it’s probably a laundry mistake.”

“That he was wearing them?”

“No, no, that he had them in his possession. Surely there was nothing going on between Dell, a plebe, and my daughter, right?”

“Not that I ever saw. We have some swim team romances every year; Julie and Tommy Hays, for instance. But no, Dell was a diver. Nice form, but not quite good enough for varsity stuff. I let him stay on as a manager on the plebe bench. Plebes know to keep their distance from firsties.”

“Yeah, that’s my experience. What else are you hearing?”

Downing shook his head. “Nothing that concerns Julie.” He glanced around the Natatorium. “But there’s been some talk that Dell was maybe a little light in his loafers. If not gay, then maybe bisexual. One of our assistant coaches heard rumors about some ‘special’ massage treatments after some of the away meets, involving an unnamed manager. Admittedly, we’re talking nineteenth-hand scuttlebutt here.”

“Specifically involving Dell?”

“An unnamed manager, I tried to run it down, but…”

“You hit the old blue-and-gold wall.”

Downing nodded. They walked together toward the pool doors. The surface of the Nat had settled into a vast mirror. “Has that NCIS team been down to interview anybody about Dell?” Ev asked.

“No. Will they?”

Ev nodded. “Yeah, Coach, I think they will. Did you know they’re considering that the Dell incident might be a possible homicide?”

“Judas Priest! You’re kidding. At the Academy?”

“That’s rumor, too. Or maybe it’s a preliminary line-you know, to rule it out.”

Downing stopped. “That why you got Julie a lawyer?”

It was Ev’s turn to be surprised. It must have shown on his face, because Downing patted him lightly on the shoulder. “No real secrets around this hothouse, Ev,” he said. “You know that.”

There might be one or two, Ev thought, but he didn’t say it. He needed to report back to Liz. The swim team wasn’t doing prereveille practices. So now it came down to a simple but specific yes or no: Had Julie been in her room when Dell went down?

Jim Hall had been unable to get on the commandant’s calendar, so he called the chief instead and asked what he’d heard about Bagger since the last time they’d talked. The chief said the police rumor mill had the story, and that the locals were waiting to see if the G would react as it usually did when an agent went down-that is, bring in a platoon of angry agents. Jim then called the NCIS office to see what further word they had on Bagger Thompson. The secretary pretended not to know what he was talking about, so Jim didn’t press it. He called the hospital, hit the same brick wall, and decided just to go over there. There might be a town cop around who could get him in to see Bagger, or at least to find out how he was doing.

It took fifteen minutes to find a parking place at the hospital, and another fifteen to find the hospital security officer’s office. He identified himself to a secretary and then told the security officer’s assistant that he knew Agent Thompson was there and that there was an official lid on that fact. He asked if could she find someone who could tell him how Thompson was doing. Another fifteen minutes out in the main waiting room produced Agent Branner. She had changed clothes and was looking tired but efficient as she strode purposefully across the waiting room, heels clicking. She sat down next to him and a wave of subtle perfume wafted over him.

“They’re moving him up to Bethesda,” she said softly, not looking at him while she scanned the almost-empty waiting room. “Major skull fracture. Something unpronounceable is swelling. If they don’t get it under control pretty quick, he’s not going to make it.”

Jim swore. “I had no idea it was that serious. He talking?”

“Hell, he’s barely breathing,” she said, and he heard something in her voice that made him turn to look at her face. Not tears exactly, but some of that gunfighter toughness was noticeably absent.

“What are you looking at?” she snapped, sniffing.

“Careful there, Special Agent. Don’t let anyone see you being human.”

“Up yours, Hall.”

He let it pass, thought about taking her hand, and then decided not to. If they were moving Thompson to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, it must be serious indeed. That’s where the president received his medical care. The vampire mugger was swiftly losing his appeal.

“You going up there with him?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Can’t,” she said. “Dell.”

He nodded. “Want me to go?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’ve done enough damage,” she replied, and then immediately put her hand on his. “Cancel that. I’m just…just wigging out. Oh and I called that Irish Pub. He had six of those Guinness stouts.”

He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Six was a lot. Then he said, “I’m going into the tunnels tonight. Around twenty-two hundred. I could use some backup.”

She was looking straight ahead, seeing nothing. Then she seemed to realize where her hand was and retrieved it. “What?”

He said it again.

“What about your cops?”

