Cadet Rick Favro was a regimental commander and Vice Chairman of the Honor Committee. He was smart, but he lacked guile. Kerry had looked up Favro’s records, too. His father owned a huge construction firm in Chicago that had built half the buildings along Michigan Avenue. This was a kid who had never bounced a check, had never lacked for anything in his life. When he walked into the windowless room in the basement, his sense of fear and dread was palpable.
He questioned Favro for about a half hour, and during that time, all he got out of him was that they’d had a typical cadet drinking party, things got a little wild, his girlfriend had started taking her clothes off in front of the three of them, one thing led to another, and they had all ended up in the sack with her. Then Kerry started boring in.
“You didn’t mind it that these other guys were fucking your girlfriend?”
Favro looked straight at him. “I was pretty drunk. I don’t remember getting angry at the time.”
“How much of a girlfriend was she, Mr. Favro?”
For the first time, Favro showed nervousness. “We were just dating.”
“Just dating. How many dates?”
“I don’t know. We hadn’t been dating long. A few, I guess.”
Kerry watched with interest as he saw Favro begin to work on the germ of an idea.
“Maybe that’s why I didn’t end up mad at the other guys. I guess Dorothy and I really weren’t that close. I mean, it wasn’t like we were in love with each other or anything like that.”
“Was Dorothy Hamner what we used to call a loose woman? Did she have a reputation for being easy?”
“I wouldn’t say so.”
“So you were surprised when she started stripping.”
“Yes. I’d say that I was.”
“Did you try to stop her?”
“Like I said, we were all pretty drunk. Maybe I was a little drunker than the others.”
“How many drinks had you consumed?”
“We were drinking beer. We had a couple of kegs. I wasn’t keeping count.”
“But you drank a lot of beer.”
“A whole lot.”
“How would you describe the alcohol consumption of the others?”
“Dorothy wasn’t drinking.”
“What about Ivar and Rose?”
“They were pretty drunk.”
“I don’t understand, Mr. Favro. Ivar, he’s a big-time running back, and he’s got practice the next day. Rose, you told me he was the one who drove the car back to the Academy.”
“I guess they weren’t drinking as much as I was.”
“And Dorothy Hamner wasn’t drinking at all. So how do you reconcile these facts with your previous statement to me that . . .” He flipped through his notes and found the quote. “ ‘We were all pretty drunk and one thing led to another.’ “
Favro considered the question for a moment before he answered. “I guess I was referring mostly to myself.”
“By saying ‘we.’ “
“Yes.”
“But the facts were otherwise, were they not?”
“Yes.”
“And so when you first described to me the scene at the party you misspoke. Would that be fair?”
“Yes.”
“Why so, Mr. Favro? You are the Vice Chairman of the Honor Committee, are you not?”
Now Favro squirmed noticeably in his chair, which was of the metal folding variety, not comfortable at all. “Like I said, I was pretty drunk. My memory of the whole thing isn’t the greatest.”
“But you have remembered so far the following: that, one, Dorothy wasn’t drinking at all; that, two, Ivar wasn’t drinking as much as you were; that, three, Rose wasn’t drinking nearly as much as you were because he drove back to the Academy. So how, Mr. Favro, do you reconcile your drunken, faulty memory with the three specific recollections I just enumerated for you?”
Favro looked at a spot on the wall above Kerry’s head for a long moment. Kerry had witnessed that behavior many times before. He called it the “prayerful stare.” It was like he was waiting for divine intervention.
“All I can tell you is, I was real drunk, and everybody was drinking—”
“Except Dorothy,” Kerry interrupted.
“Except Dorothy. And things started to just get kind of wild, and what happened, happened.”
“How do you explain this to me, Mr. Favro? You invite a girl, a fellow first-class cadet, to a party as your date. She’s the daughter of a gas-station owner in upstate New York. According to everything I’ve heard from her classmates in her company, she very badly wanted to be a career officer in the United States Army. She was described to me by her own roommate as a very conservative Catholic. She was strongly opposed to abortion. She told her roommate she voted Republican in the last election. She volunteered up in Wallkill at an orphanage before Christmas and Easter every year. So you take this girl from a small upstate New York town to a party, and she doesn’t take a single drink, and suddenly, she starts performing a striptease and has sex with you and two of your friends.”
Favro dropped his prayerful stare and looked straight at Kerry. “I don’t know why it happened the way it did. It just happened.”
“It just happened.”
“Right.”
“Was she taking drugs, Mr. Favro? Could that explain her behavior?”
“No.”
“She wasn’t drinking and she wasn’t taking drugs, and yet she just up and took her clothes off and had sex with you and two of your classmates.”
“I guess she had her reasons.”
“But we’ll never know those reasons now, will we, Mr. Favro? Because now Dorothy Hamner is buried in upstate New York.”
