Sweepers

by P. T. Deutermann

  “And you are positive the letter was gone when you got back?” Mcnair asked.

  “Yes. Although I didn’t realize it until after I had gone up to bed. I did some paperwork upstairs, where I have a small study. Then I decided that I’d take the letter into the office, so Karen here could see it. I came back downstairs to look for it. It must have been after eleven. I’d left it on the kitchen counter, with the rest of the mail, before going to see Admiral Sherman. I’d put the envelope in the trash with the junk mail. I couldn’t find either one when I looked.”

  “Anything else in the house missing?”

  “No. I checked that as soon as I got into the house. As best I can tell, that’s all that was taken.”

  Mcnair consulted his notebook. “So you think this guy has come back after all these years to get revenge for sorfiething that happened back in Vietnam, and that he’s started the game by mailing you a warning letter. Then he watched your house to make sure you got the letter, and then, when you left, broke into the house, retrieved the letter and the envelope, and left the door unlocked so you would know he’d been here?”

  Karen saw a trace of embarrassment on the admiral’s face.

  “I don’t know what else to think,” he said. “I’m very upset about what’s happened to Elizabeth,, and I’m beginning to conclude that her fall was no accident. I’m also worried that whatever happened to her might be my fault, at least indirectly. ” . Mcnair leaned forward. “This thing in Vietnam. You’re implying that something happened over there that would inspire a guy to come back after more than twenty years to do something to you, that soipething including maybe killing your girlfriend?”

  Sherman studied his feet for a moment before replying.

  Then he looked up. “I Suess I am,” he admitted.

  “It would make your hypothesis a lot more credible if we knew what that incident in Vietnam was all about.”

  “I’m sure it would. But it involved some highly classified operations. All I can say is that I can fully believe it,” Sherman looked down at the rug again for a moment. “I know.

  That’s not much to go on.”

  Mcnair gave him a look that made it quite clear he was in full agreement with Sherman’s last remark. “See, Admiral, it’s not just us,” he said.

  “To open a homicide investigation, especially if there’s a new element, we have to convince our lieutenant-and maybe a judge-that we want to do some searching. Now if we just had that letter-“

  “I know,” Sherman interrupted. “But it’s cane. Maybe? the postman might recall sorting it. I don’t know. But as to what happened in Vietnam, it’s classified. I can’t tell you any more than that.”

  “Is there a homicide investigation in progress?” Train asked from his perch by the window.

  There was a sudden silence in the room. Mcnair opened his mouth but closed it without saying anything. Karen decided to make her move.

  “Detective Mcnair,” she said, “in our original meeting, you mentioned certain forensic ambiguities. The admiral here has been concerned that, over and above the slippers problem, if he told you about this letter, it would make Elizabeth Walsh’s death seem less like an accident and more like a possible homicide. The problem is, up to tonight, the only person you are talking to is him.

  He’s told you as much as he can. What can you tell us about those forensic ambiguities?”

  Mcnair thought about that, and then he nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Our first take was accident. Lady fell down the stairs, landed wrong, broke her neck. Medical examiner’s preliminary report said the same thing. We caught the fact that the laundry room down there didn’t appear to be used very-often, if at all. But she could have been carrying that stuff down to store it, and using a laundry basket to carry it. Who knows? There was no apparent forced entry, no physical evidence of personal violence, other than that which could have reasonably been caused by the fall. Abrasions where you would expect them. And later, postautopsy, nothing in the pathology reports indicating assault, poison, drugs, rape, or anything like that.”

  “You did an autopsy?” Sherman asked. Karen had seen him wince at the word., “Yes, sir. Standard procedure in an unexplained death.

  Unless the victim’s doctor can come in and give us a reasonable explanation, an autopsy will normally be performed.

  But, like I said, that didn’t give us any indication of homicide.”

  “So what were the ambiguities?” Train asked.