“My cops deal mostly with patrolling the Yard, parking control, and tourist coordination. I mean backup. ”

She nodded slowly. “ Hell yes,” she said. “Although it’s not likely that he’s gonna be there so soon after what he did last night.”

“We’re not positive our tunnel runner is also the guy who took Bagger down,” he said. “And we may be talking about more than one guy, so our rocket shooter might also not be the guy who beat up Bagger.”

“What do you think?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I guess I think it is.”

“Yeah, me, too. And if it is, he’s gone way beyond sophomoric pranks in the Academy underground.”

“It’s weird,” Jim said. “This guy’s acting as if this is some kind of escalating game. And I’ve seen him face-to-face.”

“Could you recognize him again in his street clothes?”

“No way. He was wearing serious makeup. But very good makeup.”

“If this is a firstie, then he’s taking big chances.”

Jim agreed. “The locals tracking down those Goth thingies?” he asked.

“They said they are, but you know, with all that Goth makeup and shit, it’s the same deal as with you and your vampire friend. They could look like humans by day.”

“And if they’re from the St. John’s campus, the cops are going to strike out all around,” he said.

“The lead detective offered to do it anyway. He knows we have our hands full with the Dell case. They’re going to work the campus cops.”

“Anything more on the Dell thing?” he asked as casually as he could.

“I’m planning to interview the swim team coach on Monday,” she said. She looked at her watch. “Shit. I’ve gotta go back upstairs. Where do you want to meet?”

He told her. She said okay and walked back toward the elevators. Jim watched her go. He liked the way she moved, solid and strong. Everything about her was straight ahead. Minimal bullshit.

Now he still needed to get to the commandant, one way or another.

Ev didn’t make contact with Liz DeWinter until just after five o’clock. Since he’d spent the rest of his Saturday afternoon correcting papers in his office, he proposed that she join him for a drink at the Officers Club. As he walked across the parking lot to the club, he worried about what the swim coach had told him. Julie could have been out of her room before or even during the incident. And she could also have been sound asleep, too. But it would have been wonderful to have had an airtight alibi for the time leading up to Dell’s death.

The main bar was a comfortable paneled room with tables and chairs. Academy memorabilia covered the walls. It being Saturday, the clientele was composed more of retirees than faculty members or executive staff. He got a table in view of the door and ordered a glass of wine. Five minutes later, Liz walked in wearing an expensive-looking white linen suit whose trim lines nicely accentuated her figure. Two patrons waiting for a table were blocking her way. She was small enough that she could slip between them with an “Excuse me” smile. She sat down before he had a chance to get up to hold her chair. She was obviously dressed up to go somewhere, and for a moment, he wondered where. And with whom. Not that it was any of his business.

“Macallan, rocks,” she said to the waitress, who’d already brought Ev his glass of wine. Ev was suddenly conscious of the covert stares from a faculty couple at a nearby table. They’d known Joanne. “What’d you find out?” she asked.

He recapped his conversation with the coach. Liz frowned. “Okay,” she said. “So it would have been nice if Julie’d been in the pool with the entire swim team at the precise time of Dell’s death, but this doesn’t prove she was anywhere but in her room, asleep.”

“That’s what I hoped,” he said.

“Problem is, she’s the only tie they have right now. Which means they’ll call her in again and again and keep probing to see if they can make a connection. In her present mood, she might screw that up.”

“So now what?”

Liz looked around and lowered her voice. “My next step is to find out what’s in that ME’s report that has everyone’s nose up.”

“Can you do that?”

“I’m working my web. Cross your fingers. But basically, until they lay charges against somebody, we’re in the dark,” she said. “Maybe the best thing is to just let the NCIS people do their thing.”

“And let Julie take her chances?”

“I didn’t mean that, although she seems willing to do that anyway.”

Ev nodded and drank some wine. The room was filling up, with even some midshipmen coming in now. Firsties were allowed to patronize the Officers Club on Saturdays, and a few had brought along their dates, who appeared to be nervous. The waitress tried her best to put them at ease as she took orders and discreetly checked ID cards. Liz was glancing at her watch.

“Big date tonight?” he asked.

She finished her scotch and looked at him with an amused expression. He flushed and apologized for intruding. She leaned forward and put her fingers over his. “Are you ever going to relax around me?” she asked.

Acutely aware that the faculty couple across the way was watching, he withdrew his hand and ran it through his hair. “I feel like a teenager,” he said. “When you came into the bar all dressed up, I wondered where you were going and with whom, and then I kicked myself mentally. Like it was any of my business.”

