Full Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “This is better.”

  “Definitely,” said Jacey.

  They munched in silence for another moment or two, then Slaight swallowed the last of his glass of wine and reached for the bottle of Chianti only to find it empty. “I’m going to open another bottle,” he announced as he headed for the kitchen. When he returned, Jacey looked up from twirling her pasta.

  “I talked to Chief Warrant Officer Kerry. We found copies of Dorothy’s E-mail hidden in her room on floppy disks. I got some more off of her laptop in her bedroom in her parents’ house. She wrote to her mother the morning she died that something had happened to her at a party the night before. She sounded scared.”

  “You told this to the CID?”

  “Yes, Daddy. I told Agent Kerry everything I know.”

  “We’ve entered a dangerous area in military law here, Jacey. As the Superintendent, I am allowed to be kept abreast of the investigation, but I cannot get ahead of the investigation. I am not permitted to be a finder of fact, because I am the one who may be called upon to make a decision about whether or not anyone will be court-martialed. So it’s vital, Jace, that you have reported everything you’ve told me to the proper authorities.”

  “I have, Daddy.”

  “That makes it okay, doesn’t it, Ry?” asked Sam.

  “For the time being. But if you discover anything else independently, you must report it to Agent Kerry before you inform me. You understand that, don’t you, Jace?”

  “Yes Daddy.”

  “All right then, why don’t you start at the beginning, and tell me everything you told the CID.”

  Jacey filled in the gaps in the story. When she was finished, her mother said, “Ry, I don’t like this.”

  “Neither do I,” said Slaight without hesitation. “Jacey, I’m going to take you into my confidence and tell you something that I probably shouldn’t be telling you. I’m going to tell you this because I want you to steer clear of the cadets who were at the party. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand, Daddy.”

  “I think you’ve taken your involvement in the investigation about as far as it should go. I want you to let the authorities handle it from now on. From what you’ve told me, and from what I found out, at least three cadets here at West Point are going to find themselves in some very hot water pretty soon. Major Vernon received the results of a DNA test she ran as part of her autopsy of Dorothy Hamner. The test reveals that she had sex with three different men within twenty-four hours of her death. I’ve ordered a cross-check of Major Vernon’s DNA evidence against the DNA profiles we have on male cadets. That means if the men she had sex with were cadets, we’ll have their names in a few days.”

  “Daddy, that’s why they’re so scared! They must have raped her!”

  “Jacey, I’m going to say it again. I don’t want you involved in this any further.”

  “But I’m already involved, Daddy. Ash is going to examine Honor Committee records for patterns of abuse, and I’m going to help him. If they’ve been messing around with the Honor Code, we’re going to find out.”

  “You’ve got to listen to your father, Jacey,” said Sam.

  “Are you guys forgetting that the Honor Code belongs to the Corps of Cadets? The Code is what makes us who we are. We’re not college students, we’re cadets, and we’re not going to let them destroy it.”

  Sam looked from her daughter to her husband. The two of them were so much alike, it astounded her. Sitting there in the dining room of Quarters 100, she may as well have been sitting in Grant Hall with Ry thirty years ago, going over the evidence in the death of her brother. There had been nothing that could stop him back then, and there would be nothing that would stop her now.

  “Ry,” she implored, “tell her to stop.” She looked across the table at him. There was a mix of sadness and pride in his eyes. She remembered the look, because she had seen it the first time he came home from being a company commander, after he had made decisions he knew would profoundly affect the lives of soldiers under his command, decisions he was unsure about, but which he knew he had to make. And she had seen it literally hundreds of times since.

  He swirled the last of the wine in his glass. “Sam, I can’t pull rank on Jacey and give her an order. I’ve warned her that this is a volatile situation and it should be left to the authorities. That’s as far as I’m going to go.”

  Jacey reached for her mother’s hand. “Even if he told me to stop, Mom, I wouldn’t. I can’t. Don’t you see?”

