Darkside

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Yes,” Liz said softly. “Your father mentioned that one to me.”

  “My father?” Julie asked. “When did he tell you that?”

  “At dinner last night,” Liz said. Ev held his breath when he heard that. He felt Liz looking at him.

  “Oh,” Julie said.

  “Your father is paying the bills here,” Liz said. “I promised to keep him in the loop as to what I was doing. But we did have a nice evening, nonetheless.”

  Ev sensed what was coming next when all Julie said was “Oh” again.

  “How do you feel about your father and I seeing each other, Julie?”

  “Seeing each other?”

  “Yes. Seeing each other. You know exactly what I mean. He’s very worried that you’ll be upset if he starts seeing someone.”

  Holy shit, Ev thought, and finally looked over at Liz, aware that he was blushing. There was the hint of a smile on her face.

  “Mom’s death hit us both pretty hard,” Julie was saying slowly. “But I’m out of here in a few weeks. I don’t want him living all alone in that big house, so I’ve got zero problems with him seeing you or anyone else. You’ve been married before, Ms. DeWinter?”

  “Yes, twice,” Liz said. “And it’s Liz.”

  “Then you must know what you’re doing,” Julie said. Ev heard an element of challenge in Julie’s voice.

  “Meaning?” Liz replied evenly.

  “Meaning he’s a bit fragile right now. Don’t you dare toy with him.”

  It was Liz’s turn to say nothing. Ev tried to imagine the scene in the conference room, the two women glaring at each other. This was a side of Julie he’d not seen or heard before. Liz finally spoke.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, Julie, but I do understand that your father’s been through a rough time. And I don’t trifle with men I like.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, Ms. DeWinter,” Julie said. “Have I answered all your questions? I need to get back.”

  There was a clicking noise as Liz leaned forward to hit stop and rewind. “I guess I’d never thought much past the smart uniforms, pretty dress parades, drums and bugles, and football game rallies in Tecumseh Court,” she said. “I didn’t realize that day-to-day life inside that big building is so intense. Or that the midshipmen themselves know what they are doing.”

  “I think Julie’s a cut above in considering all that,” Ev said, still somewhat aghast. “But she’s right: Civilians have no idea. I’ve often thought about how life at the Academy begins a separation between the officers who come out of there and the American taxpayers, who pay the bill.”

  “‘Civilians’? Aren’t you a civilian?”

  “Nope. Never will be, either. Not in my mind. I’m an Academy grad who was also a Navy fighter pilot. Even after all these years in academia, I’m still not a civilian.”

  “How interesting.”

  “The place changes you. Julie’s right, in a way. If you didn’t go there, you probably can’t understand just how much it changes you. Or the intense pride one has in getting through it.”

  She sipped some wine while gazing out over the creek, where twilight was softening the individual features of trees, docks, and houses. She was obviously going to skip right past that part of the discussion involving him. Ev saw her make a token effort to tug on her skirt, but that only made things more interesting. He found himself suddenly very aware of her, physically, and he hadn’t experienced that feeling in some time. He felt a sudden urge to pick her up. She was tiny, but oh, my. The silence lingered.

  “You graduated when?” she asked finally.

  “Class of ’73. Seems like a century ago.”

  “I loved my time at college, law school less so. Would you describe your time at the Academy as being happy?”

  “Happy? No. But the Academy’s not college. I majored in aeronautical engineering, so I felt as if I had a creditable degree, but the degree was almost a sidebar. Getting through the four years, getting commissioned, that was the accomplishment.”

  “If Brian Dell had been gay, do you think that would be a reason for someone or some group to kill him?”

  Ev shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t think so. If he was gay, and groped somebody, he’d get his clock cleaned and be separated. If they caught him doing homosexual acts, they’d separate him. We had two guys in my class who got caught playing drop the soap in the gym. Both gone the next day. One other guy said he was gay, but the word was he just wanted out without having to serve out his obligation in the fleet as a white-hat. But throwing a kid out the window for being gay? Nah. Is that the current theory?”

  “I don’t know. I was just speculating. You know, the underwear thing.”

