Full Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “Yes,” said Jacey.

  “I’m going to need to talk to any cadet who had knowledge of the circumstances involving Miss Hamner’s collapse during parade. I’ll need to talk to her roommate or roommates, and I’d like to hear any assessments you have of her as a member of your company.” He shifted slightly on the bunk, trying to achieve a position that didn’t cause him pain. He couldn’t imagine how anyone could get to sleep lying on such an uncomfortable mattress. It wasn’t so much a bed as it was a device designed for proper display of sheets and blankets. “Anything you can think of regarding Miss Hamner may prove helpful to us. I want you to feel free to say whatever’s on your minds.”

  He saw them glance at each other before they spoke. It wasn’t conspiratorial. Just nervous.

  “I’ve spoken to the company about Dorothy,” said Jacey. She picked up a stack of handwritten sheets and handed them to Kerry. “These are statements I took from everyone who was close to her both before and during the parade. I had them write down their recollections when they were as fresh as possible.”

  Kerry flipped through the pile of pages quickly. “You sound like you’ve been through this before,” he said.

  “Not really,” said Jacey. “But they taught us in law class last year that witness recollections are stronger and more reliable the closer they’re recorded to the event which precipitates them.”

  “Your law professor sounds like a pretty smart character.”

  “Captain Patterson is one of the best.”

  “I’ll have a quick look at these statements and then I’d like to interview the cadets themselves.”

  “I’ll have them waiting for you downstairs in the company meeting room.” She looked over at her roommate. “Belle? Let’s round them up. I’ll meet you downstairs. I want them down there right away so we don’t waste too much of Chief Warrant Officer Kerry’s time.”

  “Sure,” said Belle. She grabbed her cap and left. Jacey stopped at the door. “We want to do everything we can to help you find out what happened out there today.”

  Kerry watched her walk out the door without answering. This was one formidable young woman. It surprised him not in the least that her father was the Superintendent.

  THE BODY of Cadet Dorothy Hamner had been dissected and lay faceup on the autopsy table. Her torso looked like someone had peeled away her skin to expose her soul, yet it was the mundane result of an ordinary autopsy that lay before Elizabeth Vernon and Stephani Duffy. The doctor had removed, examined, and sectioned the heart, removing material for microscopic examination later. But she could tell from her preliminary look at the heart itself that this had been a healthy young woman. A cursory look at the exterior of her lungs told Vernon Cadet Hamner had most likely never passed the working end of a cigarette between her lips. The lungs were of average size and weight.

  She cut into and emptied the stomach, nearly filling a stainless steel specimen tray, to find the cadet mess hall breakfast in the process of digestion. There was no sign of vomit in the esophagus, nor were there signs of musculature strain, as if something had been vomited and blocked the airway, then been somehow exhaled and lost in the transportation of the body, a circumstance Vernon had come across in her career at least twice before.

  In fact, absent any lab finding to the contrary, the gross exam of the body of the deceased produced what the doctor found to be not a terribly surprising result. She was a young woman in good health who had suffered a cardiac arrest of unknown origin.

  Vernon removed and cut into one of the lungs. “Jesus, look at this,” she said. Her major air passages were slightly constricted. “I’m going to section both lungs and have a look under the microscope. There’s something going on here.”

  They worked on the lungs for about an hour, removing samples and sectioning and preserving them for later analysis. When she was finished with the lungs, Major Vernon said, “I want to have a look at the vaginal area before we close up the torso. Help me lift her legs.”

  Lieutenant Duffy and the major each grabbed a knee and bent it stiffly into shape, spreading the thighs in the process. The doctor took up a position at the foot of the autopsy table and carefully spread the young woman’s labia.

  “Look right here.” She pointed to a red, swollen area at the opening of the vagina.

  Lieutenant Duffy coughed and turned her head.

  “Are you all right?” asked the major.

  “Yes ma’am,” answered Duffy.

  “You want to stop for a minute?”

  “No ma’am. I’ve been to the gynecologist. It’s just, like, I’ve never been the gynecologist.”

  “Got you,” acknowledged Vernon. “Do you want to take a minute?”

  “No ma’am. I’ll be okay.”

  “All right then, can you hold this area open for me? I want to get a couple of close-up photos of the abraded area.”

  Lieutenant Duffy used surgical clamps to hold open the vaginal entrance while Major Vernon photographed the area.

  “I had a case like this back at Fort Huachuca,” said Vernon. “A specialist got raped downtown. They beat her and drove her out in the desert and left her. Didn’t find the body for two days. Turned out she never regained consciousness and died of exposure and lack of water. It was July. There’s nothing hotter that Fort Huachuca in July.”

  “Yes ma’am, I’ve heard that,” said Duffy. “I had a roommate from Phoenix in college.”

  “This young woman shows the same signs of vaginal trauma as the one in Arizona.”

  “Do you think she was raped?”

  “I don’t know. Female cadets stopped taking shit from male cadets years ago, and she would have reported a rape if it happened. But there’s always a chance that she had been raped and chose not to report it immediately. After all, she died only four or five hours after awakening the next day. Maybe she was traumatized. Maybe she just needed some time. I guess now we’ll never know what she was thinking.”

