Zero Day by David Baldacci is set in Drake county, rural and remote part of West Virginia. Special agent of CID John Puller is sent there to investigate the murders of a Colonel Matthew Reynolds, his wife and teenaged son and daughter in house set in a row of isolated homes. Reynolds was with the Defense Intelligence Agency and so the case is of intense interest to the Army top brass and the FBI.
The murders are extremely professional and it looks like the family was subjected to interrogation before being seated together on a sofa. Even more startling is that the proceedings were probably filmed and transmitted elsewhere. The murders were discovered by the mailman who brought a package to the house, which he dropped while fleeing the house in panic. Now the package is not traceable. A cop guarding the place is found hanged in the basement of the crime scene.
Puller has to work in concert with Sergeant Samantha (Sam) Cole, the local police detective, who more or less heads the force of this small town of 6,000 souls, which is overseen by a sheriff. Puller has a father, Lieutenant General Fighting John Puller, once commander of the legendary 101st Airborne Division, now old and delusional. Puller’s brother was once major in the Air Force who oversaw the nation’s nuclear arsenal, but was now in prison for life, charged with treason.
Cole too has the burden of a brother, Randy, who has yet to take life seriously but in the meanwhile, is preoccupying himself with drink. Puller and Cole try to hold their own even as they have to function as a team. The murder by shooting of a couple inside the house located across from the one where Colonel Reynolds and his family were killed spreads the area of investigation.
Roger Trent is the man who owns almost everything in Drake, from the coal mines to the stores, the bars and the one motel, and has tremendous clout in the place. His right hand man is Bill Strauss. Puller has already had a nasty run-in with Strauss’ son, Dickie, and his friend outside the one bar in the town. It doesn’t make things any easier when it emerges the woman who was found killed in the house opposite the Reynolds’ happened to be a Molly Bitner who worked in Trent’s office.
Zero Day
by David Baldacci
Pan Macmillan
Rs.350