PART II
CHAPTER 2
Chief Warrant Officer Scott Brodie drove his Army-issue Chevy Impala down the narrow back road. Thick growths of Virginia pine crowded the shoulders between dirt driveways leading to dilapidated houses and shanties. It was a bright and frigid day in the middle of January, and yesterday’s snow still clung to the pine needles and patchy lawns.
Brad Evans sat in the front passenger seat. He cracked his window and lit a cigarette. “Hate these off-base busts.”
Brodie did not reply.
“A soldier won’t resist arrest in the barracks. But once he’s got his own roof over his head, even one of these little shitboxes… his thinking is different. It’s instinct. A man defends his castle.”
Brodie preferred his partner in the morning, when he was hungover and didn’t talk much. But it was 4P.M., and by now Evans had had his Irish coffee for lunch, followed by two or three more, and he was all jaw.
Brodie, age thirty-nine, was a Special Agent in the United States Army Criminal Investigation Division, more commonly known as CID, which was responsible for investigating major felony crimes and violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice within the Army. Brad Evans was his partner and, like many of Brodie’s partners over the course of his thirteen-year career, Evans was an asshole.
Evans continued talking between drags. “These new enlisteds think they can get away with anything. Remember that jerkoff in Norfolk? Growing enough weed to smoke out a brigade? Just heard, they docked his pay, no reduction in rank, no confinement. Bullshit. What the hell kind of message…?”
Brodie let Evans ramble and focused on the road. Brodie and Evans shared an office at CID Headquarters, which was within Marine Corps Base Quantico, a large complex in northeastern Virginia that also housed the Marine Officer Candidates School and Basic School, as well as the Marine Corps University, the FBI Academy, the Drug Enforcement Administration Training Academy, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service—NCIS—which was the Navy equivalent of Army CID, but with bigger egos thanks to the hit TV show.
Brodie lived in a rented house close to base, though until recently he’d been a nomad, traveling the country and the world on challenging assignments. But that was back when his life was interesting. Before his wings got clipped. Now he could actually spend time in his office. He even got around to checking his mail and doing paperwork, the ultimate indignity.
He eyed the rearview, where the Virginia state trooper was following close behind. Since they were conducting a search outside of a military installation, civilian law enforcement had to ride along. Brodie also had to get the search warrant from a civilian judge. The military had its own ways of doing things, of course, and its own parallel justice system. But in America the civilians still ruled the realm, and intruded when they felt like it, which Brodie guessed meant it was still a free country. But it didn’t make his job any easier.
Brodie glanced at his partner as the man kept smoking and yammering. Although CID was full of motivated professionals, Scott Brodie seemed to get stuck with the duds. He’d chosen to not read too much into this, despite his commanding officer Colonel Stanley Dombroski telling him on more than one occasion: “If everyone you work with is an asshole, the asshole is you.”
Dombroski was a commissioned officer. Brodie and Evans were officers of a different stripe: warrant officers, which put them above all enlisted soldiers in the Army chain of command, including NCOs, but below the lowest-ranked commissioned officer, meaning a rookie lieutenant just out of ROTC, OCS, or The Point. Within the warrant officer rank there were five grades. Brodie was a CW4. Evans was five years older than Brodie and had served longer, but was still a CW3, which said a few things about Brad Evans.
Scott Brodie, despite his time in service and his time in grade, was fairly sure he’d never get that final promotion to CW5. And the reason for that was his tendency to buck authority when the authority was being stupid. But Brodie could close tough cases, and at the end of the day that’s what the brass wanted to see—points on the board. Brodie had a lot of points, which partly made up for his bad attitude and other personality defects. He recalled another Dombroski-ism directed his way: “The only thing worse than a useless idiot you can’t work with is an effective pain in the ass you can’t fire.” Brodie wondered how much of this wisdom the colonel had picked up at Officer Candidates School.
Warrant officers, while technically considered commissioned officers, differed from regular commissioned officers in a few ways that made sense only to the Army. They didn’t have formal officer titles and were simply referred to as Mr. or Ms.—or occasionally the gender-neutral Chief—and as CID agents they usually wore civilian clothing and drove civilian unmarked cars. Today Brodie and Evans were both dressed in slacks, dress shirts, and dark-blue windbreakers with the words “CID FEDERAL AGENT” emblazoned on the front and back in big yellow letters. When you’re smashing down a suspect’s door, you don’t want any confusion. And in case there was, Brodie and Evans were packing their M9s.
