“You found a knife.”
“Not quite.”
A few minutes later, he pulled into the MP motor pool and cut the engine. The car was up on a hydraulic lift on a concrete slab next to the motor pool office. It was heavily damaged, fenders dented, roof caved in. All the windows were missing, along with the hood, three wheels, and most of the right front fender.
“The flood flipped it over and carried it for more than a mile. We found it downstream, on its side up against an uprooted oak tree.”
A motor sergeant in greasy overalls walked out of the office.
“Sergeant Kennedy, this is Major Guidry. She’s the one I was telling you about.”
Kennedy was wiping his hands on a shop rag. “Nice to meet you, ma’am.” He threw a lever, and the lift hissed as the car was lowered to the ground.
“Not much to look at, ma’am.”
Every surface of the interior was plastered with leaves, sand, mud, and grass. The driver’s door had been pried open. “I’ve had my forensics guys going over this thing all day. We haven’t come up with a single print. Not even Sheila Worthy’s. Going down that river was like putting the car through a washing machine.”
“How about hair and fibers?”
“Big victory. We found one of her hairs under the floor mat.”
“No fibers?”
“Not unless you want to include those from the carpet.”
“So what’d you bring me down here for, Frank? I’m not one of your investigators. I’ve got a job to do, and it’s not out here in the goddamned MP motor pool.” She started walking away.
Hollaway walked around to the passenger side, pried open the door, and knelt on the rocker panel. “I don’t guess you want to see what we did find.”
She returned and leaned over his shoulder. He pointed at two tiny pin holes in thin mud that had dried on the fabric of the passenger seat. “I’ll give you two guesses what we found right there.”
“I give up.”
Hollaway pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket and handed it to Kara. It contained an officer’s U.S. insignia.
“So? She was a lieutenant. It’s part of the Class A uniform.”
“How many lieutenants do you know who own solid gold insignias, Kara?”
“You’ve inspected hers, I trust.”
“Brass.”
She turned the insignia over. Tiny letters were engraved on the back.
“N.S. Meyer.”
“Just like yours are, I hazard a guess.”
“Good guess. But like you said, mine aren’t gold either.”
“Do you think the N.S. Meyer company has a record of all the officers who have bought sets of solid gold insignia over the years?”
“If I was a betting girl, I’d put my paycheck on it.”
“So would I.”
“C’mon, Frank. Out with it. You checked with N.S. Meyer, and . . .”
“And we’re waiting for the list. They’re going to fax it to us first thing in the morning.”
“They’re in New York. Everybody who graduates from West Point buys insignia from them. They have a big uniform show first class year, and they offer a good discount.”
“I’ve already thought about that. I checked records over at personnel. You know how many West Pointers are currently stationed at Fort Benning? Five hundred and twenty-two.”
“How many of those are men?”
“We can’t rule out the possibility the person she was having an affair with was a woman.”
“I rather doubt it, Frank. You heard her roommate.”
“If Sheila was hiding her sexuality, everything she told her could have applied to a woman as easily as it applied to a man.”
“You can’t be serious, Frank. This girl wasn’t sleeping with some dyke colonel.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Have I been wrong so far?”
“There’s always a first time, Kara.”
“I doubt it. What’s next?”
“The N.S. Meyer list will narrow down our list of potential suspects.”
“And what then? You can’t go around asking everyone on that list to see their insignia and count their solid gold U.S.’s.”
“Of course not.”
“So you’re stuck with a list of suspects and a bunch of evidentiary rules that preclude your doing anything about them. What else is new?”
“Not exactly. I thought we might take a page out of one of those cop shows on TV.”
A slow smile formed on Kara’s face. “If the word got out you had a piece of evidence like a distinctive uniform insignia, somebody might start doing a slow squirm.”
“You’re reading my mind, Major Guidry. You know what I like about you, Kara? Nobody can tell you anything. You already know it.”
“You know what I like about you, Frank? You always keep your promises. And it seems I recall that you owe me a drink.”
Her name was Roberta. The general had called her Robbie since they began dating halfway through his cow year at the Academy. She was a Vassar girl, and it was a time before the war in Vietnam when cross-pollination between West Point and Vassar, just across the river in Poughkeepsie, was still possible. She came from a wealthy family down South. Her father had the good fortune to foresee that a changeover was coming from nylon stockings to panty hose, and he built a half dozen heavily leveraged panty hose mills when everybody else was still cranking out hose. The guys down at the country club called him a pantywaist. He laughed all the way to the bank when he paid off the loans in eighteen months and started racking up profits that had never stopped. Then he bought the bank.