She smiled openly then. “You’re right, it’s none of your business. But I’m edified that you care. I like you. I think you’re a nice guy who’s been kicked in the teeth by what happened to your wife and now you don’t know what the hell to do. You know those people over there?”

Surprised, he almost glanced over at them. He said, “Yes, they knew Joanne.”

“I thought I detected some vibes of disapproval,” she said. “I’ve got to run. I’ll call you when I hear something. And you call me if Julie squawks.”

“I will,” he said, suddenly reluctant to see her go.

“Or just call me,” she said quietly as she stood up to leave. He smiled up at her. She then walked over to where the faculty couple was sitting, leaned down, and said something to the woman, then left the lounge with an exaggerated stride that had every man in the room watching her go. Ev saw the woman’s face turn very red, and he wondered what Liz had said. Don’t ask, he thought, and then found himself grinning despite himself.

Just call me. Okay, counselor-excuse me, Liz-I will definitely do that. Liz was the only ray of light in his life right now.

Jim listened to a movie themes CD while he waited for Agent Branner in his truck. He was parked in the small lot in front of Alumni Hall. It was just after 10:30 Saturday night, and there was barely any traffic around the Yard. A partial moon shone through fleeting clouds. There was a dance over in Dahlgren Hall, so most of the traffic was down at the other end of the Yard.

He’d caught up with the commandant late that afternoon and given him a quick debrief on what he’d learned about the Dell case, which, of course, wasn’t very much. He did not tell the commandant anything about the tunnel runner incident, nor did Robbins seem to know about the fire alarm of the night before. He’d told Jim to keep plugging and then hurried away. If he was pleased with what Jim had told him, he gave no sign. Probably just expected his orders to be carried out, with hardly a thought to the possibility that they wouldn’t be. The confidence of command. Or maybe the arrogance.

Branner knocked on the driver’s side window, startling him. He hadn’t heard or seen her vehicle approach, but there it was, parked right next to his. He rolled the window down and shut off the CD.

“Ready?” she asked. She was dressed as he’d recommended: dark slacks, a sweatshirt, black gloves, a ball cap with NCIS emblazoned across the front, and a dark-colored NCIS windbreaker. She had a utility belt with flashlight, her weapon, extra rounds, cuffs, and some odds and ends in Velcro pouches.

Jim nodded, swung out of the truck, and locked it up. He was dressed as he had been for his previous excursions, with a different windbreaker to replace the one trashed by the spray paint. He carried a small tool bag with the motion detectors, and he was also wearing a utility belt.

“The grate’s over there, behind Mahan Hall,” he said. “You okay with being underground? Not claustrophobic?”

“Not thrilled with confined spaces, but I’m not anything-phobic,” she said. “Mood I’m in, I hope your bat bird does show up tonight.”

“How’s Bagger?” he asked as they walked over toward the grate. A fine mist of steam was wafting up through the steel grating.

“Hanging in there,” she said, looking hard at the shadows around the underground entrance, unconsciously touching her sidearm. “They’ve got the swelling problem controlled. Now they’re waiting for him to surface.”

“Getting whacked in the head-it’s not like the movies, is it?” Jim said as he lifted the grate. Branner didn’t answer as she inspected the steel stairs leading down into the concrete pit. Jim asked her to pull the grate closed behind her as he led the way down.

She asked few questions as he gave her the grand tour for the next hour. He took her all the way out to the St. John’s grate and then back under the utility tunnels serving Bancroft Hall. He showed her where the rocket had left char marks on the concrete, the territorial graffiti, which remained unchanged from the previous night, and where he’d been surprised by the paint-spraying vampire. He noticed that, despite her statement to the contrary, she did seem to be uncomfortable being down in the tunnels. The tunnels weren’t exactly claustrophobic, in his opinion, what with the lights and ample room to walk around without bending over, even for someone of his height. Nor was it particularly spooky. Just a collection of pipes, cables, conduits, equipment cabinets, and steel doors leading to vaults along the sides. The air was close and warm; maybe that was doing it.

He set up the first motion detector in the main tunnel, pointing back toward Bancroft Hall. He set it high so as to not detect any rodents that might be operating down here. Branner made a face when he mentioned rodents, but she helped him string the tiny transmitter wire through the overhead conduit brackets back to the T junction with the Mahan Hall grating access. The second one went into the tunnel aimed at the Annapolis utility tunnel access, a few blocks from the St. John’s campus, with its transmitter wire coming back to the same point as the first one. He took the steam-tight globes off the two lights illuminating the junction and unscrewed the bulbs. Then they moved into the short tunnel leading back to the Mahan Hall grating, set up the receiver-indicator box, ran the box through its self-test, and sat down on some equipment cabinets to wait. The only sounds came from the steam pipes, with the additional rumble of a vehicle out on the street in front of Mahan Hall.

