brother. Well, no matter. He’d had to run into Patty Streeter sooner or later. She’d been in town for at least six months now. His mother had made a point to mention several times that Patty was stationed at Peterson Air Force Base and was a member of Good Shepherd Church. He’d seen them all watching for his reaction, too. He was proud to say that reaction had been negligible. Patty, or as his mother referred to her, Tricia, was in his past.
He chuckled mirthlessly as he turned onto Platte Avenue on his way home to Manitou Springs. Until a few minutes ago he’d actually believed that rubbish.
Chapter Two
Tricia watched in stunned silence early the next morning as Travis’s father, Maxwell Vance, pillar of Good Shepherd Church, approached General Hadley. Today she’d been tailing the general but had thought this trip across town to the Air Force Academy would be routine. Apparently it was anything but routine.
The two men stood talking on the top step outside the cadet chapel. Hadley, short and stocky, reminded Tricia of a nasty bulldog. He was dwarfed by Max Vance, who was almost as tall and rangy as his son. Their conversation seemed amiable and without purpose at first.
Did this mean she was wrong in suspecting the general? Or was the father Travis had so idolized back when they’d known each other mixed up with Diablo, drugs and murder? She knew firsthand that parents could be less than perfect. Tricia also knew they could be on the wrong side of the law. Hers had been.
The thoughts floating through her mind made her shiver in the cool October breeze but it was really the idea of a sinister meeting taking place at the chapel that chilled her to the bone, especially when the atmosphere between the two men changed. As she watched through her telephoto lens, Tricia snapped a shot of the general as he shook his head and stepped back from the other man, looking nervous and as if he were suppressing an angry reaction. Maxwell Vance’s attitude seemed too amiable to have caused such a reaction in Hadley. Especially considering what she knew about the general’s reputation for being cantankerous and gruff.
Why was he hiding his anger and why the nervousness? Even more at odds with his reaction was the fact that, though Vance was an upstanding member of the community, he should be no threat to Hadley.
Then Travis’s father said something else and walked away with a shrug. He sauntered to his car as if he didn’t have a care in the world, flipping his keys around his index finger just as Travis always had. She followed his progress, snapping a few shots till he climbed behind the wheel of his silver Mercedes and left the area. He seemed cool and unaffected by the meeting, but when she scanned back to the top step, she found Hadley still staring after Vance, looking openly tense now. His anger was no longer disguised, either.
She reminded herself the meeting could mean nothing but found herself worried anyway. Max Vance had seemed so very deliberate in the way he’d approached Hadley. Was this encounter linked to Captain Taylor’s displeasure at the drop yesterday? Taylor had demanded the swarthy man’s boss get in touch with his. Officially, General Hadley was Taylor’s boss. Could he be Taylor’s boss in this illegal business, as well? Could Maxwell Vance be the man her Hispanic bag carrier answered to? Had Vance come there in answer to the general’s demand? If so, he’d told the general something he didn’t like hearing.
Her heart suddenly heavy, Tricia felt as if her own hero was teetering on the brink, ready to fall off his pedestal instead of Travis’s. She wanted to reject the notion out of hand but couldn’t because it could endanger the lives of his sons, daughter and wife. She pursed her lips. Whatever the truth was, she had to find it. She sighed. This was just one more reason to find all the Diablo connections on the base and help rid the community of a growing menace.
She lowered the camera and checked her watch. Time to report in with General Fielding. It wasn’t a meeting she looked forward to, but she couldn’t keep a three-star general waiting. Not even with information guaranteed to make him hit the roof over the culpability of Air Force personnel and all the civilian interference she’d run into thus far.
Tricia went back to her office and did a quick and dirty search of Maxwell Vance’s military records. It netted her lots of questions and absolutely no answers. Vance had spent decades in the Army yet he’d retired a lowly sergeant. His family lived too well for his pay grade and they’d never lived at a duty station with him. Max Vance didn’t add up at all.
Two hours later, whether she was ready or not, she walked in and saluted Lieutenant General Charles Fielding standing at attention in front of his desk.
The general kept his nicely appointed office free of all clutter so that the highly polished mahogany desk and bookshelves gleamed in the sunshine that poured in through the windows behind him. Photographs of his late wife and grown son were dotted throughout the room between an odd assortment of mementos. The room somehow managed to look homey and businesslike at once.
“At ease, and be seated, Major,” he said. “And tell me something I want to hear.”
General Fielding was a tall man in his very early sixties who’d given up on hair when it had given up on him. He simply shaved it all off the same way he shaved his youthful face. His most memorable feature was blue eyes that had all the cutting power of a laser when he aimed them at a junior officer. She felt that heat now as she settled into the leather chair in front of his desk.
Tricia swallowed. “I’m sorry, sir. The autopsy report on Ian…uh…Major Kelly showed exactly what the prelim did. He was forced to his knees and shot in the back of the head at point-blank range. His body was moved off base, I would imagine in the hope of throwing suspicion out into the community. The medical examiner turned up no other useful evidence. But Luminol and DNA tests show Major Kelly was killed on the flight line, in hangar four. Sir, there’s a killer somewhere on base with blood not only on his hands but on his uniform, as well.”
“Unless he or she managed to dispose of it when they got rid of the body. It’s Hadley or one of his pilots, right?”
“I’d say so, sir.”
“The Air Force went to a lot of trouble to move Hadley and his wing here where they could be watched. We aren’t in the habit of temporarily shutting down bases, even one as small as Cascade.”
“That story about a geological survey showing a major fault line running under Cascade was brilliant, sir.”
Rather than smile at the comment, the general frowned. “Yes it was, Major. And this idea apparently cost Major Kelly his life. Are you closer to proving who killed him?”
Tricia hesitated. She knew General Fielding felt terribly responsible for Ian’s death, though he’d never say so. “Not yet, sir. But on that front, I tailed Captain Taylor from the Meadow Lake Airport where the Buccaneers keep their F-100 Super Sabre. Taylor went straight to the general after reporting in at the flight line. He left twenty minutes later, however. The general’s secretary wasn’t on duty during that time so he may not be involved. General Hadley’s office door and his desk line up with the outer office door and the approaching hall. The general left both doors open so I’d have been seen if I’d tried to get close enough to hear what was being said. Money was the subject, though. I heard Captain Taylor say something about it. Even though I don’t know the context, it ties in with something I heard later.”
She caught the glitter in General Fielding’s eyes before she continued. “Taylor left the general and went immediately to the warehouses close to the Colorado Springs airport. There he met with a swarthy man and exchanged the duffel bag for a briefcase. I got a few black-and-white shots of the meeting and the exchange. They appeared to argue, but I couldn’t hear all of what
