The Night Crew (30 page)

“How long did this last?”

“I wuz makin’ coffee in the lounge cell, and I wuzn’t checkin’ my watch or nuthin’. It . . . it wuzn’t like half an hour, though. More likely five minutes, or thereabouts.”

“And you could hear what they were doing?”

“Well . . . not ever’thing.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Nope. Like I tole you, Danny and Mike said they wuz goin’ to the mess to git some food, so I stayed in the lounge.”

“Tell me what you could hear, Lydia.”

She seemed to think about this. “A guy’s voice sayin’ stuff to that old man. And the noise of the beatin’ . . . y’know, these loud whacks, only more squishy-soundin’ . . . sorta like when you throw watermelons on the ground. I didn’t like it none. Even stuffed my fingers in my ears.”

“Did you ever witness with your own eyes what they were doing?”

She shook her head. “I tole you, I wuz fixin’ coffee.”

“And are you sure the voice you heard was Danny?”

“Sounded like Danny.”

“How far away were you?”

“I dunno. That empty cell was on the far side of the cellblock. Probably like thirty cells away.”

“Could you hear what they were saying?”

“I jus’ remember that Danny sounded real angry. Like I said, after I heard a few of them whacks, I tried not to listen. I plugged my ears shut.”

“Did Danny ever mention what happened that night to you? Ever discuss what he and Mike had done?”

“Nope, never.” She looked away for a moment. “Never really asked him about it, neither. Don’t guess I really wanted to know ’bout that night. That guy, he died, right?”

Right. I changed topics and instructed Lydia, “This next question is going to be as difficult for you as it will be uncomfortable for me. But it’s important to know the truth. Were you sexually abused as a child, and by who?”

She looked back at me, and, while she did not physically recoil, mentally she certainly took a big step back. She was willing to open up about a brutal murder, but she didn’t want to touch the topic of incest.

I allowed her a moment to overcome her inhibitions and, when she didn’t, I said, “I’m sure your parents ordered you never to talk about this. Maybe your father, or your mother, or both, threatened you to protect the family secret.”

By the way she began biting her lip I could see that Lenore and Silas had done exactly that, and Lydia was struggling to get past an injunction she had obeyed for God knew how long. Of all the crimes in the world, incest brings forth the most conflicted feelings for the victim because, after all, the victim is torn by loyalty to the very loved one who raped her, by the eternal shame of having submitted to acts that both nature and society find grotesquely abhorrent, and because a young child, in order to survive and not go entirely mad, has to banish the memory of what was endured into some dark corner of the mind, to repress it, very often to make it disappear.

Often the father who abuses his daughter is, by day, a perfect parent, adoring, caring, even doting, the guy on the sideline at the kid’s soccer match who cheers her on and takes her to the ice cream parlor afterward. It is only at night, after the lights go out, that he becomes a monster. Thus, just as the victim’s fate is separated by day and night, by lightness and darkness, it becomes more and more difficult to illuminate what truly happened.

I continued in a more forceful tone, “But that no longer matters, does it, Lydia? You’re twenty years old. You’re all grown up. You’re a soldier, and you’ve gone to war. You’re on your own, a woman, an adult in the eyes of the law, and certainly in my eyes. You don’t have to be afraid any longer.”

She leaned back in her chair, and I allowed her the time she needed to get past her reluctance. She eventually took the first tentative step. “I never liked it much.”

“Of course you didn’t,” I reassured her.

“I tried to git him to stop, but he . . . he jus’ wouldn’t.”

“Who wouldn’t stop, Lydia?”

“You got to promise you won’t hurt him, okay? I know what he did wuz wrong, but you cain’t tell nobody.”

“I can’t make that promise, Lydia.” I asked, “Who was it that abused you? Your father? An uncle? Who?”

“Wuzn’t my pa, no.” She added, after a moment, “Wuzn’t Uncle Clete, neither.”

“You’re sure, Lydia? You can and should tell me the truth.”

“Pa beat me sometimes, but he never did any of that other stuff.”

“All right. Who did do that . . . that other stuff?” I asked, adopting her neutral euphemism for being repeatedly raped.

“Jimmy . . . my big brother. When I wuz real little, he’d touch me . . . you know, he’d feel my privates. Wuzn’t till I wuz nine or ten, ’fore he started goin’ all the way.”

“How long did this last?”

“How long?”

