Hostile Witness: A Kate Ford Mystery

by Leigh Adams

  The obituaries gave the story of the attack and Turner’s heroic death just as Kate had heard for years, but the obituaries didn’t link to anything. She’d been able to find no evidence that either Turner or Ozgo had been in Afghanistan at all.

  ***

  Kate didn’t see her father that night and didn’t get to sleep until well after the time she should have. When her alarm clock jerked her awake at six o’clock in the morning, she nearly picked it up and threw it out her bedroom window.

  She got up and threw on a robe. Out in the kitchen, Kate heard the frying pan on the stove burner, the clink of utensils on stoneware, and Jack and Frank talking.

  The two of them looked up when she came in. Jack looked her up and down and shook his head. “That’s nice,” he said. “Get your picture taken just like that.”

  “You’ve got a tuft of hair sticking up right on the top of your head,” Frank said. “It’s like a—”

  “Spout on a whale,” Jack suggested innocently.

  Kate gave him a significant look and took a place at the table. Jack put a coffee cup down in front her of and filled it.

  “You don’t really look ready for prime time,” Jack said. “You want some of this stuff? Grandpa made waffles. In the waffle iron. I told him the freezer stuff would be just as good, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “The freezer stuff is not just as good,” Frank said.

  “There’s also bacon and syrup,” Jack said. “You have no idea how much syrup.”

  Jack started packing up to leave for school. “Did Grandpa tell you? He’s going to substitute tomorrow. My grade but not my class, you know, because of the conflict of interest stuff or whatever that is. It’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  “They think I’ll give you better grades than I give everybody else because you’re my grandson,” Frank said. “Or worse ones.”

  “Whatever.”

  Jack headed to the front door.

  Kate was beginning to feel better. Coffee was medicinal. She turned to her father.

  “Do you really think that’s a good idea? I thought you’d decided to stop substituting.”

  “I’d decided to taper off, Kate. And I am tapering off. I haven’t taken a class in two months. But I’m not gone yet. And I’m very bored. And there’s no sign that I’m going to be the kind—well, you know what I mean.”

  “The kind of dementia patient that gets violent,” Kate said.

  Frank showed no reaction. “On the money. I’ll be fine, Kate. If something happens, it will just be that I get vague or forget where I am. I won’t hurt anybody. And if anybody notices, I won’t get asked back. That’s all.”

  “Eh,” Kate said. She had finished her coffee. She got up and poured herself another cup.

  “You’re one to talk, anyway,” Frank said when she came back to the table. “You must have been up all night. It was after two when I went to bed.”

  “I was trying to find some information,” Kate said. “I know you think the sun rises and sets with the US Army, but it’s impossible to get anything out of them. I know sometimes you don’t want people to get intelligence. But you’d think they’d have some information up somewhere about battles and attacks and that kind of thing, if only so they could give some details to the families if a loved one’s killed.”

  “You’re still asleep,” Frank said. “If you’re saying they should have information on battles fought and attacks suffered publically available, they do.”

  “Really? Because I couldn’t find a thing. I even went to this website called—I don’t remember, something about military history.”

  “The Center for Military History.”

  “That’s the one,” Kate said.

  “The website might have been your problem,” Frank said. “What was it you were looking for?”

  Kate explained about the attack that had killed Turner and four other people and left Ozgo physically wounded and psychologically shattered.

  “I don’t even know what I was looking for,” Kate admitted. “I just wanted to get a feel for what kind of person he’d been before the attack. The attack has to have been the most significant event in his life. So I went looking for an account of it. And then—nothing. Nothing definite, maybe just nothing. Not that there weren’t press accounts. Because there were. Sort of.”

  “What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”

  “Well,” Kate said, “there weren’t any press accounts from the time the thing actually happened. There weren’t any of those stories that go, ‘Today in Afghanistan, an IED killed . . .’ The accounts I could find were all from the time of Turner’s funeral. And they were all just sort of hashes. If you really paid attention, they didn’t make any sense. It was like the reporters wrote them knowing that nobody would ever read them carefully. That’s when I went to the Center for Military History website,” Kate said. “It sounded like the right kind of place. I was a little afraid of the history thing. I thought maybe there wouldn’t be anything as recent as Afghanistan and Iraq. But there was, lots of it. There just wasn’t anything I could find on this particular event.”

  Frank picked up a piece of bacon and contemplated it. “I can think of a number of things that might be going wrong here. The first is that the press accounts, whenever they occurred, were so hashed that you don’t have the information you need to find what you’re looking for. Newspaper reporters being what they are, that’s entirely likely. Especially since all these guys are lazy as hell. The first one reports the wrong town or area and the rest of them just take his stuff and stuff it into their own story. I know you think I’m being a fogey out of Fogey Central when I say the kids today don’t have any sense of honor anymore, about themselves or their jobs or anything else, but this is the kind of thing I mean. And it happens all the time now.”

  “Maybe it happened all the time then, too,” Kate said.

