by D. F. Bailey
“Hey, look at us, Finch.” J.R.’s eyebrows rolled upwards as his face broke into a wide grin. “Two beautiful girl-cops towing us around in handcuffs.”
“Yeah. Two sad sacks. Lucky at last.”
The women chuckled and traded a look.
“Back then you’d just started at The Post,” J.R. said. “Broke that story on those five knives murders, right?”
“Couldn’t have done it without you.” Finch shrugged as if he was admitting to an indisputable fact. “It’s the truth, man.”
J.R. averted his eyes, not quite able to accept this.
“I mean it.” Finch realized that it was time to change direction. He gazed at the amber light from the oil lamps on the fireplace mantle. No point in being abrupt or impolite, he told himself. The moment called for some gentle diplomacy.
“Teesha, that was a feast. Totally unexpected, too,” Finch said and wiped his lips on a paper napkin. “But before I have a second piece of pie, J.R., you have to tell me how the hell you found us.”
“A bit of devilry to it, huh?” J.R. smiled as if the twists and turns had exceeded his expectations. “It starts with Tony Turino. Did you ever know him in Baghdad?”
“Never seen him before the day he arrived at my doorstep.”
“A week ago last Saturday,” Eve added.
“I wondered about that. He said he knew you, but I wondered. Anyway, he came to me with this story. We talked about what to do. Took me two or three hours to sort it out.”
“Sort what out? I’m so far out of the loop I can’t even figure out why we’re here.” Finch pointed to the floor as if he needed to clarify the exact location of the mystery.
J.R. rubbed a hand over his mouth and considered how to lay everything out. “Let’s do Tony, first.”
“All right,” Finch conceded. “One step at a time.”
“About two, maybe three months ago, Tony had a visit from Joey Kinsella, one of the guys in his platoon. Apparently Kinsella was churned up. Unable to talk sense, he was so worried. He’d heard that another man from their unit, Frank Chernovski, had been killed in a mugging in Detroit. Kinsella convinced Turino that one by one, we are all going down.”
“We? Who the hell — ”
“Just let me get there, okay.” J.R. held up a hand. “Kinsella had this journal that he’d written through his tour in Iraq. Like a diary, right? He gave it to Turino to check out and Turino passed it on to me. I got a copy right over there.” J.R. pointed a thumb to some stapled pages sitting on the side table next to the sofa. “It’s a photocopy of Kinsella’s Moleskin book. Our notary made two verified copies. That’s one of them.” He paused as if he needed to find his bearings, and then went on. “So I read this thing through, cover to cover. Kinsella makes some bold claims. After I read it, I called Turino. Right away I could tell the man was beside himself. He said Kinsella was murdered that same night. In Bakersfield, where he lived with his wife and two kids. Some kind of motorcycle accident that Turino claimed was a setup. I happen to know Kinsella was a champion bike racer. He won both the Circuit of The America and Sonoma Raceway cups,” he added, as if this provided an additional dimension to his death. He looked back at Finch and continued. “So at this point I’m starting to take this very serious myself. You feel me?”
“Yeah.” At the very least, Finch felt the mystery of the story building. “Go on.”
“I told him we had to meet. We set it up for the next afternoon down at his bar.”
“Shotwell’s?”
“Yeah. We sat in a corner and he told me what he knew. Within ten minutes, I figured I had to record his testimony and get it officially notarized. Which is what we did the next day with this guy our company uses. Frank Whittaker, at Abacus Public Notaries. Whittaker’s the same guy who verified the copies of Kinsella’s diary.”
He pointed to the papers on the table again, and leaned toward Finch, looking for an acknowledgment. Finch nodded and J.R. continued. “So the only way I know to break open this long chain of murder was to out the whole thing at once. Get it on CNN and MSNBC. Broadcast it wide, so the FBI jump on it from day one. I told Turino the only one I knew who could do that was you.”
“Me? Why not go to the cops?”
As J.R. shook his head, Teesha spoke up.
“This’s bigger than the cops.” Her eyebrows rose in a wide arc as if to say, wait and see if I’m wrong. “If we don’t shout this out across the country in the next week, we’ll all be dead first.”