“Yes. How old were you when it stopped?”

“It ain’t never stopped.”

“Oh . . .”

“Jimmy’s real big. He don’t really take no for an answer.”

“And your parents were aware this was going on?”

She nodded. “They tole him he better cut it out. Pa even beat him a few times after he caught him. Jimmy’s the real stubborn type, though. So Ma and Pa just made sure I got good birth control.”

I thought back to the expressions of shock and horror on Silas’s and Lenore’s face when I informed them that Lydia was pregnant. So that’s what they were thinking—they were scared shitless that their stupid son had impregnated their daughter. Talk about parental nightmares.

I asked Lydia, “Was that your primary reason for enlisting in the National Guard? To escape from Jimmy?”

“I guess. But Jimmy, like I said, he’s awful willful. He up and joined the Guard, too. Ended up in my same unit.”

“I see.” I took a shot in the dark and asked Lydia, “And what about the night you first approached Danny Elton in the bar back in Ohio, back before the deployment to Iraq. Was Jimmy present that night?”

“Sure was.” She nodded. “Figured if I hooked up with Danny, maybe he’d lay off me. Jimmy can git real ornery toward guys I flirt with . . . but Danny . . . well, he don’t take no guff off nobody.”

“And how did your brother react?”

“Oh . . . he looked real pissed, but he jus’ sat there and stewed.” She smiled at this small victory.

But this revelation opened a fresh possibility regarding the mystery that was most personal to me—who was killing the lawyers—so I asked Lydia, “Was Jimmy with your unit in Iraq? Was he at Al Basari?”

“He was gonna be, but . . .”

“But . . . ?”

“He got bumped ’fore we left. Turned out he had rickets on account of he don’t eat too good.”

“Yes, that can happen.” I asked, “When was the last time you saw Jimmy?”

“’Fore we left. Ain’t heard from him since.” She shrugged. “Jimmy never was much of one for letters.”

I had one other question. “I know you were mad at Danny and the others. Was it you who electronically forwarded the file of photos to a reporter?”

She appeared upset that I would ask this. “Wasn’t me, no . . .” she insisted, confirming what I suspected. “I never even saw them pictures . . . leastwise, not till the newspapers started puttin’ ’em in everybody’s faces. They wuz all stored in Ashad’s trailer. That’s God’s honest truth.”

I thanked Lydia and explained that her insights would be very helpful in building her defense. That wasn’t exactly true, but she didn’t need to know that.

She smiled and asked me one, and only one question. “You really think Danny’s gonna run off and git hitched to that lyin’ bitch, June?”

Are you kidding me
? I drew a deep breath, then told her, “My advice, Lydia, is to forget about Danny.”

I got up, turned around, and walked out the door.

I stepped out of the interrogation room and while I walked back to my car, I pulled out my cellphone and called Chief Terry O’Reilly, chief of my security detail. The moment I identified myself, he said, “I’m not in the habit of being disrespectful to my superior officers, but you know what? You’re an asshole.”

“That’s nothing. You should hear what my friends call me.”

“Don’t bug out without telling me again. You got a death wish, or something?”

“I was fine,” I told him. “Hey, I checked the backseat every time I got in the car. I even carried my amulet in the shower.”

“The range is only five miles.”

“Oh . . .”

“Next time it’s me whose gonna cut your throat.”

I gave him a second to cool off, then said, “I need you to do me a favor.”

“Really? My balls are swinging from the colonel’s keychain on account of your skipping on me and now you want a favor.”

“I want to make amends, Chief. Come on, it’ll be good for your career.”

I then told him to notify his CID and FBI buddies and have them run an all-points check with local police to see if a James or Jimmy Eddelston was staying anywhere within a thirty-mile radius of West Point. Check the hotels, boarding houses, short-term rentals and, since Eddelston was a country boy, don’t overlook the local campsites. Also have his CID superiors check with the National Guard to see if they have a thread on him.

“Hey, thanks for telling me how to do my job,” he said, dismissively. He then asked, “He’s some kinda relation to the pee-chick, right?”

“Her brother.”

“Shit, you mean there’s two of them?”

“If he’s in the vicinity, he should be regarded as dangerous.”

“This got anything to do with the killings, or are you just trying to find out if peeing in faces runs in the family?”

“Maybe both. He may have had a motive to kill the lawyers.”

“Want to tell me about that motive?”