  “Now you’re both going to tell me this is for almighty West Point.” She stood up. “Well, God damn West Point!” She walked straight into the kitchen with Jacey at her heels.

  “Mom, you don’t tell me everything I can and can’t do anymore. I’m on my own now. It’s just the way it is.”

  “I understand that, Jace, but it doesn’t make it any easier for me.” Sam reached for her daughter, pressing her against her bosom. She knew that mothers had worried about daughters since time began, and that this moment was just one teeny-tiny blip in that great continuum, but it sure as hell hurt.

  “We love you, Jace.”

  “I love you, Mom, and I love Dad, too. I know it’s hard for you, but you’ve got to trust me. You know?”

  Sam looked into her daughter’s eyes. “I know, Jace. But I want you to be careful. Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “I will, Mom. I promise.”

  Sam held her tight, thinking back to all the nights she had cuddled her daughter . . . nights she was sick with a fever . . . nights she woke up from a bad dream . . . nights the boy she had a crush on didn’t call. But this was different. Even though her daughter lived only a few hundred yards away in the cadet barracks, she may as well have been halfway around the world, because it was true. She was on her own now.

  CHAPTER 29

  * * *

  CROSS-CHECKING HER DNA profiles against those of the male cadets at West Point turned out to be a far more complicated process than Major Vernon had anticipated. The DNA profiles of cadets at the Academy were stored at the armed forces DNA database in Rockville Center, Maryland, where they had been lumped together with the rest of the DNA profiles on active-duty military personnel. There were just about 1.5 million people in uniform. Culling the male cadet DNA profiles was going to take some work. She went at it step by step.

  First she logged into the military network and accessed the Rockville Center database. She clicked away, asking the database to spit out the Military Academy profiles. Not available as a separate file or category, the computer answered. She made pass after pass at singling out the cadet data from the rest of the DNA database without success.

  After grabbing a quick lunch, she picked up the phone and called down to Rockville. She spent about forty-five minutes on hold and went through about four levels of civilian bureaucracy before she located a human being by the name of Linda who knew how the system worked. First Linda wanted to know Major Vernon’s authorization. So Vernon hung up the phone and called Melissa at the Supe’s office, who quickly faxed the formal order authorizing the search to Major Vernon, who turned around and faxed it to Linda down in Maryland. Having covered her ass with actual paperwork signed by a three-star general, Linda grew cooperative.

  “What we have to do is, we have to come up with a code we can feed into the computer that will pull your data out of the system. Do you know the code?”

  “For what?” asked Major Vernon, completely puzzled.

  “The code for cadets. I mean, like, the code that identifies cadets at West Point.”

  “I’ll have to get back to you,” she told Linda. She made a few calls around the post—to the personnel division over at HQ USMA, to the personnel office at HQ Corps of Cadets—and nothing turned up. Then it came to her. What are the basic identifiers of every individual in the Army? She had learned it as a plebe. The Code of Conduct said that if you’re captured by the enemy, you are to give no information to the enemy beyond your nam
e, rank, and serial number.

  Providing the name of every cadet at West Point would be a time-consuming process. Equally tedious would be listing all cadet serial numbers. Which left rank. “Cadet” is actually a rank within the Army’s structure, falling between second lieutenant and warrant officer. There is also a federal pay line for cadets, half of a second lieutenant’s base pay. She picked up the phone and called finance at HQ USMA and got a sergeant first class on the line. She asked him for the code identifying the rank of “Cadet” in the Army’s finance system.

  “Easy,” the sergeant said. He read her a five digit code, three numbers and two letters. “That’s the pay line for cadets.”

