Zero Day (6 page)

T
HE WOMAN CLIMBED
out of her ride. It wasn’t police wheels. It was a plain, decades-old pickup truck with a four-speed stick drive and three transmission antennas drilled in the cab’s roof. It also had a white custom camper with side windows and a flip-top gate on the back with the word “Chevy” stenciled on it. The truck’s pale blue was not the original color.

Samantha Cole was not in uniform. She was dressed in faded jeans, white T-shirt, a WVU Mountaineers windbreaker, and worn-down calf-high boots. The butt of a King Cobra double-action .45 revolver poked from inside her shoulder holster. It was on the left side, meaning she was right-handed. She was a sliver under five-three without the boots, and a wiry one-ten with dirty blonde hair that was long enough to reach her shoulders. Her eyes were blue and wide; the balls of her cheekbones were prominent enough to suggest Native American ancestry. Her face had a scattering of light freckles.

She was an attractive woman but with a hard, cynical look of someone to whom life had not been overly kind.

Cole stared at Puller’s Malibu and then up at the house where the Reynoldses sat dead all in a row. One hand on the butt of her gun, she advanced up the gravel drive. She passed the Lexus when it happened.

The hand was on her before she realized it. Its grip was iron. She had no chance. It pulled her down and then over to the other side of the car.

“Shit!” Her fingers closed around the long, thick fingers. She
could not break the grip. She tried to pull her gun with her other hand, but it was blocked by her attacker’s arm pinning hers against her side. Cole was helpless.

“Just stay down, Cole,” the voice said into her ear. “There might be a shooter out there.”

“Puller?” she hissed as she turned to him. Puller released his grip and squatted next to the right front fender of the Lexus. He flipped up his night optics. He had one M11 in hand. The other pistol was parked back in its rear holster.

“Good to meet you.”

“You nearly gave me a heart attack. I never even heard you.”

“That’s sort of the point.”

“You about crushed my arm. What, are you bionic?”

He shrugged. “No, I’m just in the Army.”

“Why did you grab me?”

“Your guy named Wellman?”

“What?”

“The cop on guard duty tonight?”

“Yeah, Larry Wellman. How’d you know that?”

“Somebody strung him up in the basement of the house and then stole his ride.”

Her face collapsed. “Larry’s dead?”

“Afraid so.”

“You said there might be a shooter?”

He touched his optics. “Saw a flash of movement through a window of the house when I heard you pulling up.”

“From where?”

“The woods behind the house.”

“You think they…?”

“I don’t presume. Why I grabbed you. Already killed one cop, so what’s another to them?”

She gave him a searching glance. “I appreciate that. But I can’t believe Larry’s dead. No wonder he didn’t answer my call.” She paused. “He’s got a wife and a new baby.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You sure he’s dead?”

“If I weren’t I would’ve cut him down and tried to resuscitate him. But trust me, it would’ve been pointless. He hasn’t been dead long, though. Body’s still warm.”

“Shit,” she said again, her voice shaky.

He drew in her scent. Her breath smelled of mints with the tobacco lapping right underneath. No perfume. She hadn’t taken time to wash her hair. He glanced at his watch. She had gotten here two minutes ahead of her own deadline.

He saw her eyes start to glisten; a wobbly tear freed itself and slid down her cheek.

“You want to call it in?” he asked.

She answered in a dull, tired voice, “What? Oh, right.” She hastily wiped her eyes and pulled out her phone. She drilled in the numbers. She spoke fast but clearly, also putting out a BOLO on the missing police cruiser. The woman had gone from emotionally paralyzed to professional in a few seconds. Puller was impressed.

She closed the phone.

“How many officers do you have available?” he asked.

“We’re a rural county, Puller. Lot of space, not a lot of dollars. Budget cuts have wrecked us; cut our force by a third. And three of my guys are reservists who are currently in Afghanistan. So that translates into us having a total of twenty-one uniforms to cover about four hundred square miles. And two of them are banged up from a car crash last week.”

“So nineteen. Including you?”

“Including me.”

“How many are coming now?”

“Three. And that’s a stretch. And it won’t be fast. They’re nowhere near here.”

Puller looked toward the woods. “Why don’t you stay here and wait for them and I’ll go check out whatever it was I saw in the woods.”

“Why would I stay here? I’m armed. Two’s better than one.”

“Suit yourself.” He eyed the woods, did the run-through logistics in his mind. It was so ingrained in him that he thought about it thoroughly without seeming to think about it at all.

“You ever been in the military?” he asked.

She shook her head. “State police for four years before I came back here. For the record, I’m a hell of a shot. Got the ribbons and trophies to prove it.”

“Okay, but you mind if I take the lead on this search?”

She looked out at the dark woods and then at his large, muscular physique.

“Works for me.”

A
FEW MINUTES LATER
Puller glanced behind him to see Sam Cole struggling to keep up with him in the dense brush. He stopped and held up his hand. Cole froze. He swept the area in front of him with his night-vision optics. Trees, brush, the dart of a deer. Nothing that was looking to kill them.

He still didn’t move. He thought back to what he’d seen in the woods through the window. A shape, not an animal. A man. Didn’t necessarily have to be connected to the case, but probably was.

“Puller?”

