Sweepers

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Having pancreatic cancer might have had something to do with that,” von Rensel observed.

  “Yes, indeed, and we’re sorry that he passed away. But Warren Beasely was not the kind of guy this JAG had in mind for the liaison job. I’m told that you, on the other hand, are not unused to working off-line?”

  Train smiled noncommittally. “I think Admiral Carpenter and I reached an understanding during my reporting-aboard call, Captain,” he replied. “I hope to make myself useful.

  I was pleased to find that he seems to know exactly what he wants’from people.”

  “Oh, yes, he certainly does that. You may not be aware that he’s short-listed for a judgeship on the Court of Military Appeals. So he’s being especially careful these days, which is probably why he’s having Karen look into whatever this is all about.”

  “Oh, supposedly Captain Mccarty will be in touch with you about all this,” Karen said.

  Pennington sat back. “Ah, the chain of command. Better late than never, I suppose. Okay. Mr. von Rensel, since you’re replacing Beasely, you might as well take over his cube. The yeoman will set you up.” Thank you, Captain,” von Rensel said. He nodded at Karen and backed out of the captain’s office, being careful not to knock any walls down. Karen remained behind.

  “So,” Pennington continued. “In the meantime , you will be acting on private instructions. As before.”

  “Yes, sir,” Karen said. She had done one other investigatory assignment for Admiral Carpenter, involving a seale had sent her after the Tailhook scandal. She had information on three individuals, but she had never learned how that information had been used or what, if anything, had happened to them, or why he wanted it in the first place.

  That also was vintage Carpenter.

  “And no shipping-over lectures?” Pennington asked gently.

  She smiled. “Not this time. Although I suspect he has some high hopes that this kind of assignment might change my mind about leaving.”

  “I can’t imagine the admiral being so devious,” Pennington said with a straight face, and then they both laughed.

  “I’m not going away mad, Captain,” she reminded him. “I’m just going away. The Navy’s been terrific. Oh, okay, not always terrific, but certainly far more interesting than doing corporate law or political flack work here in D.C. It’s just that with Frank gone, the fun’s gone out of it. I’m forty four years old, no kids, no family to speak of.

  Going on with the career just seemed … pointless.”

  Pennington nodded sympathetically. “The only observation I can offer is that your Navy work could at least fill the void for a while.” He paused to let her consider that, but she said nothing. “Qkay. Get on with whatever he’s got you doing this time. And I’ll pretend to be appropriately surprised when Mccarty calls down.”

  She gave him her best smile. “Thanks, Captain.”

  She checked her voice mail when she got back to her cubicle, but there were no messages. Frank had often called her during the day, usually leaving a mildly obscene message or a two-line joke on her voice mail.

  And yet, try as she might, she could not quite sustain a perfect halo of love and remembrance around her late husband because of that nagging detail that nobody wanted to talk about: why Frank had been at that hotel in the first place. The question that would not go away. And the roaring silence that followed whenever she asked the question, along with the inescapable conclusion that perhaps her whole marriage to that congenial, successful, and ostensibly loving man had been a sham.

  She sighed and placed a call to Sherman’s office. She was put on hold.

  Then there was a click. “Admiral Sherman.”

  “Admiral, thank you for taking a moment. I wanted to let you know that I’ll be calling the Fairfax County Police this afternoon to see ‘what I can find out about their investigation. Basically, my tasking is to find out if they are going to continue with it or declare victory and go home.”

  “That sounds reasonable,. Commander,” he said. “It wasn’t exactly clear after the meeting what they were going to do. ” t

  “No, sir, it wasn’t.

  Anyway, I’m going to be in contact with them, low-level sort of thing.

  They may choose, of course, not to give me the time of day.”

  “That would tell you something, wouldn’t it?” He was silent for a moment. “Look,” he said. “I’m going over to her house this evening.”