  “Well, it’s like this. When there’s no obvious cause of death, we assume misadventure, or accident. But we also look at it from the other perspective: If this had been a homicide, what kind of evidence should be there? Well, first of all, some physical evidence of someone else being in that house. So just to make very sure, we had our crime-scene unit come in and do a standard sweep.” He leaned back in his chair for a moment before going on.

  “Let’s put aside fingerprints for a minute. Let’s postulate, for instance, that someone who knew what he was doing broke in waited for her, and, surprised her, say, and then pushed er down the stairs. He probably wouldn’t have come in the front door-too exposed. More likely, he’d use the back door or a back window, say from that garden. Either way, there should have been some physical traces of that garden in the house-grass, dirt. And the back porch paint is old and dried out. There should have been some tiny flakes of that paint in the carpets. None of the windows had been kicked in, right? The back door lock is a Baringer.

  They use a peculiar steel alloy for their keys. If somebody had picked the lock, there should have been physical evidence of foreign metal-alloy particles in that lock, or in any of the locks. Stuff like that.”

  “But there wasn’t?” Train asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “This sounds like a pretty thorough examination,” the admiral said. “But I don’t understand the premise. If this was an accident, none of this evidence would be there in any event.”

  “Ah, yes,” Mcnair said, leaning forward. “But from a forensic perspective, that place was hinky.

  Like’fingerprints?

  Well, we did find fingerprints-hers, Mrs. Klein’s, and, incidentally, even some of yours, Admiral-but only upstairs.

  Remember what I said about physical evidence a mirfute ago? That there wasn’t any? We didn’t get a single fingerprint lift downstairs. None.

  Zero. Zip. And you know what else? Mrs. Klein, the nice old lady who says she goes over there all the time to have coffee, shoot the breeze, whatever?

  Mrs. Klein says she always comes over via the back porch.

  They’re connected. She even has a key. Her porch paint is like Miss. understand,” Sherman said. “Except for the very obvious trail she left when she found the body, there were no other signs of that paint in the Walsh kitchen, or in any of the rugs on the main floor. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything in those rugs. Very little dirt. And no sand or bits of moss from those bricks in her front walk. Assuming Miss. Walsh came home via her own front door that afternoon, there should have been something, see?”

  Karen twisted anxiously in her chair. This was beginning to sound like something far different from the cut-and-dried accident they had been talking about all along.

  “Admiral,” Mcnair continued, “this may be painful to hear, but there was something wrong with Miss. Walsh’s clothes, too, besides what you told us about the slippers.”

  “Her clothes?” he asked, obviously baffled now.

  “Yes, sir. We found none of the things on her clothes that should have been there after a working day in the office-no dandruff, no loose hairs, no foreign fibers on the seat of her slacks from an office chair, no ink smudges on her fingers, no residue of toner from a copy machine or a laser printer on her hands or sleeves. Now you know most Washington people can’t spend a day in the office without touching a Xerox copy of something, right?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And in. addition to all the stuf
f that collects after a day in the office, there’s the ride home on the Metro. She took the Metro, didn’t she? There was a fare card in her purse.”

  “Yes, she did. Park and Ride from the West Falls Church station. “

  “Well, okay. You come home Friday at rush hour, it’s back-to-back, belly-to-belly, right? But her street clothes were clean-much too clean.

  No one else’s hair. No traces of another human being anywhere on her collar or her raincoat. We checked.”

  “Like somebody had vacuumed them?” Karen asked.

  Mcnair gave her a look, as if to say she had just incriminated herself.

  “Maybe. Or the clothes she was wearing weren’t the clothes she wore to work.”

  “How about her shoes?” Train asked.

  Mcnair smiled. “Bingo,” he said softly. “Oh, we found shoes aplenty up in the closet, but none that showed evidence of having been worn to the office that day and then exchanged for slippers.”

  Karen let out a long breath. “So can’t you check with the people in her office, find out what she was wearing that day?”

  “We did,” replied Mcnair., “Slacks, blouse, sweater. But no one remembers exactly which ones, which colors. One guy said gray; another guy said dark. They were mostly men in the office. You know how it is, Commander: Men never notice a woman’s shoes. And you review investigations, right? You know how poorly even eyewitnesses’ statements correlate.”