“Can he get directly out into town, down at the other end?” she asked, speaking quietly. “Down by those old brick arches under Dahlgren Hall?”

“He could, except I locked out the interchange doors last night after that rocket. Assuming he has the regular series lock key, the new locks will defeat him, so he’ll have to come out via St. John’s.”

“And the other detector will get him coming back in, assuming he’s already out there?”

Jim nodded. “It being Saturday night, this may be a waste of time,” he said. “If this is a firstie, he could just come back through the gates.”

“Not dressed up as a vampire, one assumes,” she said.

Jim shrugged. “Yeah, but if he’s operating with those Goth freaks, he may have a base of operations in the student ghetto somewhere. My guess is that he’ll be in costume in the tunnels only if he’s on the run. Like after busting some civilian heads in an alley. And it’s a little early for that shit.”

“How do these things work?” she asked, indicating the receiver box for the detectors.

“The sensors themselves are out there in the tunnels. They get a hit, they send a signal here over those wires, and we get a channel light. Tells us which one is getting the hit.”

“Why wire? Why not a transmitter?”

“A wire signal can’t be detected. If the detector used a radio to get back to this receiver, it could be intercepted.”

Branner was skeptical. “You’re assuming your mid would have some pretty sophisticated gear,” she said.

“They get to play with sophisticated gear in the double-E labs all the time. You go to any of the football games?”

She nodded.

“You catch the Navy-Air Force game last year? The bus drivers like to put on a falconry display at halftime. The falcons are their mascots. Last year, some mids built a high-powered radar transmitter dish. Mounted it on the back of a pickup truck, with a parabolic antenna and an optical tracking telescope. Parked it outside the stadium, out with the tailgaters. When the falcon started doing his thing, they turned it on, locked a tracking beam on the bird, and drove it nuts. Damn thing went up into the light towers and wouldn’t come down.”

“Damn.”

“Well, we don’t especially like the Air Farce. But all of that gear, that was just bench stuff from a missile fire-control lab. Homework assignment. So, yes, he could have a detector that could pick up the fan beams from my motion detectors, if he’s worried about stuff like that. I don’t think so, though.”

“You think he’s getting overconfident?”

“I’m hoping so. Although he did surprise me fairly easily, and he had to have preplanned that rocket business.”

“He won’t surprise me,” she said. “And if he comes up with any bullshit like that rocket, I’ll cap his young ass.”

Jim grinned. “The objective is to apprehend subject young ass, not blow holes in it. Got enough dead mids this week already.”

She grimaced at the reference to Dell.

“My chief said he’d heard some stuff about the postmortem. Said that was where the homicide vibes were coming from.” He kept his voice casual, his eyes on the receiver.

“It’s cumulative,” she said, suppressing a yawn. “There was the panties bit, plus some, um, anatomical aspects that might indicate the kid was no stranger to wearing panties, if you catch my drift. Main thing was the bruising. Upper arms grabbed from the front, probably right before he died. One interpretation would be that he was lifted and thrown. But there are some S and M situations that could cause those bruises.”

“Wow,” he said. “What’s ambiguous about all that?”

“Well, there you are, Mr. Security Officer,” she said. “That’s why we’re looking into it as if it might be a homicide. Tell me, are you technically a cop?”

“Nope. Government civilian, grade twelve. I supervise the people who have police jurisdiction in the Yard and on other Academy property, but I personally don’t have a badge. I pack a Glock on occasions like this, but probably not legally. That help?”

She frowned. “Can you make arrests?”

“Not normally. If I get into that situation, I’d be calling the Yard cops, or maybe even you guys. But, no, I’m not a cop. I’m technically an administrator.”

“So what’ve you been doing down here chasing this shitbird? Why not your own cops?”

“Because he made it personal?”

She stared at him for a moment and then nodded. Personal, she understood. “Okay,” she said. “So if we catch this guy tonight, and especially if he did Bagger, he’s mine, right?”

“Absolutely. As long as you don’t shoot him right off. We won’t know he’s the guy who did Bagger until there’s been an arrest and some questions asked, right?”

