A Knife Edge (28 page)

“What about the disk—the one I sent you an MPEG copy of?”

“The FBI found Dr. Spears's DNA all over the envelope's seal. I heard someone say it was almost like she'd gone down on the thing. If she didn't want people to know she'd sent it, you'd think someone with her experience would have been a bit more careful.”

“Yeah, you would,” I agreed. “Have they located her?”

“Don't know.”

I let all this sink in. There was silence on the line. After a few moments, I said, “Has a statement from Al Cooke turned up yet?”

“Who's Cooke?”

“The cook on the
Natusima.
You remember, Dr. Tanaka—”

“You're not on that one anymore, Vin.”

“I knew you'd say that, Arlen. Has it turned up?”

“I don't know.”

“Listen, can you get some bank statements—”

“No.”

I told him whose statements I wanted. Arlen was surprised, but he agreed to see what he could do.

“You're a pal,” I said.

“I know. And, by the way, Happy New Year,” he said.

“Thanks, Arlen. Back at you.”

“So, what did you end up doing last night to see in the New Year?”

“Went to this noisy little restaurant in Pensacola. You?” I enjoyed a quick flashback to Clare on top, rocking back and forth, massaging my naked torso with honey as she licked her fingers.

“Sat at my desk along with everyone else in Washington and made phone calls.”

“Any of them involve heavy breathing at least?”

“No. So, did Anna get through to you? She said she'd tried and was going to try again later.”

Anna had tried to call? I didn't believe it. The hotel I'd stayed in wasn't in a dead zone—the call from Boris before sunrise proved that. Was she just paving the way for an excuse? “I didn't hear from her.”

“Oh, yeah, the other big news… my promotion came through. You can call me Lieutenant Colonel now.”

“That's great, buddy. Congratulations.”

“Sir…” said Arlen.

“What?”

“Congratulations,
sir.”

“Blow me.
Sir,”
I said.

“No thanks,” Arlen said.

“So, how's Anna doing?” I asked, fishing.

“Good, I think,” Arlen said. “We didn't talk much. She said she wanted to talk to you. Told me to tell you that if she didn't get through to you, she'd call again in a few days.”

“ Uh-huh.”

“Everything OK?” he asked, picking up on something in my tone. Crushing guilt, most like.

“Yep, all copacetic,” I said.

“OK. Hey, gotta go,” said Arlen, distracted. There was the sudden noise in the background of several people in the room with him, all talking at once. “Drop by tomorrow.”

“Will do. See you then.”

“Sir.”

“What?”

“See you then,
sir.”

“Fuck you.
Sir.”

I hit the off button, but not before Arlen beat me to it. He was enjoying himself.

Hand-delivered orders, a call from Andrews in the form of Arlen to make sure I got them—something big was up. I glanced
at the envelope in my hand. I tore the side off it, removed the folded sheets of paper, and ran my eye over the legalspeak. As usual, much of the letter was a form, reminding me that as I held a commission, I had numerous legal responsibilities to my commander in chief, the President. Basically, these were that I had to do what he said. Distilling out all the wheretofores, therebys, and hereins left me with the demand to get my ass to the Pentagon no later than tomorrow, where I was to present myself in Class A uniform to Captain Charles Schaeffer at my old Pentagon address. OSI, DoD, OSI, and now back to DoD. I was going back and forth like a badminton birdie. What gives? I wondered. And why make such a big deal about the dress code? Chip and I weren't exactly strangers. The written orders held no clues. There was no point giving it any thought—as Arlen had said, I'd find out soon enough. That didn't stop me feeling annoyed. I'd been yanked off the Tanaka case before bringing it to a successful conclusion, and it looked like the Ruben Wright case was going to go the same way.

I tossed the paperwork on the desk and leaned back in the chair, a number of competing thoughts running through my head. I wondered why Anna said she'd called me when she hadn't. Was her intuition picking up on my movements, particularly the ones beneath the sheets with a certain colonel?

I needed some air. I picked my way through the electrical gear and the records spread around that was all that remained of Ruben Wright, and went outside. While the early-afternoon sun had begun its downhill slide to the horizon, it still held some warmth out of the breeze. I thought about Freddie Spears. She must have wanted to be connected to the disk. So why the theatrics?

