THIRTY-FIVE

“Cold Case, Gooch speaking.”

“Hey, Lieutenant, it’s me.” Silence. “Mechelle.”

The line remained silent.

“Sir? Lieutenant? Sorry I didn’t make it in this morning. I don’t know what it is, but I’m sick as a dog. Must have eaten something bad last night. I’m hoping it’s just food poisoning, but I’m throwing up, I’ve got diarrhea, I’ve got all this junk coming up that—”

“I don’t need a stool sample, Detective. Just get better by tomorrow. We got work to do.” The lieutenant hung up on me.

“Thanks for all your concern and everything,” I said to the dead line.

After that I made a couple more phone calls, then got in my car and started driving.

 

 

Fort Benning, down on the Alabama border, is a massive place, bigger than half the counties in Georgia. In fact, it’s one of the biggest army bases west of the Mississippi, a major training station for the infantry, with all kinds of schools including ranger and airborne training as well as the infamous (and recently renamed) School of the Americas, which is often accused of training South American right-wing death squads. The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division maintains a regional CID headquarters battalion, as well as a unit called the 86^th Military Police Detachment, which has investigative responsibility specifically for Fort Benning.

The country is flat and hot and heavily forested around Columbus. July had been unusually dry this year. There was a big forest fire burning to the west as I drove down the interstate, and for twenty miles before I reached Columbus, I could smell smoke.

The head of the 86^th MP Detachment at Fort Benning referred to herself as special agent-in-charge, rather than by her military rank. Special Agent-in-Charge Rose Ellen McGahah was a small, solid white woman with hair cut so short it verged on crewcut length. She had a frank manner, a strong Boston accent, and a square face with pale, clear skin and big freckles.

“I wasn’t entirely clear from our conversation on the phone what you were looking for, Detective,” she said as she led me back to her cramped, anonymous-looking office. There were no particular decorations in the place other than a couple of plaques on the wall that showed she’d won practical pistol marksmanship awards.

“I was deliberately vague, Agent McGahah,” I said. “I felt this was something that I ought to take up with you in person.”

“Please,” the Special Agent-in-Charge said, pointing at a chair in front of her desk. We sat.

“Here’s the tricky thing,” I said, “we’re involved in putting together a case involving a string of homicides. We believe, in fact, that we’re dealing with a serial killer. But I’ll be honest with you; at this point the investigation is fairly preliminary, fairly sketchy.”

McGahah raised her eyebrows slightly. “Where does the Army come into this?”

“I’ve been doing a survey of unsolved cases in the state that seem to fit the general pattern we’re looking at. And I’ve found one homicide that occurred here at Fort Benning.”

“I think you may be mistaken. We haven’t had an on-base homicide in quite some time.”

“This case is almost fifteen years old.”

“Wow. You’re saying this guy—I presume it’s a guy? Yes? —this guy has been out there killing people for fifteen years?”

“Close to it.”

“So what are you hoping to accomplish by coming here?”

“I’m here to request that you release your investigative files on this case to the Atlanta Police Department.”

McGahah nodded. “Yes. Well, as I’m sure you might guess, that will involve some fairly extensive paperwork.”

“I had a hunch.”

“What’s the name of the victim in the case?”

I wrote the child’s name on a piece of paper and pushed it across the desk.

“Was she a soldier? Civilian employee on base? What?”

I shook my head. “Six-year-old girl. A military dependent.”

McGahah looked at me for a while. “My God,” she said, eyes widening. “You’re saying you’ve had a serial killer out there killing kids for fifteen years?”

“Close to it.”

“Why doesn’t anybody know about this?” she said sharply.

“This guy’s smart. The MOs in the cases are different. He disguises them, makes them look like child abuse by family members. The only way we picked up on it was a subtle thing that showed up in the autopsies. Not a contributor to death, though, so initially nobody picked up the pattern.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Truthfully, I just can’t tell you everything right now,” I said. McGahah’s face stiffened. “And before you start getting your panties in a wad—which I would, too, if I were you—let me be real clear. This is not some kind of protect-my-turf thing. This is not me wanting to hog the case.”

“What is it then?” she said coolly.

“So far—and, Agent McGahah, I’m going to have to ask you to keep this in absolute confidence—it’s looking like our killer is law enforcement.”

“You’re kidding me.”

I shook my head. “No, ma’am. Straight-up truth.”

“You have a suspect?”

“Not, ah, specifically.”

“Well, what I’ll need you to do is make a written request for the case file. Might speed things up if it came straight from the Chief’s office. Also, we’ve got a form for you to fill out. You’ll need to route that request through the Judge Advocate General. I’ll give you the name of the officer you’ll need to address it to.”

“How long are we talking?”

McGahah smiled mirthlessly. “A couple months? Six? A year?” She shrugged. “Army bureaucracy, you know how it is.”

I shook my head. “We haven’t got a couple months.”

“Fifteen-year-old case, what’s the big rush?”

I took a photograph out of my purse, set it on her desk. “Her name is Jenny Dial. We believe our perp snatched her a week and a half ago. Right now, if we can trust our reconstruction of things, she is sitting in a box where she is slowly being starved to death. He will continue to starve her for another month. Then he’ll force-feed her for a week to get her weight back up. Then he’ll kill her.”

