Blind Justice

by Ethan Cross

  “I already told you that we checked all that.”

  “Did you just look at his bank and credit card statements or did you check the actual leave and earnings statements he received from the government?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, of course not, we were just foostering about. It’s not like I know how to do my damn job or anything.” She reached across the table and killed the call. To Black she said, “Is your boss always such a wanker?”

  He thought of Munroe’s name in small black letters inside the binder at the Pentagon Memorial. “He’s been through a lot, but I don’t really know him very well. I’ve only been working with him for a few days.”

  “What did you do before DCIS?”

  “This and that.”

  The waitress arrived and asked to take their orders. She was pretty with long black hair done up in a french braid and dimples in her cheeks. Another waitress walked by with a large strip steak on a tray, and as the smell of sizzling meat wafted past, Black realized how hungry he was. He checked the time on his phone. Gelman would be arriving in about a half hour. “We have someone else coming in a few minutes,” he said to the young brunette.

  “But I’ll have one of your ice cream sundaes while we’re waiting,” Katherine added.

  The waitress gave a nod and a smile and headed toward the kitchen. Black said, “What are you, like five years old? You’re going to spoil your dinner.”

  “Thanks, mum, but it’s more important to me to make sure that I have room for dessert.” Then Katherine’s smile abruptly faded, and her demeanor turned cold. “Who are you really?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I tried to pull your file. Apparently, it’s classified. Are you like some sort of CIA assassin?”

  “Not that I recall, but maybe they erased my memory. You were checking up on me?”

  She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. A cold silence stretched between them. They sat and stared at each other for a few moments. Black cracked first. “Okay, you win. Up until a few days ago, I was in prison.”

  Her expression told him that she had considered a lot of scenarios, but that had not been one of them. “And now you’re a federal agent?”

  “Sort of, I guess. I don’t think Munroe likes to color within the lines, and apparently, he’s pretty well connected. Plus, I had less than six months left on my sentence. It’s not like he sprung Charlie Manson. He needed me to convince Corrigan to talk to him, but now Corrigan’s not talking to anyone.”

  “Wow.” Her head seemed to be swimming with the implications. “What were you in for?”

  “I killed my brother.”

  Her eyes went wide. “I think I’m going to need a wee bit more explanation than that.”

  Jonas Black hadn’t discussed that night with anyone for years, not since the trial. The guilt and pain were always there at the edge of his thoughts like a ghost watching him from the shadows, but discussing such things had never helped. He’d visited several counselors, both after his time in the war and his brother’s death. But some scars never healed, no matter how many times people with good intentions forced him to tear the wounds back open. Talking about the past didn’t change it or make it easier to live with his choices. But something disarming in Katherine’s eyes made him want to open up, and so he took a long drink of water and then told her everything.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  As he told his story, Jonas Black watched Katherine closely, but she didn’t speak or show much reaction. She didn’t try to council him or comfort him. She offered no absolution for his sins. With a nod, she simply said, “That’s horrible. I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” he added, not knowing what else to say.

  “Did your brother have a family?”

  “Yeah, a wife and a little boy. Will and Stacey. But they won’t have anything to do with me. Stacey hates me, and it’s been over five years since I’ve seen my nephew. He was only eight when it happened. He probably doesn’t even remember me…or his dad.”

  She didn’t say anything, just gave an almost imperceptible nod. He imagined she didn’t know what to say beyond the standard I’m sorry that she had already used once. Her discomfort with the situation was clearly visible, but he appreciated the fact that she didn’t try to offer hollow words of consolation.

  The ringing of her phone saved them both from the awkwardness of the moment. He listened to the one-sided conversation and could see by her expression that something bad had happened. Signing off with a thank you, she said, “That was NCIS headquarters. They knew I came out here to speak to Gelman. And they just got a call that he fell down the stairs at his office building and snapped his neck.”

  Black cracked his knuckles, and through a clenched jaw, he said, “Which means he was murdered. Because of us. We got him killed.” He slammed his fist down on the table.

  She reached across and squeezed his hand. “You had better call Munroe,” she said in a whisper.

  With the phone on speaker, he dialed and Munroe answered almost instantly. “Well?”

  “Gelman’s dead.”

  “What? How?”

  “They say he fell down the stairs and broke his neck.”

  “Dammit, they’ll probably figure out that it was murder when the ME gets a hold of him, but that still doesn’t help us. Listen, I had Joey look up the leave and earnings statements—”

  Katherine shook her head derisively. “You have to be kidding me. I told you multiple times that we looked through all that.”

  “Yes, you examined the records for Corrigan, which could have been tampered with.”

  “So whose records did you pull?” she asked.

  “Darryl Gelman.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I told you.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean there were no records on file for him during that time period.”

  “He had to have gotten paid. What about the actual paper records?”