Favro showed no emotion at all. In fact, his voice turned hard and cold. “I think it’s worth noting, Mr. Kerry, that Dorothy Hamner did not file any charges against me or any of the others the next day. What happened between the four of us was consensual. If it hadn’t been, she would have filed charges, and you would have been questioning me a long time ago.”
Kerry took his time making a note of what Favro had just said. He thought briefly about bringing up Dorothy’s last E-mail message to her mother, but decided it wasn’t conclusive enough to warrant a new line of questions. He was relatively certain that Favro had at least been told of its contents and was probably prepared with an answer.
“I take it those are your final words on the subject of Miss Hamner,” Kerry said without looking up.
“You are correct.”
“Then you’re dismissed, Mr. Favro.”
THE FOLLOWING day, Kerry requested that the football team van deliver Ivar to the Provost Marshal’s building immediately after he finished practice. When he walked in, Ivar’s face was still flushed with the glow of physical exertion. Kerry sat him down on the same folding metal chair. He was huge, by cadet standards. Around 240, six-three, with enormous hands and a neck as big around as a telephone pole.
He got the same line from Ivar he’d gotten from Favro. It was obvious that they had gotten their stories straight, because the language was even similar. We were all a little drunk . . . things started to get wild . . .
The next thing Ivar knew he was in bed with her. He added a detail. She and Favro had been “playing around” in the backseat of Rose’s car on the way back to the Academy.
“So she and Favro still seemed to be together, even after what happened.”
“Yeah. You could say that.”
“I find the whole thing rather curious, Mr. Ivar. If you were dating a girl, especially a fellow cadet, would you invite her to a party and then share her sexually with your friends?”
Ivar hadn’t seen this one coming. Kerry could see him struggling for an answer he hadn’t been prepared for. “I don’t know . . .”
“Do you have a girlfriend, Mr. Ivar?”
“Sure. Back home.”
“What’s her name?”
“Karen.”
“I’ll ask you again.
Would you invite Karen to a party and then share her sexually with your friends?”
“No.”
“Then why do you figure that Favro did?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you discuss it with him? Did you ever ask him why he allowed you to have sex with his girlfriend?”
“No.”
“I find that incredible, Mr. Ivar. Here we have a situation where a bunch of guys get together and they’re at a party and a girl who’s one of their own classmates starts stripping her clothes off and then she has sex with the guys, and you’re telling me that you and Favro never talked about this?”
“I’ve been pretty busy with football.”
“I see. Mr. Ivar, you have written off this behavior, at least in part, to drunkenness. But you did not have that much to drink, did you?”
“I guess not.”
“And neither did Rose, did he? Wasn’t he the one who drove the car back to the Academy?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, he drove the car, or yeah, he wasn’t drinking that much?”
“Both yeahs.”
“And Dorothy Hamner wasn’t drinking, was she?”
“I didn’t see her drinking.”
“Was she taking drugs, Mr. Ivar?”
“I didn’t see her taking any drugs.”
“That’s a qualified answer, Mr. Ivar. I’ll ask you another way. Do you know if she was taking drugs?”
“No.”
“Do you believe she was?”
“No.”
“How do you explain the scene you’ve described, Mr. Ivar? You’ve been a cadet for more than three years now. Has anything like this ever happened to you before?”
“No.”
“So what’s your explanation?”
Ivar looked confused for a moment, then his face brightened. “All I know is, she didn’t file any complaints. I mean, if she objected to what happened, wouldn’t she have gone to the MPs, or to the Tac?”
“Perhaps she didn’t have the time.”
“She had all that night and most of the next morning.”
“Before she died, you mean.”
“Yeah.”
Kerry folded shut his notebook. If these guys were the warriors of our nation’s future, then the country had some worries about its safety. “That will be all, Mr. Ivar.”
KERRY HAD saved Rose for last. He had spent extra time going over Rose’s cadet records, and he’d made a few calls. This guy was a piece of work. He came from rather humble beginnings on Long Island. His father was a minor functionary in the Nassau County Republican machine. His mother managed a dry cleaner’s. From the day Rose arrived at West Point he had thrived. He was in the top 2 percent of his class academically. Physically, he wasn’t a standout, but his record in intramurals included stints coaching championship company teams in sports such as cross-country and cadet triathlon. He had ridden a rank-rocket to six stripes and the chairmanship of the Cadet Honor Committee. It was evident from Rose’s file that his chief sponsor was the Commandant of Cadets. For some CID agents, this would mean that he was an individual who should be handled with kid gloves. But not Jim Kerry.
Unlike the other cadets, who had been wearing their class uniforms, Rose arrived after supper in his dress gray uniform and took his seat on the folding metal chair in a relaxed position, unzipping the bottom of his dress coat and crossing his legs. Rose didn’t give him the same song-and-dance about drunkenness leading to things getting wild and one thing leading to another, which told Kerry that he had consulted with Favro and Ivar and was prepared for the line of questioning they had faced. Instead, Rose said while he was well acquainted with Favro and Ivar, he didn’t know Miss Hamner at all, and so he did not have even the foggiest notion why she had behaved the way that she did. Then he cheerfully admitted that he had gone first with her because Miss Hamner had taken her panties off and wrapped them over his head, and had used them to pull him toward the bedroom.
