Astride a Pink Horse

by Robert Greer

  For too long, racing off to Heart Mountain had been Kimiko Takata’s answer to far too many things. Dropping everything to drive four hundred miles from Laramie across Wyoming to a place that had caused her so much pain had always seemed ludicrous to Rikia, but he’d known from the moment the news about the murder at Tango-11 first aired that a trip to Heart Mountain was imminent. Kimiko referred to her trips to what remained of the World War II–era relocation camp as “pilgrimages.” She claimed these pilgrimages helped to cleanse her soul.

  She’d lived at Heart Mountain for two months in 1943 and all of 1944, and Rikia had come to understand that Kimiko’s soul had been permanently tarnished during her fourteen-month internment in that dusty, treeless, high-desert world.

  He couldn’t help but think that if he’d kept his meeting with Major Cameron to himself instead of running home at noon to tell Kimiko about it, he might not have ended up losing what would amount to two half-days of work. He’d still be polishing up the paper his grad student would deliver for him in El Paso, and he wouldn’t be packing up his ten-year-old Volvo station wagon for a trip to a place he detested. It hadn’t helped that Sarah Goldbeck had called Kimiko early that morning to tell her about Major Cameron’s visit to Hawk Springs, infusing Kimiko with a sense of purpose that had made her all the more eager to make the seven-hour trip to Heart Mountain.

  Now, as he tossed his sleeping bag into the back of the station wagon, Rikia found himself hoping that Kimiko might for once at least decide to stay at a motel in either Powell or Cody instead of trespassing onto an off-limits section of what was now Heart Mountain Memorial Park to spend the night camping illegally.

  It was hard for him to understand why, at seventy-six and with worsening arthritis and what he suspected was creeping dementia, Kimiko continued to make her pilgrimages. But she did, always returning to Laramie seemingly reenergized. If he’d been in her shoes, he would have long ago burned every square acre of the god-awful former internment camp, but Heart Mountain was Kimiko’s cross to bear, not his. It had also been her own choice several years earlier to accept a twenty-thousand-dollar reparation handout designed by the U.S. government to wash away the sins of Heart Mountain and hopefully gain the silence of the internment camp survivors. He saw Kimiko’s choice to take the money as a form of dishonorable acquiescence, something he never would have been party to.

  When Kimiko called to him from the back porch, “Are you finished packing the car, Rikia?” he muttered a disconsolate “Yes,” stuffed a pair of hiking boots in next to his sleeping bag, and shut the Volvo’s tailgate.

  “Did you remember to pack plenty of water?” she asked, headed down their Russian-olive-tree-lined driveway toward him.

  “Yes,” he said, his response barely audible.

  “And you brought along your grandfather’s diary, of course?”

  “It’s on the front seat.”

  Kimiko’s eyes lit up. “Good. It would be a tragedy to forget that.”

  “Yes, I know. We’d be forced to turn around and come back,” Rikia grunted.

  Frowning and eyeing him sternly, Kimiko said, “I’ll have none of your insolence, Rikia.”

  Knowing that Kimiko could never again lock him in the basement, a linen closet, or the pantry and feed him only rice and water for days or beat him with a razor strap, as she’d done when he’d crossed her as a child, Rikia nonetheless took her warnings seriously, aware that she might instead choose not to speak to him for weeks.

  His childhood disobedience, driven by the taunts he constantly had to endure at school because of his speech problem, had been addressed with punishment, but Kimiko had not sought medical attention for the real problem until he was in his teens. By then he’d already suffered through periods of depression after having been forced to come live with her following the death of his parents in a mid-1970s San Francisco car crash. The crash had occurred only a year after his father had come with his wife and son from Japan to teach physics at San Francisco State University. Frail, retiring, and tongue-tied, Rikia hadn’t as yet adjusted to his new Bay Area environment before he’d had to move to a strange, desolate place called Wyoming.

