Heart of War

by Lucian K. Truscott

  The town was like a church to her, a place you come to renew yourself and worship the past. She could hear the rushing burble of the river, the enormous diesel engines of the tugboats, the faint echo of street musicians playing boogie-woogie on the street behind her in the Quarter.

  I wonder if he killed any other young women along the way.

  The door to his room at the Maison de Ville opened as Randy reached for his key. Ed pulled him inside.

  “What in the hell is she doing here?”

  “She was at the party last night. She saw us with General King. She had already figured it out, so I told her everything.”

  “Jesus!”

  Randy sat down. “Now that our secret’s out, to Major Guidry anyway, I, for one, feel relieved.”

  Ed sat down across from him. “She doesn’t know we’re staying here together, does she?”

  “No.”

  “So tell me what she said.”

  “She was at the party with a friend of hers from New Orleans. It was pure happenstance. But she’s no dummy. She took one look at our table and knew immediately what was up.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She thinks Beckwith killed Sheila Worthy. She wants my help.”

  Ed stood up and paced the room for a moment. “What kind of time table is she on?”

  “A tight one. Beckwith is putting pressure on her and the MP in charge of the investigation to close the case. She knows if she doesn’t get enough evidence to charge him by the time the President appoints him chief of staff, it’s all over. They’ll never bring murder charges against the chief of staff of the Army.”

  “She’s right. Is there any chance she’ll have her evidence before the AUSA convention next week?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If Beckwith pulls off his act at the convention, he’s a shoe-in. We’re screwed if that happens. We’ve got to come up with something to counter his moves at the convention.” He sat down on the bed.

  “You mean you do. I’m out of it, Ed. This finishes me off.”

  “Do you really want to see a man like him become chief of staff?”

  “You know something? I don’t care anymore. If you and General Ranstead are going to pull anything at the convention, you’re going to do it without me. I’ve given you the guest list. I’ve told you what he’s going to do. I told you Maldray has something planned. What more do you want from me?”

  “Randy, I understand if you’re scared. I would be too—”

  “You don’t understand, Ed. You’re a general. I’m a captain. Beckwith has probably figured out that you’re opposed to him becoming chief. Between you and him it’s just Army politics. You’re another faction in the Pentagon. But with me, it’s not politics, it’s betrayal.”

  “He’s not going to find out what you’ve done for us.”

  “You’re not listening to me. I feel like the lowest piece of crud on earth. Don’t you even care about how I feel?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then you’ll tell General Ranstead I’m out of it.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “That’s what I want.”

  Ed took Randy’s hand. “I’m sorry I got you involved, Randy. I don’t want to do anything to hurt you. You believe me, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t have to worry about a thing from now on. I’ll tell Jack, and we’ll protect you.”

  “You know what he’d do to me if he found out,” said Randy.

  Ed touched the younger man’s cheek. “I know only too well.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Fort Polk was near the Texas state line, about three hours from New Orleans. The sun was coming up over the prairie of western Louisiana as Kara made the turn off Route 171. It had been a long drive, and a longer night. Her second long night without Mace.

  It was the news about Lannie and Beckwith that had startled and frightened her and sent her on her way to Fort Polk. If she came back from Polk with evidence that another young woman had been killed during the time Beckwith was stationed there, that would make Beckwith a suspect in Sheila’s murder, even for Frank Hollaway. There was a lot at stake, and getting the information she needed wasn’t going to be easy. She couldn’t let on about the target of her investigation. She would have to play her hand very, very carefully.

  The MP at the gate saluted the blue officer sticker on the Cherokee’s front bumper. She returned the salute and pulled to a stop next to the guard post.

  “Corporal, can you give me directions to the provost marshal’s office?”

  “Yes, ma’am. You just follow this street here about two miles, and when you come to your first red light, you turn left, and it’s right there next to the stockade. You can’t miss it, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Corporal.”

  The MP snapped to attention and saluted smartly. “Pleasure, ma’am.”

  Kara returned the salute and pulled away from the guard shack. She made the turn at the light, and the provost marshal’s office loomed on her right, a large brick building in a cluster of old wood-frame retreads from World War II.

  A single MP sergeant was at the desk inside. “May I help you, ma’am?”

  Kara showed him her military ID. “I’m Major Guidry. I’m a JAG from Fort Benning, and I’m investigating a series of murders of female soldiers that have happened over the past few years. I was wondering. Could you point the way to the duty officer’s shack?”

  The MP’s eyes shifted nervously. “Ma’am, the duty officer has, uh, gone for breakfast, ma’am. Maybe I can help you.”

  “I’m sure you can, Sergeant,” Kara said, picking up immediately on the fact that the MP duty officer was ghosting, probably asleep at home in bed with his wife instead of on duty, as he should have been. “I’d like to see your homicide records for, let’s see . . . the last six years. Would that be possible?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The MP sergeant studied her for a moment. “Ma’am, this wouldn’t be an emergency request, would it, coming like it does on a Saturday and all?”

