Heart of War

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “You’d do that to your friend?”

  “My friend, sir, is dead.”

  Beckwith blinked once, twice. His face reddened as he scrawled his signature and threw her request on the floor. She picked it up.

  Approved.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  The commo shack was tucked away behind an old warehouse on a rail spur that ran along the western edge of the post. Kara knew the technology scrambling the secure lines on the post was classified as a national security secret. Still, Sheila Worthy had made two cell phone calls the night she was killed, and they had been patched through the secure switchboard at the commo shack. Now that they had charged Randy with Sheila’s murder as well as Lannie’s, the calls she had made took on an added significance. She had to give it a shot.

  The evidence against Randy in Lannie’s murder was nearly overwhelming. Even under the best of circumstances it would be nearly impossible to overcome. But the Army had made a potentially fatal error in linking the murders, ordering a court-martial of both charges at once. If she could show that Randy didn’t murder Sheila Worthy, then the case she would put on challenging the evidence in Lannie’s murder would be that much more compelling and believable.

  It was obvious that the last call Sheila made on her cell phone the night of her murder had been to someone other than Randy, because he didn’t have access to a secure telephone. So who had she called?

  Kara was convinced she had called Beckwith, but proving it was going to be difficult. She pulled up outside the commo shack and found the door locked. She knocked hard, twice. The door opened halfway. A grizzled old sergeant with the name Crowell on his chest peered from the door. He was holding a cup of coffee.

  “Mornin’, ma’am. Something I can help you with?”

  “Sergeant Crowell?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I am Major Guidry. I’m a JAG officer. May I come in?”

  The sergeant looked momentarily confused, but he stepped aside and opened the door wider. “Yes, ma’am. I don’t know what commo’s got to do with the JAG corps, but you’re welcome.”

  “Thank you.” She walked inside. It was a large room crammed with communications gear. There was row after row of metal shelving holding what looked like switching equipment. Along one wall was a very sophisticated radio console, and next to it, a telephone console. A spec-4 wearing a headset was sitting at the console.

  “I’ve got a problem, Sergeant Crowell. There was a murder awhile back here at Benning. Maybe you read about it.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Lieutenant. Female.”

  “Right. I’m defending the man they accused of killing her.”

  “I don’t envy you that job, ma’am. Not many court-martials I heard of end up in the guy gettin’ off.”

  “You are right about that, Sergeant.” She reached in her purse. “Let me see . . . on the night she died, she made two cellular telephone calls . . .”

  “We don’t have nothin’ to do with cellular here, ma’am. That’s downtown.”

  “I understand that, Sergeant. Let me finish.”

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  She unfolded Sheila’s phone bill. “The calls she made were to the secure switch. I’ve been told the secure switchboard is here in the commo shack. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Comes in right over there.” He pointed at the console where the spec-4 sat. “But that’s classified, ma’am. I can’t get into that without orders.”

  “I’m not asking you to, Sergeant. What I want to know is, when a call comes into the secure switch, where does it go?”

  “It goes out on regular lines, but it’s scrambled, ma’am. You got to have a secure phone to receive one of those calls.”

  “Right. And that technology is classified.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Top secret.”

  “When you get a call into the secure switchboard, is a log kept?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “So there’s no record kept at all of where those calls might have gone.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She handed the phone bill to the sergeant. “Look at these calls, Sergeant. It looks to me like she called once, and there was no answer. So she called again.”

  “Might be. No way of telling.”

  “Let’s say I’m right. She called once and there was no answer. She calls again. Let’s say she was calling the same person. Where might that second call go, Sergeant? If you were just guessing, I mean?”

  The sergeant thought for a moment. “We get calls in here from the Pentagon. They call on the secure lines all the time. Sometimes we patch them through, and the party is out of the office. They might be in their vehicle, or in the field. So we pick up the call and put it through on their radio.”

  Of course! Beckwith had been in his staff car!

  “Let me ask you this, Sergeant. A call made through this switchboard that’s patched through to a radio, that would be in the clear, right?”

  “Not necessarily, ma’am. They’ve got scrambled radios in their command vehicles.”

  “That would be in their combat command vehicles?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Command helicopters got ‘em. Some of the Humvees got ‘em. There’s quite a few of ‘em around.”

  “I’ll bet they’ve got scramblers in staff cars too,” she said, fishing.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Kara folded the cell phone bill and stuck it in her purse. “Thank you, Sergeant, you’ve been very helpful.”

  “Anything else I can do, ma’am?”

  She stopped at the door. “One other thing, Sergeant. Staff cars here on post, like commanders’ staff cars, they’ve all got radios, right?”

  “That’s right, ma’am.”

  “Do they have cellular phones too?”

  The sergeant thought for a moment. “I know some of them do. The Generals’ staff cars, they’re completely outfitted—radios, cellular, the whole bit.”

  “Thank you again, Sergeant.”

  “No problem, ma’am.”

  She found Randy pacing when they opened his cell door.

  Eagerly: “What happened?”

  “I got it. I’m defending you.”

  “That’s great! How’d you do it?”