  “But the homicide angle-you think that’s real?”

  “My source does. I asked the NCIS people what motives there might be for murder in Bancroft Hall. He said the usual: money or love.”

  “Not many people in Mother Bancroft have money,” Ev mused.

  “Right. Which leaves love. An Academy romance gone way off the tracks.”

  “One assumes boy-girl. I suppose in this modern age, it could have been boy-boy.”

  They were interrupted by the doorbell. Ev left her in the kitchen to go get the pizza. When he came back, he found her looking at a collection of Markham family pictures on a shelf beneath the cookbooks. She was holding one picture in her hand, a group photo of Ev, Joanne, and Julie at about age thirteen, based on the awkward posture and the hint of the good looks to come. Ev, taller than both, was beaming with pride, his arm around both wife and daughter. Joanne was spectacular in this picture, a glowing brunette, wide-eyed, perfectly proportioned face, luxuriant figure, looking back at the camera with practiced ease, knowing that she was beautiful, and apparently comfortable with it. Liz put the picture back as he walked in, then cleared some mail off the counter to make room for the pizza.

  “Arrgh,” she said when she saw the anchovies.

  “I know,” he said, “But it’s half-and-half. I was going to abstain, but I happen to love the little stinkers.”

  “Aptly put,” she said, wrinkling her nose. He laughed at her.

  “I’m going to switch over to beer,” he said. “Your half okay?”

  “It’s fine. I rarely eat pizza, so when I do, it’s always good. Although hell on the girlish figure.” He got out some plates and silverware, and she helped herself to a slice well away from the offending anchovies.

  “Nothing wrong with the girlish figure from where I’m standing,” he said, cracking open a Coors.

  “One of these days, I’m going to give up and just let myself…expand.”

  Ev laughed as they moved back to the counter.

  “Is there a chance Julie might know more about this Dell business than she’s telling either of us?” she asked.

  Ev felt a protective impulse rise in his chest. Liz kept coming back to this. She saw his concern.

  “You want to know why I keep asking,” she said. “I sense there’s something wrong over there in Bancroft Hall. This is the Naval Academy. Four thousand straight-arrow men and women, the best and the brightest, duty, honor, country, pick your slogan. And yet someone’s killed a plebe?”

  He stared at her, then down at his pizza. He pushed it away and concentrated on his beer while trying to marshal his thoughts. “You think Julie’s lying to you?” he asked.

  “Not exactly. I mean, I don’t think she had a hand in the boy’s death, of course. But I do think she’s not telling me everything. I’m just a civilian, you see. She’s one of…them.”

  “Them. Right.” He nodded slowly, still not looking at her. He was aware of the lights reflecting in small dazzling patterns across the creek. The house was very still.

  “I hired you to protect Julie,” he said slowly.

  “That’s correct.” She seemed to be waiting for him to understand something important.

  “But you can’t do that if she’s holding back on you, can you?”

&n
bsp; “Bingo.”

  “And you’d like me to do what, exactly?”

  “I’d like you to reinforce the notion that if she does know something about this incident, she needs to tell me, and preferably before those G-persons do. Maybe point out that precisely because she’s not a civilian, the government’s investigators might not play nice.”

  He steepled his hands in front of his face, then nodded again, making up his mind. He’d been on the verge of getting angry, but he then saw the logic in what she was saying. “You’ve got my attention, counselor,” he said. “I’ll try to think of something.”

  “Liz,” she said. “So far, I can’t get either one of you to call me by my first name.”

  He laughed. “Liz it is.”

  They finished their pizza, and Ev made some coffee. They took it into the study.

  She stirred her coffee for a moment. “Julie indicated that sometimes there’s a collective decision made that a plebe isn’t worth keeping. That he’s a ‘shitbird.’ What happens then?”

  “Pretty much what she described. In my day, he’d become a target for the entire company’s upperclassmen. After a month or so of that, he’d crash and burn and then resign. Nowadays, though, my impression is that the system steps in. The company officers, the kid’s academic adviser, his squad leader, his mentoring youngsters, even his sponsor, maybe. That said, they do lose a couple hundred by attrition during plebe year.”