“Have a nice day, Chief.” I hung up, left the MP station, and got in my Prius.

Sometimes, you can smell when the endgame is coming. I checked my watch. I had only eighteen hours left to solve a murder dozens of investigators had failed to crack after two months of investigations. I was okay with that.

But I had the sense that I now had a big bull’s-eye painted on my back. Something told me that I had become the next target.

Chapter Thirty-One

The weather had turned chillier, and light snow was falling, when, at 4:30, an innocuous blue sedan glided to the curb, and I climbed into the backseat. I had spent an hour dodging through buildings, running out back entrances, and doubling back to shake Chief O’Reilly’s watchdogs.

An equally inconspicuous young man in a de rigueur gray suit sat behind the wheel. He punched the gas and the sedan shot forward.

I introduced myself and asked his name.

I saw his eyes observe mine in the rearview mirror. He chose not to make any reply.

I said, “Are you kidding me?” and thought I had heard a chuckle. “Where are you taking me?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

With the CIA it’s always smoke and mirrors silliness, even when it doesn’t have to be. After another ten minutes of driving through back streets, without conversation, I asked him, “Hey, have you ever heard the story about the KGB officer and the CIA officer who met at the end of the Cold War to compare notes?” When there was no response I continued, “So the KGB guy says, ‘How secretive were we? I’ll tell you, comrade, I’ve been with the KGB twenty years. My wife has been with the KGB this whole time. Her office is right across the hall from mine. All these years, and she still doesn’t know what I was doing for the KGB.’ So the CIA guy looks unimpressed and answers, ‘Yeah, well I’ve been with the CIA thirty years, and even
I
don’t have a fucking clue what I’m doing.’ ”

The driver grunted, then replied, “That’s very funny.”

He then wheeled into the double garage of a private home, then got out of the car and pulled the garage door closed. Another car was parked in the spot to the right. He told me, “Get into the backseat of the other car.”

Did James Bond have to put up with this shit? But there was no use arguing. It was a Blue Ford SUV, with Margaret Martin behind the wheel, and now, me seated in the back.

Margaret welcomed me warmly by saying, “Get your head down low.”

The other agent pushed open the garage door, then Margaret backed out, turned around on the street, and wheeled off back the same way we came.

She said to me, “A pair of our chase cars tailed you the whole way. We don’t think you were followed.”

I was going tell her my stupid KGB-CIA joke but even I didn’t want to hear it again. I settled for, “This is bullshit, Margaret. Ashad and I could meet in front of a press conference, and nobody would have a clue who either of us is.”

She glanced at me in her rearview. “Is Army CID providing security for you?”

“I gave them the shake.”

“Yes, you did—we just confirmed it. Look, this is your fault. Ever since you stumbled onto Amal, everyone is being hyper-cautious.”

I was tempted to tell her that I didn’t “stumble onto” Ashad, I merely followed the trail of breadcrumbs they had stupidly left in his wake; but I suppose that merely reinforced her point.

I asked Margaret, “Where are we going?”

“Relax. We’ll be there in another minute.”

Perhaps I was being paranoid, but it suddenly occurred to me that the CIA might renege on this deal, and she was taking me to a barren bank of the Hudson River, where a crew of swarthy assassins were sharpening their knives—especially when we pulled into the parking lot of the Econo Lodge on the far end of Highland Falls, and I saw the last person I had expected, or wanted, to see walking toward the SUV.

“What’s he doing here?” I asked Margaret.

“I think he’s about to tell you.”

Mark Helner opened my door and stuck out his hand. “Surprised to see me?”

“Nearly speechless.” I then suggested, “Why don’t you follow my lead?”

“Look, my superiors told me to come up here to . . . to, well, to apologize. So . . . I . . . Look, I’m sorry I took your security clearance and your badge.” He put out his other hand; my CIA pass was in it.

I almost laughed in his face, but Herr Helner looked like a man who had left half his ass on some assistant director’s shelf back at Langley and I didn’t want to push it too far. But I couldn’t resist saying, “Keep it, a souvenir to always remind you of the special moment we shared together.”

He did not appear to appreciate the generosity of this offer and reverted back to form. “Don’t let it go to your head, Drummond. You may have won this round, but there’ll be a next time.” He took a step back. “The real reason they sent me is to minimize the number of people read on to Ashad’s status.”