Evans flicked his cigarette out the window and punched the power on the car radio. A rock song came on, something awful that Brodie half remembered from his college days. Evans started tapping the glove box along with the riffs. “These guys rock. Saw them last summer at the Birchmere. They still got it.”
Brodie suggested, “Keep an eye out for the turn.”
“Shoulda let the state cracker lead.”
“Not when you’re with me, Mr. Evans.”
This should be a simple bust. But sometimes the cases that looked straightforward ended up going sideways and screwing up your whole day. Still, it beat parking your ass behind a desk all day like some of Brodie’s colleagues at Quantico.
Within the CID were experts in a host of fields such as cybercrime, procurement fraud, forensic analysis, polygraph administration, criminal records processing—the desk jockeys—as well as specialists incounterterrorism, protective services, and, in special circumstances, war crimes and treason.
Brodie and Evans were not in a specialized unit, but general criminal investigators—the equivalent of police detectives—working felonies that fell outside the skills and purview of the specialists. They spent much of their day out on the beat gathering evidence, conducting interviews, and—on a good day—locating and arresting the bad guys. Lately the bad guys seemed to be getting stupider and easier to catch, though in reality it was Brodie’s cases that were getting stupider, and smaller. And this afternoon’s assignment was a perfect example: searching for stolen goods at the home of Private First Class Eric Hinckley, who was suspected of involvement in a larceny ring operating out of Fort A.P. Hill, an Army base near Fredericksburg. Someone was stealing MREs—meals ready to eat—the canned and dehydrated rations that kept America’s fighting men and women satiated and constipated while deployed in the field. Private Hinckley worked as a guard at a warehouse that stored MREs, and he was suspected of supplying a third party who was running an online store that had so far done about sixty thousand dollars’ worth of business. That was more than enough for a felony charge, though not generally enough to get Scott Brodie out of bed in the morning.
He used to work big cases. Homicides, narcotics, weapons theft. High-stakes stuff. Often overseas. Evans had too, before he sabotaged his career with an assist from Johnnie Walker. Scott Brodie, on the other hand, hadn’t drunk himself into career oblivion. In fact, he’d done his jobtoowell on his last major assignment, investigating beyond his mandate, pissing off several Intel agencies, and discovering a few things that were well above his pay grade, and way beyond his need to know. So he got saddled with a deadbeat partner and a bullshit caseload not befitting his experience or skills. Brodie wasn’t sure if this was temporary punishment or an attempt to drive him into early retirement. Either way, the Army’s aggression toward its maverick officers was often passive but never subtle.
The case that had gotten him on everyone’s shit list was from five months back, and had involved tracking down an infamous deserter, Captain Kyle Mercer of the Army’s elite Delta Force, who had apparently abandoned his remote post in Afghanistan and been captured by the Taliban. CaptainMercer eventually escaped his captors and turned up in—of all places—Caracas, Venezuela. It would have been more pleasant for everyone if Kyle Mercer had instead decamped to, say, Tahiti, or the Côte d’Azur, but Mercer had chosen the armpit of the Western Hemisphere for very specific reasons that dated back to some wet stuff he’d gotten into while commanding a Black Ops team in Afghanistan. It was a complicated, messy, sensitive, and ultimately sad case, and more than one person who should have stood in front of a court-martial instead came home in a body bag. And people like Brodie and his former partner Maggie Taylor, and their boss, Colonel Dombroski, should have gotten promotions—but got a ton of shit instead. Shit happens.
Evans pointed to a roadside mailbox. “Two-five-six. Right here.”
Brodie turned off the road onto a dirt driveway that led to an aluminum-sided ranch house. He parked his car fifty yards from the house and the Virginia state trooper pulled in behind them.
Brodie noticed a Toyota compact parked in front of the detached garage. Brodie, Evans, and the trooper got out without slamming their doors shut.
The Virginia trooper, a pale and lanky redhead in his late twenties named Dave Finley, walked up to them with a crowbar in his hands. Brodie had interacted with Finley before in executing a search warrant, and the guy was a straight arrow. Trooper Finley nodded to the door. “How do you want to do this?”
Brodie looked at the house. The front bay window had heavy curtains drawn. He said to Evans, “Cover the back.”