  Karen knew only too well. “Yes, I do. How about her vacuum cleaner?”

  “New bag.”

  “Ah,” she said, understanding what he was trying to say.

  “So the evidence in this case is backward. It’s the evidence you didn’t find that’s bothering you.”

  “Sherlock Holmes,” the admiral muttered. “The dog that didn’t bark.”

  “That’s correct, Admiral,” Mcnair said, nodding. “So your news about the slippers is, unfortunately, entirely consistent. But until you told me about this letter, it was still ambiguous. What was this guy’s name, Admiral?”

  “He was a hospital corpsman-a medic, as well as a SEAL. HMI Marcus Galantz.”

  Mcnair blinked, almost as if the name meant something to him. But then he asked the admiral to spell it for him, and he wrote it’in his notebook. Then he asked another question. “Since Mr. von Rensel is here, can we assume the Navy’s working on this Galantz I angle, Commander Lawrence?” t,” That came out of nowhere, Karen thought quickly. “On getting his old service records, yes,” she replied. “Beyond that-“

  Beyond that, the Navy didn’t yet know about Galantz.

  “The records may be of use, and they may not,” the admiral interjected.

  “My guess is that they’ll end abruptly in 1969.

  Mcnair stared at him, his expression making it clear that the admiral could not go on with all this secrecy.

  Sherman looked back at him for a moment and then got up, walked over to a front window, and stared out at the growing darkness. Mcnair, as if sensing a critical moment, remained quiet, watching him. Then he spoke.

  “Admiral, it’s becoming pretty clear that something happened to Elizabeth Walsh, something that was not an accident. We-‘re reasonably satisfied that you didn’t go over there Friday night and do something to her. Now you’ve given us another lead to pursue, but you’re leaving too much out. We need your help. We need to make this guy real.”

  And to get you entirely off the hook, Karen thought.

  The admiral remained at the window, his back to them, for almost a minute. “Okay,” he said finally, so quietly that Karen wasn’t sure she had heard him. Then he turned around, and she was startled by the pain in his eyes. “Okay.

  This’ll take a while.”

  He returned to his chair and sat down, his eyes slightly out of focus as the memories came flooding back. Then he told them the story of the aborted SEAL pickup and that terrifying night on the river.

  “Did they go back the next night?” Train asked.

  Sherman hesitated. “No. They didn’t. Saigon naval headquarters called it off. They concluded that the SEAL never made the rendezvous and that the VC probably had him, which was why there was a mine ambush waiting.”

  “But they were wrong, weren’t they, Admiral?” Train said. The two men stared at each other for a long moment.

  Then Sherman looked away and exhaled. “Yes. They were wrong. Because three years later, the SEAL came to see me.

  I was finishing up my department-head tour in a destroyer and was actually home for a change. But I remember it.

  God, do I remember it. He was a memorable guy. I was sitting in my dining room, working on some overdue fitness reports.”

  It had been after ten o’clock on a rainy February night, one of the few such nights in San Diego’s unvarying pattern of monotono usly beautiful weather. Sherman had been downstairs in the dining room when he thought he heard the front door open. He remembered sitting up and thinking, What the hell? I locked that door. There had been a gust of wind and the sudden sound of rain, and then suddenly a figure was standing in the entrance to the dining room, just outside the cone of light from the chandelier. Sherman absorbed a vague image of jeans and a wet black windbreaker, but the face-the face looked familiar. Only this time, there was no brown and green paint. Just those eyes. Actually, just one eye. I

  “Remember me?” the figure asked in a husky, strangled I voice.

  There was something wrong with his throat. There was a small swatch of gray bandage where his voice box should have been, and a livid scar.

  Sherman had been speechless, glued to his armchair, try-I ing to comprehend what he was seeing. A very dangerous looking one-eyed man was n his dining room, dripping rainwater on the rug.

