Hostile Witness: A Kate Ford Mystery

by Leigh Adams

  “Jack went out to the park with the Kramer kid,” Frank said as Kate sat down. “I gave him a ten in case he wanted to get something to eat.”

  “You sound like you were trying to get rid of him.”

  “I wanted to talk to you for a bit.”

  Frank put a plate of eggs, bacon, and buttered toast in front of Kate. Kate stared at it as if food were a novel concept she was never going to get used to.

  Frank sat down across the table. “Tom was worried about you,” he said. “And I think maybe he had reason.”

  “I really wasn’t doing anything all that crazy,” Kate said. “I was just asking some questions. And, you know, checking the computer at work.”

  “Checking the Department of Defense computer?” Frank said.

  “I was thinking we maybe shouldn’t talk about that,” Kate said. “I could get you into a lot of trouble.”

  “And it would be a terrible thing for a man of my age to spend the rest of his days under investigation on felony security charges.”

  Kate coughed and kept her eyes on her toast.

  Frank sat there for a while, drinking coffee. Kate didn’t look at him.

  “You know,” he said finally, “I meant what I said last night. I really didn’t mean for you to run around acting like Nancy Drew. Or that other character . . . the Agatha Christie woman . . .”

  “Miss Marple,” Kate said. “I’m not old enough to be Miss Marple.”

  “You’re old enough to get yourself killed if you act like an idiot.”

  “I’m less worried about getting killed than I am about ending up in jail,” Kate said.

  Frank harrumphed. “We’ve got plywood where the glass used to be in the living room,” he pointed out.

  “You were the one who thought I should look into this.”

  “I thought you should look into this the way reporters do,” Frank said. “I thought you’d look into the obvious things and write an op-ed or something. Not get yourself into classified files.”

  “You know,” Kate said innocently, “I never actually told you I did that. If anybody asks you what I said, the best you could do was tell them I went in to use the computers at work, and most of the computers at work aren’t linked to the United States government.”

  “I don’t really think that’s the most sensible response to my concerns, Kate.”

  Kate took an enormous swallow of coffee and shrugged. “It probably doesn’t make any difference anymore,” she said. “Tom wants me to back off and shut up, and my guess is that’s going to mean no more free rides into the courtroom on his reserved passes. And without a pass, I’m not getting into that courtroom at all. Especially with final arguments and the case going to the jury. They’ve got people who camp out on the courthouse steps overnight to get one of those open seats.”

  “Ah,” Frank said. “Why is it you never think of the obvious things?”

  “I am thinking of the obvious things,” Kate said.

  “Well, I’m more obvious than you are. Grab your coffee and come look at the computer for a second.” Frank pulled out the chair and made Kate sit down. Then he tapped the space key to bring up the computer’s monitor.

  Kate found herself staring at a color picture of a whole slew of men and women in basic camo arranged in three rows and smiling broadly. Next to them was an older man in camo not smiling at all.

  “That’s their sergeant,” Frank said. “Ignore him. Look here.” He tapped the screen, indicating a young man almost exactly in the middle of the group.

  Kate leaned forward and frowned. “He looks familiar.”

  “He ought to look familiar,” Frank said. “That’s Ozgo.”

  Kate tapped a couple of keys and made the image larger.

  “My God,” she said. “It is Ozgo. He looks twelve years old.”

  “He’s nineteen in that picture,” Frank said. “Remember how I told you there are always records out there of anything that happens in the armed forces? This is Ozgo’s class at basic, taken on the day they graduated. Fort Bragg.”

  “Okay,” Kate said. “But they wouldn’t all have been sent to Afghanistan together, would they?”

  “Actually, they almost certainly were,” Frank said. “But at the moment, I want you to notice something. The first thing is this.” Frank stepped forward and tapped a few keys. What came up was a long list of people and places.

  “That,” Frank said, “is the caption. Every soldier there and their hometowns. I tried to see if the unit had a Facebook page, but I couldn’t find one, which is interesting in and of itself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Facebook is full of unit pages. Almost every unit in the army seems to have one. Except this unit. It fits in with the whole idea of making it seem as if Ozgo didn’t exist in the military.”

  “Except there’s this, and it shows he did.”

  “It’s one of the first rules of covert operations. Once something is public, you can never get entirely rid of it. That’s why, when you’re running an op, you try to put the lid on from before the beginning. Even that doesn’t work most of the time anymore. Everybody has too much of a web presence, as the people at Jack’s school like to put it to me.”

  “You can’t put a lid on something you don’t know about yet,” Kate said.

  “Exactly,” Frank agreed. “So whatever went on hadn’t been thought of when this picture was taken. Nobody covered this up because nobody had any reason to cover it up.”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t go back and get it later.”

  Frank tapped a few more keys. “This picture,” he said, “I found on the website of a woman named Hannah Arles. She’s the sister-in-law of this woman here,” Frank tapped the photograph, “and the website has no other mention of Ozgo’s name or the name of the unit. The name of the woman in the photograph is Linda Blenham. Even if you were actively searching for every reference anywhere to Ozgo, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t have found this. I almost found it entirely by accident. I made a guess at Ozgo’s term of service and then I went looking through the classes at Bragg. I couldn’t find Ozgo, but I tried Googling the members of each of the classes in turn, and I finally came up with this.”