  “I guess what I’m trying to understand is how much power do the upperclassmen have? Julie implied it was a lot. Even if the executive staff and the faculty get into it, can the upperclassmen run a guy out?”

  Ev shrugged. “I’m twenty-eight years out-of-date. When I went through, the answer would have been yes. But he’d really have to be a shitbird. Someone who bilged his classmates, skirted the honor system, or was suspected of stealing-that kind of stuff. It wouldn’t happen just as a matter of unpopularity.”

  “Sounds like extra work for the upperclassmen.”

  “Actually, they’d set in motion the ultimate sanction: Get the guy’s own classmates to shun him. The upperclassmen can run a guy ragged, but if his classmates see that as unfair persecution, they’ll help him, carry him even. But if they dump him, he’s meat.”

  “I’m wondering if that’s what happened to Dell. Julie called him ‘weak.’ Right from the first, during that plebe summer. She says he appeared to be struggling. If someone combined that opinion of him with an innuendo that he was also a homosexual, he could end up feeling really cornered.”

  Ev nodded. “But that would imply suicide, not homicide.”

  She shook her head. “I just don’t know. From an outsider’s perspective, all I see are lots of windows, but I can’t see anything inside. But the civilian system’s saying there might be a murderer in there.”

  “I can’t see that,” Ev said, shaking his head. “When I was there, there were some plebes who got through plebe year who shouldn’t have. We all knew it. Guys with no moral fiber. Liars. Shirkers. Some ex-enlisted who knew how to get by. Guys who held the system in visible contempt. But we also knew that the system would eventually catch up with them: They’d cheat on an exam, or lie, or do something else that would get them sideways with the honor system. And that’s what happened.”

  “You’re implying that most midshipmen believe in the ‘system,’ as you call it.”

  “Basically, they do. We do. I think West Point says it better than we do: Duty, honor, country. Midshipmen are proud to be there. They want to serve their country. They hold the profession of arms to be an honorable endeavor. They’ll bitch and moan about the red-ass nature of daily life in Bancroft Hall, but down deep, they believe in it.”

  “And yet we have a homicide investigation in progress. We think, anyway.”

  He sipped his coffee and tried to think of a way to explain what it was like inside Bancroft Hall. The hivelike relationships among the upperclassmen, the plebes, the commissioned officers of the executive department, the companies themselves. A civilian just wasn’t going to understand all that. Liz was looking at her watch.

  “Tomorrow’s a workday, unfortunately,” she said. “I’d better go.”

  “Thanks for sharing that tape with me,” he said. “Or most of it, anyway.”

  “She meant well, I think. I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything.”

  He saw her out, then went back into the kitchen to clean up. The evening had not gone the way he’d envisioned it. He paused over the trash can, his hands full of pizza wrapping. Liz suspected that Julie was holding something back. Surely his daughter understood the danger of that.

  He dropped the stuff into the trash can and put the silverware and coffee mugs into the dishwasher. What he hadn’t said to Liz was that there was another explanation possible in the Dell matter: that this wasn’t a case of a consensus decision on the part of the upperclassmen to drive out an unworthy plebe, but perhaps the work of a single upperclassman, some secret bastard who’d managed to fool the system long enough to rise to firstie status. As much as he would defend the Naval Academy, the midshipmen, and their sense of pride in being part of that duty, honor, country ethic, he knew as well as anyone who had actually been inside that the kids were very different today from when he’d gone through. He’d met enough of Julie’s classmates to know that they had experienced more of life than he ever had at that stage. If an evil kid, evil in the Columbine sense, was smart enough to get through the academic program without having to lie, cheat, or steal, he could play havoc in the military school culture of Mother Bancroft. The system was, after all, based on trust and expectations, and Ev had encountered a couple of midshipmen in the past few years who occasionally dropped the mask of military subservience long enough to reveal quite another attitude. What had happened to Brian Dell might have been the work of one of those gifted, smiling psychopaths who live in plain sight and fool all the people all the time until they do something truly unspeakable.