  There was another short silence on the line. “To Elizabeth’s house,” he continued. “Elizabeth Walsh. I’ve got this need to see where it happened-her accident. I don’t know if that makes any sense-“

  “Yes, actually, I do understand, Admiral,” she interrupted. “Frank, my husband, had a heart attack in a hotel lobby.” She heard a sharp intake of breath, although Sherman said nothing. “I got to him in the hospital, but he never … surfaced, as they put it. A week later, I found myself standing in that hotel lobby. There was nothing to see, of course, but I felt that need just to, well, go there.”

  “Yes, exactly. I can’t explain it, either,” he said. There was a thread of relief in his voice. “Elizabeth and I weren’t married, of course, but we were pretty close. I’m having trouble with this notion that she just fell down the stairs.

  Anyway, if you’re going to try to get some info on what happened, you might want to see the uh, scene, as it were.”

  She tried to think if there was any reason not to go there.

  Then she agreed.

  “Okay,” he said. He gave her the address. “That’s in Reston. Do you live in northern Virginia?”

  “Yes, sir. Great Falls.”

  “Oh. Okay. I live in Mclean.” He gave I her directions, then told her he still had a key.

  That was interesting, she thought. She wondered if the police knew that.

  “I can find it,” she said. What time will you be there?”

  “I’m supposed to be at Mrs. Klein’s house-she’s next door, on the left, as you face it-at seven this evening. Let me give you her phone number.” she copied it down. “Will Mrs. Klein be going into the house with you, Admiral?” she asked.

  “She might, although I haven’t asked her. But I thought that would be a good idea. Or maybe You can, I don’t know.

  But I’m just thinking I shouldn’t be in there by myself just now.”

  “Yes, sir, that probably wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  There was another moment of silence. “Right. Okay, I’ll see you there.

  I’ll be in civvies, by the way.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll see you there.”, She hung up, wondering if she should tell von Renset about this. She looked out of her cubicle, but he wasn’t in sight. She asked the yeoman where Mr. von Rensel had gone.

  “Anywhere he wants,” the yeoman said with a grin.

  “Actually, into the checkin pipe, Commander. Building pass, parking pass, Opnav security briefing, then Crystal City for the other stuff.

  Probably be back tomorrow-if he’s lucky.”

  Okay, so much for that, she thought, wheeling her chair back into her cubicle. We’ll just have to go meet the admiral on our own.

  Train von Rensel waited patiently in the line for parking passes down on the Pentagon concourse. After nearly twenty-five years in the federal and military bureaucracy, he was resigned to the all-day routine of checking into a new organization. As the line shuffled forward, he reviewed his first meeting with Admiral Carpenter. The old man had pulled no punches about his disappointment with Train’s predecessor.

  Only the onset of a terminal disease had prevented Beasely from getting fired outright back to NIS.

  Train had been just as direct: NIS had sent Beasely in the first place because, at the time, NIS had been at war with Opnav, as the Navy’s headquarters staff was known. Carpenter had then shared his perspectives on the new political situation.

  “Your boss and I have made a deal. NIS and Opnav need to bury the hatchet somewhere besides between our r
espective shoulder blades. In effect, we’ve signed a peace treatyshared computer network and database systems, much closer coordination between their investigations and our field attorneys. Your assignment is part of this. Your boss promised me a player. You’ll work directly for me. You’ll be stashed in Investigations Review, which is about as bland as we get here in JAG.

  Does that square with what you’ve been told?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve been detailed to be your freelancer, with complete access to the top people in NIS.”

  “And I see you’ve worked in Naval Intelligence, with a secondment to the FBI. So I can presume you know your way around town?”

  “Reasonably well, Admiral. Always learning new and interesting things, though.”

  Carpenter had smiled at that response. Any Washington old hand who thought he had seen it all was, by definition, not yet an old hand. This business ‘with the homicide cop was another matter. Commander Lawrence was right: That cop didn’t really appear to want the admiral for the death of Elizabeth Walsh; otherwise, the meeting would have been in a much smaller room with much brighter lights. And yet they obviously felt that the Walsh woman had met with more than just an accident. And that homicide cop was interesting: not what Train would have expected from a county police force, even in the upscale northern Virginia area. He would have pegged Mcnair for an FBI guy, or maybe even Treasury.