  “I’ll just get a couple of sodas from the refrigerator in the garage and we can leave,” Kimiko said, still peeved by Rikia’s remark about the diary. As he watched her walk into the garage, he had the sense that she would have loved nothing more right then than to step back forty years in time and flail his bare behind with a handful of thorny Russian-olive branches.

  “I’ll read to you from the diary once we’re under way,” she called out from inside the garage. “After your visit from that military police major, I think we’re both in need of hearing your grandfather’s words.”

  Thinking that Major Bernadette Cameron represented far more of a problem than the military police, Rikia nodded to himself. He’d urged Kimiko time and again over the years to cut her ties with Sarah Goldbeck and dim-witted Buford Kane, but she never had. And now—although Major Cameron had never actually said so—because of Kimiko’s uncommon sense of loyalty or her creeping senility, they’d both become suspects in a murder.

  Kimiko reappeared from the garage holding two soda cans in her misshapen, arthritic hands. “Let’s go, Rikia.” There was an urgency in her tone that had Rikia quickly slipping behind the wheel of the station wagon. Suspecting that he had at least sixty miles and a good hour of driving ahead of him before Kimiko began reading from his grandfather’s diary, he felt a temporary sense of relief. A feeling that quickly disappeared as he backed the station wagon out of the driveway and thought about the fact that his hour-long respite would be followed by a six-hour sermon.

  After returning to her office from Laramie, Bernadette had spent a half hour completing her preliminary report on the security breach at Tango-11 for Colonel DeWitt, detailing near the end what had happened at Sarah Goldbeck’s the previous evening. Just before lunch, she’d spent a few minutes scrutinizing aerial, satellite, and topographic maps of half of the nearly three hundred deactivated missile-silo sites in Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska and trying to find any link between those sites and the Tango-11 site. She’d also spent several minutes studying the flattened-out photocopy of the wadded-up piece of paper from Sergeant Giles’s mouth that Sheriff Bosack had faxed to her. Certain that the piece of paper had been torn from a Wyoming missile-silo site map, and that the single locator dot near the center represented Tango-11, she’d wearily gotten up from her desk at twelve thirty and gone to lunch.

  Now, at a little past two thirty, she was busy trying to track down what Thurmond Giles had done for a living and where after leaving the air force sixteen years earlier. It had been relatively easy to track the movements of someone who’d been one of the air force’s most qualified and decorated senior enlisted electronics and nuclear-warhead maintenance technicians, especially since Giles possessed the kind of technical expertise the civilian world coveted.

  She’d made a couple of phone calls to air force retirees who’d known Giles, both of whom had told her that after leaving the service, Giles had taken a job with Gromere Electronics and Engineering, a Seattle-based weapons guidance system firm with a long history of hiring military retirees with high-grade electronics skills.

  Contacting Gromere hadn’t been difficult, but getting through to someone who’d known Giles was proving to be much harder. After suffering through a series of phone transfers and finally being connected to someone who had known the man, she found herself explaining for the third time who she was and that she was investigating a security breach and break-in at a government facility where there’d also been a murder. After assuring that third person, a supervisor in the human resources department named Elaine Richardson, that her call involved possible national security issues and that, under the circumstances, the call wasn’t an invasion of the deceased sergeant’s privacy, she quickly learned that Giles had left Gromere four years earlier.

  Speaking haltingly and obviously upset, Elaine
Richardson said, “And you say they found Thurmond stabbed and hanging by his ankles inside some missile silo out in the middle of nowhere?”

  “He was actually found inside the personnel-access tube adjacent to the missile silo itself.”

  “Figures.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because Thurmond was the kind of person who could rub people the wrong way. His superiors, his coworkers, and jealous men especially. He had a habit of choosing women who should have been clearly off-limits to him. Women who’d already been picked by someone, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “That’s what got him headed down the road and out of here at Gromere. Fooling around with the wrong woman.”

  Sensing that the somber-sounding Elaine might have wanted to add, Instead of me, Bernadette asked, “And it got him fired?”