“So Turino tried to dig you up at The Post. Took him some time, he told me, before he’d found where you were in Canada.”
“Through me,” Eve put in. “He was pretty devious. But not stupid.”
“No, he’s not that.” J.R. drank some water from his cup and continued. “So at this point I’m getting paranoid, you know. Believing him. That’s when I made plans for me and Teesha to come up here. In a no-trace fashion. Took her car, not mine. And instead of giving out my number, I told Turino to get you to call my Aunt Liane.”
“Except her cell number expired.”
“Yeah, I realized that just after he left. Hell, she didn’t never use that phone anyway. Looks like she never paid the bill for it, too. I got it as a back-up for her landline. Anyway, once he drove up to Canada I had no way to track Turino down. But ’parently, you figured that all out, right?” A broad smile crossed his face.
“You still haven’t told me how you found me down near the Ashland Co-op store.”
“Aunt Liane used her landline to call Teesha’s cell the minute you stepped out her apartment.”
Finch considered this subtle deception. So Liane Linner hadn’t disclosed everything she knew. But why would she? She had to protect J.R. and follow the plan he laid out for her. Finch knew he’d have done the same.
“I figured it’d take you a day to get up here. Once you were in Ashland, I knew you’d cross my path somewhere in the village.”
Finch shook his head with a doubtful look. “You know how many turns of luck that took?”
The big smile flashed across J.R.’s face again. “Like black on a bruise, man. Black on a bruise.”
Finch laughed, but then he realized that J.R. knew only part of the story. “So you haven’t heard about Tony, right? Or his friend, Fuzzy.”
“Fuzzy?”
“Turino’s buddy who drove up to Canada with him.” Finch waited to let this sink in.
“They’re both dead,” Eve said.
“Dead?”
A heavy silence filled the room. Finch felt as if they were all trying to calculate the body count, but no one could come up with an exact number.
“How did it go down?” Teesha’s eyes narrowed. “Both at once, or what?”
“What we figure,” Eve said, “is that Fuzzy targeted Turino from day one. Three days ago we met Turino’s uncle at his memorial service. The uncle told us Fuzzy and Turino were going fishing up in Canada. Since Turino’d never done a day of fishing in his life, it didn’t make sense.”
“And both of them followed you up there?”
Finch nodded and picked up the thread. “That first night, Turino came alone to my cabin. I’d never met him before, but he claimed he’d seen me on TV. He said he’d met you, and something about we were all going to be taken out. I told him to come back the next morning and I’d talk to him.”
“But in the morning,” Eve continued, “two Canadian cops came by to tell us Turino was found dead on some rocks next to the ocean. It looked like he could have fallen. Maybe.”
“I guess that’s the way they want it to appear. Death by misadventure. No mess, no fuss,” Finch added. “The official report just came out yesterday. Their coroner concluded it was a non-suspicious death. Broken neck due to a fall. But we’re certain Fuzzy killed him a few hours after he knocked on my door.”
“How do you figure that?” J.R. asked.
“ ’Cause the next night Fuzzy came after us with a nine-millimeter pistol fitted with a silencer.�
�
“Jeezus.” J.R. drew a deep breath. “And what happened to him?”
“No comment,” Finch said in a tone intended to terminate that line of inquiry.
“My God,” Teesha whispered and stared at J.R. He held her eyes for a moment, nodded, then turned away. Another bleak silence washed through the cabin as everyone absorbed the depth of the conspiracy surrounding them. But Finch still felt confused. The complete picture was obscured by the episode with Turino and Fuzzy. Apparently something bigger lay beneath the murders and J.R.’s vanishing act. An earthquake trembling beneath their feet.
“So look, I know I’m not here just because my name comes with a headline. What’s all this got to do with me?”
J.R. cranked his head to one side as if he had to stretch out a bothersome kink in his neck. His eyes turned back to Finch. “You’re in it whether you know or not. Not that it was any of my doing.”
“What d’you mean?”
“ ’Nother long story.” He lay his hands flat on the dining table. “Let’s grab some coffee and sit near the fire. I’ll try to spell it out.”