  She thanked him, dialed Linda down in Maryland, and gave her the federal pay code for “Cadet.” Linda asked her to hold the line for a moment. She could hear Linda’s fingers flying across a keyboard 250 miles away. “Okay, I’ve figured out how to break it out.” She explained to Major Vernon how to use the federal pay code to instruct the database to spit out the cadet DNA-profile data. Major Vernon thanked her profusely and hung up the phone. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at her terminal. Once again, she accessed the Rockville Center database and typed in the code, along with the instructions Linda had provided. Her screen showed the blinking “wait” signal for a few long moments. Then the data started coming through the high-speed ISDN link. She took the entire download and popped it in a data file on a Syquist drive. The data included male and female DNA profiles, but that didn’t matter. She’d just go ahead and run the check across the whole damn thing. She popped up the three DNA profiles she had separated out from Dorothy Hamner’s vaginal sample and instructed the computer to search for a match between the file in its memory against the file on the Syquist drive. She hit “enter” and sat back. The Syquist drive whirred away, and she watched data fly down her screen. There was nothing quite like watching a computer hard at work. As she had suspected before the longer portion of the process had begun, the actual cross-check took less than five minutes. There they were:

  Cadet Gerald Rose

  Cadet Richard Favro

  Cadet Glenn Ivar

  “This is going to be cute,” she said to herself out loud, recognizing each of the names on the screen. “We’ve got the Cadet Honor Chairman in the number one slot. In slot number two, we’ve got the Vice Chairman of the Honor Committee. And slot three is occupied by none other than the biggest ground-gaining running back West Point has seen in the last ten years.”

  She did some rearranging of the data on the screen and hit the print button. Next to her, a laser printer whirred to life and a single page slid forth. She picked up the page and carefully examined it. There was no way she could display all of the DNA data that matched her samples from Dorothy’s vagina to the DNA profiles of the three cadets, but she had instructed the computer to use its own short-hand. In one column, she had listed the samples as ONE, TWO, and THREE with their DNA ID codes. In the column immediately adjacent, she had instructed the computer to print out the names of the cadets, along with their DNA ID codes.

  A monkey wearing sunglasses in a dark room could see the match. She picked up the phone and dialed the number for Chief Warrant Officer Kerry.

  “Jim, I ran the cross-check and I’ve got the names for you.”

  “Let me come to you,” he said, and she heard the click as the phone went dead.

  She looked at her watch. Five-forty-five. Her five-minute cross-check had taken just under five hours.

  CHAPTER 30

  * * *

  WHEN PERCIVAL informed him that the DNA cross-check had identified the three cadets who had had sex with the dead girl, General Gibson called the Chairman of the Honor Committee and warned him. He left it at that. If he had told Rose to make sure they got their stories straight, or had contacted either of the others, and it turned out that somehow those idiots had contributed to the death of the girl, it would look like obstruction of justice.

  He knew that all three of them, Rose, Ivar, and Favro, would be called in by the CID Special Agent in Charge and questioned about their behavior at the party on Labor Day. If what Rose had told him was true, that they were a little drunk, she was a willing particpant, and all they’d done was knock off a piece, there wasn’t much to worry about. The problem was, cadets were unpredictable creatures. There was always the chance that something else had happened at the party Rose had not told him about. Rose was a conniving little bastard, and Gibson knew this well; he had maneuvered Rose into the postion of Cadet Honor Chairman precisely because he was a cunning little bastard. That was the thing about young men like Rose, with gigantic ambition and a limited grasp of their own conscience: You could control them because you knew what their motives were.

  With one exception: sex. Years of experience in the gender-integrated Army had taught Gibson one thing. When it came to the libido, everything was up for grabs, especially when it came to the libidos of twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds. There was no way of knowing what had gone on between the three male cadets and Dorothy Hamner, and so for the time being, anyway, the cadets were on their own. The interrogations would take place. All Gibson could do about that situation was wait for the system to take its course and have what little faith he could generate that his three young charges may have fucked the girl, but they hadn’t fucked up.