  “You must have been working all morning,” Kate said.

  “I have been,” Frank said. “At least some of the people that Ozgo graduated basic training with would have had to be deployed with him in his same unit to Afghanistan. And some of those people would have had to be on hand when that attack happened. The times are just too short for Ozgo to have been completely separated from his original unit. For that to have happened, either Ozgo was something special, and I can’t see that he was, or Ozgo would have to have screwed up in a major way, which I can’t find any evidence of. I’ll tell you what I did find, though. I found no evidence of the other American soldiers the papers said were also killed in that attack. They weren’t in Ozgo’s original unit, and they don’t seem to have been in anybody else’s original unit, either. Hell, most of them don’t seem to exist.”

  “Wait,” Kate said, feeling a chill run up her spine. “If the ones the papers said were there didn’t exist, then that means that the ones who were there had to be . . . some of them could have been—”

  “In Ozgo’s training unit,” Frank said. “Exactly. Once I knew that that had to be the case, I Googled the rest of the people in that photograph. I came up with three names. Sarah Bray. Eveta Elwin. Martin Edelman.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They’re people who should be here but aren’t,” Frank said. “They’re listed as honorably discharged. The whole unit except for Ozgo himself is listed as honorably discharged. But here on Facebook, their relatives have put up information that says they’re posted to places like Rio and Germany.”

  “You think they’re undercover or something like that?” Kate asked.

  “I think they’re dead,” Frank said. “I think they died in that attack. But before you go looking into that, you sh
ould look into something else.”

  “What?”

  “This Sarah Bray? She’s got a mother in Baltimore.”

  Thirteen

  The name and address her father had found her were just a name and address: they could mean anything. For all Kate knew, she was about to drive into a maelstrom.

  Drive, though, she definitely was going to do. Frank looked nonplussed.

  “I didn’t mean for you to go haring out there in person right this minute,” he said.

  “It’s the weekend,” Kate said. “It’s relatively quiet. There won’t be any rush hour traffic. And people are likely to be home.”

  “People are likely to be out doing errands. Or they might have activities at church.”

  “They’d have been in church this morning. They’ll be home now.”

  “Some churches have Bible study and children’s activities on the weekends.”

  “I’ll be as fast as I can,” Kate said.

  Then she headed straight out the door.

  At the best of times, Baltimore was a good two hours away, and to get there, she had to use the Beltway, the worst piece of road design in the history of creation. When she got through the Beltway and out the other side, she pulled into the compact little neighborhood where Marianna Bray was supposed to live.

  It was a beautiful neighborhood, lined with small brick houses on neat, eight-acre plots. All the lawns were mowed. All the window boxes were full of flowers. All the front windows had white lace curtains pulled back to let in the sun.

  Kate found number 486 Maldives Street right away. The mailbox on the wall next to the front door was painted red and blue and had a tiny figure of a bluebird on the front flap. There was a driveway next to the house, but no garage, and a monster SUV parked toward the back. It looked brand new and very expensive, both to buy and to run. Kate pulled in behind it and cut her engine.

  It always seemed a lot easier in books when amateur detectives went around questioning people. The people they questioned always seemed very amenable to being questioned.

  She got out of the car and headed for the front door. There were people in their front yards up and down the street, and she could tell that they were looking at her. This was the kind of neighborhood where people watched. And she probably made a very interesting figure on a boring afternoon.

  When she got to the front door, she rang the doorbell. There was an instant response from somewhere inside—“I’m coming! I’m coming!”—and the sound of something hard hitting wood.

  That something turned out to be a cane. It was a beautiful thing, made of polished dark wood and topped with a shined silver nob that reflected images better than a mirror.

  A man’s voice came from somewhere back in the house. “Mama, what did I tell you? I’ll get the door. I said I’ll get the door.”

  The tiny African American woman with the cane, frail and rickety and looking far from well, looked at Kate and shrugged. “That’s Noah. That’s my son. I named all my children from the Bible, and that worked out. Noah’s a pastor at our church now. He went to seminary and got ordained and everything.”

  The man who came out from the back was neither tiny nor frail. He was a good six foot three and massively built, and his head was bald.

  The man frowned when he saw Kate. “Is it my mother you’re looking for or me?”

  Kate hadn’t really thought out this part. “My name’s Kate Ford,” she said, not even thinking about giving the Plymouth pseudonym. “I’m a freelance reporter. I’m working on a story about what happens to recruits when they finish basic, where they go, if they stay in the service, that kind of thing. I’m going to follow the lives of everybody in one unit, and I think from the information I have that one of those recruits may have been your . . . sister? Maybe. Her name is Sarah Bray.”

  “That’s my daughter,” the old lady piped up. “I told you, didn’t I? I named all my children from the Bible. They all turned out fine. They all did. Sarah and Noah here and Judith and Ezekiel. Ezekiel never liked his name, though.”

