for him?”
“My name is John Puller Jr. My father was in the Army, same as me. I used to come here with my mother and brother when we were little. My mother disappeared from Fort Monroe thirty years ago. She was never found. I’m just trying to piece together what might have happened.”
The watery blue eyes softened even more. “Why now if so much time has gone by?”
Puller took out his CID cred pack.
The priest studied it. “CID? So is this an official investigation?”
“No, just personal. Some things have occurred recently that led me to want to finally find out what happened to her.”
“I can understand that, Agent Puller. Not knowing is a terrible thing.”
“So might you know what happened to Father Rooney? I don’t even know if he’s alive.”
“Well, I can certainly try to find out. I can certainly make some calls. Do you mind waiting, or perhaps coming back later? I have a meeting coming up in about fifteen minutes that I have to prepare for, but I can do it right after that. Say about two hours or so?”
“I’ll be back. And thank you, Father.”
Puller left the church and checked his watch. He didn’t like to waste time. The Army did not teach wasting time—quite the reverse.
Puller hadn’t even reached his Malibu when he heard the man.
“What are you doing here?”
He turned to see CID special agent Ted Hull sitting in the driver’s seat of his Army-issued Malibu that was a clone of Puller’s. The Army bought in bulk with not a thought to diversity of the product. Indeed, in their eyes uniformity was a good thing, whether it was a soldier or a car.
Puller looked back at the church and then walked over to Hull’s ride. “Just revisiting old times.”
Hull eyed him suspiciously. Puller knew he would be doing the exact same thing if the positions were reversed.
“Is that right? At Fort Monroe, the scene of your mother’s disappearance?”
Puller shrugged and leaned closer to the window. “You’re the one who dropped this in my lap. Made me curious. What would you do if it was you and your mother?”
Hull nodded and tapped the steering wheel with his thumbs. “Probably the exact same thing you’re doing.”
Puller straightened. “Well, okay.”
“You find out anything?”
Puller leaned back down. “I’ve talked to a few people. My mother was dressed up that night. She walked; our car was still in the driveway. The church was within walking distance. She was devoutly religious. Maybe she came here.”
“Why here?”
“If she had a problem she might come here to talk about it.”
“You mean like a confession?”
“They don’t have any actual confessionals in the church, they just do it in one of the rooms. But no, I mean like just talking to a priest.”
Hull eyed the church. “The same priest still here?”
“No, but they’re trying to locate him.”
“You think it might be a viable lead?”
“Since I have no others I’ll take what I can get.”
“I didn’t see any record of the CID agents talking to a priest thirty years ago.”
“They didn’t really know my mother. I did. But then again, it may come to nothing.” He looked around. “Place is really different now. I remember when it was full of uniformed people hustling somewhere.”
Hull nodded. “Me too. But we got too many posts and not enough money. So there you go. When will you know if they found the priest?”
“A few hours.”
Hull considered this. “You can’t officially investigate this.”
“I get that.”
“So what are you really doing, Puller?”
“I’m just looking into my mother’s disappearance. No law against that.”
“If your father is a suspect there is. You’re in uniform.”
“But my father is not officially a suspect.”
“Will you give me a call when and if this priest turns up?”
“Be glad to.”
“Don’t throw your career away over this, Puller. I understand a little about what happened with your brother when he was at USDB. Scuttlebutt was you got perilously close to the line there.”
“I’m a soldier. Peril comes with the territory.”
“There are different kinds of peril. And the one coming from your own side is sometimes a lot worse than anything the enemy can chuck at you.”
Hull drove off.
Puller watched him go for a bit before turning his attention elsewhere.
He hadn’t been completely truthful with Hull. He had another lead to follow up.
Part of it was real.
The other part was all in his head.
Chapter
17
PULLER SAT IN a chair in his motel room and stared at the duffel.
It was just an ordinary duffel.
Canvas.
Zippered.
Crammed with stuff that helped Puller do what he did.
Find the truth.
What he did. All he ever wanted to do.
Was that because his mother had left the house and never come back?
Because some evil had made sure she couldn’t ever come back?
And was that evil his own father?
He covered his face with his hands, the impossible burden of this thought threatening to crush him without a gram of actual weight behind it.
Then he sat up straight and composed himself.
You’re Army, John Puller. You’re an Army Ranger. You can do the impossible. You’re expected to do the impossible on a regular basis.
So open the bag, John. Open the damn bag and just let it out. Finally.
His fingers reached out to take hold of the zipper.
He imagined his father glowering at him.
Come on, soldier, you put your life on the line for your country. A damn zipper shouldn’t be too hard.
He slid it down, spread open the canvas, and saw what he had put in there.
He touched the edge of the letter but didn’t pull it out. Not right away.
He had to work up to it, as strange as that sounded. The gravitational pull of family dynamics; it left a black hole in the dust.
He finally eased it out enough to see the name written on the front of the envelope.
Written in his mother’s hand.
John.
Not him, his father.
The letter had been for John Puller Sr. At the time he was a one-star busting his ass to add more silver to the epaulets. This meant leaving everything else in his life, including his family, in a distant second place.
Puller Sr. would finish his career with a trio of stars. There were only forty-three of those in the entire United States Army. But his old man wanted the fourth, which would have put him in the elite company of only nine people on earth at any given time. And because he never got there, he was a failure, at least in his eyes.
A failure in the mind he used to have.