I walked out into the parking lot. The Harley-Davidson caught my eye. I rode one for a few years out of school. Mine had been held together with gum and wire, so it was nothing like this one. This baby was low at the back with raked forks out front and just enough chrome to ensure the job of keeping it all
polished up was never quite finished. Its bright crimson gas tanks reminded me of hard candy and looked good enough to lick.

There were plenty of Harleys running around the base, but something about this one told me it was Ruben Wright's. Maybe it was the two thousand miles on the clock. Or maybe it was the fact that I'd seen the paperwork for it in his files. Seeing the bike reminded me that I had a single day to resolve, as much as I was able, what happened to Ruben and why.

I went back inside to hunt for a few specific items I'd seen listed with the bike on the breakdown of Ruben's effects. I found some of the items in the third box I opened. One was a digital Handycam. The batteries still held some juice. I fired it up and checked its folders. Empty. The other item was an Apple PowerBook. I pressed the start button and waited for it to boot up. I don't know what I expected to find, but whatever it was it wasn't there. Aside from a bunch of old nineties hits burned into iTunes, it was completely devoid of documents, e-mails, photos, movies. There was nothing.

I replaced the Handycam and computer in the box, disappointed. I wandered out of my office in search of Agent Lyne. I found him in a back room.

“Do you know if Colonel Selwyn's around?” I asked, leaning on the doorway. I had some news for her she might not like. Or maybe that was my ego talking. Would she care that I was leaving town? Maybe she'd strike up the band.

Agent Lyne ignored me. I called louder. “Yo, Lloyd!”

Nothing. I became aware of a distant sound that reminded me of chipmunks rioting before I saw the little white iPod buds in his ears. He had the volume turned way up. I tapped him on the shoulder, which made him jump. He turned and pulled out the buds.

“Don't think much of your old pal's taste in music,” he yelled. “Full of nineties crap.”

I gestured at him to hand it over. He shrugged and pulled the
unit from his breast pocket. It was new, of course, and top of the line. I toured the playlists—Aerosmith, Metallica, Hootie and the Blowfish, LL Cool J, U2, Matchbox 20. I didn't share Lyne's problem with Ruben's music taste. On a hunch, I checked its settings. It didn't contain many songs—one hundred at most. Not enough to account for all the memory used. I checked the video folder. Empty.

I backtracked into my office, restarted the PowerBook, jacked in the iPod, and waited for everything to fire up. The icon for the iPod appeared on the computer's screen. Ruben had titled it “Sgt. Rock.” Cute. I double-clicked it and a window appeared. Inside the window there was a folder titled “Bitch.” In the folder were a large number of MPEGs and JPEGs. Each MPEG was dated. Ruben must have stored them here so they couldn't be played on the iPod's screen. I opened the MPEG with the earliest date, taken close enough to seven weeks ago. The clip opened on a slow pan along a beach, empty except for a few joggers. It was not a sunny day by the looks of things. Then the camera zoomed in on something a long way in the distance. After what seemed a moment of hesitation, the camera had come in for an even closer look. I could now make out more detail. It was a couple making out on the sand. They were dry humping each other. The person on top rolled off. I recognized the person on the bottom first. The red hair gave her away. Her dance partner turned briefly toward the camera. It was Staff Sergeant Butler. He unzipped his fly and extracted his erection, which McDonough shoved down her throat with the gusto of a plumber trying to unblock a drain. The show ended prematurely. Counting back the weeks, the recording would have been made at around the time Ruben first tried to change his will. Given that I don't believe in coincidences, the timing was at least suggestive.

I watched the other MPEGs and opened the photos. The dates on the files indicated Ruben had his girlfriend and Staff Sergeant Butler under close observation for the ensuing eight-week period leading up to his death. There were even a couple
of MPEGs taken through the lens of a night-vision monocle, McDonough and Butler looking as green as tree frogs as they slid around on each other in the backseat of her Chevy.

So which hypothesis did this discovery support?

“The colonel is in, sir,” said Lyne, breaking in on my train of thought.

“What? Sorry, who?”

“Colonel Selwyn. You asked earlier whether the colonel was in. Well, she's in.”