Robbie inherited a fifth of the family business when her father died, which on top of her generous trust fund had made life in the Army for the Beckwiths more comfortable than most. They had given lavish and frequent parties that many among his compatriots said had greased the tracks of his steep yet rapid upward climb through the ranks. Now they lived in the commanding general’s quarters at Fort Benning, a wood-frame Victorian monster on a tree-lined avenue at the center of the old post. The Army provided a generous entertainment allowance, a cook, and a housekeeper, not to mention a squad of gardeners who spent several days a week tweaking and trimming the two acres of grounds surrounding the house. Robbie supplemented the Army staff with a butler and an upstairs maid, but still there were times, such as the night of the big shindig at the officers club, when a fit of Southern belle overcame her, and it was during those moments of stress and indecision that the general’s aide was pressed into service. Robbie Beckwith didn’t see eye to eye with many of the General’s military men, but his aide was another matter. Randy Taylor had become the son she’d never had, and she depended on him in ways the General never knew about.
The life of a commanding general’s wife could be a lonely one. Military protocol dictated when you could, and could not, associate with other officers’ wives, and most of those occasions were formal in nature, such as Robbie’s position as honorary president of the Officers Wives Club. There were monthly luncheons, of course, and more frequent afternoon teas to welcome the wives of newly assigned officers. Nevertheless, she didn’t have any close friends at Fort Benning, and her relationship with Randy had filled a gap that had existed in her life for years. She needed a soul mate, and in Randy she had found one.
She had made with Bill Beckwith what her mother would have called a “good marriage.” They had two daughters. One, Virginia, was attending a boarding school in Rhode Island, studying hard, trying to get her grades up so she would be accepted at Princeton. The other daughter, Cathy, was a senior at the University of North Carolina. The girls were happy and well adjusted, and every time Robbie picked up one of them at the airport, she felt like dropping to her knees in prayerful thanks for the happiness they had brought her over the years.
Everything in her life, in fact, was better than she had expected when she first learned they were going to Fort Benning. Even her relationship with the Gener
al was on an upswing. Of course, the demands of the job on his time were arduous, but they managed to have dinner together at least twice a week, and depending on his schedule, which included frequent travel to view Third Army training and an average of one trip a week north to the Pentagon, they took a weekend off at least once a month. One weekend in August they had spent at a luxurious condo complex down in Florida. The condos were unattached single-family homes. They had played a couple of rounds of golf, and spent the evenings on the condo’s generous porch watching the sun go down over a delicious expanse of watery lowland, populated by waterfowl and deer. She had talked to him about buying one of the larger homes in the complex, even the very condo they had rented for the weekend, but the General had pooh-poohed the idea. That was when he told her he wasn’t going to retire anytime soon. He was going to be the next chief of staff, and that meant a presidential appointment of at least three years, possibly six. They were moving to Washington, D.C.
It was a prospect that gave her chills. They had spent more than their fair share of time inside the Beltway when he served on the National Security Council, which had been followed by a position as deputy director of operations at the Pentagon, an important job for a young general on his way up. She had thrived in the Washington social whirlwind, even though the politics could make her blood boil. The prospect of being the wife of the chief of staff of the United States Army made her whole lifetime with the General worthwhile.
She had known when she married him at the West Point chapel that his ambition was like cold fury inside him, and now that he was so close to realizing his dreams, the fury had taken on a life of its own. He was distant and difficult, but he had been that way to one degree or another for years. All of her life with him, Robbie Beckwith existed in a kind of half world, waiting for those moments when the perks and poses of power got too much for him to bear, and he turned to her for the sustenance a marriage was supposed to bring.
Now, watching him come through the door, she knew this was going to be one of those nights. He opened the side door and walked in, his face ashen with exhaustion.
“Did you see what King did today? He took Maldray up in a Blackhawk and gave him the grand tour and dropped him off just in time to catch his flight back to Washington, and I didn’t even get so much as a howdy-do.”
Robbie took his overcoat and hung it in the closet. “He was just down here visiting King to shore up his left flank for the election. It was all over the news tonight. You shouldn’t get so upset. He didn’t snub you.”
“I know Maldray didn’t snub me; it was that scheming King! Maldray and I go way back. Hell, I knew him when he was still a congressman from the peanut hills of west Georgia. I testified before the Armed Services Committee a dozen times when he was on it. King knows Maldray and I are close. He wanted to kiss Maldray’s ass in private. The Republican moderates are pushing King for chief, and he was trying to get Maldray to at least stay neutral on the appointment.”
“You know Maldray is backing you, Bill. He told you himself when you were in Washington last week.”
“Yeah, but I trust him about as far as I can throw him, and the way he eats, that isn’t far.” He opened the kitchen door and looked down the long center hallway leading to the front door. “Where is the butler? I need a drink.”
“He’s worked seven nights straight. I gave him the night off. Here. I’ll fix your drink. What are you having?”
“Black Label. A double. On the rocks.”
Robbie opened a bottle of Black Label and poured a generous glassful. She grabbed a handful of ice from the ice maker and dropped it in the glass and handed it to the General.
“Where’s the cook? You give her the night off too?”
“No. She’s at the commissary. We ran out of butter.”
Beckwith drank deeply from the scotch. “I’ve got the pass in review for the Sec Def tomorrow morning. I’m going to tell him what Maldray told me about the Defense budget last week. That’ll cut King cold.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you, Bill. The Secretary knows Maldray is backing you, and so does General King. You’ll be running a risk of cutting down General King unnecessarily in front of the Secretary.”