That sounded like a closer version of the truth.

Margaret was already walking briskly in the direction of the ground floor rooms of the two-floored building. I looked around, and saw two or three more men, also in gray or blue suits, loitering, and trying to act inconspicuous—but such formal attire in the largely blue-collar village of Highland Falls was like wearing a sign that says, “Guess who works for a federal agency?” What this agency needed was a big budget cut.

Margaret looked over her shoulder at me. “Come along, Sean. Your guest is waiting for you.”

At 5:00, almost on the dot, Margaret used her passkey to open the door to room 133 and I stepped inside. She reminded me, before shutting the door behind me, “One hour. I’ll be back.”

I looked around. It was an anodyne motel-hotel room furnished blandly and inexpensively in the same cookie cutter fashion they all use, so you could travel from Boston to San Francisco and wake up the next morning and wonder what the hell you were still doing in Boston. I did not see Amal Ashad until the bathroom door opened and he stepped out, aggressively wiping his hands on a face towel. He looked at me. “Sorry. I had to piss the whole way up on the helicopter.”

I made no reply to this inauspicious introduction, nor did I proffer my hand to shake, which he observed as if he didn’t care.

“So how do you want to conduct this . . . this . . . ?” He rolled his eyes and asked, “Exactly what are we to call this, Colonel Drummond? A blame session, a meeting of the minds, or an interrogation?”

I was here to get his answers to my questions, not answer his. I ignored him as I pulled the office chair over from the desk and placed it about four feet directly across from the lounge chair in the corner of the room.

He watched me with what I assumed was professional detachment. He suggested, “I assume the chair in the corner is mine.”

“Take whichever chair you wish.”

He chose to sit in the office chair, which was about three inches higher than the lounge chair, and you sat upright; thus it was the natural seat of superiority and ergo, authority—the interrogator’s perch.

I sat in the lounge chair, which had the only important distinction I cared about—it was the more comfortable piece of furniture. He smiled.

I asked, “Have I done something to amuse you?”

“Not really.” He shrugged. “You just made a mistake only an amateur would make.”

I leaned forward in my chair until my face was ten inches from his. “I’m not here to play Interrogation 101 games with you, Ashad. I don’t care who has the bigger chair, the bigger ego, or the bigger prick. You’re going to tell me what I want to know, or after tomorrow, you and your lovely wife will spend the rest of your lives running from the press and international prosecutors.” I added, “Also those cute little children of yours will know what a truly sick prick their father is.”

“So it’s going to be that way.” He relaxed back into his chair. “Do you mind if I call you Sean? It just seems so asinine to stand on formality while you toss around your stupid threats and insults.”

As I had anticipated he would be, Ashad was a tough customer and a cool one. Face to face, he appeared to me, physically, at least, pretty much as his photos suggested, and as my imagination had pictured him—broad shouldered, slim-waisted, a narrow, intelligent face that was clearly Arabic by extraction. But like a lot of Americanized Arabs, it was a more animated face than you find in the homegrown variety. Something about America’s casual, carefree culture makes its citizens more openly emotional and visually expressive than most of the world’s citizens. With Ashad, however, I suspected it only ran skin-deep.

Also he had anthracite black eyes that, in contrast to his more lively expressions looked frigid and icy-cold.

In response to his question, I replied, “Call me Sean, or Colonel, or asshole, or as you wish. We are not friends, Ashad. We are never going to be friends.”

He shook his head, dismissively. “Okay, Sean. So . . . why don’t we get the big question out of the way, the one I know you’re dying to ask?”

“There are many big questions I’m interested in.”

“Here’s some advice, Sean. You have only sixty minutes of my time. Don’t waste a minute of it.” Satisfied that he had established the pecking order for this meeting, he leaned forward until his face was almost in mine. “Did I kill General Yazid Palchaci? Did I take a bat, or a crowbar, and pulverize him so badly that that little niece he raped wouldn’t recognize him?”

“What makes you think I suspect you?”

“Because I’ve seen the pictures of Palchaci’s corpse. Because we both know none of the girls were capable of that, don’t we? The damage was so . . . so . . . unfeminine. Because, in any regard, it’s just not how they roll. So I think this leaves Mike Tiller or Danny Elton, or both . . . or me, as suspects.” He paused for a moment. “But in the event you don’t know him well enough, Mike’s definitely not your man.”

