The Night Crew (24 page)

Then a woman’s voice in reply, “Nah . . . git off your fat ass and you git it.”

“Stupid lazy bitch. Awright, but next one’s yers.”

The door opened and there stood a large fat man in baggy jeans and a filthy white T-shirt that was stretched tight at the belly. “Who’re you?” he asked by way of greeting.

I offered him my name and my rank, as well as a brief explanation of what I was doing there.

“No shit?” he asked, leaning on the doorjamb. The first thing I noted about Silas was the odor, which was as foul as it was pervasive. He did not appear to be a frequent bather, or even an infrequent one, nor was vanity one of his vices, as his unkempt hair hung down past his shoulders and his scraggly beard down to his chest. Perhaps I was responding to the suggestion already planted in my brain, but this guy actually
looked
like a child molester. He was now inspecting the cut of my jib and asked, “You ain’t got no uniform on. You sure you ain’t another of them damned reporters been comin’ around here lately?”

“Do I look like a nosy asshole?” When the expression on his face appeared ambiguous on this issue, I withdrew my military ID card and allowed him to study it.

He finally looked up at me. “You takin’ care of my little girl?”

“Trying to.” Apparently he was experiencing a lapse of manners, so I inquired, “Mind if I come in?”

“Place is a little messy,” he warned, stepping aside, which I took as permission to enter.

Silas Eddelston also had a gift for understatement. I stepped over toys and broken furniture and bits and parts of machinery until I entered what was supposed to be a living room, though it looked more like a storage bin for chaos.

Lenore yelled out, “Well, who is it, fatass?”

“Some army lawyer,” Silas bellowed back. “Says he’s defendin’ our little girl.”

A door in the back flew open and Lenore waddled down a narrow hallway, squeezed through a skinny doorframe, then entered the living room, which instantly shrank in size. She was, well, I suppose the most charitable way to put this is, a lot of woman. About four hundred pounds worth, though I doubted she kept count, as a precise weight was long past the point. Neither was she particularly attractive, with a small, upturned nose hidden somewhere in a large, fleshy face accentuated by a greasy, unwashed, and unfashioned mess of brown and gray hair. Her eyes were small, brown, and glinted with distrust. Though the floors were cluttered, she moved confidently and with surprising deftness, as if she knew where every piece of junk lay, stepping glibly over broken furniture without even glancing down.

“He talkin’ ’bout you?” she demanded in a low smoker’s voice.

Who else? “Lieutenant Colonel Sean Drummond, ma’am. I dropped by to ask a few questions about Lydia.”

She contemplated this announcement a moment, and me. “Should’a called ahead.”

Why
? “Yes, ma’am, I suppose I should have.”

“Well, what do you want?”

To get the hell out of here
. I smiled at Mrs. Eddelston and asked, “You’re aware of the charges being brought against your daughter?”

“Course I am. Ever’body in the friggin’ world knows the terrible lies bein’ spread ’bout our Lydia.”

Silas, who had momentarily disappeared, reentered the small room carrying a can of hillbilly champagne, aka Miller beer. “Lydia didn’t do none of that shit they’re sayin’,” he remarked, echoing his wife’s sentiments. “I ain’t never seen such a bullshit contest,” he added, eliminating any mystery about the origins of Lydia’s grammatical propensity toward double negatives.

I asked both of them, “You’ve seen the pictures in the news?”

“Hell, course we have,” Lenore answered with a disapproving scowl. Her husband raised his beer can, which seemed to be his way of replying in the affirmative. “So what?” Lenore demanded. “She might’a done a few little naughty things, but it don’t amount to nuthin’.”

“Mrs. Eddelston, the pictures you’ve seen actually account for a small slice of Lydia’s activities at Al Basari prison. In all, the prosecutors have over four hundred photographs of Lydia engaging in acts over more than a month-long period that you describe as naughty, any one of which could get her convicted of very serious crimes. And there may be even more photos.”