“Right,” she said, touching her weapon again. “But if it is…”

“We subdue him, cuff him, you take him into custody, read him his rights, and then you can shoot him. But do it over in your holding cell, not one of ours, okay? Ours doesn’t have a drain.”

She grinned, although it wasn’t a pleasant sight just now, Jim thought. Then the receiver beeped, and the channel from the detector pointed at Annapolis lighted up.

“Hello,” Jim said softly. He moved up to the edge of the tunnel junction, with Branner right beside him. The nearest overhead light was fifty feet down the main tunnel, in the direction of the St. John’s campus. Branner had her weapon out. Jim saw it and leaned over to whisper in her ear. “You fire that thing down here in a concrete tunnel and it’s as likely to get you as him,” he said.

“Only if I miss,” she whispered back. “I’ll go down that way. Let him go by; then yell halt. If he rabbits, he’ll run right into me.” With that, she slipped into the main tunnel, turned left, and hurried silently down to a dogleg turn fifty feet toward Bancroft, where she disappeared around the corner.

Okay, I guess we now officially have a plan, Jim thought. Although it would have been nice to have had a vote. On the other hand, she was a trained police agent, and he was not. He waited.

One minute stretched into two, and then three. Shouldn’t have taken the guy this long. He reviewed the layout of the tunnel complex to see if there was another branch he could have taken, and decided there wasn’t, not if he was headed back to Bancroft. Four minutes. Then he heard a distant clang of metal, as if one of the interchange doors was being closed.

More silence. Three vehicles in succession bumped over the road above his head. Five minutes. He wanted to look around the corner toward the sound of that door, but he held back. The guy would probably see him as he went by the entrance to the branch tunnel, but by then, Jim would be coming at him. He touched the Glock but decided not to draw it. Once he called the guy out and Branner made her presence known, a mid would give it up for Lent. Six minutes.

Then a soft shuffling sound to his right. Something coming down the tunnel. He crouched into a ready stance and drew out his big Maglite. Nothing like a little white light to disorient his quarry for a crucial second or two. Another sound. Closer. Then silence. Then a very soft giggle.

Giggle? Before he could even blink, a stumpy figure in flowing black robes slipped by the entrance to his tunnel, a smallish figure, with a painted white face. He got only a momentary glimpse, then stood up and roared for her to halt just as she went out of sight to his left. He jumped into the main tunnel, saw the figure’s back ten feet away, and snapped on the Maglite just as the girl spun around. It was one of those Goth girls, looking like some kind of alien in the harsh blue-white beam.

“Put your hands out where I can see them,” he ordered, staying put while he held the blinding light in her face. To his amazement, she screamed. Really screamed. She took a deep breath, clenched her fists, and let one fly, a continuous, top-of-the-lungs, “My baby is being ripped from my womb before my very own eyes” scream. That brought Branner out from behind the dogleg, her own flashlight blazing up the tunnel and partially blinding Jim. Then a jet airplane fired up its engines in the tunnel behind him and he could hear nothing but a huge roar of sound as the girl ran right at him, her face still contorted in the act of screaming, even though the blast of sound from behind him in the tunnel was overwhelming all his senses. He managed to grab her as she tried to slip by, and then both of them were down on the deck plates as he tried to hold on to her billowing robes and keep his sanity in the midst of the incredible noise. His flashlight went flying and he was left grappling in the dark with this surprisingly strong girl. He managed to pin one of her arms and then a second one. She started kicking out, and he ended up dropping across her back, still gripping both her arms, until she stopped it.

He felt rather than saw Branner jump over both of them as she ran in the direction of the St. John’s doors. The blasting noise was getting even louder, if that was possible, and then he felt a billowing wet heat enveloping them both.

Steam. Shit! There’d been two of them, and the other one, probably the guy they were after, had opened a steam-line drain valve as he took off back the way they had come in. The girl began to struggle again, but this time it was different. She wasn’t fighting him as much as fighting to breathe, and he realized he’d laid his entire weight on her. Being careful to keep his grip, he rolled off her back and yelled at her to keep still, that she was under arrest, but it was pointless in the shattering noise. As he raised his head, he realized he wasn’t able to breathe, not at all. His first inhalation brought a hot, wet gulp of oxygen-free water vapor, and he bent his head down immediately to get some air. This was dangerous. The tunnel was quickly filling with steam. This wasn’t a drain valve, but one of the main lines. Steam would soon displace all the oxygen. They couldn’t stay here. He wondered where Branner was, then decided he had to get himself and his prisoner the hell out of there, or at least behind a fire door. The nearest one was back in the branch tunnel leading to Mahan Hall, so he began dragging the girl toward the junction.