  “Yes, it would, Sergeant. You’re very astute.”

  “In that case, follow me, ma’am.” He led the way down a long corridor and turned down the stairs. Two flights down, he opened a door and flicked on the overhead lights. One wall of the small room was lined with black five-drawer file cabinets. He walked down the row, tapping the top drawers with his finger. Finally he stopped.

  “You can start with this one, ma’am. This top drawer here is the current year, and the other drawers go back four more years, and if you want to go back further than that, you just start with the top drawer of the next cabinet. They’re all marked.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Ma’am, there’s a copying machine in the next room, but if you’re going to be needing originals, you’re going to have to sign them out with me at the desk, and then take them to the colonel and get him to countersign the requisition.”

  “Right. Why don’t I just check with you before I go anywhere with this stuff?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’d be a good idea. That way I can make sure all the forms are filled out okay.” He stopped at the door. “Ma’am, you just give a holler if you need anything.”

  “Okay, Sergeant.”

  He closed the door and she was alone. Randy had said Beckwith was stationed at Polk five or six years ago. She opened a file drawer. She would start with six years ago, and go one year earlier and one year later, in case his memory was off. She started flipping through the files. The first year had been a slow one for crimes at Fort Polk. Only twelve incidents listed on the index to the burglary file, probably because Polk was a locked-down post, where you needed a sticker to get through the gate.

  She pulled another file, major felonies, assault and battery, armed robbery. She kept flipping through the file drawer. Homicides. She carried both files to the table and opened the homicide file. Firs
t page: a husband charged with killing his wife. Next page: a racial thing, two Latino enlisted men jumped a white guy. There was an eight-by-ten of the suspects.

  She kept looking. Female. Nineteen. Rape-murder. She turned the page. Civilian authorities arrested her ex-boyfriend. She closed the homicide file and opened major felonies. She was halfway through this file when she stopped at an assault and battery. Female Second Lieutenant Patti O’Brien, badly beaten. She reports it as a robbery, says somebody jumped her from behind and clobbered her with a club and stole her purse. The investigators think she’s lying. They believe she knows her attacker but won’t identify him. Local address in the file is an apartment in downtown Leesville.

  She looked for a home address for O’Brien. Nothing. She made a note to check with Fort Polk personnel later. She opened the next drawer in the file cabinet and thumbed through its contents for a moment, found the homicide file and carried it back to the table and started reading.

  It was right there on top. First Lieutenant Sheryl Jansen, stabbed in the neck. Body found off post in the woods. No prints. Minimal physical evidence. One arrest, a townie. He came up with an alibi and it stuck. She made a note about the unsolved murder and opened the next major felony file. She was flipping through the file when a loose page fell to the ground. She picked it up. It was a misplaced page from the Patti O’Brien assault with a cross-reference notation at the bottom of the page.

  Now, this was interesting. If she could find the cross-reference . . .

  She checked each of the cabinets along the wall. There were two more cabinets across the room, but they turned out to be empty. She opened a door and switched on a light. A dusty copying machine was set on a table in the corner. A piece of dirty olive drab canvas was draped over something next to it. She yanked the canvas away, exposing a stack of battered Stor-All cardboard boxes. She sat on the floor and started going through the boxes.

  An hour passed before she got to the bottom box. She opened it and pulled the first file. The cross-references matched. She carried the file to the table in the next room. She flipped through the file, found the index: “Interrogations in the matter of the murder of First Lieutenant Sheryl Jansen.”

  Bingo.

  The first person listed on the index was Second Lieutenant Patti O’Brien, interrogated at 1501 First Street, Apartment 6, Leesville. She looked at her notes on the Jansen murder. Jansen’s address was 1501 First Street, Apartment 6. They had been roommates. She went through the thick file one page at a time and reached the end. O’Brien’s interrogation was listed on the index, but the transcript was missing. She drummed her fingers on the table for a moment.

  Someone had gone through the files on the Jansen murder and had deliberately misplaced key elements of the investigation. The Jansen interrogation transcripts hadn’t been in the original homicide file in the first place. The transcript of the interrogation of Patti O’Brien was missing. Somebody had made one hell of an attempt to conceal the fact that Patti O’Brien had been questioned in the matter of her roommate’s murder.

  She decided to read the transcripts of the other interrogations. The first person they had talked to was the guy who found Jansen’s body. He was out hunting, tripped, and fell on it. The body was covered with leaves, hidden behind a large log.

  She read further. The next two interrogations were of Jansen’s co-workers. They had been the last ones to see her alive. They all met for a drink at the O-Club earlier the night she was killed. The last interrogation was Lieutenant Colonel Harry Roberts.

  Kara looked up. He was Beckwith’s chief of staff at Fort Benning!

  She scanned the page. Back then Roberts had been a brigade XO. And the brigade CO was . . . Beckwith!