Lenore grew quiet, which was a treat. But Silas took over. “Aw, fuck that. Ain’t it yer job to git her off?” He cocked his head to the side, squinted, and added, “Don’t sound like yer doin’ shit to help our little girl.”

I’d been here less than a minute and already I was resisting the impulse to pull out my gun and pop Silas and Lenore Eddelston. Regarding his rude query, I replied, “My responsibility, Mr. Eddelston, is to provide your daughter the best defense I can, which in this case might amount to a plea of guilty and a pretrial bargain that allows her to walk out of prison before her AARP card becomes an antique. Your daughter is in a great deal of trouble, and no, my job is not to get her off, as you simplistically and erroneously put it, but to try my best to convince the court martial board that Lydia’s crimes do not merit their most severe sentence. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

While Silas considered my words, I decided to throw a little fuel on the fire. “My visit here relates to that intent. There is evidence suggestive that Lydia was abused from a very young age, that she was sexually molested here, at home, that she exhibited sexually inappropriate behavior throughout elementary school, and that, in high school, she seduced several of her teachers. I am told you were informed of this by school authorities.”

Silas Eddelston was now staring at me with an expression that veered between shock and confusion; Lenore merely looked dully preoccupied, like she couldn’t recall whether she had included sanitary napkins on her shopping list.

I continued, “I raise this because it speaks to the issue of extenuating and mitigating circumstances, as to whether your daughter’s decisions and actions at Al Basari prison were motivated, or perhaps even precipitated by, her childhood experiences, the result of sexual trauma inflicted here, in her home.”

Neither Silas nor his wife appeared to fully comprehend what I was saying, so I recast my multisyllabic explanation into an easier vernacular that might sink in. “What I’m saying, Mr. Eddelston, is that by diddling your daughter you fucked up her head. This caused her to reenact what you did to her on the prisoners. Now, do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Apparently, it did register because Silas cocked a fist and ran toward me. I’m no longer the lean, mean fighting machine I was in my days as a Special Forces stud, but Silas was hauling at least one hundred pounds of pure lard and, anyway, he made the bar-brawler’s mistake of signaling his intentions.

I took a step to my right just as he yelled, “Why you somnabitch, I’m gonna—,” and with my left arm I clotheslined him, then with my right fist I popped him hard on the right ear, which is more painful than a punch in the kisser. Silas’s feet kept going, but his ass and his head bolted straight for the floor, and he let out a loud
ooompf
as he landed, then grabbed his ear and began rolling around and howling.

His wife looked at me, then down at him and said, “You fat-assed idiot. You couldn’t’ve made it more easy for him to kick yer ass.”

I gave Silas a moment to let some of the pain wear off, and his squealing to subside, then said to him, “If you care about your daughter, you’ll tell me the truth, Mr. Eddelston. It might be her only hope of persuading the jury that she wasn’t entirely responsible for her own actions at Al Basari prison. Did you diddle your daughter?”

Silas looked up at me. “You bastard. You broke my ear.”

“That looks like it hurts. Does it?”

“Hell, yeah . . . feels like a bunch’a hornets are stinging the crap outta me.”

Satisfied that Silas was now in the proper frame of mind, I told him, “Then answer my question, Mr. Eddelston. Did you diddle your daughter?”

Still seated on the floor, he shook his head a few times in an effort to make the pain lessen. “Hell, no,” he squealed. “I ain’t never touched little Lydia.” He then amended that to, “Well, sure, I spanked her plenty . . . but I never once touched her in that sick way yer sayin’.”

“He’s tellin’ you the truth,” Mrs. Eddelston interjected. “Silas loves that little girl. But in a God-fearin’ way.”

I looked at Lenore. “I’m having trouble believing you, Mrs. Eddelston. Lydia exhibits all the symptoms and behavioral characteristics of a young woman who has been sexually traumatized. She’s promiscuous, a sexual exhibitionist, sexually predatory, and at the prison, she was modeling her peculiar activities and behavior on something.” I did not state that Lydia had neither the physical imagination nor sexual creativity to invent such behavior but I was sure they got the point.