  “It sure did. It also got him pretty much blackballed from ever being employed in the weapons guidance system world again. We’re a small, close-knit community, Major. Everybody knows everybody, East Coast to West. In a community that small, you don’t pull on Superman’s cape.”

  “And Giles did?”

  “Yes. He yanked the president of Gromere’s chain by fooling around with his daughter.”

  “And the president is?”

  “I know where you’re headed, Major, and I can assure you it’s down the wrong road. The president at the time was Roman Haverton, and he’s dead.”

  “And the daughter?”

  “Cicily Haverton. Dead as well. She died in a skiing accident a couple of years back. Out your way, in fact, in Jackson Hole.”

  “Sounds like you keep up.”

  “Like I said, we’re a close-knit industry.”

  “No reason for revenge on the part of either of the Havertons, then?”

  “Nor their heirs. There aren’t any. Cicily was an only child.”

  “I see. So where did Sergeant Giles go after leaving Gromere?”

  “To Canada.”

  “Quite a leap.”

  “It’s not really much of one from Washington, and with all of his years in the air force, Thurmond had connections there.”

  Bernadette jotted a note to herself to double-check on any of Thurmond Giles’s military connections that she might have missed. “Who’d he go to work for in Canada?”

  “A company named Applied Nuclear Theratronics of Canada Ltd.”

  “Guidance systems again?”

  “No. They make radiation therapy equipment—machines for treating cancer patients.”

  “Quite a switch from nuclear weapons guidance systems.”

  “Not really. In either instance you’re dealing with a product that’s got a nuclear payload at the end.”

  “Interesting way of looking at it,” Bernadette said, continuing to jot notes.

  “It comes from years of looking at what some people might refer to as the right and wrong ends of the nuclear industry. Pretty much the same missile-warhead guidance systems we manufacture here at Gromere, with a few adjustments, of course, can be programmed to control the movement of uranium rods in a nuclear power plant. As Mr. Haverton was fond of saying, it’s a stupid rabbit that has but one hole.”

  “Makes sense. So how long did you keep up with Sergeant Giles after he left Gromere?”

  “Until about six months ago, actually. That’s when he stopped answering my emails and phone calls.”

  “Was he living in Canada?”

  “Yes. In Ottawa.”

  “Do you have an address for him?”

  “Somewhere I do.”

  “Four years is a long time to keep up with a former coworker, don’t you think?”

  “He was a friend, and a very interesting man,” Elaine said defensively.

  “I’m sure he was. When you find his address, would you please email it to me?” Bernadette recited her email address.

  “Certainly.”

  “Is there anything else about Sergeant Giles that you can pass along?”

  “No.” Elaine took a breath, obviously trying to maintain her composure. “What a horrible way for a person to die. To be stabbed and then hung upside down like some side of beef. I hope you find whoever did it.”

  “Actually, that’s the job of the Platte County sheriff’s office back here in Wyoming. My investigation’s centered on break-in and security-breach issues.”

  “You mean the air force doesn’t really care what happened to Thurmond?”

  “Of course we do. But the separate responsibilities of civil law enforcement and the air force are pretty clear-cut in cases like this.”

  “You don’t think someone out there roped Thurmond into trying to peddle nuclear secrets, do you?”

  “In a case like this, nothing can be discounted.”

  “Thurmond’s murder could’ve been racially motivated, you know.”

  “We’re aware of that.”

  “Well, I hope to God there’s no espionage involved, but to be honest with you, I wouldn’t dismiss it. If anyone out there knew the inner workings of an atomic warhead—how to wire, repair, activate, or transport one—it would have been Thurmond. Maybe someone killed him to gain that knowledge.”

  “Maybe,” Bernadette said, gauging from the somberness in Elaine’s voice that the other woman had probably known Thurmond Giles more intimately than she cared to admit.

  “So, do you think Thurmond might have been peddling government secrets?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say.”

  “You’re sounding very evasive, Major.”