  He shook his head to drive away that unsettling thought. With four thousand talented American kids in there, of course it was possible. It was just not likely.

  You hope, he thought.

  Jim Hall reached the grating entrance behind Mahan Hall at just after eleven o’clock Thursday night. He’d told only the chief that he’d be going into the tunnels tonight, not wanting to alert Public Works. Bustamente had asked Jim to page him once he came back out, but he had not seemed otherwise concerned.

  The grating was at the right-rear edge of Mahan Hall, beneath an embankment of grass. During the winter, it exhaled a column of steamy air into the Yard, with the thickness of the column a function of how many steam leaks there were down there. Tonight, the column was visible but not very dense. The windows of the nearby academic buildings were illuminated, in contrast to those of Alumni Hall, which was pretty much at darkened-ship. The difference being in who was paying the lighting bills, Jim thought. The night was misty, with no wind and a promise of real fog later on. The light at the top of the chapel dome was already framed in a halo of moisture. The midshipmen were, theoretically anyway, bedded down in Bancroft Hall for the night.

  He was dressed in a one-piece engineering-maintenance jumpsuit, with a black knit watch cap on his head, tropical-weight Marine combat boots, and black leather gloves. He hadn’t bothered bringing his cell phone or pager, because the reception in the tunnels was nonexistent. He did carry a Marine combat knife strapped to his right leg, two Maglite flashlights, one large, one small, on his belt, and a Glock strap-holstered in the small of his back. He wore a small lightweight backpack, in which he had a bottle of water, a battery-powered motion-detector box, a compact first-aid kit, and one can of black spray paint.

  He lifted the grating that covered the slanting steel ladder, slipped underneath, and then let it back down. He descended the ladder into a concrete pit that ended in a steel door. He had the series key to this and the other Yard entrance doors, courtesy of the chief. For fire-fighting purposes, one key op
ened all the grating access doors. It also meant that anyone who could get a copy of this key would have free run of the tunnel system, although Jim knew that some of the main communications centers had additional locks. He suspected that there might be other access points inside Bancroft Hall, but he had not found them yet.

  He closed the door behind him and looked around. He was standing in a small vestibule facing the main passageway in a T junction. He looked both ways down the tunnels. There were sixty-watt bulbs encased in steam-tight globes every twenty feet, and their yellow light seemed to accentuate the subterranean atmosphere. The only bare concrete visible was on the floor, as the sides and the overhead were covered by cable bundles, various-sized conduits, water pipes, and thickly lagged steam pipes. There was a hum of electricity in the air, audible against a background of hissing steam and the occasional clank of thermal expansion in the pipes. The air was humid and smelled of ozone and old pipe lagging. The pipes were marked at intervals with their contents and pressures. A ribbon of corrugated steel deck plates ran down the center of the five-foot-wide floor, under which ran the main sewage-pumping system.

  He consulted his map and turned right, going fifty feet or so to the first dogleg turn to the left, toward the town of Annapolis. The walls being sufficiently covered by the utility lines, there was no room for any graffiti, but he checked anyway, probing the overhead and electrical panels with his Maglite for any signs of spray paint. The tunnel along this branch was one of the modern ones. It was eight feet high, but all the cables and pipes slung along the ceiling made it feel smaller than it was. Behind him, the main tunnel stretched back toward Bancroft Hall, where it branched out into several different loops and legs to the academic buildings nearer the river.

  He stopped at the dogleg and listened. He had been careful to walk on the concrete and not the deck plates, but the only sounds came from the steam lines. He stepped around the corner and came to a major telephone vault, a concrete room that branched off the main tunnel and held a bank of signal-relay cabinets, as well as power amplifiers and hundreds of junction switchboards. Its steel door was framed by two large fire extinguishers. The regular keys to the vault were held by the fire department and the telephone company’s contractor, with a firefighters’ master override box superimposed on the regular locks. Jim did not have the keys to the vaults with him tonight, although he had been into every one of them in the past. Any midshipmen who came down here probably wouldn’t want to get into them. They would have other things on their minds.