While Lenore Eddelston pondered this charge, I decided to make her situation a bit more complicated, and revealed, “Oh, by the way, in the event you aren’t on the notification list, you’re about to become Grandma and Grandpa.”

Mrs. Eddelston’s eyes popped up. “What?”

“Your daughter is pregnant, Mrs. Eddelston. About three months now, which means the father is probably someone she served with at Al Basari. I’ll leave it to your daughter to tell you who the proud father is, but there’s a very good chance your first grandchild will be born in prison. I thought you should know this.”

Lenore and Silas were now exchanging looks and expressions that shifted from surprise to horror. There was a great deal communicated by those looks, a shifting collage of emotions that was hard for me to sort out, just as it appeared difficult for them to settle on a final communal verdict. But the prominent emotion wasn’t elation that a new generation of Eddelstons was about to be brought into the world—aside from horror, it was guilt and fear.

Silas, in fact, said, “Well, I’ll be . . . You gotta be shittin’ me.”

“She got herself knocked up?” Lenore asked, though I thought it was more along the line of an observation than a question.

Silas, by now, appeared to come to his senses and said something I would’ve said long before. He pointed a finger at me. “You git yer ass outta here.”

I looked down at him, still seated on the floor, still rubbing his ear. “I think you’re telling the truth, or at least some version of the truth about you not diddling your daughter, Mr. Eddelston. But I think you’re hiding a different truth. Something happened to Lydia in this house, and you and your wife know what it was, and are trying to keep it secret. I think you feel some guilt about this, and I think that if you don’t come clean about what happened in the past, you are going to compound that guilt and make the situation infinitely worse for her, and for yourselves as well.”

“Git out.”

“Have a good day,” I told him and left, picking my way back through both the material debris piled up in their cluttered yard, and the muddled swamp of the Eddelston’s sorrow, secrets, and shame.

Chapter Twenty-Five

On the drive back up to West Point I pulled off Interstate 95, into the Maryland House Service Area, where I reached into my pocket and withdrew the slip of paper upon which I had written the office phone number for Margaret Martin, the CIA Director of Support Services, and apparently, Amal Ashad’s boss du jour.

It was nearly six o’clock in the evening, but I was betting that Margaret Martin’s workday had been spent trying to figure out how to handle a big problem called yours truly, and she would still be in her office trying to work her way through the other issues in her inbox.

She answered on the third ring.

“Mrs. Martin, this is Sean Drummond.”

There was a long pause before she replied, “Who?”

I nearly lifted my feet off the ground to avoid the bullshit. “Let’s not play that game, if you don’t mind. Listen, Mrs. Mar . . . Can I call you Margaret?”

“If you wish.”

“Good. Now that we’re friends, you and I need to have a little talk.”

There was another long pause, and I could picture Margaret frantically punching a button to a switch that could record and trace this call. Margaret’s voice, if you’re interested, was what I would classify as bureaucratic baroque, as there was absolutely no intonation or variation in pitch, as though someone had taken a steam iron to her vocal chords. It was a cool, impersonal voice that radiated impartiality; the only clue you weren’t talking to a machine was her breathing, which sounded like her lungs were hooked up to a metronome. Where did they get these people? She eventually observed, “I believe you called me, Sean. Why don’t you talk and I’ll listen.”

In fact, she sounded like a younger, sprightlier version of Phyllis—which tells you something about Phyllis’s vocal range—so I decided not to beat around the bush. “This morning when Mark Helner took away my magic pass, I think I forgot to mention to him that I took several adorable pictures of Amal Ashad dropping off his kids at Williamsburg Elementary School. The photos are date- and time-stamped, so there won’t be any unnecessary confusion about whether these were taken before or after Ashad never died.”