  “They don’t exist. Everything’s digital now. Any records are destroyed after the daily batch of updates is made in the database.”

  “So it’s a dead end.”

  Black thought back on his time with Gelman in Afghanistan, the time on base trying to pass the time, talking about family back home. “Wait a second,” Black said. “Gelman would have received a copy of any of those records, right?”

  “I suppose so,” Katherine said.

  “Gelman always talked about how much of a packrat his wife was. Said she kept everything. She probably still has a copy of those statements somewhere.”

  Munroe’s laugh sounded tinny over the speaker phone. “That’s good thinking, Mr. Black. If you can get me those records, then we’ll actually have some hard evidence to support our theories. With that in hand, I may be able to go to the Secretary of Defense and get to the bottom of this mess.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  By the time they arrived at her home, Eileen Gelman bordered on hysteria. Confusion showed in her beat red face, and she seemed to Black like a woman stumbling half-coherent through a waking nightmare. When they questioned her about the leave and earnings statements, Jonas felt like an ambulance chasing vulture preying on a defenseless and fragile woman on the worst day of her life. But his assumption had proved correct. She kept the files at a self storage yard in Montclair, VA. They stressed the importance of the documents and cajoled her in to handing over the keys. She mumbled something about putting everything back the way they found it just as another bout of sobbing racked her body. They left the new widow in the care of a sister, but Black knew that in reality she was alone with her grief, no matter how many people were by her side. The whole exchange left him feeling dirty.

  The storage yard resembled a thousand other such facilities that dotted the nation—a standard collection of corr
ugated metal containers strung together on the edge of town. Katherine pulled up to the gate and entered a code that Eileen had provided into a hooded keypad attached to a white metal pipe. Upon completion of the code, the facility’s black rod-iron gate slid aside with a high metallic scrape and buzz. The yard had both indoor and outdoor containers, and Black was happy to see that Eileen had opted for the indoor unit. Rain slapped against the Charger’s roof, and a dense fog had settled over the entire area. Visibility had dropped to zero, and he didn’t want to be outside in the rain more than necessary.

  Inside the building, a narrow maze of walkways led to the various storage units. Fluorescent lighting hummed in exposed metal beams overhead and reflected off the polished concrete floor. A roll-up metal door and a padlock marked the face of each container. After a bit of wandering, they found Unit 318, designated by faded numbers applied in green paint, and Katherine used the key to undo the lock. Black pulled up the door to reveal a twelve by twelve space stacked from floor to ceiling with all manner of junk—boxes, totes, old furniture, a fake potted tree, children’s toys, an ugly 1970s style floor lamp, a rack of old clothes, old bikes, unused exercise equipment, a big black stereo, and what seemed like a million other objects. The space smelled faintly of moth balls and old varnish.

  Katherine pulled her long red hair back in a pony tail as she said, “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”

  Black sighed and threw his jacket over a stack of totes. “Where did she say the file was?”

  “A file box marked Military Records.”

  As they started checking boxes and rummaging through the junk, Jonas said, “Sorry to have kept you out so late. I’m sure your boyfriend is pissed.”

  She smiled. “Try not to be so obvious. And no, I don’t have anyone waiting up for me.”

  “That’s good. I mean, it’s not good, but…”

  “I know what you meant. I was in a pretty serious relationship up until a few weeks ago, but it didn’t keep.”

  “What happened?”

  “You ask a lot of questions,” she said. “Pull your socks up and find that file. I don’t want to be here all night.”

  After a few more minutes, Black moved aside a box marked with a bright green Christmas tree sticker and found what they were searching for, a large translucent plastic file box with Military Records written on its top in blue permanent marker.

  “This is it.” He pulled out the tote and added, “You’re the professional. I’ll let you do the honors.”

  “What a gentleman.”

  She flipped up the box’s hinged top and sifted through the records. At last, she found the right dates and pulled the papers free. She scanned over the numbers and information and said, “I’ll be damned.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  She showed him the paper held in her left hand and gestured to a few of the dates and numbers. “Gelman was getting paid quadruple hazard pay. Four times what he would have received for being in a war zone, even though he was stateside in Maryland and supposedly participating in a cultural relations class. This is proof that there was a hell of a lot more going on than teaching troops how to be more sensitive to the locals.”

  “Yeah, the military was conducting some kind of experiments, and these poor bastards volunteered to be the crash test dummies.”

  “And you think that whatever they did to him caused John Corrigan to kill his family?”

  Black nodded. “And now we have the proof.”

  “Not so fast there, cowboy. This proves that Gelman was involved in something at Fort Meade that was dangerous enough to get paid four times hazard pay, but that’s it. Anything beyond that is speculation.”

  “Maybe, but you heard Munroe. With this, he can force the brass to come clean. Or at least get some more info on what really happened.”

  She shrugged. “We’ll see. Since you have so much energy, why don’t you put all this junk back so we can get out of here. I’m going to have a cigarette.”

