“I assume you know who painted this?” Roddy asked.
Zig motioned to the bottom corner of the painting, which had a signature line in white block letters: NBrown.
“When was this painted? It looks old,” Zig said, though it wasn’t just from the outdated computer monitor. The art itself . . . the soldiers at the center—it looked more . . . rudimentary than Nola’s usual paintings.
“When she was Artist-in-Residence, you know what her job was, right?”
“She painted disasters.”
“Sometimes disasters, sometimes total horrors, sometimes the mundane,” Roddy explained, shaking his leg like it was asleep again. For over a century, the Army had had a painter on staff documenting the country’s greatest battles. “Five years ago, when they hired Nola as Artist-in-Residence, the Army told her she could go wherever she wanted—Afghanistan, Syria, anywhere. War painters get full clearance. In fact, on the day this painting was created, a Pave Hawk Medevac helicopter crashed in Bahrain. Eight service members, including three doctors and a reporter, were killed. Time magazine made a cover story of it.”
Zig remembered the story—and the bodies when they came through Dover. Zig had worked on the copilot, a Marine, whose head was cracked open like an eggshell. Zig spent nine hours wiring the man’s skull together, then personally polished his wedding ring, which somehow had gotten looped onto a cracked rib. When they presented the ring to the Marine’s family, his wife threw it back in Zig’s face, screaming that this wouldn’t bring back her dead husband.
“Why’re you telling me this?” Zig asked.
“That Medevac story was impossible to ignore. It was national news. Most war painters would’ve headed straight to Bahrain. Instead, for some reason, on one of Nola’s first days on the job, she headed here.” He pointed at the painting.
“Grandma’s Pantry,” Zig said.
“This was one of the very first pieces of artwork she painted.”
Zig took another look. “So what was the mission in Grandma’s Pantry?”
“It’s the title of the painting. But recognize any of the soldiers?”
Zig looked closer at the painting. The soldier sitting at the desk—his face was in profile. But his forehead . . . his hairline . . .
Mothertrucker. “Lieutenant Colonel Mint?”
Roddy swiped to a new photo—the back of the canvas, where Nola always ID’d her subjects. Onscreen, three names were handwritten in block lettering:
Archie Mint
Rashida Robinson
Elijah King
“From what I could find, all three were in the same unit,” Roddy explained, swiping back to the painting and enlarging the photo to enhance the logo on Mint’s jacket. A hand grabbing two lightning bolts. Semper Vigiles.
“Army Security Agency,” Roddy explained, again checking over his shoulder. This time, the street was quiet. “Dates back to World War II, where they did high-end investigative work—top secret and above—stuff they didn’t even trust to the Army intel folks. Oddly, the unit was supposedly disbanded after the Cold War.”
“Yet here they are, doing an investigation big enough that it made Nola ignore the number-one military story in the country, just so she could come see it,” Zig said as Roddy again made that Mhmm sound. He didn’t have to say anything else. Whatever Nola was chasing all those years ago and whatever Mint was investigating—their paths crossed here, at a place called Grandma’s Pantry, a military location whose real specialty so far seemed to be making high-end secrets disappear.
“What about Rashida and Elijah?” Zig said, referring to the other two soldiers in the painting. “Have you tried reaching out to them?”