She looked around at the groomed lawns and exotic trees in the center court, which was filled with a good sized lunchtime crowd enjoying some sunlight. Recalling the bleak air-shaft view from OP-614, she could appreciate the sunlight herself. When they returned to the office, Grace sat down at her desk and began pulling small cables out of the carrying case for her computer.
Once she had had time to set up her machine, he brought her up to speed on what he had been doing.
“I’ve called Bupers, and they tell me Hardin’s records will take another week to get out of St. Louis.
So in the meantime, I’m going to try something else.
I’ve asked the bureau to give me a printout of the names of the wardroom officers in Luce at the time Hardin served, starting with the captain.
I’ve asked for the printout to include present duty stations.”
“So we’ll be starting a big telephone exercise, then.”
“Yeah. I guess we’d better figure out exactly what we’ll be asking these people.”
Snapper stuck his head in the door and pointed an imaginary gun at Dan.
“His eminence the EA requests the pleasure of your company in the front office,” he announced.
“Now?”
“Anytime in the next eleven seconds would be entirely satisfactory. Yes, now would be nice. Excuse us, Miss. Snow. Commander Collins is the Op-Six-one pet rock, as well as being a well-known subversive. It’s always difficult to get his attention, and even then he whines.”
Grace smiled as Dan put on his jacket. “I’ll work up a list of questions,” she said.
Dan walked up to the 06 front office, greeting some fellow action officers in the hallway. They congratulated him on his detail to the investigation; any escape from Opnav, even temporary, was cause for congratulations.
When he arrived in the front office, he found Captain Manning engaged in a muted conversation with Capt.
Eldon Randall, senior aide and executive assistant to the Vice Chief of Naval Operations. Randall was a tall, dark-haired, and impeccably turned out naval captain, who wore the four gold appellants of his station as senior aide and executive assistant on his left shoulder like the mantle of a crown prince, which in a sense he was. He had been selected for flag rank on the previous December’s promotion list and was now reportedly awaiting an assignment as a cruiser-destroyer group commander. Randall maintained an aloof, distant expression, even when talking to other EAs. He had bright black eyes, heavy brows, a wide, shiny forehead in front of a receding hairline, a dramatically hooked nose, and thin, almost bloodless lips. He was tall enough to look down at most officers on the staff. In many respects, Randall looked a lot like his boss, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations himself, Admiral William H. Torrance.
Dan had never seen Randall without his coat on, even at his desk, as if he could not stand to be without those gold loops in full view. As an action officer, Dan had not had any direct dealings with the vice chiefs EA: Manning was as high as any of the 06 action officers were allowed to go. But he knew his reputation: a fiercely protective palace guard, fully invested with the power of the vice chiefs office, and direct to the point of being rude to any officer not an admiral. In the surface-ship community, he had earned a reputation as a commanding officer who indulged in the time-honored surface Navy tradition of eating his young. If an officer did not measure up to his own high standards, Randall would write him the kind of fitness report that would wilt a budding career to the point where the officer would be advised by the bureau to try civilian life.
Among the more senior Opnav staff officers at the working level, Randall’s reputation was equally menacing.
He seemed to enjoy taking a staff briefer apart, cleverly provoking mistakes at the podium and then calling everyone’s attention to them.
Dan literally hesitated in the doorway when he saw Randall, but the two EAs ignored him. Dan gave the high sign to the chief yeoman, who nodded, indicating that he would get him in to see 06B when the admiral was available. Dan turned his back on the two EAs and tried to make himself inconspicuous by once again staring at the picture gallery. A helicopter droned by the window from the Pentagon heliport outside, suspending all conversation for a moment.
“You are Commander Collins?” an imperious voice wanted to know. Dan realized Randall was talking to him, and he turned around but did not walk over to Manning’s desk.
“Yes, sir, I am,” he said.
Randall gave him a three-second inspection and then turned his back to talk to Manning, dismissing Dan without further word. And a pleasure to meet you, too, Your Friendliness, Dan thought. He turned away again, not wanting to look as if he was trying to eavesdrop on the EAs. Dan realized that some of Randall’s demeanor arose from the fact that his admiral, the vice chief, was almost certainly going to be the next Chief of Naval Operations, the senior officer in the entire Navy.
If visibility was indeed the key to promotion in the Navy, one could not be better positioned than to be the senior aide and executive assistant to the next CNO.
But Summerfield had made some interesting observations about Randall during one of their late-afternoon talks.
According to Summerfield, one of the main reasons Randall and the other EAs acted the way they did was because they were so visible. They had to serve in their EA billets for sometimes two or even three years literally without ever making a mistake. Typically, they came in to work at 5:30 a. m., sometimes earlier, six days a week, in order to know everything that was going on by the time their principal arrived at seven. Then they stayed in the office until their principal went home at night, however late that might be. Dan had been astonished one night when he had the duty to observe Manning performing the EA’s final chore for the night, known as “desk mapping.” When Vice Admiral Layman was through for the day, he would simply get up and walk out of the office to his official car. Manning was then expected to go into the DCNO’s office, draw a quick map of where every folder, letter, or staff paper physically lay on the large desk, stack everything away in a safe for the night, and then reconstitute the desk the next morning, using the map, putting every paper right back where the great man had left it the night before.