  “Maybe you ought to come inside,” Noah said. “Mama likes talking about Sarah. She likes talking about all of us.”

  “I’ll get you some sweet tea,” the old woman said.

  Noah practically dragged Kate through the door and propelled her into the tiny living room.

  “I’ll get the sweet tea, Mama. You go sit down. You’re not supposed to be tiring yourself out.”

  “It’s not going to tire me out to get some sweet tea and put it on a tray.”

  “You can’t carry a tray with that cane,” Noah said.

  The old lady allowed herself to be manhandled into a big armchair.

  “Proud of all of them, that’s what I am,” she said. “And I’ve got every reason to be.”

  The sweet tea turned out to be very sweet, even by the standards of the South. Kate had to force herself not to blanch. Learning from her mistake the last time she lied about being a journalist, she took a notebook out of her bag and started to pretend to write things down in her own personal shorthand.

  “We’ve been very fortunate,” Noah was saying. “When Sarah was deployed to Afghanistan, we were worried as hell.”

  “People die there,” the old lady pronounced solemnly.

  “But it worked out all right,” Noah said. “She was there for six months, and then she was routed out of there. They tell you they send soldiers back to the states after a combat deployment, but you know how it is. It doesn’t always work out.”

  “So where is she now?” Kate asked. “I’m hoping to talk to her as part of the piece.”

  “She’s in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” the old lady said. “She sends us pictures from there all the time. Every month. Just like clockwork.”

  Noah nodded. “She’s good about writing. And she seems like she’s having a good time. I just wish she’d do one of those video chats where you can sit at the computer and see the person while you’re talking to them.”

  “Noah bought me a computer,” the old lady said. “And Judith taught me how to use it. She does things with computers where she works—”

  “Software engineering, Mama,” Noah said. “She’s a software engineer.”

  “Sounds like she’s making pillows,” the old lady said. “And I know she isn’t doing that. Graduated from Johns Hopkins right here in Baltimore. That’s a good place to graduate from. You have to be real smart or they won’t even talk to you.”

  “I graduated from Howard,” Noah said.

  “Nothin’ wrong with Howard,” the old lady said. “Ezekiel went to Howard, too. He’s a lawyer, Ezekiel. Noah here thinks Ezekiel sold his soul to the devil because he works for some big corporation.”

  “He’s a partner in a law firm, Mama. He has big corporations for clients.”

  “Sarah’s going to make a career of the military,” the old lady said. “She went to American University, and then she went into the service. I thought that was a fine thing, but I worried when she was in Afghanistan. She’s a real women’s libber, my girl, always wants the army to let women into combat because if you go into combat, you get promoted faster. I say it’s a good thing they don’t, even if it means it’s going to take her a while to get where she wants to go.”

  “She does write every month,” Noah said, “and she sends money, a lot of money. More than she should. The four of us, we always wanted to make sure Mama could rest easy in her old age.”

  “Well, I can do that,” the old woman said.

  “We all decided we’d all contribute,” Noah said. “We decided that when we were still kids. I just worry about it sometimes with Sarah, because she must be sending us her whole paycheck. And she does it every month.”

  “She does other things,” the old lady said. “Don’t make it sound like it’s just about money. She picked out this living room set.”

  “She did do that,” Noah said. He frowned. Kate could see the lines of tension in his face. “She had it sent, just like tha
t. Mama wrote her that the living room couch was getting threadbare and that she was going to try mending it, and the next thing we know, all these things showed up. Just like that. No warning or anything.”

  “They took away the old furniture, too,” the old lady said. “That’s the part I really liked about it. Usually, you get new furniture in, you’ve got to spend a couple of days finding something to do with the old things if you can’t give them away, and I never was able to give anything away. Then you’ve got to haul them down to the curb and pay the garbage extra to pick them up.”

  By now, Noah was so tense, his face looked paralyzed. “I don’t like to think of Sarah sending all her money or spending it all to buy things for Mama,” he said. “It’s not right and it’s not necessary. Mama doesn’t want Sarah to practically starve just to send new furniture. She knows she doesn’t have to do anything on her own. There’s the rest of us. We all get things done around here.”

  “I told you,” the old lady said. “She thinks the army isn’t good enough. Not next to what the rest of you got done. She’s trying to make it up to me.”

  “She doesn’t have to make it up to you,” Noah said sharply.

  “I know that,” the old lady said. “And I told her that. But you know Sarah.”

  Noah looked as if he didn’t believe any of it.

  Kate put her pad and pen back in her bag. She had managed to finish the sweet tea, but she didn’t intend to have any more.

  “She bought that car out there, too,” the old lady said. “I had to get a step stool just to get into it. It’s that high off the ground.”

  “Well, I think it’s an inspiring story,” Kate said bravely. “And I thank you both for talking to me. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

  Noah stood up from where he had been sitting near his mother’s recliner. “You parked around here somewhere? I’ll walk you to your car.”

  ***

  When they exited the house, Noah carefully closed both the main door and the screen. Kate’s car was still safely in the driveway, not all that far away, but he started walking her toward it anyway.