But which way was the junction? In his struggles with the girl, he had lost his bearings. Now he no longer knew which way led to the branch intersection. What little light there had been was being swallowed up in the billowing steam, and his attempts to breathe were bringing in increasingly less oxygen. If he chose wrong, there were no more doors for at least three hundred feet. He felt the girl start to cough and choke in his grip, and he forced her head down to the deck plates, where there was still some air.

The deck plates. There was a channel under the deck plates. Hot steam would rise. There might be air in the channel. Keeping one hand on the girl, he clawed at the edge of the deck plate nearest his hand until he got under an edge. He heaved against it and it moved, but the girl’s body was holding it down. He rolled her off of it and tried again. She had stopped struggling and was now down flat on the concrete floor. With one enormous heave, he got the deck plate up and out of its brackets. He pushed the girl down into the trenchlike channel, which was two feet deep and the same distance across, a notch running beneath the tunnel floor where water could accumulate in the event of a major leak, allowing repair crews time to get it stopped. On the bottom of the channel was the top of the main sewage line. He dropped in after her and landed partially on her and into a few inches of ice-cold water. Above him, the steam noise was louder and the temperature was rising fast. He could see nothing but a glow in the billowing mist above the floor. He pulled the plate over them as best he could, and the noise subsided a little.

“Stay down,” he yelled into the white blur that was the girl’s face, and she got flatter, no longer resisting. He fumbled in his belt for the small, spare Maglite and snapped it on. Where the hell is Branner? he wondered. She doesn’t know these tunnels. The channel ran in a straight line in both directions until it disappeared from sight. It smelled faintly of sewer gas and salt water. He felt water starting to drip down from the edges of the deck plate. Hot water. Steam’s condensing up there on the cold walls, he thought. He wondered how long it would be before the water started rising in the channel. But there was nowhere else to go. Above them, all the air and oxygen had been displaced by steam, and even at atmospheric pressure, the ambient temperature would be at least 150 degrees, enough to sear lung tissue. They would just have to wait until the steam plant’s operators detected the pressure drop, realized they had a leak, and shut down the main steam-supply line to Bancroft Hall. He took as deep a breath as he could stand, then settled lower into the water at the bottom of the channel to wait it out.

After what seemed like ages, the noise began to subside above their heads. He looked at his watch. It had been more like ten, maybe fifteen minutes since the whole thing started. He waited for the roaring noise to reduce itself to a medium blast, and then he jammed his fingers up between the edge of the plate and the lip of the trench. He raised his hand. The air was still hot and wet. When he thought he could make himself heard, he told the girl that they had shut off the steam but that they’d have to wait until there was air up there. She made a noise, and he shone the light in her face. All that white pancake makeup had begun to run off her face, and he was looking at a young and very scared college kid. Not all the moisture streaming down her cheeks was from the steam.

After another five minutes, all the noise had stopped and he pushed the plate out of its channel and sat up in the trench. The water was another inch or so deeper in the channel and running in a visible current around his hips. The air above them was still full of mist, but it was no longer hot and he could breathe. The girl was still flattened down in the bottom of the channel, her black clothes looking like an ink spill. He hoisted himself to sit on the edge of the channel, set the flashlight down on the floor, and lifted her up to a sitting position. He could hear the sounds of a maintenance crew in the distance. He wondered where the hell Branner was, and if she’d caught the bastard who’d done this.

“Did I tell you that you were under arrest?” he asked the girl. She nodded emphatically and started to cry again.

He saw lights coming down the tunnel from the direction of Bancroft Hall, then heard someone coming from the other direction.

“Hall?” Branner called. “You still down here?”

“Here,” he yelled back. “You catch him?”

A flashlight stabbed through the swirling cloud of condensing steam and then Branner stepped out of the mist. She appeared none the worse for wear. “Saw him, but he slammed a steel door shut, and I didn’t have a key. Then all that steam came and I had to run for it. Found another tunnel behind a door and hid out.”

“Well, I managed to hold on to this one,” he said, pointing at the bedraggled Goth.

“She’ll do,” Branner said, crouching down to stare at the frightened girl. Branner had a wolfish look on her face. “She’ll do.”

The girl began to cry in earnest as the maintenance crew showed up to ask what the hell was going on.