“I—”

“Wait, I’m not finished.” The best way to get Herr Helner off my ass was to show these people how badly he’d screwed up, so I informed her, and whoever else was listening, “When I get back to West Point, I intend to have the pictures entered into evidence, and to share these photos with the prosecutors and other defense attorneys. I further intend to give copies to Melvin Cramer, who I am confident will find a way to get them on the front pages of many newspapers. Then I will take them to a military judge so I can obtain a subpoena that will be issued to your agency compelling Ashad to testify.” I paused, then asked her, “Do I have your attention?”

“I would say you do.” As I expected she would, she insisted “You really don’t want to do this, Sean.”

“Well, Margaret, yes, I really do.”

“Listen . . . you have no real idea what you’re getting into.”

In the event my former boss Phyllis, was, or would soon be, listening to the tape, I replied, “I was already told that once in the past twenty-four hours. It didn’t work then, and that was before you people decided to screw with me and interfere with the conduct of a legal investigation.”

There was another brief pause, and I could picture Margaret Martin taking a deep breath, now realizing how badly Mark Helner had mismanaged the Sean situation. Still in that same flat tone she said, “I’m sorry if Mr. Helner mistreated you. That was . . . unfortunate. He has some rough edges.”

“You mean you’re sorry he didn’t scare me off.” On the chance that Mark Helner was also listening, I felt the need to add, “And if rough-edged is a euphemism for saying he’s an asshole, I won’t argue with you.”

She had obviously chosen a placating tact over a defensive or antagonistic one, which showed she was a realist. “I can certainly see where you’d feel that way, Sean.”

“Quit trying to jerk me off, Margaret. It didn’t work this morning and it’s not working now.”

She realized this appeasing approach was falling short of the mark and fell back on her earlier warning, telling me, “There’s a great deal more going on here than you know.”

“That’s what I love about you people.”

“I wasn’t aware you love anything about us.”

“It’s your predictability, Margaret. Every time you get caught with your hands in the wrong place, you think you can make it go away by claiming you’re the only grown-ups in the room.” I told her, “We’ll let the American people know. Let them decide.”

“You’re mad right now, Sean. You’re not thinking clearly. Don’t do anything stupid or precipitous.”

“The only stupid ones on this line are you, Margaret, and the people working with you. You should have known Ashad’s activities at Al Basari, once they blew up in the army’s face, couldn’t be covered up and concealed no matter how much camouflage you threw on it. But to let five soldiers take the entire responsibility for what happened at Al Basari is more than stupid. It’s criminal.”

My use of the word “criminal” was intended to fling down the legal gauntlet, and Margaret was obviously savvy enough to pick up on it, with all the ugly implications it conveyed. Ashad’s activities were demonstrably prosecutable, but now that the Agency had engaged in a cover-up, everybody who had knowledge of or fingerprints on that conspiracy was a candidate for a perp walk. And if this thing went as far and as wide as I was beginning to suspect, the perp walk would look like the Macy’s parade and it would begin at a well-known address on Pennsylvania Avenue. The government would have to rent a coliseum for the trial.

She needed a long pause to consider how to reply to this troublesome insinuation. I suspected there was someone else in the room with her, because I couldn’t even hear her breath, meaning she was either experiencing a serious coronary event or she had a hand placed over the mouthpiece.

When she did not drop dead, it was to insist, “Sean, you and I need to talk.”

“We are talking, Margaret.”

“What I have to say to you cannot be breached over an open line. I can only convey this to you in person.”

“You could’ve seen me in person this morning. Remember? I was just outside your building.”

She displayed admirable self-restraint and responded, “Please, Sean, that’s all I ask. Let’s discuss this, and . . . afterward, if you still feel the need to expose Ashad, we won’t try to stop you.”

“You couldn’t stop me if you tried.”

“I . . .” Whatever Margaret was about to say, she changed her mind and inquired, “Do we have a deal?”

“Tomorrow, not later than 1000 hours. Come alone.”

“That’s not acceptable. I’ll be accompanied by one person. You’ll understand why tomorrow.”

“If it’s more than one, I’m gone.” I then warned her, “I’ll be armed.”

“That’s fine, but totally unnecessary. We won’t. I promise.”

“And I’ll be bringing my cocounsel. She has the right to hear this also.”