  “How-who-“

  “Oh, you remember, Lieutenant. You know who I am.

  Or who I was,” the man said, advancing closer to the table, into’ the light, appearing to get bjgger as he did so. He was not visibly armed, but there was no mistaking the menace in that mutilated face. And then Tag Sherman knew.

  “You’re-you’re the SEAL.”

  “Yeah, the SEAL. The one you left behind. In the Rung Sat.”

  Sherman could only stare at him, trying to remember what the division commander had said-what, exactly? He couldn’t recall the words, other than him saying, “You did the operationally right thing, aborting the mission.” But by then, the SEAL had come even closer to the table, and with a sweeping motion of his left arm, he scattered Sherman’s pape rwork. That’s when Sherman saw the glove, the black glove with a glint of stainless steel at, the-left wrist. What was his name? he’d asked himself. Galantz, that was it.

  Galantz perched on the edge of the dining room table, making it creak, and leaned down to stare directly into Sherman’s eyes. His face was pale, gaunt, hollow-eyed, with taut skin, a bony forehead fringed with only a stubble of closecropped black hair. The right eyebrow was flat, but the left was bisected by an ugly red and obviously unstitched scar running from his voice box up into his jaw and then exiting across the left cheek up into his scalp, transacting the puckered skin of his empty left eye socket. Sherman had been able to smell the wet clothes, overlaid with the rising scent of his own fear.

  “See this?” the SEAL asked, pointing to his face and throat with his finger. “One of your fifties did this. Ricochet round. While you girls were busy running away, shooting that stuff indiscriminately all over the riverbanks-where I was hiding, waiting for you. And this”-he brandished the bulky black glove in Sherman’s face-“this is where I had to amputate my own hand after a croc bit most of it off.”

  He leaned even closer to Sherman, who remained frozen in his seat.

  Sherman had to crane his neck just to look up at this man, whose single eye burned in his face like the headlight of that proverbial oncoming train.

  “It had lots of time to’get infected, Lieutenant,” he whispered. “Five nights in the mangrove roots, while I tried to get down out of the Rung Sat and i
nto the harbor. Couldn’t quite make it, though, because the Cong knew I was running, see? And I couldn’t go into the main river because by then the crocs could smell the arm. All that heat and mud and humidity. They call it gangrene. Stinks real bad. I’m a medic. Know it when I smell it. Crocs love rotten meat. So finally one night, I found a tree stump and chopped it off at the wrist with my trusty knife. This knife, right here.” Out of nowhere, he brandished a heavy dulled steel knife, then deliberately put it down on the table right in front of Sherman. It looked bigger than he remembered it, when the SEAL had had it strapped to his ankle. It made an audible clunk when Galantz laid it on the table.

  Galantz had leaned back then, staring down at the knife, and continued his story, “I clamped off the artery with a piece of string and then that night I bellied into a VC camp and killed some people so I could get to their fire and cauterize the stump. Didn’t happen to have any anesthetics, by the way. It hurt a lot. But I did what I had to do.

  Stuck that bloody stump into the fire and bit a piece of bamboo right in half waiting for it to cook. I gotta tell you: I did scream.

  But the screaming sounded better than the barbecue noises, you know?”

  “We were in an ambush,” Sherman had said, feeling his stomach grab. His voice seemed to be stuck in his throat, which was as dry as sand. “There were mines. We had standing orders to withdraw. We came back the next night.”

  And then he remembered: No, they hadn’t.

  The SEAL had just looked at him with that one baleful eye. “Sure you did, Lieutenant. But you know what? I was three klicks from the main river by then, trying to lick my wounds with my tongue swelling out of my mouth, hiding out inside the hollow trunk of a dead tree that was full of that Agent Orange stuff. And trying to figure out if that was my eyeball dangling on my left cheek or just another leech.

  And that was just the beginning. It took me five weekv to get back to friendly territory. Five weeks of crawling around in the Rung Sat, no compass, no landmarks, no food, no clean water, moving only at night, going the wrong god damned way every god damned time. And killing people.