“So you’re saying the Marshals—you think they killed Salty and his daughter to get their money?”
“That’s why our unit got the call,” Elijah explained, taking a sip of Suicider and grabbing an orange Starburst. “They needed an outside investigative team with no dog in the fight. Within an hour of the shooting, Colonel Mint’s phone rang. Then he reached out to me and Rashida—”
“Why you?” Roddy interrupted.
Peeling open the orange Starburst, Elijah shot a look at Roddy. “Anyone ever teach him manners?” Elijah asked Zig.
“I looked up the jurisdiction,” Roddy said. “Security for Grandma’s Pantry is done by the Marshals Service, which explains why P.G. and Titus picked that as a meeting place. But if there’s a break-in—or a murder—that’s a federal building, meaning jurisdiction goes to the FBI. So why did a top secret military unit—Semper Vigiles—get the call?”
Zig stared at Elijah, who was now chewing on his Starburst, a fat round lump in his cheek. It was a good question.
“Military blood,” Elijah finally said.
“Pardon?”
“The SNS storehouses were designed to keep civilians safe. But if you’ve got the right clearance, you know they also have an additional mission: DOD storage,” Elijah explained, referring to the Department of Defense. “All the extra blood for our troops—Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines—plus all military force protection from Ebola, smallpox, and all the rest . . . the warehouses store all of it. So when those gunshots went off that night, Pentagon phones started ringing off the hook.”
“They thought it was a foreign attack?” Zig asked.
“Lemme say it like this,” Elijah said, pulling another Starburst—a yellow one—from the bowl. “Three thousand service members have been killed in Afghanistan—but you tamper with our spare blood or the vaccinations that’re stored in these warehouses? We’d be burying our young men and women by the battalions.”
It made Zig think of those days at Dover when U.S. troops were helping battle Ebola in Liberia. Contaminated bodies weren’t allowed to be sent home. Instead, they were bagged and put in mass graves.
“Crack of dawn the following morning, Mint, Rashida, and I arrived at Grandma’s Pantry. Nola showed up an hour or so later,” Elijah explained, his voice slowing down as he tossed the yellow Starburst back in the bowl, unopened. All his ease was gone, like he was suddenly talking about his own funeral. “Truthfully, it was a pretty standard sweep—examining the blood spatter . . . collecting footage from security cams . . .”
“What did the Marshals—？”
“P.G. and Titus,” Elijah corrected.
“Exactly—what did P.G. and Titus have to say?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? Mint and the rest of us interrogated them for two hours. According to P.G. and Titus, they were simply doing their jobs—facilitating a final father-daughter visit in an SNS storehouse, one of the most secure facilities in the country. The location was a bit odd, but otherwise, it’s standard procedure. But when they started questioning Salty about his missing twenty-two million dollars . . . they said that’s when the old man lost his temper, charging straight at them and trying to grab their guns. In the close confines of the freezer, well . . . you know how these things go. We were just trying to defend ourselves.”
“They were lying,” Roddy said, his focus across the room, at the consultant with the ankle holster.
“Of course they were lying,” Elijah said.
“So what’d they say when you confronted them?” Zig asked.
“It was actually kinda hard to tell, considering P.G. and Titus were both found dead later that same night—facedown in a gravel parking lot of what had to be one of the very last Bennigan’s in the country. Single shots to the temple. Military kills,” Elijah said, putting a finger gun to his own head and pulling the pretend trigger. “Oh, and Salty’s twenty-two million? Right after our interrogation—poof—the twenty-two million suddenly magically disappeared as well.”