  Frank ignored her. “The other possibility,” he continued, “is that the people running this website are incompetent or lazy or both. Considering the kind of messed up crap that occurs on government websites, it’s hard to remember that the army invented the Internet. The Center for Military History will have an account of that attack. Definitely. Every unit in every branch of the service is required to send reports of everything that happened on their watch to the CMH, and they have to do it every three months.”

  “Every three months? But that’s crazy. There must be mountains of material—”

  “—which take forever to sift through and process and file,” Frank finished. “And although it should be done in a systematic way, there are lots of reasons it might not be. So the first thing is that the Center for Military History will definitely have accounts of that attack. The best thing you can do if you really want to know is to call them. Forget the website. Call them, tell them what you need, let them give you the information.”

  “You mean they’d tell me? Just like that?”

  “Why not? It’s not going to be classified information. And they exist to give people information. They’ve got a public relations officer or a press officer. Go through those. And then—”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something called a serious incident report. SIR. Officers have to file them every time anything happens that might be considered ‘serious.’ By anybody. It’s a low bar for seriousness. And anytime anybody is killed, for any reason, it’s a serious incident. Drown while you’re swimming in the base pool. Have a heart attack at your desk that everybody’s been expecting for years. It doesn’t matter. Somebody dies, somebody has to file an SIR.”

  “That sounds classified,” Kate said.

  “It’s not,” Frank said. “It’s so far from classified, I don’t know where to begin. SIRs go up the chain of command. Everybody sees them. They even go out of military commands and end up in Congress. Especially if a congressperson has a kid in his district who’s killed in the line of duty. They get the reports so they can talk to the families and give them mo
re information than the service is going to give them.”

  “And I can ask for one of these SIRs myself?”

  “You probably could, but since you might not know enough to identify the attack, beyond the fact that it was the one involving Turner, I’ve got a better idea. Turner lived in this congressional district. Your own congressman probably got that SIR at the time, and it’s probably on file somewhere. Call his office and get them to make you a copy.”

  “And they’d do that?”

  “They should,” Frank said. “Senators are one thing, but congressmen live and die by constituent service. You call and you’re a constituent, they’re going to want to do everything they can to make you happy so that you’ll go back and tell all your friends how good they were about making you happy. It’s usually stuff like intervening in problems with Social Security or that kind of thing, but this will operate on the same principle.”

  “The things they don’t teach you in civics class.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “Although, I’ve got to admit, it’s kind of a little odd.”

  “What is?”

  “The fact that nobody seems to have done it already,” Frank said. “It was a big story when Turner died. You’d think one of the reporters would have gotten hold of an SIR. You might want to be a little careful here.”

  “Because this really is classified and it was some kind of special secret operation and—?”

  “You always did have an imagination,” Frank said. “No, if people have been shying away from the story, it’s possible that Turner wasn’t as heroic as he’s been made to appear.”

  “You mean a cover-up.”

  “No,” Frank said. “Look, the army isn’t heartless, not usually. It doesn’t want to hurt people or their families. If some kid didn’t quite make it up to grade, they don’t want his parents feeling like crap. They just . . . let it go. And a lot of times the papers will let it go, too.”

  “Turner had no living parents,” Kate pointed out. “And he was buried at Arlington. Don’t they dig up people and move them when it turns out they didn’t do the stuff that qualified them to be buried there?”

  “You’d better go get ready if you’re going to be on time to meet your new boyfriend and get that reserved seat. If I’ve got some time this afternoon, I’ll go looking for that SIR myself.”

  ***

  Tom was waiting, as usual, in front of the parking lot, and her space was still empty.

  “You know,” Tom said, “it would make a lot more sense if you let me pick you up on the mornings you want to be here. I get to use reserve cop parking, if you get what I mean.”

  “We might not always want to leave at the same time,” Kate said. “You’ve got a professional interest in the case. I might have to leave early.”

  “I might have to leave early myself,” Tom said. “But it’s beside the point.”

  She frowned at the traffic. “Maybe we ought to go over and take our seats. I know you said they were reserved, but—”

  “Let’s do something else. Let’s skip this morning and go have some coffee.”

  Tom took her to a diner built into a shining, aluminum, retro dining car. Kate was sure it wasn’t a holdover from the fifties, though. There was something about it that said . . . yuppie.

  Tom noticed her face and smiled. Then he ushered her over to a booth near a window that looked out onto a busy street and said, “I didn’t have time for breakfast, and I can get a decent omelet here if I insist on whole eggs instead of egg whites and declare my undying devotion to ham. I still can’t get real bacon here—they’ve only got the turkey variety—but I’ll make do. Someday I’d like to be involved in a case that takes place in a town full of truck drivers.”

  “I think you picked the wrong geographical area for that.”

  “Maybe.”

  The waitress came over, and Kate realized she hadn’t had anything but coffee, either. She asked for decaf—no need to make an episode more likely if she didn’t have to—and an English muffin with butter.

  The coffee came immediately. The waitress assured them that both the decaf and the regular were fair trade. She walked away and came back with an English muffin the size of a Frisbee.

  “At least they feed you,” Kate said.

  “This place serves breakfast all day,” Tom said. “The first real diner is ten miles away, and I didn’t want to go that far. Have you been following this case at all since you started coming to the trial?”