  “I wonder what really happened to her.”

  “Hand me a sterile slide, please, Stephani. We’re going to find out.” Vernon walked to a cabinet and came back with a speculum and inserted it in the vagina. “Swab, please.”

  Duffy handed her what looked like a long wooden Q-Tip, which she slid through the opening in the speculum, introducing it into the far reaches of the vagina. She took a sample and smeared it onto the slide.

  “Again, please. One of each.” She did the same thing with a new swab and a new slide, then repeated the procedure again. When she was finished with the slides, she used a suction device to remove a larger sample from the vagina, which she deposited in a test tube. Then she removed the speculum and they lowered the young woman’s knees. Silently she began to stitch up the torso.

  “We’re going to have to send this stuff down to the Institute of Pathology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It’s going to take a week or so to get the results, and until they come in, I want to keep this aspect of our inquiry quiet. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes ma’am,” said Lieutenant Duffy.

  “I’ll notify the Special Agent in Charge that we’ve shipped off these samples, but he’s the only one I want informed until we get the results.”

  “Ma’am, can I ask why you want to keep this secret?”

  “I don’t want anyone getting wind of the fact that she has signs of sexual trauma. Somebody did this to her. I want that somebody to stew in his juice until we turn up the heat to boil.”

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  SAMANTHA SLAIGHT was sitting at her desk in what had once been a maid’s room just off the pantry, which she had transformed into a private office. It was a small space, only about nine by nine feet square. There was a tiny adjoining bath, and her desk looked out a window onto the garden. She had arranged her office to be the place she went to run the family business, as it were: to pay the bills and answer mail and make the social plans that, because they comprised a fairly large part of the Superintendent�
��s job, consumed an even greater part of her time. She didn’t mind. Entertaining came naturally to a woman from New Orleans whose father had been a judge and, before that, a powerhouse in the city’s legal and political communities, which were actually a single community in those days. She remembered that her mother still had a tiny office in the slave quarters behind their house in the French Quarter that she used for the same purpose. There was a cliché about southern belles and afternoon teas and cocktail parties and balls and ball gowns, but it didn’t apply to New Orleans women, because most of the women her mother had known, and indeed her mother herself, were truly neither southern nor belles. New Orleans was located in the South but was not naturally of it. Samantha had once heard a cook who worked at Antoine’s in the Quarter describe New Orleans in this way. He had a Creole accent, which mixed the weird Brooklynese of the New Orleans working class with the rhythms of the Cajun French. Listening to him talk was like hearing an accordion in full wail: “See, there’s this ocean nobody knows about, see, which begins way over there in the Mediterranean ‘round ‘bout Greece and Italy and France and Morocco and Tangier and such, and this ocean goes all way ‘cross and ties into the Caribbean, see, ‘round ‘bout the islands of Martinique and Nevis and Antigua and St. Barts and such, and this ocean just keeps on goin’ round the Florida Keys and then it heads right into the Gulf, see, and it goes right on up the Mississippi and it ends up right down there at the foot of Saint Peter Street, see?”

  Precisely.

  She was tapping at the keyboard on her laptop, sending an E-mail to a friend whose husband was over in Bosnia. Her friend had the geographical-widow blues after fifteen months during which her two teenagers had gone through the normal hormonal changes all teenagers went through, made vastly more difficult by the absence of their father. The friend had E-mailed Samantha that she felt like a “cross between a maid and a shrink,” a feeling Samantha had experienced more than once. Samantha was writing the final lines of a hang-in-there-babe note when she heard the back door open. She leaned back in her chair and saw Jacey walk into the kitchen.

  “Jace! In here!” she called from her office.

  Jacey embraced her mother. “Mom, I had to come and talk to you. The girl who died today? She was in my company.”

  “Jace, I’m so sorry,” Samantha said. “Let’s get something to drink.”

  “I can’t stay long,” said Jacey. “I’ve got to get back to the company. But I needed somebody to talk to, Mom. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Of course not.” Samantha poured them tall glasses of iced tea and they sat down on stools at a counter in the kitchen overlooking the garden. It was an extraordinary space, walled on three sides by elegantly trimmed hedges, planted with flowering shrubs and beds of perennials that began blooming in the early spring and still showed colors into late fall. Samantha ran her hands through her hair and gave her daughter an encouraging smile.

  “Dorothy was a great kid, Mom. It’s just so awful to think she’s not there anymore.”

  Samantha put an arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “Jacey, it’s never easy when somebody dies. Remember when your grandfather passed away? It was so sudden and unexpected, I thought I’d never recover. It’s the way people are, Jace. When somebody who’s close to you dies, it’s like a blow to your heart. You’ll do all right, Jace. You’ll see.”

  “It’s still hard, Mom.”

  “Of course it is, darling. That’s why you should talk to your dad. He knows about this kind of stuff. It’s his job. It’s been . . .” She took a deep breath, and her eyes wandered away from her daughter’s face, across the garden, over to the barracks of North Area that loomed in the distance. “It’s been his life, Jacey. There’s no way you can go wrong talking to your father.”