“Why not? Nobody is above suspicion until I decide who the real killer was.”

“He’s a weakling. Oh, I’m not referring to his physique, which is certainly impressive. But he’s an almost neurotic follower. Timid, not very bright, so anxious to please, he bleeds subservience. Why do you think Danny chose him as his sidekick?” He then answered his own question. “Mike reaffirmed Danny’s view of himself. Mike did whatever Danny asked of him. Mike is a vocational lapdog.”

“All right, that explains Elton’s attraction to Mike. So why did Mike go along? What did he see in Elton?”

“It’s not complicated. For the most understandable of motives—free pussy, as much as a man could indulge.” He smiled at me. “That was a rare and invaluable commodity in Iraq. The girls liked him, too. He has big hands, if you understand that expression.”

“So, that leaves Danny, right?”

“Danny . . . yes.” He stroked his chin a moment, as though contemplating that possibility, but the result looked Mephistophelean. “He’s certainly my number one suspect.” He dropped the-hand-on-the-chin pose. “I’ll bet he was yours also, at one time.”

“Go on.”

“Very good, Sean. Straight from the manual. Keep the target talking.”

“So keep talking.”

“The question you should ask, is why I picked Danny to handle my cases? I assure you, he wasn’t the only guard at Al Basari with a cruel streak. The prison was such a mess, a lot of those guys were on power trips.”

“Why don’t you tell me, Ashad? What made Elton so special?”

“It came down to one factor. He was easily the most corruptible.”

“That’s an impressive epithet.”

“I’m sure you studied his record, as did I, prior to selecting him. Such a long unbroken chain of failures; failures to get promoted; failures to keep a job; failures to maintain his marriages . . . Danny is one of those men who just naturally fucks up everything he touches, so . . .”

“So . . . ?”

“I entered his cellblock one night to check one of my charges. I heard all this yelling and cursing. I found a dark corner where I could observe Danny and Mike without their knowledge. I watched them yank a prisoner out of a cell, and work him over for nearly twenty minutes. The man hadn’t done anything particular, in fact, he didn’t even grasp why they were beating the shit out him . . . it was just Danny having his fun. Then, these two girls showed up. I learned later, Lydia and Andrea were making a social call. Danny tossed the man back in his cell and, within minutes, the four of them had entered an empty cell and engaged in something I could never have imagined in a military prison in a war zone. All four of them, on the floor, naked, having an orgy, Mike on Andrea, Danny on Lydia.”

“And you watched this?”

“I couldn’t tear my eyes from it. Over the next month, I sneaked back again and again to observe them. From a psychological point of view, the group dynamics were so absorbing. Danny is such a unique and powerful personality. Like a prehistoric predator, he naturally senses the weakness in others, and he exploits them. He created his own little world in there.”

“A warped world,” I commented.

“Yes . . . one exquisitely shaped by the peculiarities and eccentricities of his very monstrous personality. I tell you, it was like something out of a Joseph Conrad novel if only Conrad had had a pornographic bent.”

“Why didn’t you step in? Why didn’t you stop it?”

“
Stop
it?” he asked in an incredulous tone.

“You’re a case officer of the CIA, for God’s sake. Presumably you were trained on the Geneva Convention and your ethical duty to adhere to it.”

“Stop it?” he repeated, rolling that phrase across his tongue as though he had never heard it before. “To the contrary, I began reassigning all my cases to his cellblock. To avoid attention, it took the better part of a month. But Danny’s sick little world, that’s exactly where I wanted them. They
deserved
to be there.”

Ashad stared at me, apparently blind to the fact that the world he was describing was, in fact, not Danny Elton’s world; it was
his
world. For sure, it would not have existed without Danny, or somebody like him. But it needed two special ingredients—victims, the men Ashad wanted tortured and broken; and the sanction of a superior officer, somebody who not only allowed it to exist, he encouraged it, and perhaps he even protected it.

“Did you tell Elton what you wanted him to do? Did you instruct him and describe how to break down the prisoners?”

Again, it seemed I had amused him. “Danny?” he answered. “The man is a force of nature. He needed neither motivation nor instruction from me. Well, an occasional challenge came up . . . a certain prisoner responding irrationally, and always, since none of the five soldiers spoke a hint of Arabic, there were communications issues. In those special cases, yes, we put our heads together. But, Danny was at his best when left alone to run his little chamber of horrors.”