According to my watch, it was almost one thirty. I wondered if Bobby Devane or Brian Razzano had tried to reach me. Turning on the transceiver again, I checked with the dispatcher to find out whether I had any phone messages. Carlene was on duty and said that no calls had come in for me.
As I pulled into the parking lot behind the police building, a sheet of wood paneling flew past the windshield as if it was a piece of stationery. Before I could get out of the truck, Carlene called me back to say that an army officer was trying to reach me from Washington. I asked her to patch him through. It was Mike Andrews.
“Well, I tracked your man down,” he said. “It wasn’t as hard as I thought. He was no ticket puncher, Jake. The guy was one hell of a combat soldier, although he didn’t do so well later in the Pentagon under the eyes of the almighty brass. I guess he didn’t like ass-kissing as much as soldiering. Anyway, he made it to brigade command before they finally retired him.”
So Taylor had gotten his star. He had made brigadier general.
“A retired sergeant major I trust told me that Frank Taylor was one of the best battalion commanders in Vietnam during that whole goddam war.”
“Did he serve with the 101st?”
“Yeah . . . he was leading a company when the 101st relieved Hue after Tet. He won a Silver Star at Perfume River . . . and later on another one near Pleiku.”
“What regiment was he with?” I asked.
I could hear him flipping the pages of a personnel file before he said, “The five oh deuce.”
Ben Massengale hadn’t been so drunk after all. He had gotten it right.
“Mike, you only owe me sixteen more favors,” I said.
“The next time you’re in Washington, just take me to the Palm for lunch,” he came back. “I’ll order the twenty-four-ounce prime rib.”
“Sure,” I said, signing off.
So where are you now, General Taylor? I wondered.
The squad room was mobbed as I came through the rear door and headed straight for the emergency medical technician who was sitting on one of the cots in the hallway. She looked as exhausted as I felt. I asked her to bring her medical kit to my cubicle. Taking off my waterproof jacket, I pulled up the lower edge of the bloody denim shirt and asked her to put a new bandage on the wounds.
“Duct tape,” she laughed.
She sliced the tape with medical scissors and gently pulled the ends away from the towel I had used for a bandage. The entrance and exit wounds looked like the puckered mouths of two trout.
“This looks like a bullet wound,” she said, glancing up at me.
“I was speared by a length of copper tubing. Just take care of it.”
She looked back up at me dubiously before spraying anesthetic on the holes and taping on a new bandage.
There was no doubt in my mind that General Taylor was within a few hundred yards of where I was now sitting. He wasn’t about to leave. Not when he had one more job to do.
I tried to put myself in Taylor’s position when he had first arrived at St. Andrews a couple of nights earlier. He had probably never visited the campus. Thirty years ago, he might well have been deployed overseas. His son was here for only five months.
I thought about where I would have chosen to stay in a strange town where my son’s life had ended so long ago. I would have stayed in the same place my son had lived during the months he was here as a student. The last place he had lived before his death.
Captain Morgo walked in on us a moment later and saw the bandage covering my side.
“How bad is it, Jake?”
“I’ve had worse,” I said, putting on the waterproof jacket to cover it.
Before she had a chance to ask what had happened to me, I gave her the details of my interview with Hoyt Palmer. After telling her about General Taylor, I suddenly remembered Palmer saying that he had been the fraternity brother assigned to visit Creighton Taylor on the night he had been tapped to become one of their anointed pledges.
“Could you get Ken on the VHF and ask him to find out from Palmer where Creighton Taylor was living when he visited him on pledge night?” I asked her.
While she tried to reach Ken on the radio, I trudged into the lavatory and took a long, satisfying leak. When I came back out to the squad room, she was still trying. After another unsuccessful attempt, she said, “There must be some malfunction with his radio. I can’t raise him.”
I called Lauren Kenniston again.
“Does the story in the Journal say where Creighton Taylor was living at the start of his freshman year here?” I asked.
“Let me check,” she said.
“Drink this,” ordered Captain Morgo, handing me a large plastic cup she had just carried over from the refreshment bar.
I took a sip. It was a thick chocolate milkshake and was as delicious as anything I had ever tasted. I finished it as Lauren came back on the phone.
“His last known local mailing address was 326 Highland Drive.”
Highland Drive was the first cross street after the traffic bridge. It led down to the Fall Creek Tavern. I didn’t know the street numbers, but there were a lot of homes on that street where people rented rooms to students.
Captain Morgo said she would drive me over in her cruiser. Outside, the rain was finally losing its intensity. The wind wasn’t quite so violent either, but it was still gusting fiercely enough to make the trees on campus sway wildly before its might.
We had just crossed the traffic bridge over the gorge when Captain Morgo received a call on her cell phone. She listened for almost a minute before saying, “Stay there. I’ll call you right back.”
She turned to me and said, “That was Ken Macready. Hoyt Palmer is dead.”