“No, you . . . I’m afraid that’s . . . Look, that’s not part of the deal.”

“Why not?” I lied and informed her, “You’ll like her.” I then told her an even bigger lie. “She’s more reasonable than I am.”

“Regardless of Ms. Carlson’s personal proclivities, she doesn’t have a security clearance. What you’re going to hear is on a need-to-know basis.”

This seemed like a good opportunity to remind her, “I don’t have a clearance either.”

Margaret also was into lies and deceit because she responded, almost managing to make it sound sincere, “That was a stupid mistake. Nobody told Helner to do that. I’ll get it reinstated right away.”

I thought about Katherine’s earlier admonishments to me about not flying solo—not to mention that two corpses are harder to dispose of than one. “Wave your magic wand and give Ms. Carlson a temporary security clearance. You can do that, Margaret. I know you can.”

“You’ll understand why I have to insist on this when we talk. This is nonnegotiable, Sean. Please, don’t be difficult.”

Whatever she had been briefed about me, she obviously did not know me very well: difficult is my middle name.

But it sounded like Margaret Martin was offering to let me in on the big secret shared by Amal Ashad, and though it went against my better survival instincts, I decided to accede to her demand that we meet alone. Why not? In the memory chip of my cellphone was all the evidence I needed to blow the lid off this case—as long as she couldn’t destroy it, or me, I had enough protection to survive a meeting.

Apropos of that thought, I told Margaret, “Just so we’re clear, I’ve already taken precautions to ensure the pictures survive in the event I don’t.”

I hadn’t yet. But now I thought about it, it didn’t sound like a dumb idea.

“I understand,” Margaret replied. She then added, for the first time with real conviction in her voice, “Please do drive safely, Sean.”

The moment we rung off, I punched Imelda’s number into my phone. Before I could identify myself, Imelda inquired, “Where you at?” in a tone that did not sound all that friendly.

“I took a wrong turn leaving the neighborhood yesterday, and ended up in DC, of all places. I’m on my way back.”

“Uh-huh. Shoulda tole somebody. Them security folks across the street’s been going nuts.”

“It’s in their job description to go nuts.”

“And everything’s goin’ nuts with this case.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Cuz them little girls is pregnant.”

Despite possessing two master’s degrees and a razor-sharp mind, Imelda’s diction can often be confusing, even to me. For instance, I thought she said pregnant, plural. I replied, “We learned that Lydia is pregnant before I departed.”

“I know that. But that other little girl’s pregnant, too.”

I took a stab. “Are you referring to June Johnston?”

“Well, it ain’t me.”

“And we learned this, how?”

“Private Eddelston called Katherine. Her head was all messed up.”

This seemed to be a reliable clue as to who the father was; actually, times two. I definitely wouldn’t want to be in Danny Elton’s shoes when the night crew got together for veteran reunions.

“Where’s Katherine right now?”

“With the client. When Eddelston learned Johnston was pregnant, she flipped out. Katherine is calmin’ her.”

“I see.” I then told Imelda, “Don’t tell Katherine where I’ve been. Also, I’m about to forward you some pictures I took this morning, but you are not to show them to anybody. Not even Katherine.” I emphasized, “
Especially
not Katherine.”

There was a long silence before Imelda said, “You two got to cut this crap out. It ain’t good.”

I replied, perhaps untruthfully, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t be playin’ that with me. You’n Katherine, you two like a pair of dogs in heat, pissing on everything around you.”

Now I was sure what she was talking about, and I didn’t like it. I cleared my throat. “Imelda, it’s none of your business.”

“You two makin’ it my business. You gotta a client whose head is so messed up, she needs her lawyers to have their heads on perfectly straight. You two best straighten your shit out.”

Imelda rarely uses profanity, and it is even more rare for her to stick her nose into the personal lives of those around her. She had a good point, though. “I’ll work on it.”

“Didn’t ask you to work on it. I said straighten this shit out.”

I informed her, “I should arrive in about three hours,” and rang off.