  Gibson had not given Rose time during the brief phone call to make his report on the Jacey Slaight situation. He assumed that Rose had done what he said he was going to do and had figured out some way to get to her. Gibson wasn’t concerned about Jacey Slaight’s obsession with the death of her friend Dorothy Hamner. In fact, the Academy’s own investigation was now going to find out much more than she already knew. What concerned Gibson about Jacey Slaight was the fact that he couldn’t control her. She was smart and she was angry and he suspected that like most women, she could be dangerously vindictive. If she started sticking her nose into the affairs of the Honor Committee . . . Gibson fairly shuddered at the thought.

  AFTER TAKING the call from the Commandant, Rose immediately got ahold of Favro and Ivar during a midperiod between classes that morning. They met in his private cadet room. Rose closed the door and locked it. He passed the word that the three of them had been identified by DNA evidence taken from Dorothy Hamner, and all of them could expect a visit from the CID. They had long since gotten their stories straight. It was just like he’d told the Com. They were drunk, she was coming on to them, and one thing led to another. The CID would ask for details. They would tell the Agent in Charge that they were in the rented cottage at the lake, and she had started doing a striptease, and they were all digging it, and when she got down to her panties and took them off and walked over to Rose and put them on his head, well, he took that as a signal, and they went into the adjoining bedroom, and they did it. When he came out, the others went in, first Favro, then Ivar. Later, they’d all ridden back to the Academy in the same car, Rose’s car. They were all as stunned as anyone else the next day when they heard the announcement in the mess hall that she was dead.

  Rose wondered if he should tell Favro and Ivar that he had stolen the E-mail disks from Jacey’s room, but he quickly decided that was a piece of information that belonged to him alone.

  Rose hadn’t told General Gibson that he had Dorothy’s E-mail disks because he didn’t trust the Commandant. He wanted to wait and see how Gibson behaved when the heat got turned up. Gibson had warned him the moment he had gotten the news that the DNA cross-check had named them. He wasn’t showing signs as yet of distancing himself from them. Still, you didn’t get to be a general by looking out for many asses other than your own. So Rose would continue to hold the E-mail disks in abeyance. They were “hip-pocket” power. Rose would wait until the Commandant had trouble of his own. He knew Gibson was already having trouble with General Slaight. It was just a matter of time before his problems got worse. Rose would wait until exactly the right moment, and then he would take two of the E-mail
disks to Gibson and report that he had been tipped that Jacey Slaight had them, and that he had then seized them. He would charge that Jacey was sitting on the E-mail disks because they contained exculpatory love letters between Dorothy and Favro. Gibson would be able to make the case to Slaight that his own daughter was guilty of withholding evidence and obstructing an official investigation. Rose knew that having come to Gibson’s aid, he and the Commandant would be glued even closer together. He wanted to make it impossible for Gibson to cut him loose. His Honor Committee had passed judgment on cadets who stood entirely alone, without powerful sponsors, and he had watched as they passed through the South Gate in civilian clothes. He was determined that such a fate would not befall him.

  The third disk, the one with the letter Dorothy wrote to her mother, he would hip-pocket for good. No one would ever read those words. Rose had made sure of that the night he melted the plastic floppy with a cigarette lighter and chucked it in a Dumpster.

  CHAPTER 31

  * * *

  IT WAS nearly close of business on Friday and the weekend was almost upon them by the time Chief Warrant Officer Kerry got the names of the three cadets from Major Vernon. He waited until Monday before calling in the three cadets for questioning. He decided to interrogate them separately in a small, windowless room in the basement of the building housing the Provost Marshal’s office. He’d make it as intimidating as possible, taking them out of their cadet barracks onto his turf, and see how far that got him.

  He wanted to start with Ivar. He had looked up his cadet records and found he was close to the bottom of his class. Kerry thought Ivar might let something slip he could use against the others. But his request for an interview with Ivar fell on deaf ears. He had just returned from the Washington State game, and the team had been given a day of rest to get over jet lag. You should never underestimate the power of the Directorate of Athletics at West Point, he reminded himself. He took on Favro instead.