“Being an EA is kind of a rite of passage,” Summer field had observed, “and the admirals are pretty ruthless about it: You want to be an admiral like me, see if you can cut it as my EA. And you better be very damn good at it. If you are, then we’ll think about making you one of us.” Some captains wanted no part of it, preferring to stay down on the naval bases or at shore staffs after their captain sea commands, avoiding the rarified air of the three-and four-star front offices throughout the Navy. And since Summerfield had been an EA himself and was a classmate of admirals, Dan felt that he knew what he was talking about.
“Commander Collins, the admiral will see you now, sir,” announced the chief yeoman, and Dan headed for 06B’s closed door. The two EAs stopped talking as he walked by, with Randall giving him another studied look.
“Close the door,” Admiral Carson said as Dan entered.
“Sit down. I’ll be right with you.”
Carson was reading a staff paper clipped to a brown manila folder, a red felt-tip pen in hand. Dan knew all about that red pen. Finally, Carson put the folder down and looked over his reading glasses at Dan from his desk.
“You’ve moved your operations back to Washington.
Why?”
“I felt there was nothing more I could do in Philly, Admiral. I have the NIS field officer working on extensive interviews with shipyard workers who could have had access to the battleship, but that’s going to take some time—if in fact they do it. I thought I’d be more productive trying to develop a possible motive or reason for Lieutenant Hardin’s death.”
“And that motive is in Washington?”
“We don’t know that, sir. But all the records are or will be here, and it’s a better place to locate Hardin’s shipmates from two years ago than in Philly.”
“I see. You said if they do it—is NIS not cooperating?”
“Ostensibly, yes, sir. We’ll have a test pretty soon, though. Miss.
Snow, the liaison with NIS Washington, told the Philadelphia field office guy that these interviews were his first priority. If that stands, then I’ve got no complaints.”
Carson nodded. “Director NIS is Rear Admiral Keeler. We understood that his deputy, Mr. Ames, was pushing to take this matter up to the Secretary of the Navy, but it didn’t happen. So I suppose you’re still in business.”
“Yes, sir.” :
“I’m not going to inquire about the details of what happened up there, but the CHINFO got up at the CNO’s morning briefing today and said that it had the potential to be rather sensational.”
“Yes, sir, I think it does.”
“If it does, you may start to get some stick and rudder from all sorts of helpful Harrys. Remember the JAGMAN rules: You are the investigating officer, and you call it the way you see it. And if somebody senior really interferes, then you recuse yourself and hand it over to him and then it becomes his investigation. Kind of like when the captain walks out on the bridge and gives a maneuvering order: The captain then has the conn, right?”
“Yes, sir. But how senior does that advice go, Admiral?”
Admiral Carson’s face showed the ghost of a smile.
“You’ll probably find that out. That’s all, Commander.
You have a wonderful day.”
When Dan got back to 614, he was surprised to find a courier package from Bupers on his desk. Grace told him that it had come over five minutes ago. Dan opened the package and to his surprise extracted a tan personnel folder, a white fitrep folder, and two green medical records, one health, one dental. The records had a transmittal letter from the federal records depository stating that these records had not yet been archived and must be returned. He sat down with Grace and showed her what kinds of records were in each, then asked her to see if the medical examiner’s officer in Philly still wanted the dental records. He began to study the fitness reports, but he soon found that they were not going to be of much help.
“Damn,” he muttered.
Grace hung up the phone. “Philadelphia does want the dental records; they’re satisfied with the ID, but they took impressions, and the records will close their files. What’s the matter?”
“The fitness reports: They’re all plain vanilla—nothing superlative, nothing adverse. Ranking one of one, because the only other supply corps officer in the ship was the department head. These are going to tell us nothing.”
“Do they identify who the captain was?”
“Oh, yes. And I’ve got the wardroom list and locating info coming. But I was hoping there’d be some indication here, something pointing to a professional or personal problem, or even a personality trait.”
Grace sat back in her chair. “Why do you expect there to be a problem—just because he was black?”
“No, of course not. Because he was killed. My sense is that these things don’t happen out of the blue: He was involved in something that led to his being murdered.”
“Based on what evidence?”
It was Dan’s turn to think for a moment, but Grace pressed him.
“You see what I’m saying? That’s the wrong way to approach an investigation, making assumptions like that. I think it’s time for a case board.”
“Case board?”
“Yes, like the British police use. They set up a situation room, like this one, and then they list all the facts as they become available on a big white board. Each fact has a date or time associated with it. Then they list the names of anyone tied to the case in any way, again with dates of association. Then they set up a master board with a chronological timeline on it and place the facts and the people on that line. If there’s a pattern or connections, it typically shows up on the master board.
We should do that now. You’ve got these three white boards here already.”