  He looked at his watch. This was Tuesday. Whole thing would probably blow over by the end of the week, which is when he might, if he was lucky, also be done with admin checkin. And he had thought NIS admin was bad Karen arrived early in Reston, having misjudged the traffic, and parked across the street to wait. The town houses were tastefully done, with sculpted front gardens and mature trees interspersed with faux gaslights. Sitting alone in, the car, of depression watching commuting husbands and wives driving by on their way home, she felt the familiar wave , approaching.

  Karen had been born and raised in the Washington, D C., area, moving around the city and its suburbs as her parents’ careers prospered. Her mother had been a special-education teacher who worked in both the private and Oublic school systems. Her father, now drifting peacefully in a Chevy Chase nursing home, had been an attorney with the Federal Power Commission for thirty years, which is how Karen had come to meet J. Franklin Lawrence.

  Marriage to Frank had come much later in life than she had ever planned, after she had already spent ten years in the Navy’s JAG corps. She had been thirty-four, Frank ten years older. He, had been divorced for three years ac when they met at a weekend barbecue at her parents’ place in Chevy Chase. Frank had been interesting, funny, wealthy, and desperately lonely, although it had taken some time for him to reveal that. She had just been selected for lieutenant commander and assigned to the Navy headquarters staff at the Pentagon for the first time. She had met several really great guys in the Navy over the years, but by the time she met Frank, she was profoundly aware of what the typical Navy marriage entailed: months of separation, perpetual money problems, and increasingly intense career pressures.

  Frank the civilian had been a perfect fit. Her only real disappointment was not having had children, but they had both agreed from the outset that neither their careers nor their respective ages would be very suitable for child rearing. She had been old enough to keep her own counsel on this subject, and she had to admit that their well-to-do lifestyle had assuaged whatever sense of loss she had experienced along the way. Now that Frank was gone, she reluctantly acknowledged an almost guilty sense of relief that she was not facing the prospect of raising teenagers without a father.

  She looked at her watch. It read 6:45. She felt somewhat conspicuous sitting alone in her car on a residential street at twilight, flanked by a row of town houses on either side.

  She really missed the after-work routine, and she realized how much she had been just going through the motions over this past year. She looked over at the single dark town house, one in from the corner, and thought about Elizabeth Walsh, coming home of a Friday evening, settling into her own routine, resigned perhaps to -living alone but probably missing the dashing, young Admiral Sherman, and then falling down the damn stairs and breaking her neck. What a way to end the week, she thought irreverently. Damn, I’ve been in Washington too long.

  She wondered about the new guy from NIS, von Rensel.

  Bet he could run an effective interrogation, she mused. All he would have to do would be to stand up and stretch a couple of times and I’d sing like a bird. She checked her watch again. She wasn’t quite sure if von Rensel was supposed to be her partner in this matter or just a backstop. She would have to find out how well he knew his way around town and the Pentagon. Mccarty had mentioned something about his having worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence.

  Von Rensel was completely different from Sherman, who was a tall, dark, and handsome type, if ever she had seen one-the picture of a Navy success story. Right. Here he was, in his first year as a flag officer and involved, however tangentially, in a Fairfax County homicide investigation.

  Congratulations of! that fine promotion, Admiral, sir; may we have a few minutes of your time?

  She looked at, her watch again. Eight more minutes. He would probably drive up at the stroke of seven. She wondered again about Elizabeth Walsh, what she had looked like. And why there was not even a mention of a family in the admiral’s biography. What had he said at the meeting with the police-that he had told her from the start that he did not want to get married? No, he had said “remarry.”

  “I did not want to remarry, ever.” So he had been married once. She wondered about all that vehemence. A flare of headlights in her mirror announced his arrival, and she got out of her car.

  “Commander,” he said formally.