  “Let’s just say your boss and I came to a meeting of the minds.”

  “He tried to stop you.”

  “And then he thought better of it.”

  Randy sat down on one end of the bunk. Kara sat on the other.

  “I tried to get you released into house arrest, Randy. Beckwith’s not going to allow it.”

  “Even Lieutenant Calley wasn’t locked up during his trial.”

  “All they charged him with was killing a couple hundred Vietnamese. With you it’s different. You killed not one but two of the General’s mistresses.”

  “But I didn’t do it!”

  “Just joking, Randy.”

  “Sorry. I guess I’m a little tense.”

  “You’ve got a right to be.” She opened her briefcase on the bunk between them. “We’ve got some stuff to go over. Let’s talk about the night of Lannie’s murder. You said when you got to the room, you found her on the bed, and there was a knife sticking out of her neck and you pulled it out.”

  “Yes.”

  “That means they’re going to have your prints on the knife. There was a lot of blood. Did any of it get on you?”

  “Lots. They took about thirty pictures of me, from every angle.”

  “Christ.”

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  “It could be worse. They could have caught you in the act of sticking the knife in her.”

  “But—”

  She held up her hand. “Stop. I know you didn’t do it. Beckwith killed her. I just know it.”

  “Kara, I’m frightened.”

  “Look, Randy, I’ve got to know if there was anyone who could have seen you in the hall or on the stairs that night. Did anyone see you, like, in the eleva
tor, or in the hall at that time?”

  Randy looked away for a long moment.

  “Randy, talk to me.”

  “My lover saw me.”

  “Great! What’s her name?”

  “His name. I’m gay, Kara.”

  As Kara looked up, she was thinking, of course.

  “Okay, what’s his name?”

  “Ed Teese.”

  “He’s the general you were sitting with in New Orleans!”

  “Yes.”

  “You were staying with him at the hotel?”

  “No. Each of us had a room, but he was with me in my room that night.”

  She made a note. “Randy, why didn’t you tell me this before? You have an alibi.”

  “I was scared. Kara, I’m gay. You know what that means in the Army.”

  “Look, Randy, Lannie was dead when you got to her. That means she was killed sometime before you arrived. What time did you say it was when you picked up her message?”

  “Three-fifteen. I remember looking at the clock radio next to the bed.”

  “So you got to her room at, say, 3:16, 3:17.”

  “It couldn’t have been any later. I had to go down only one floor.”

  “That confirms your alibi. You were in your room with General Teese, and you called the message desk. So we’ve got the hotel operator who gave you the message, and we’ve got General Teese, who can testify as to your whereabouts at the time of death—”

  “He can’t do that. I won’t ask him to.”

  Kara looked at him, incredulous. “Randy, this is serious. You’re being charged with capital murder. You could get life in Leavenworth without parole. You’ve got an alibi, and you have got to use it. We can probably get the charge that you killed Lannie dismissed with General Teese’s testimony. In the United States Army there is no more credible witness than a general. That court-martial will believe him in a heartbeat.”

  “Not when they find out he’s gay, and we are lovers, they won’t. They’ll put me away for life, and they’ll court-martial him to boot. It will mean two of us end up in Leavenworth instead of one.”

  “That seems like a chance he would be glad to take, to ensure his lover doesn’t go to jail for the rest of his life.”

  “Kara, you don’t understand. You don’t know what it is to be a gay man in this Army. You think ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell’ is going to save anybody? They’re purging gay men and women right and left! The prejudice against gay people in the Army is incredible, and it’s not going away. If you think they’re going to empanel a court-martial of senior officers who will put aside their prejudices and listen to a gay general stand up and give an alibi for a gay captain, you are out of your mind.”

  “I guess I didn’t think of it that way.”

  “How could you have? It’s not your experience talking here. It’s mine.”

  “Randy, I still think it’s worth trying. Why don’t I talk to General Teese and see what he thinks?”

  “I won’t allow it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense. If you try to get him to testify and give me an alibi, it will backfire. The members of that court-martial will go in that jury room, and they’ll figure I’m a faggot and I hate women, and that’s why I killed them. It would be the worst thing you could do, putting Ed on the stand. Believe me. I know. So does Ed. He’d tell you the same thing.”

  “Randy, I still think I should talk to him.”

  “Okay, talk to him. But it’s my life that’s on the line, and if I say he doesn’t testify, he doesn’t testify. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “All we’ve got to prove is, I didn’t do it.”

  “We don’t have to prove a thing, Randy. They have to prove you did it. But the way things look right now, they’re not going to have a very hard time.”

  “I know. It looks bad, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m going to be honest with you. It doesn’t look good.” She flipped through her notes. “Oh. One thing. I found out Sheila made two cell phone calls just before she was murdered. She called the secure switch.”

  “She was calling Beckwith. That was the way they got in touch.”

  “I knew it!”

  “But you can’t prove it. That’s why they used the secure line.”

  “Yeah. I was going to ask you. Is the radio in his staff car scrambled?”

  “Yes. They talked that way all the time.”