  “You smoke too?”

  Rolling her eyes and heading for the entrance, she said, “Don’t start.”

  He watched her slender form move down the narrow row. She looked over her shoulder at him once and smiled, and then she turned the corner and was out of sight. He started placing the collection of boxes and junk back in the order in which it came out.

  He had only just begun the tedious process when the overhead lights blinked out, and total darkness closed in all around him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Black was no stranger to night time operations executed in total darkness, but in almost all of those situations, he was the guy wearing night vision goggles and performing the assault. In this case, he had a bad feeling that the roles had been reversed. The lights going out could have had a very simple explanation. Even then, he heard the rain pinging off the building’s metal roof, but he hadn’t seen any lightning or detected any thunder.

  He resisted the urge to immediately retrieve the cell phone from his pocket to use as a light source. First, he listened and analyzed the situation. If they were under attack, which seemed like a definite possibility considering the events of the past few days, he needed to keep his head, think of how the assault team would react, and do something that they wouldn’t expect.

  The hum of the rain, his own breathing, and the pounding of his heart seemed to be the only sounds. But then he heard something else in the distance echoing off the concrete.

  Cautious footsteps? The rustle of fabric? A slight rattle of tactical assault gear? Was it Katherine?

  If he called out to her, he would reveal his exact position, and the sound he had heard seemed to come from the opposite direction in which she had been heading.

  No matter what was out there in the darkness, even if it was nothing but his own imagination or Katherine making her way back to him, he couldn’t simply wait for something to happen. Being passive got you killed. Being proactive saved your life.

  Risking turning on the phone to get some light, he shined the device’s screen into the open storage unit. Then he quickly unscrewed three light bulbs from an ugly old floor lamp resting along one wall and ripped a T-shirt from a rack of clothing. He wrapped the bulbs in the T-shirt and, making as little noise as possible, crunched the light bulbs into small shards of glass. The faint sound he had heard seemed to have come from the building’s west corner, and so he moved east to the edge of his row until he reached the outer wall. The building contained multiple rows, and an attack could come from almost anywhere, but he guessed that an assault team would move straight to Gelman’s storage unit and then fan out from there. And so he sprinkled the broken glass of the light bulbs on the paths stemming out from that area. Then he moved to the end of the row, squatted down, pulled his PT845 pistol, and waited.

  If someone came down one of the marked paths, night vision goggles or not, he would hear them coming before they stepped around the corner and saw him. That would give him the extra second of tactical advantage that made all the difference in a firefight.

  ~~*~~

  Katherine was five feet from the storage building’s exit when all the lights went out. The sudden onset of darkness felt like the floor had fallen out from beneath her feet. Her body shuddered, and her stomach crawled into her throat. The sensation lasted only a second before she realized that it was probably nothing more than a power outage. But still, what if it was more than that?

  She considered calling out for Black or using her phone as a light, but would that alert anyone approaching in the darkness to her position? The exit rested just ahead, and the parking lot was well-lit. The open space of the lot seemed like the best option in that moment, and so she decided to simply push forward to the exit and worry about everything else once she was outside and free of the darkness that seemed to be physically pressing down on her from all sides.

  Wi
th the image of the exit fresh in her mind, she covered the final five feet and groped for the handle. It felt like an eternity before she could locate the door, but she tried to tell herself that there was nothing to fear. Finally, she found the handle, pushed it down, and shoved.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  A terrible sensation of claustrophobia flooded over her.

  Someone had blocked the exit. She was trapped.

  Locked inside with an unknown number of killers converging on her from all directions.

  Right behind her. Warm breath on her neck.

  Calm down, she told herself. She forced her mind to focus and almost immediately recognized her mistake. The realization made her feeling like a silly little girl, a child that needed a parent to check under her bed and believed that pulling the covers over her head would protect her from monsters.

  She growled at her own stupidity. The door opens inward, you eejit, she reminded herself. Yanking back on the handle, she stepped outside and moved toward the car.

  The glove box contained a flashlight, and once she was out of the rain, she would call Jonas and tell him that she was coming back inside with the light. After all, he and Munroe had been attacked recently, which would set anyone on edge. She didn’t relish the idea of a friendly-fire incident and wanted to give him a heads up.

  She unlocked the door to the Charger, climbed inside, and retrieved the phone from her pocket. Then she dialed the number that she had programmed earlier for Jonas Black.

  ~~*~~

  Waiting in the darkness with his sight stolen from him, forced to rely on other senses, Jonas felt very alone and very helpless. He had never considered how much reliance he placed upon his ability to see his surroundings. Operating in total darkness felt like someone had tied his hands behind his back and then told him to clean and fieldstrip an M16 assault rifle using only his teeth. It was truly paralyzing and made him respect Munroe’s perseverance all the more.