The SAC looked at me for a moment, and then looked away. Her freckles seemed to grow brighter, but I guess it was her face getting paler.

“Let me see what I can do,” she said finally.

She stood and left the room for a while. After about twenty minutes she came back with a thick folder in her hands. “I can’t release this to you officially,” she said, “but in the meantime I can let you look at it on a sort of unofficial basis and take notes. Then you can put through your request, and I’ll try to expedite it so you can have an official copy.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Before I hand it over to you, though, let me take a look through it. Every law enforcement organization has its quirks in terms of recordkeeping and whatnot. I might be able to save you some effort, point out what’s important, how to read between the lines.”

She went through the file carefully, eventually looking up at me.

“I don’t know how you guys do it,” SAC McGahah said, “but we don’t exactly have a form to fill out that says ‘This person is a suspect’ at the top. But it’s pretty clear our agents investigating this case did, in fact, have a suspect.”

“Okay.”

“The agents who investigated the case looked at a number of people. There was a fellow on base who had been a suspect in a child molestation. He’d never been article six-teened, though, because the case was never proven. Looks like he had a pretty solid alibi. There were a couple of other leads. But based on where they put their efforts and the various tests they ran, it’s quite clear who they suspected.”

“And that was?”

“Well, let me give you the general outline of the case first. The girl came up missing in April of 1987 and was found in June. She had been more or less beheaded. So the murder weapon looks like it was a machete, or maybe even a sword. The autopsy shows she had been raped, and that she had not actually been killed until about two months after her abduction. So what the investigators deduced is that the killer was somebody on base. This is an enormous place, Fort Benning. Absolutely enormous. And a lot of it is just woods. There are all kinds of little out-of-the-way shacks and buildings that have been thrown up over the years for one purpose or another, to the point that nobody even remembers where they all are. Believe it or not, somebody who goes wandering around out in the woods a lot might know of all kinds of places where a child could be kept prisoner, and no one would even know.”

“And who might go wandering around in these woods?”

“Well, this base is probably the premier infantry training base in the United States. You’ve got ranger training, Special Forces, recon, all kinds of guys that go humping around the boonies here.”

“What’s recon?”

“Sorry. Everything in the Army has a goofy acronym. In Vietnam they had these guys called ‘Lurps.’ That’s LRRP. LRRP is the acronym for long range reconnaissance patrol. Now it’s called ‘Recon.’ Those are the sort of maniacs who go hiking into the jungle with a knife, a compass, a rifle, and some dried meat; and stay out there for weeks, killing people and blowing up bridges. Crazy types, if you ask me. There’s a recon training course here.”

“I see.”

“From the order of the reports, I’d say the investigators decided they had a decent suspect fairly quickly. They ran the rape kit and found that the perp was a secreter. As you know, Detective, that means that the suspect secretes tiny amounts of blood into the seminal fluid, and therefore you can determine the perp’s blood type from the semen sample. The blood type found in the semen matched the suspect’s blood type. So they brought him in.” She paused significantly. “I guess you already know, the suspect was the girl’s father.”

I nodded.

She squinted at the page. “Very experienced soldier, gung-ho type, spotless record, nothing but good reports from his superiors over the years. Silver star from Panama, Purple Heart in Grenada. He was a recon trainer here at Benning, spent lots of time alone in the woods.”

“But y’all never made an arrest.”

“Nope. This was pre-DNA, of course. The perp was O positive, the suspect was O positive. The most common blood type on the planet. The girl’s body was found just off a trail that was used in recon training, a trail that the suspect used frequently. And that’s absolutely all we had on him. No previous record of child abuse. The investigators sweated him for three days, and he didn’t budge one inch.”

“You mentioned a rape kit,” I said. “What I’d like to do is run a DNA test on the rape kit, see if we can come up with a match on any of the later cases.”

“Yeah.” McGahah stroked her chin. “Yeah, see, that gets problematic, giving you the rape kit. We’d be talking about an awful lot of red tape.”

“I don’t have to tell you a girl’s life is riding on this,” I snapped.

“I know, I know.” The SAC looked thoughtful. “You know what? The Army has one of the best crime labs on the planet. I might be able to get them to run the DNA. Then I could kind of informally pass the test results on to you. Again, pending things getting resolved through channels.”

“How quick would that happen?”

“I’ve got a few strings I could pull. Given the nature of the situation, we might be able to turn it around in a day or two.”

“That would be fantastic.” I felt a rush of excitement. This was better than I’d hoped, probably a good deal faster than routing it through the GBI crime lab.

“Anything else?” McGahah said.

I shook my head. “Don’t believe so.”

The CID officer stood. “You going to catch this bastard?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to see what the test results show, won’t we?”

“Our suspect in this case, is he your suspect, too?”

“Maybe.”

McGahah looked down at the file again, read off the name of the suspect. “Staff Sergeant Hank Gooch. You know where he’s located and all?”

I looked at the CID officer soberly. “Matter of fact, I do.”