J.R. carried two oil lamps from the dining table and placed one on each of the side tables in the living room. Eve and Finch settled on the overstuffed sofa opposite the fireplace. Finch took a moment to study his surroundings. Next to the river-rock fireplace a wooden door led to the backyard. To the left, an open door revealed the only bedroom in the cabin. Beneath the bedroom window he could see a brass bed layered with two or three blankets. In all, the cabin was a small, tidy place where a couple on good terms with one another could sit out a long, cold winter.
Teesha carried four mugs and the coffee percolator to the table near the fireplace. She asked if anyone wanted milk or sugar. Everyone declined and she sat beside J.R. and tucked a hand under his thigh.
“So this goes back to Iraq,” J.R. began and then paused, wondering how to sketch out a story that he knew to be both vague and complex — something beyond his ability to set out in an order that made obvious sense. “You ever hear of Captain Brodie?”
Finch considered the name, then shrugged.
“Deacon Brodie. A captain in Army Air Assault stationed outside Baghdad in oh-four.”
“The Deacon Brodie who ran the president’s election campaign?” He shook his head in disbelief. “He’s just been nominated for the next secretary of state.”
“One and the same.” J.R. shook his head as if he could barely believe his own words. “Back in oh-four he was supervising the transfer of prisoners from battlefields all over Iraq. Bringing them in by CH-47 Chinook helicopters. First they’d land at the Baghdad airfield for processing. The bad guys then got convoyed over to Abu Ghraib for interrogation.” He paused. “As I remember, that’s where you came in.”
Abu Ghraib Prison was Finch’s station for eight months during the war. As a Public Affairs officer he had to stick-handle the stories of torture and sexual abuse broken open by 60 Minutes — the first huge scandal of the war. In reality he was a first lieutenant from Military Intelligence working undercover on the scene. Years later, rumors emerged that Finch himself was the source of the leaks that brought the 60 Minutes team to the prison. Rumors that he would neither confirm nor deny. At the time, it seemed like a clever dodge.
Finch gazed into the fireplace as a knot of seared wood popped free from a log and rebounded against the fire screen. “Yeah. I was there. That’s when you and I first met.”
J.R. gave him a knowing look and continued.
“So one day — one very bad day — Brodie is flying in with fifteen or so POWs on board. Normally he wouldn’t be part of the flight crew, but Brodie liked to absorb the real-time action. We’ve all seen his type, right? Frontline blood ’n’ guts COs. Anyway, to this day, nobody knows for sure how many hajjis they’d bagged. Course, you remember back then, no one could tell a prisoner of war from some unlucky teenager scooped up in a village next to nowhere. Anyways, flying a hundred meters above the desert, their chopper takes a hit. Some flak takes out the co-pilot — killed where he sat, sliced right through his throat. One engine starts coughing up smoke. You know how it is. There’s nothing but adrenaline, blood, and panic. This is when Brodie takes the prisoners and slings them out the open landing ramp. Their hands all zap-strapped behind them, out they go one after another until not one of ’em’s left. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.”
Finch stared at J.R. as he spoke. He snapped his fingers with each pop in a slow, steady rhythm as if he might be counting in the beat for a laid-back blues tune.
“Did they make it back to the base?”
“Barely.”
Finch looked away. “What happened when they touched down?”
“Radio silence.”
“Really? They put a lid on something like that?”
J.R. almost laughed. “Hey, you were at Ghraib. How long did they keep a lid on that before it popped open?”
Finch rolled his eyes, wondered why he’d even bothered to ask. “So how’d it get to you?”
“Turino. He was one of seven men guarding the POWs. So was Frank Chernovski. And Joey Kinsella.” He paused to wipe a hand over his face. “So next is when things get strange. A week or so after the chopper returned to the base, the pilot, Dutch VanHeussen is murdered outside a local kafyh in Al-Karkh.”
Finch contemplated the possibilities. Sure, the story sounded suspicious, but not unlike many others he’d heard in the first few years in Baghdad.
“Then in mid-March, two more witnesses on the same mission are killed in action while driving from Baghdad out to Abu Ghraib. Larry Cottrell and Alan Rousseau. You heard of them?”