“So? What do I care what King thinks?”
“This much. If he makes chief instead of you, he’ll see to it that you end your career at the Kenworthy ammo depot counting 105 shells.”
“He’s never going to make chief, not this year, not ever. I’m going to beat him if I have to pull every trick in the book to do it.”
“I’m sure you will, dear. But there’s no sense in burning your bridges. If you make chief, he’ll be a good man to have in your corner. He’s got debts that are owed to him on every Army post in the world, and you could be the one for whom he collects them.”
Beckwith sat at the kitchen table and loosened his tie. “I don’t trust Maldray. I know King is playing the race card with him. If Maldray stabs me in the back and backs King to be chief, he’ll get fifty percent of the black vote next year. He’ll coast back into office, and if he runs for president next time around, and a whole lot of people say he’s going to, he’ll make sure King is re-upped as chief and use his association with the Great Black Hope to drag the black vote into the Republican column. And the thing is, it’ll work.”
“You’re making your chances look dimmer and dimmer by the minute, Bill. You and I both know you’re going to be the next chief, even giving away the race thing to Bernie King.”
“I’m not going to take Maldray’s support for granted, Robbie. I’m going to make sure Maldray knows about the changes I’ve made down here. He and Greenwich over in the House are busy cutting the budget to the bone. I’m going to make sure he knows how many federal dollars I’ve saved down here at Benning.” He paced up and down in front of the refrigerator for a moment, then turned to Robbie, smiling widely. “You know what we ought to do? We ought to give a party at the Association of the United States Army Convention up in Washington. We’ll invite Maldray and Greenwich and everybody on the armed services committees. We’ll invite the CEO of every Defense contractor there is.”
“That’s a brilliant idea! How many people are we talking about?”
“I don’t know . . . AUSA’s a big convention. Three, four hundred?”
“That’s going to be expensive. Those hotels up there overcharge for everything right down to cocktail napkins.”
“Whatever it costs, it’ll be worth it. I want those bastards in Washington to know I’m a player. People don’t notice you unless you give them some flash and pomp and circumstance.” Beckwith walked over to her and put his scotch on the counter and took her in his arms. “I want to rock and roll at that convention. We’re going into the AUS A with real firepower. Bernie King’s going to be wandering around the Colt Industries display playing in the popgun booth, and we’re going to be hosting a party for the really big guns.”
He gave her a kiss on the forehead and rubbed the back of her neck. She closed her eyes. Her mother would have told her that a good marriage means you think about your husband before you think about yourself. She had spent thirty years doing exactly that. They had been a team, a good one, but the interests of her husband had always come first. Now that they were about to ascend to the pinnacle of Army power, she knew that her interests and his were coequal. He couldn’t engineer his way onto the E-Ring of the Pentagon without her. This meant that for the first time in their long relationship, she had the power.
She remembered what her mother had told her in the fitting room the first time she tried on her wedding dress at Henri Bendel on Fifty-seventh Street in New York City. She was surrounded by women with mouths full of pins, tugging at her waist, nipping the cut of her bodice, measuring the hem. The wedding department at Bendel’s was the most feminine place she had ever been, before or since. Her mother was sitting on a pale peach damask loveseat across the room, sipping white wine. She could still see her mother’s white gloved hands wrapped delicately
around the glass as she moved it to her lips. Her voice was husky from cigarettes and whiskey, and as she spoke her eyes darted from one seamstress to another, making sure they were doing up her daughter right.
Just remember this, dear. Women don’t have choices. They have duties.
And who was she to argue at that stage in life? But thirty years of climbing the rungs of Army power had taught her a thing or two. She had a choice now, and she relished the moment. If she didn’t pitch in and help him, he would never make chief, and he knew it.
“I’ll call Betty Forrest. She knows all the party planners. We’ll give a party like no one has ever seen. They’ll be talking about you in Washington for weeks when we’re through with them. Your name will be the only name on their lips. Bernie King won’t stand a chance when we’re through.”
He kissed her, on the lips this time.
“Chief of Staff William Beckwith. I like the sound of it, don’t you, hon?”
Oh yeah, she liked it. She liked it a lot.
“Let’s have another drink,” she said. It was an instruction, not an invitation. “I want to start on the guest list.”
Chapter Eight
Lieutenant Colonel Barbara Lambert’s office was three doors down and around the corner. She had twenty years in the service, and she was on the list for colonel. That’s all you needed to know about the staff judge advocate, Kara thought as she knocked on Lambert’s door. She heard her voice from the other side.
“Come in.”
As usual, Lieutenant Colonel Lambert was sitting behind her desk. She was a tiny woman, thin to the point of emaciation, with a prominent nose and overly rouged cheeks. People around the office said her husband was her polar opposite, very short and as wide as he was tall, but Kara had never seen him. The clerks called her the Sitting Judge Advocate, because she got up from her chair so infrequently. No one in the office had ever seen her leave her desk long enough to go to the bathroom. It was like the job title and the big leather chair behind the big oak desk that went with it were inseparable in her mind.
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