“OK, thanks,” I said. I had to tell her I was leaving town. And there were also the discoveries found on Ruben's iPod. The old good-news, bad-news thing. I wondered what she'd want to hear first.

G
ive me the bad,” Clare said, a realist. Her hair was pulled back off her face in a tight ponytail, accentuating her strong cheekbones. She was dressed in BDUs. I found it impossible not to think about what she might be wearing under them. A framed photo of her son sat on her desk, his innocent, big brown eyes following me. Sorry, kid.

“I'm leaving tomorrow,” I said, straight out. “Orders.”

“And the good?” she replied, without the slightest flicker of regret evident. Clare Selwyn wasn't the type who'd be standing on a train platform waving anyone good-bye with a tear-sodden hanky, unless it was her son.

“That doesn't bother you? The fact that I'm leaving?” I said.

“Of course I'm disappointed. The sex was pretty good, but this is the Air Force.” She shrugged. “What can you do?”

The sex was pretty good.
Pretty
good? I'd have said
amazing.

“So, the good news?” she asked again, this time with a frown.

I took her through the discoveries on Wright's iPod by showing her, loading the QuickTime MPEGs up on her computer. “So what do you think?” I said when we'd gone through them all.

“I think you should spend your last evening in Fort Walton Beach with me,” she said, using that command tone of hers.

“For some more of that
pretty
good sex?”

“Who said anything about sex, Vin? I'm just talking about a
home-cooked meal. You're probably not going to get one of those for a while. And maybe we can talk about the case.”

“Sure,” I said. She was toying with me. Cat-and-mouse might be another of Clare's little games. The thought of having dinner with her was a distraction. It took a moment or two to lift my head out of her pantry and get back to Ruben Wright. “The further I get into this case, the more I'm wondering about the other side,” I said.

“What other side? What do you mean?”

I stood and walked to the window. There were clouds in the sky now, white on top and gray beneath as if they couldn't decide which sort to be. “Right from the get-go we both believed the most likely scenario was that someone who jumped with Ruben cut him out of his harness. Butler seemed our best suspect because of the flashlight and his injuries.”

Clare nodded. “I've just completed the tests on that flashlight, by the way. The red lens material you recovered near the crime scene belonged to it.”

“So no surprises there,” I said. “On the face of it, you'd have to say Butler's our man. Except…”

“…except for what we now know about Master Sergeant Ruben Wright.”

“Yeah.” I made the points on my fingers. “One: He had MS, a fact he'd kept from the Air Force. It was the aggressive variety, so he didn't have long till the Air Force evened the score and had him medically discharged. Two: He'd discovered his girlfriend was saucing Butler's sausage. Three: The ultimate insult to a guy like Ruben—he discovered that McDonough was pregnant with Butler's kid. My guess is that it might even have been Butler who gave him the news. Four: Amy McDonough was the sole beneficiary of Ruben's will, a will he tried to change at a time that roughly coincided with the date of the first home movie of Butler and McDonough making like turtles up the beach.”

“So now you think that perhaps Ruben Wright, to get back at his cheating girlfriend and the English staff sergeant, killed himself in such a way as to frame Butler in the role of perp?”

“A reach, isn't it?”

Clare gave a noncommittal shrug. “Like you, I think I'm almost convinced enough not to be totally convinced about murder.”

“There are a couple of other issues I don't have answers to,” I said.

“And they are?”

“Ruben never did get around to changing his will. It would help to know why. I also want to know where he kept his MS drugs. The fact that we haven't found them means that he either disposed of them on the morning of the day he died, or they were kept someplace secret and we just haven't located them yet.”

“What would be the significance of him getting rid of them?”

“If he dumped his medications, then a reasonable conclusion would be he knew he wasn't coming back. The fact that we haven't found them could also mean that he didn't want anyone to know he was on medication for MS. We might never find them.”

Clare nodded. “Hmm…”

“Would an autopsy have told you he had MS?” I asked.

“Perhaps, if we knew we were looking for it,” Clare said. “But a human body that hits the ground at around a hundred miles an hour ain't pretty. Organs are practically liquefied on impact. Finding something as subtle as reduced myelin on cranial nerves would be kinda iffy.”