  “So they might have patched her call through to his staff car radio.”

  “That might have happened.”

  “But he’s got a cell phone in his car too, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “So her call could have been patched through to his cell phone as well?”

  “It could have.”

  “That means the last call Sheila made before she died was to the man who killed her. We can’t prove it yet, but that’s what happened.”

  “What good does that do us?”

  “I don’t know right now. I’ve got to think about it.”

  He looked away, lost in thought.

  Kara touched his hand. “You really love him, don’t you? General Teese?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I wish there was some way—”

  “There isn’t. Don’t you think I’ve racked my brain about this? Don’t you think if I knew we could use my alibi and it would work, I’d have gotten Ed to talk to you and Hollaway back in Washington?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t want to beat a drum or anything, but I’ve got to tell you, Kara, if it’s hard being a gay man in America, it’s impossible being a gay man in the Army. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you admit you’re gay, they throw you out for being gay. If you conceal the fact and they catch you, they throw you out for lying. It’s hell on earth, is what it is, Kara.”

  “So why did you go to West Point in the first place? Why be an officer if it’s so terrible?”

  “I could ask the same question of you.”

  Kara chuckled softly. “Yes, indeed you could.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Dahlia King was dicing onions, and the General was sitting at the counter with a cup of tea. Outside, the wind had kicked up, flapping the awnings on the kitchen windows.

  “Everybody’s talking about Bill Beckwith’s speech at the AUSA convention, Bernie.”

  “I never heard such a load of crap in my life.”

  “He was a big hit. I heard Senator Maldray telling one of his aides to get him a copy of the speech.”

  “Maldray’s already made it clear he’s backing Beck-with. I wrote him off weeks ago.”

  “Is there anything you can do to counter it?”

  “I’ve got an op-ed piece coming out in the Washington Post next week. I compared corporate downsizing to what’s going on in the armed services. Everyone is giving short shrift to the human element in this thing. Large corporations like AT&T and institutions like the Army really aren’t that different. In both cases we ask these people to dedicate their lives to the organization, and then we come along ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty years later, and tell them thanks a lot but no thanks and they’re on the street.”

  “And what did you come up with?”

  “The problem we’ve got is, we’re asking soldiers right from the start to look forward to retirement at twenty years with half pay, when in fact we know many of them will never get that far. We’re cheating them out of their dreams. I’m suggesting voluntary retirement at an earlier time would yield one sliding scale of retirement benefits, and mandatory retirement in a downsizing would yield still another scale of benefits. I think if we give some of these younger people a chance to opt out at, say, fifteen years with benefits, we won’t have to RIF so many of them.”

  “That sounds like a good idea to me.”

  “Yeah, but it’s going to be a political hot potato. The problem is, we’d have to increase expenditures in the nea
r term to pay for it, even though it would save us money over the long term. That would mean the money would have to come from somewhere, and the logical place is to cut the Reserves and the National Guard, and those congressmen and senators with all those Reservists and National Guards in their states aren’t going to stand for it.”

  “Those bastards on Capitol Hill are so shortsighted.”

  “Like moles.”

  She laughed.

  “That smells good. What are you cooking for lunch?”

  “I found some blue crabs this afternoon. I’m making gumbo.”

  “Man, that’s going to hit the spot on a cold winter day like this.”

  “That’s what I know.”

  “I’ll tell you what the deal is in the Army. We’re in a people business. That’s all we’ve got out there is people. We don’t make a product. We don’t yield a profit. All those tanks and helicopters and weapons systems exist solely to support our people. It’s easy to lose sight of that, sitting up there in the Pentagon, surrounded by paperwork, looking across the Potomac at the ebb and flow of politics in Washington. That’s the thing that gets me about Beckwith’s speech. Hell, I’d call the President myself and recommend him for chief if I thought he believed even a word of it. But the only thing that cunning son of a bitch believes in is his own career.”

  ***

  Kara slammed down the phone. Detective Fogel from the Chicago PD had called back and told her they had located Patti O’Brien’s place of work. It was a chain record store on Broadway called the CD Shak, but the place was closed for renovations. All the employees had been given vacation time, and Patti O’Brien was nowhere to be found.

  Kara called the 800 information operator and got a listing for CD Shak, Incorporated, in Minneapolis. The people there didn’t have a list of employees of CD Shak franchises, but they did have the name of the store manager in Chicago, a Jeff Klein, who they said would know the home addresses of all his employees, but he was on vacation too. Kara talked her way through the bureaucracy at CD Shak, Inc, and ended up on the phone with the corporate president. She said Jeff Klein had taken his motor home and was driving through the Mississippi Delta, going to blues clubs and juke joints. Most of the places he was going didn’t even have phones, so there was no way to leave a message for him. Then she thought of a record store in Clarksdale, called Stackpole Records, where Klein was bound to stop. Kara left an urgent message with the CD Shak president for Jeff Klein to call her, then called Stackpole Records and left a message for him there too. It was vital that she locate Patti O’Brien. She was positive O’Brien would provide information about her roommate that would implicate Beckwith in her murder.