  “Mom, that’s why I had to talk to you. Don’t you see? Daddy’s the Supe now. People are watching everything I do. If I go running to my father, they’re going to think I can’t take it. I can’t let that happen, Mom. I’ve got to deal with this on my own.”

  Sam leaned over and kissed Jacey on her cheek. “I understand, Jace. I know your father will, too. But just remember, if you need us—either of us—we’re here.”

  “Thanks, Mom. You’ll tell Daddy, won’t you? I mean, I don’t want him to think I’m avoiding him, but it’s kind of like I have to. At least until we figure out how this is going to work, with me being a cadet and a company commander, and him being the Supe.”

  “It’s going to work out okay, Jace. You’ll see.”

  Jacey stood to leave, and Samantha marveled at the miracle that was her daughter. She and Ry had waited awhile before deciding to have a child, and now she was glad they had. To be able to experience your own daughter in full stride making her passage into adulthood was like nothing that she could have ever foreseen. She had always known that there was something really special between mothers and daughters, because she had felt that way about her own mother, now living alone and rattling around her huge Garden District house down in New Orleans like a pebble in a tin can. But you don’t really know what it’s like until you look back over the fence from the other side. Being a mother had its pain-in-the-ass component, but now came the payoff. She had ushered her daughter out the door into the care and feeding of West Point, and now she would be there when West Point ushered her through the gates into the care and feeding of the Army, and on to the care and feeding she would be doing on her own.

  “Bye, Mom. And thanks.”

  “Bye, Jace. I love you.”

  The screen door shut with a gentle pop and silence settled over the house again. Never in her life had she spent so many hours listening to nothing more than the wind rustling leaves and whistling through the windows.

  She missed the sometimes gentle, sometimes shattering din of young voices around the house, and there was a part of her that would never be able to see in the face of her daughter anything other than the innocence she glimpsed when she first held her baby girl in her arms. That was the thing about being a mother. At the close of the day she was left feeling that this was the biggest and best thing that had ever happened in her life, motherhood, and she suspected that at the close of her life the feeling would be exactly the same.

  She thought of Dorothy Hamner’s mother and the mothers of children who had been killed, interviewed on the news or the magazine shows. Closure was the word they used. Was this what they were seeking when they stood silent vigil in a courtroom, awaiting the conviction of a killer? Was it because they knew that the death of a child had left the door ajar, the door that would have led to the rest of the child’s life?

  The death of a daughter at Jacey’s age . . . Samantha’s imagination froze at the prospect of losing her own daughter. Inside her the sixth sense of motherhood raised a red flag. There were going to be consequences from the death of this young woman. Right now, she couldn’t tell what they would be, but she knew they were out there, waiting.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  IT WAS because his secretary, Melissa Grant, had a formidable shit detector that Slaight had insisted she attend the briefing on the investigation given by the Provost Marshal and Staff Judge Advocate. When they arrived, Slaight put them quickly at ease, inviting them to take a pair of overstuffed armchairs that faced the dark brown leather sofa where he sat. Melissa was to one side, a yellow legal pad perched on her knee.

  “What have you got for me?” Slaight asked.

  Lieutenant Colonel Percival cleared his throat. “Chief Warrant Officer Jim Kerry is running things for the CID, sir. He’s the Special Agent in Charge here on post. He has interviewed all of the cadets in Miss Hamner’s company who witnessed her collapse on the Plain, sir, and he has forwarded his notes from the interviews to Major Vernon, who is conducting the autopsy. It’s Kerry’s feeling that the cadets’ observations of Miss Hamner’s behavior just previous to her collapse might help Major Vernon in her determination of cause of death. Agent Kerry reported that she was seen breathin
g heavily just before she fell, as if she couldn’t catch her breath.”

  “Did the cadets in her company notice anything unusual about her before parade?”

  “Apparently not. As you know, sir, your daughter is Hamner’s company commander. She reported to him that Hamner’s behavior was completely normal.” He cleared his throat. “Incidentally, sir, Agent Kerry has told me that she was a big help. She personally took statements from all the cadets in the company who saw the young woman fall at parade.”

  “Thank you,” said Slaight, allowing himself a twinge of pride.

  “I’ve got a preliminary report from Major Vernon, sir,” said Percival, reaching into his briefcase. He handed over a single sheet of paper, and Slaight scanned it quickly.

  “This indicates that she has established a strong probability that the young woman did not die of heatstroke.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What do you make of that, Colonel?”

  “She indicates that we’re going to have to wait for the results of certain lab tests she’s running, sir, before we get anything solid.”

  “I understand that, Colonel Percival. I’m asking what you make of Vernon’s initial determination that she apparently did not die from the effects of the heat. Another cause of death will emerge eventually. Do you have any speculation what that might be?”

  “No sir.”

  “Let me ask you this. Has there been any evidence turned up over the last year concerning use of drugs by cadets?”

  Percival glanced at Lombardi, who leaned forward in his chair. “The answer to that is negative, sir. As you probably know, we do urine tests on the Corps, the way they’re done periodically on all active-duty soldiers in the Army these days. We haven’t turned up any positive test results recently.”