  “Let’s just say that at the moment, I’m unwilling to speculate.”

  “ ‘Speculate,’ ‘evasive’—when you come right down to it, they’re just a couple of words. Thurmond, on the other hand, was a living, breathing human being. Please tell me you’ll find his killer, Major Cameron.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Bernadette said, suspecting that any reexplanation of her limited role in investigating what had happened at Tango-11 would fall on deaf ears.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Okay,” Elaine said, clearly fighting back tears as she hung up.

  The displeased look on Joel DeWitt’s face told Bernadette that she’d made a wrong turn somewhere in her Tango-11 investigation. Moments earlier, without knocking, DeWitt had walked briskly into her office; pulled a chair up to her desk; and in an authoritative, superior-to-subordinate tone said, “I don’t appreciate being blindsided, Major. You above all people should know that.”

  “Sir, I didn’t—”

  “Let me finish, Major. This morning I had to drive up to Douglas, and you know how much I hate that pig-ugly, two-hour drive. On my way back I stopped in Wheatland and talked to Sheriff Bosack about where he was with our Tango-11 problem. The sheriff was fuming. Seems someone, and we both know who, ran an internet story, masquerading as news, suggesting that the investigation into the security breach and murder at Tango-11 might very well be beyond the ability of the local sheriff and the Office of Special Investigations here at Warren.” DeWitt slipped a piece of paper out of a trouser pocket. “Let me quote: ‘The small-town sheriff, known to often ride his horse out on investigations, and local air force OSI brass from Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, very likely don’t have the necessary experience or the skill to determine what happened at Tango-11, or why.’ ”

  As Bernadette leaned forward to respond, the sour-faced colonel waved her off. “And there’s more. While I was there with the sheriff, some buffoon from homeland security showed up, and that, I need not tell you, Major Cameron, presents a rather serious problem. All we need is a bunch of those loose-lipped incompetents sniffing around. After Bosack got rid of him, the sheriff informed me that he’d spoken with Sarah Goldbeck earlier in the morning and learned that you and some reporter from the same outfit that ran that ambush story on the web had an altercation with Goldbeck and her husband last evening. Were you planning to fill me
in, Major?”

  Suspecting that by now Colonel DeWitt had already had a full report from Captain Alvarez detailing everything that Alvarez had seen at Sarah Goldbeck’s, and that Sheriff Bosack’s reputed anger was merely water to prime DeWitt’s own aggravation, Bernadette said, “Sir, I emailed you a preliminary report about what happened last night in Hawk Springs a little earlier.”

  “Are you inferring that I should’ve read your report by now, Major?”

  “No, sir,” said Bernadette, knowing that when DeWitt did read her full report he’d probably heat up from a simmer to a boil.

  “Good. The byline on that smear job of an internet piece says Frederick Dames, by the way. Digital Registry News again! I want them out of our hair. Am I clear, Major Cameron?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now that that’s settled, I need to remind you of something else you seem to be forgetting. Our first priority here at Warren remains the Tango-11 break-in and security breach. Let Sheriff Bosack worry about who killed Sergeant Giles. It could be that the killer was simply out to settle a score, and Tango-11 was nothing more than a stage prop. One to be talked up on the nightly news, and effectively stroke the killer’s ego.”

  “Perhaps,” said Bernadette. “But Sergeant Giles’s air force career had warts, Colonel. Ugly ones. His service record’s full of them. From what I’ve been able to dig up so far, the sergeant was quite a womanizer. I’m amazed that he lasted in the air force as long as he did, even if he was one of the most seasoned and skilled missile-warhead maintenance techs in the business. I’ve had more than a half-dozen verbal confirmations of that expertise. I hate to say it, but it’s possible that he decided to sell his skill and knowledge to someone. Someone he ended up getting crossways with, and that person killed him.”

  “I’d prefer another motive, Major. A much cleaner one for us. We absolutely don’t want anything that smells like espionage on our plate. Let’s hope Giles’s womanizing did him in.”