  Kate settled in to tell him all about her investigation the night before and her talk with Frank this morning.

  “I think I just wanted some sense of the relationship between Ozgo and Turner. I thought I’d start with the attack because I thought it would be the easiest thing to find material on, and it turned out to be no material at all.”

  “Your father was in the military and he doesn’t think that was odd at all?”

  “He does think it’s sort of odd,” Kate said, “but not odd-odd, if you get what I mean. Sometimes I think I’m making problems where they don’t exist just to have something to do. I had no idea how hard it would be to stay home and do nothing.”

  “It would make me absolutely insane,” Tom said. “But here’s what I want to know. Ozgo is obviously so mentally impaired he belongs in an institution. Why is there a trial at all?”

  “I used to wonder if Chan wasn’t in love with Ozgo,” Kate said, “but now that I’ve seen him, I don’t think it would be possible.”

  “The official story is that Ozgo was a friend of Turner’s in Afghanistan, a kind of mentor relationship. So, after Ozgo got out of the hospital, he showed up at Chan’s door, and she took pity on him for Turner’s sake and took him in.”

  “That actually is plausible,” Kate said.

  “To an extent,” Tom said. “But it always has seemed to me to be a little extreme. Yes, give the guy some money. Maybe even let him live in one of the outbuildings. But the department looked into that relationship, and it was almost like they were married, minus the sex part. We don’t think there was any sex. But they stuck together—or rather Chan stuck to Ozgo like they were Siamese twins.”

  “Huh,” Kate said.

  “I have a crazy idea of why you can’t find any information, though,” Tom said. “Maybe somebody hacked the military records.”

  Kate shook her head. “You can’t just hack the military records,” she said. “You could probably hack something like that military history website I told you about, but anything the military was doing for itself, anything that might in any way involve classified information—they don’t even use the same Internet we do. They’ve got an entirely separate system just for themselves and the people they work with. That’s how I got into so much trouble at work. I tried to access the regular Internet on a computer that was dedicated to military use only. I could have compromised the entire defense system.”

  “So why’d you do it?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time?” Kate tried. Then she shook her head. “I got hit out of the blue with a firewall and a tripwire of a kind I’d never seen except on military files, and I got so carried away looking for answers that I didn’t stop to think about the consequences. The next thing I knew . . .” Kate shrugged. “When I came across a military-grade tripwire, I thought that the Robotix files could actually be military files themselves, and I shouldn’t have had them on my office computer. I think the reality is probably that Robotix is run by a flaming paranoid.”

  “That would work, too,” Tom said. “What I’d like to know is why so much of the file on the Hamilton-Ozgo case is missing.”

  “Missing how?”

  “Missing as in not available for the rest of us to look at. Usually, case files are all over the place: in the office of the presiding officer, at the DA’s office, on every computer in the building. There’s nothing secret about case files. We’re not even legally allowed to keep things secret. We’ve got to hand over everything we know to the defense c
ounsel in a process called ‘discovery.’ If we don’t hand over everything we know and the guy’s convicted, any judge worth her robes will throw the case out and make us start all over again. But there’s a ton of stuff out there that has just gone missing, including all the stuff on the arson.”

  “Oh,” Kate said. “That’s—”

  The sound of the opening chords of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 cut through her thought, and Kate grabbed her bag off the seat beside her.

  “That’s my phone,” she said.

  She looked at the number. It wasn’t familiar.

  Kate opened the phone. “Hello?” she said.

  “Oh,” a mousy little voice said, as if she were surprised to find somebody speaking on the line. “Oh. Is this Ms. Ford? Kate?”

  “This is Kate Ford,” Kate said.

  “Oh, I’m so glad. And I’m so glad I caught you. We’ve met a few times, but you probably don’t remember me. This is Betsy Hare at the Rappahannock Pie Hole. You remember the Rappahannock Pie Hole? You come in every once in a while with your father and your son. Your son always has six hot dogs.”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “I remember your shop.”

  “Yes, well,” Betsy said. “I got your phone number off Mr. Ford’s cell phone. Not that I usually take customers’ cell phones, of course, but in this case, I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t want to call the police. That wouldn’t be nice for Mr. Ford or for you, and you’re very good customers. And, anyway, I’m not sure the police would have been the right people to call. And an ambulance wouldn’t make much sense either. I didn’t know what to do. So I took his cell phone and found your number and tried it to see if you were in. And here you are, you see, so I guess I did the right thing.”

  Kate closed her eyes and counted to ten. “Is there something wrong with my father?”

  “But that’s the problem. It’s hard to tell, isn’t it?”

  “All right,” Kate said. “What exactly is it that’s happening?”

  “He’s here, sitting in a booth. He’s been here since at least eight thirty. I don’t mind that, of course. We haven’t been particularly busy, and he’s been drinking coffee. And he’s a very nice man, as a rule. But about forty-five minutes ago, he started to talk. Out loud. Not very loud, you understand, it’s not that he’s making a fuss or anything, but he keeps talking. I went over and asked him if there was anything I could do for him, but it’s as if he couldn’t really see me.”