They spent the next hour setting up the boards. Both Summerfield and Snapper looked in occasionally while they worked, but neither man said anything. When they had finished, Dan sat back down and stared at the boards.
“If there’s a pattern here, it’s eluding me,” he said with a sigh.
“We’ve just begun the investigation,” Grace said.
“But I see one pattern already.”
Dan looked hard but did not see it, but Snapper, who had reappeared in the doorway, did.
“Two deaths,” he said, pointing at the left side of the master chronology board. “Hardin’s sister dies in a traffic accident in D.C. on the twelfth of April 1992. Her brother gets killed around two weeks later, only nobody knew it at the time. Brother and sister, both Navy, both dead in less than a month. What are the chances of that happening in an unconnected manner?”
Grace was nodding. “And the only reason more wasn’t made of it was that, at the time, it was one death
and one disappearance. We only find out about the second death two years later.”
“The question is, then,” mused Dan, “are they in fact related: Is Hardin’s murder related to his sister’s accident?
Maybe we should go talk to the D.C. cops.”
Captain Summerfield appeared in the doorway next to Snapper. He had exhumed his pipe and was pretending to puff on it in deference to all the new antismoking rules.
“Seems to me,” he said, “that’s pretty unlikely.
You’re not going to get much from the D.C. police on a hit-and-run that’s two years cold. I think you need to talk to Lieutenant Hardin’s CO, XO—people like that.
I agree with Dan: Whatever got him into trouble is probably something they knew about.”
“The fitreps are plain vanilla, Captain,” Dan said.
“Yeah, but that’s not atypical of jaygee reports. He hadn’t been in the Navy long enough to warrant very elaborate fitness reports and all the promotion board code words. Promotion to full lieutenant isn’t automatic, but damn near so. I recommend you talk to the guy who was CO of Luce when she was in the yards.
There has to be some reason, something about this guy, that brought this on his head. And I’ll wager, since he was the Disbo, that it had something to do with money.
Even if the skipper won’t really talk about it, that will tell you something. There’s my phone.”
Summerfield and Snapper left the back room. Dan looked at Grace, who shrugged. Dan got up and closed the door.
“Captain Summerfield is probably right,” Dan said.
“We have to talk to the senior officers on his ship.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” she said. “You talk to them.
They’ll be more likely to talk to another naval officer than to a woman from the NIS.”
“Hey,” Dan protested. “We’re not all that bad.”
“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. But you must admit, mention of the NIS typically brings the shields up pretty quick, to use your expression. A commander calling from Opnav is likely to produce better results.
I’ve got a list of questions ready.”
“And you?”
“I think I’m going to give the D.C. police a call.”
on tuesday, malachi ward returned to his town house on Capitol Hill and screened his answering machine.
There was a message from the captain to call in.
He had to consult his Wizard for the number; he hadn’t heard from the captain for nearly two years. His beloved principal must have had an attack of chastity and learned to keep his zipper shut for a while. It was nearly 6:00 p. m., but he knew the captain would still be at the office. The captain was nothing if not dedicated. He dialed the number.
Malachi was tired after the four-hour drive back from Norfolk. He had accompanied the chief of staff of a House subcommittee down to the Tidewater area to have a little heart-to-heart with the head of a maritime trade lobby group. It seemed that the lobbyist had cross
ed the subcommittee chairman during hearings in the middle of an important power play on the Hill, this after promising to support a quota issue of interest to the chairman. The merits of the bill itself had not been in question: The political issue had been about the prerogatives of the chairman to control a bill. Malachi was hired to go along as an attention-getting device.
They had driven down to the Tidewater area, timed to arrive at the man’s home in the early evening, where the chief of staff had shared his thinking with the trade rep. Malachi, whose instructions were to say nothing, simply stood at the side of the patio and looked meaningfully at the man, his home, and his pretty wife and children visible through the kitchen windows. The message seemed to have penetrated. The following morning, the chief of staff met with the lobbyist and his entire staff to ensure that everyone was properly cali brated. Malachi had revisited the house in time to catch the lobbyist’s wife on her way to morning tennis, all pert and perky in her little white tennis outfit.
Again he had said and done nothing: He had just pulled up in front of their house and waited. When she came out the front door and saw him looking at her, she turned right around and went back in. He had given her time to get on the phone to her husband before slowly driving away.
When a voice he didn’t recognize answered the phone, Malachi left the code name and number and then went to make a drink. He had been good last night —traveling with a client. The chief of staff had a dinner invite somewhere, so Malachi had contented himself with the microwaved mystery d’jour at the Holiday Inn dining room and one double Harper before going up to his room. He had taken a quart of bourbon with him but decided to test his willpower. He had put the bottle out on the motel room dresser, unopened, and then watched television and smoked cigarettes until finally falling asleep. The still-unopened bottle sitting there the next morning was a vivid testimonial’to his self-control.
But that had been last night. This was tonight. He poured his usual and went to watch the evening news.
The phone rang as the local broadcaster was reviewing last night’s body count in some of the more socially dynamic neighborhoods of the District. He picked up the phone.
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