  She started reading the interrogation of Colonel Roberts. Right there in his answer to the first question was the T word. Lieutenant Jansen was a “troublemaker,” according to Roberts. She had received a very low OER. Always late with paperwork. Late to work. Too many sick days. A whiner and complainer.

  She turned the page and kept reading. There were questions about Lieutenant O’Brien. She and Jansen had both worked for him. What kind of an officer was Lieutenant O’Brien? Fine officer.

  She closed the file. One question about Jansen, and Roberts is running at the mouth, putting down the victim, and one question about O’Brien, and they get a monosyllable of praise.

  The door opened. A young officer wearing an MP arm band walked in. “I’m Captain Talmadge. I’m the military police duty officer. Sergeant Kenny informed me that you arrived early this morning and asked to see some old case files?”

  Kara stood up. “That’s right, Captain. I’m Major Guidry, from Fort Benning.” They shook hands. “I’m looking into a series of murders of young females that we believe have been committed on military installations over the past five or six years.”

  “You think there’s a serial killer? In the Army?”

  “Maybe. We don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Usually we get a request through channels when we’re being asked to share investigatory data.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, Captain. I hadn’t planned on stopping here at Polk at all. I was driving back to Benning from Fort Sam Houston, and a huge storm hit just outside Shreveport, so I turned south to get around it, and I looked at the map, and what’s dead in my path but Fort Polk. That was when I decided to stop off and see what you all have in your case files.”

  The captain nodded. “I see. Well, I’m going to have to check this out up the chain of command. You understand. Protocol, ma’am.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  He took one last look around the room and left. Kara grabbed the file she had been reading. She knew he’d be back with questions about her investigation and military forms to fill out, and the best plan was to get the files copied before the paperwork started. She threw the switch on the copying machine, and it hummed to life.

  At the main gate she returned the guard’s salute and stepped on the gas. She passed through the Leesville suburbs and drove straight into cattle country, musing about what she had discovered from a spec-4 at post personnel: There was no permanent home address in the system for O’Brien, but she had been commissioned through ROTC, so maybe she could find it in her college files.

  She ran down the chronology the files had coughed up: Lieutenant Jansen had been killed in January. Lieutenant O’Brien was assaulted in February. In March, O’Brien was given a waiver of her service obligation from ROTC and allowed to resign with a compassionate discharge. Now, what could have brought that on?

  The answer was Beckwith. He had cashiered her out of the service to shut down the investigation of Jansen’s murder. It would have been easy enough for him to do. They’d had a competent, thorough investigation of Jansen’s murder. They tried as hard as they could to get O’Brien to open up about Jansen, and she wouldn’t. They tried to get her to tell them who beat her up, but she wouldn’t cooperate there either, and a month later she’s out of the Army and headed to parts unknown. All that work they did ended up in a bunch of investigation files, and some of those files were “misplaced,” and at least one of them had disappeared. Beckwith wouldn’t have even needed the cooperation of the MP’s to do that. He could have done it himself.

  The fact that there were missing files in a murder investigation was troubling but hardly surprising. In a typical conspiracy of military circumstances, this gets moved, that gets lost. General So-and-So gets transferred. Beckwith goes to the Pentagon. The provost marshal retires. The great thing about the Army from the point of view of a criminal is that everybody moves around so much, there is almost no institutional memory. There was no one around at Polk to remember all the details of what had happened during a three-month period five years ago. Nobody.

  And now Beckwith was doing the same thing at Benning, putting pressure on Hollaway to close the cas
e with the accidental death of a suspect, Parks.

  It started to rain, and she switched on the wipers. She squinted, trying to make out the white lines running down the middle of the road ahead. If she drove straight through to Georgia, she could hit the phone first thing Monday morning and try to track down Patti O’Brien. She hadn’t cooperated with military investigators at the time of the murder, and there was a chance she would be just as reluctant now. But five years was a long time. There had to be a spot in O’Brien’s heart she could reach. She had to have known her roommate was having an affair with Beckwith, and Kara was certain that she would want the man who killed her friend brought to justice.

  That man had to be Beckwith. There were too many coincidences. Two dead female lieutenants, both of them stabbed in the neck, both killed out in the boonies. If O’Brien would testify that Jansen had been having an affair with Beckwith, that would establish the pattern she needed to charge him with Sheila’s murder.

  And then there was Lannie. She thought about stopping to call her but thought better of it. She gets a call from her best friend telling her that her lover is a murderer . . . there was no way that was going to work.

  There was nothing left to do but press her foot to the gas pedal and head for Benning.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Mace found Hollaway’s office and knocked on the door.

  “Have a seat, Sergeant,” said Hollaway.

  Mace sat down stiffly.

  “I’ve got a few questions for you about Parks’ death.”

  Mace could feel the major’s eyes drilling straight through him. He didn’t like this one bit.

  “What kind of a platoon leader was Lieutenant Parks?”

  “A pretty good one, sir. I’ve had worse. A lot worse.”

  “You had been out in the field with Parks previously?”