Cottrell and Rousseau. Their names were familiar but Finch couldn’t quite place them. Then it hit him. The memory — one that always hovered in the ghost shadows of his mind — came back to him in its entirety. “Cottrell and Rousseau were two guys on my Humvee when we hit an IED about ten miles out of Ghraib. Both killed in action.”
J.R. nodded. “And one month after that, one of the guards on the CH-47 flight, John Sinclair, goes missing and is never seen or heard from again. Never.”
Finch looked at Eve, then his eyes stared into the distance beyond her.
“That’s why you’re in this, Finch. Because of Cottrell and Rousseau and what they witnessed on that CH-47 Chinook. And the off-chance they told you what they saw. But mostly because Turino wanted you for his mouthpiece. And Deacon Brodie knows it.”
He paused to lift his hands in the air with a sign of bleak resignation. “I could go on, but everything else I know is on my recording with Turino — and in that journal.”
“All right then.” Finch picked up the photocopies and flicked through the pages. He took a moment to appreciate Kinsella’s careful, economical handwriting. Then Finch drank the last of his coffee and turned to Eve. “You heard enough?”
Eve glanced at the ceiling as she considered the question. “I think so. If we’re going to be part of this — and I know we already are — then we should make a copy of the diary and keep it in the vault back at The Post.”
“Okay with you?” Finch looked at J.R.
“Keep it,” he said. “The notary has the original and a certified copy.”
Finch turned to Teesha. “What do you think?”
“What I said before,” she replied. “Anything we can do to break open Brodie’s story, let’s do it. The sooner the better, right?”
“In situations like this? Absolutely. Remember when John Kerry ran as the Democratic candidate for president? He was cruising to victory when suddenly his Vietnam war record came into question. The so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accused him of cowardice. And worse. But before Kerry could turn it around, it was too late.” He paused. “Deacon Brodie is whip-smart. The Swift Boat lesson won’t be lost on him. He needs to kill this story before it’s out.”
“In that case,” J.R. said in a low voice, “it means killing all the witnesses.”
“Can we hear your intervi
ew with Turino, too?” Eve asked.
“I can get the audio file to you.”
“Is it encrypted?”
“No. But password protected. I’ll use the internet connection in the town library to email it to you.”
A skeptical look crossed Will’s face. Email was never the best means of exchanging sensitive information. “What about loading it on a flash drive?”
J.R. smiled and waved a hand at the oil lamps. “No juice, man. The notary has the original on a flash drive. Mine’s in the cloud.”
“Right. Then I guess email will have to do.” Finch wrote his email address on the bottom of the map that J.R. had slipped to him at the Ashland Co-op store. Then he considered another option. “And why not give me the file password now? That way it can’t be intercepted online.”
J.R. took Finch’s pen and on a new slip of paper wrote the password: JR2finch.
“We’ll get on it tomorrow after we get back to San Fran. You should hear from me no later than Tuesday,” Finch said and stood up. “That work for you?”
J.R. glanced at Teesha. Her chin dipped forward, a defiant nod.
“We’re with you, man.” J.R. put on a weak smile. “On this mission, it’s all the way — or no way at all.”
※ — EIGHT — ※
IT WAS JUST past ten a.m. when Finch steered the RAV4 back onto the I-5 and drove south to San Francisco. By late afternoon he’d settled in the easy chair in his writing loft and began to thumb through Kinsella’s photocopied journal. It held about a hundred pages of small, narrow script. The sort of cramped, exacting penmanship you’d use if you didn’t know when you’d be able to acquire a new Moleskin book to continue your diary. The top right corner of the first page was dated December 16th, 2003. The top left corner identified a location: Baghdad.
He stretched his back against the chair cushion, adjusted the reading lamp, and began to absorb a story that unfolded in short bursts and long, interminable pages obsessed with the inanities of war: the food, the gutter talk, the boredom, the moments of terror. Some of the sentences had no subjects — no places, no times, no first or last names. Sometimes the short phrases merely captured a mood, a feeling, a sense of place. Desert’s oven hot … Jinx is on the Squad … Pushing thru til dusk.