  “Admiral Sherman,” she replied, nodding. She had almost saluted. He locked his car and they went across the street. As they approached the corner town house, its front door opened and a short elderly lady with bright white hair came out and down the stairs. She met Sherman at the sidewalk.

  “Tag,” she said emotionally. They embraced for a MOMENT, then stepped apart so that Sherman could make introductions. Mrs. Klein looked over at Karen and nodded a greeting; then she looked back at Sherman with an unspoken question on her lips.

  “Commander Lawrence is a Navy lawyer,” he explained.

  “She is going to try to find out what the police have found out. I want to go into Elizabeth’s house. I still have a key.

  When we’re done, I’d like to come back and talk to youunless you want to come with us?”

  “No, Tag,” Mrs. Klein said, shaking her head. “I don’t want to go in there anymore-The police have been there.

  They just took down all that awful yellow tape this morning.

  This is just so terrible. I can’t believe it happened. I miss her so much.”

  “I know, Dottie. I do, too. We won’t be, long. I just had to come see.

  I’m having a hard time accepting all this.”

  Mrs. Klein kept shaking her head from side to side. She fished a handkerchief out of her sleeve. “I just don’t understand. Why her? She was so young. And such a good person. It doesn’t make any sense. But you go ahead. I’ll make us some coffee.”

  “Thanks, Dottie.”

  Mrs. Klein walked back up her front steps and went inside. Sherman produced the key to the adjacent town house and went up and unlocked the front door. The mailbox was stuffed with what looked like mostly junk mail, -with m ore on the foyer floor, and he gathered it up before stepping inside. Karen followed him in. He turned on the light in the front hall. The air was slightly musty, with a faint hint of perfume.

  Karen looked around while he turned on some more lights. Fairly standard town house layouq carpeted stairs on the left going up to the second floor. A hallway straight ahead, leading back to the kitchen, and a spacious living room to the right. She noticed that the living room was devoid of the clutter of everyday life, which meant that, li
ke many city commuters who lived alone, Elizabeth Walsh had Orobably lived in her kitchen. She followed him back through the living room and dining room and into the kitchen, which had a breakfast nook overlooking a walled garden in back. He was walking around the kitchen, turning on every light. She had been right: The kitchen table was stacked with mail and magazines, a phone, and Day-Timer book; there was a small and very cluttered desk and a television.

  “It even feels empty,” he said, sweeping his eyes around the room. Karen felt like an interloper. “Yes, it does,” she said. “I can wait in the living room, if you’d like, Admiral.”

  No,” he answered quickly. “No. I’m not sure why I’m doing this. I guess I don’t really believe it yet.” He looked at a door next to the refrigerator. “That goes downstairs.”

  Karen didn’t know what to say to that. After a minute of looking around the kitchen again, he went over to the door, opened it, and flipped on the light.

  “What’s down there?” Karen asked, already pretty much knowing the answer.

  “Finished basement: family room, fireplace, wet bar.

  Storage rooms, utility room.”

  “And the laundry?”

  He turned to look at her with a peculiar expression on his face. “Well, no, not really. I mean, yes, there’s a laundry room down there. But she didn’t use it. Couldn’t see the sense of hauling clothes up and down two flights of stairs, so she had one of those over/under was I her-dryer units put in upstairs about a year after her divorce.”

  She frowned, remembering his reaction when the policeman had mentioned laundry. “So why was she carrying a laundry basket full of clothes?”

  “Yes,” he replied, frowning. “Why indeed?”

  He turnedaway and started down the stairs, with Karen following reluctantly behind him, unsure of what they would see down there. He flipped on a second light switch at the top of the stairwell, which turned on recessed overhead lights downstairs. He stopped halfway down when he saw the chalk outline of a human figure on the carpet below, just beyond the landing. No mistaking what that was, she thought as they resumed their way down the stairs. Karen noticed that the stairs were steep but fully carpeted, with handrails on either side. There was a long green scrape mark on the left side wall about halfway down, and a dent in the wallboard that had been circled in chalk.