He didn’t look back at her but simply waved Cole forward. She crouched next to him a few seconds later.

“You catch anything with that fancy gear of yours?”

“Just a deer and a whole lot of trees.”

“I don’t hear anything either.”

He eyed the lightening sky. “There was a searchlight on when I arrived. To the east, couple of miles away.”

“Probably mining operation.”

“Why a searchlight?”

“Chopper landing most probably. Giving the bird a target to hit.”

“Chopper landings at a coal mine in the middle of the night?”

“No law against it. And it’s not a mine. They do mountaintop extraction here. Which means they don’t tunnel under, they just blow up the mountain instead.”

Puller kept scanning ahead and on the peripheries. “Were you the one who contacted the Army about Reynolds?”

“Yes. He was in uniform. That was our first clue. And we checked
his car, found his ID.” She paused. “You’ve been inside obviously. You saw he didn’t have much of a face left.”

“Did he have a briefcase or a laptop?”

“Both.”

“I’ll need to see them.”

“Okay.”

“There could be classified material in and on them.”

“Right.”

“Are they secure?”

“In our evidence room back at the station.”

Puller thought for a moment. “I need you to make sure no one tries to access them. Reynolds was DIA, Defense Intelligence. It could be a big issue if an unauthorized person gets into that stuff. A real headache you don’t need.”

“I understand. I can make a call.”

“Thanks. File said you printed him?”

“And faxed it off to the Pentagon to a number they gave us. They confirmed his ID.”

“How many crime scene techs you have?”

“One. But he’s pretty good.”

“Medical examiner?”

“Chief’s way over in Charleston along with the state medical lab.”

Puller kept scanning while he talked. Whoever had been out here was gone. “Why are the bodies still in the house?”

“A number of reasons, but mostly because we didn’t really have an appropriate place to put them.”

“Hospital?”

“Closest one is a good hour away.”

“Local ME?”

“We’re in between.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the one we had moved out of town. And he wasn’t a doctor. He was an EMT. But under state law that was good enough.”

“So who’s going to do the posts on the victims?”

“I’m trying to work that out now. Probably a local doc I know
who has some forensics background. How many crime scene techs did you bring with you?”

“You’re looking at him.”

“Tech and investigator? That’s a little unusual.”

“It’s actually a smart way to do it.”

“What do you mean?”

He said, “That way nothing gets between me and the evidence. And I’ve got the Army’s Criminal Investigation Lab to fall back on. Let’s head back to the house.”

A minute later they stood in front of the four bodies. It was growing light outside but Cole turned an overhead on.

Puller said, “The integrity of the crime scene has been blown. The killers came back. They could have screwed with the evidence.”

“They could have screwed with it before too,” shot back Cole.

“Even if we get a suspect to trial, his attorney can trash the entire prosecution based on this.”

Cole said nothing. By her angry features Puller could tell that she knew this to be true.

“So what do we do about it?” she finally said.

“Nothing for now. We keep working the scene.”

“Will you have to report this back?”

He didn’t answer her. Instead he looked around and said, “The Reynoldses didn’t live here. So what were they doing here?”

“Home belongs to a Richard and Minnie Halverson. They’re Mrs. Reynolds’s parents. They live in a nursing home. Well, he does. Mrs. Halverson was living here, but she suffered a stroke recently and is at a specialty hospital over near Pikeville. Not that far as the crow flies, but on our back roads it’ll take you a good hour and a half to get there.”

“I saw some of that getting here.”

“Apparently Mrs. Reynolds was staying here temporarily to take care of things, oversee her father’s care, get the house ready for sale, and have her mother admitted into the same nursing home since she can no longer live alone. It was summer, so the kids were staying with her. Mr. Reynolds was apparently coming out here on weekends.”

“Where’d you get all this info?”

“Local sources. Nursing home and the hospital. And from poking around here. And we talked to some of the neighbors on the street.”

“Good work,” said Puller.

“I’m not here to do crappy work.”

“Look, I’m only here because one of the victims is wearing a uniform. And my SAC said you guys were cool with a collateral arrangement.”

“My boss was.”

“And you?”

“Let’s just say the jury’s still out.”

“Fair enough.”

“So he was with DIA?”

“Didn’t they tell you that when you faxed the prints in?”

“No. They just confirmed for me who he was. So military intelligence? Was he some sort of spy? Is that why someone killed him?”

“Don’t know. He was getting ready to retire. Might just be a paper-pusher with eagle leaf clusters looking to punch the private-sector ATM. Pentagon is full of them.”

Puller had decided not to fill her in on what Reynolds had really done at DIA. She wasn’t cleared for it, and he wasn’t looking to get busted down in rank for letting something slip he shouldn’t.

“That doesn’t really help us all that much, then.”

Puller’s honest side got the better of him. “Well, it might be he wasn’t just a paper-pusher.”

“But you just said—”

“I said
might
. It’s not confirmed. And I’m just coming to the investigation too. Lot I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

Puller drew closer to the bodies. “You found them like this. All seated in a row?”

“Yes.”

“The adults’ causes of death are pretty obvious. What about the kids?” He pointed to them.

When she didn’t answer, Puller turned to her.

She’d pulled her Cobra and was aiming it at his head.