“I don’t know many cadets who would turn down an invitation like that one, do you, Mr. Kerry?” Rose asked cheerfully.
“No, but neither do I know many cadets who had sex with a dead girl less than twenty-four hours before she died. In fact, I know only three, and you are one of them, Mr. Rose, which is why you are here.”
“Can I ask the purpose of this inquiry, Mr. Kerry? It is official, I presume, or I wouldn’t have been asked to come to the Provost Marshal’s building. Is this a criminal matter?”
“Not yet, it isn’t.”
“Then why are you asking me and the others about having had consensual sex with a young woman? She filed no complaints against us, neither a disciplinary complaint with the Tactical Department nor a criminal complaint with the law-enforcement authorities at West Point.”
“We are in the process of seeking to determine her cause of death, Mr. Rose.”
“I thought she died from heatstroke.”
“That possibility has been discounted.”
This statement set Rose back on his heels, but only for a moment. “Well, Mr. Kerry, I really don’t have anything to say about how Dorothy Hamner died. She wasn’t drinking at our party. The last time I heard, having sex, even three different times, with three different guys, doesn’t kill you.”
“That is an impertinent, improper, and disrespectful remark, Mr. Rose.”
Rose let his face fall a little. “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand why I’m here if what you’re trying to do is determine her cause of death.”
“You could confirm something for me, Mr. Rose. The other cadets, Favro and Ivar, told me that Dorothy Hamner wasn’t taking drugs at the party. Is that your recollection as well?”
“Yes it is.”
“Were you with her all or most of the time?”
“She was around. I think I’d have noticed if she was taking drugs.”
“Why is that, Mr. Rose? She could have gone into the bathroom and closed and locked the door.”
“What I mean is, she wasn’t acting funny.”
“You wouldn’t say that a young woman from a conservative back-ground in a small upstate New York town taking her clothes off and having sex with three fellow cadets is acting funny, I take it.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Have you ever had such an experience before, Mr. Rose? When you and another cadet or cadets had sex with the same woman at a party or another cadet gathering?”
“Once or twice.”
“So this was nothing new to you.”
“It doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens. We’re adults, Mr. Kerry. Guys go to whorehouses down in the city, too. Some of them come back with a case of the clap. I’m sure you are aware of that.”
“I am.”
“Boys will be boys. You were one.”
“Indeed I was.”
“Then I think our business is complete. I don’t know why Dorothy Hamner died. I’m sure the autopsy will turn up something.”
“Your business may be complete, Mr. Rose. But mine has just begun.”
Rose stood up and walked to the door. “Good luck with your business, Mr. Kerry.”
He is hiding something, thought Agent Jim Kerry. And I’m going to find out what it is.
CHAPTER 32
* * *
JACEY WAS alone at her desk going through company paper-work when the door opened and Ash walked in.
“I’ve got some news. I heard Kerry questioned Favro yesterday and Rose and Ivar today.”
“I can’t believe she did it willingly, Ash. Dorothy would never have sex with three guys, one right after the other. You knew her. She was so innocent. They raped her. I just know they did.”
“Yeah, but how do you go about proving it was rape? It’s not enough to say Dorothy was a great kid.”
“When I talked to Kerry, I told him we think the Honor Code is involved, but he said he doesn’t have authority to start poking around in the Honor Committee. That’s a Corps of Cadets matter, he said. The only
way he could get clearance to look into the workings of the Honor Committee would be if he could tie the Honor Committee directly to Dorothy’s death.”
“Well, the three guys who screwed her are all Honor reps. That’s a start.”
“But not enough.”
“Well, maybe we can give him some help. I checked out the regimental Honor records today.”
“You did?”
“As regimental rep, I’ve got access to the files of the Honor Committee. I didn’t want anybody thinking I was up to something, so I just pulled my regimental files and went through them. I even asked Rose to remind me how the cases were filed. I told him I was trying to find a case from last year so I could talk about it in a company Honor lecture.”
“He was there when you went through the files?”
“Sure. I figured the best way to do it was to hide in plain sight.”
“So what did you find?”
“Not much. I was going at it like we said, looking for patterns. I wanted to see which Vice Chairman forwarded the most charges to the full Honor Committee. You know how it works. If someone is reported for an Honor violation, the first thing that happens is, the company Honor rep talks to the person making the report, and the person who is accused. If he thinks there is reason to go forward with the charge, he turns it over to the regimental rep. He turns the case over to a Vice Chairman. The Vice Chairman . . . there are two of them. Favro and Reade. The Vice Chairman has the authority to dismiss the case or forward it to the Honor Chairman, who can order an Honor hearing.”
“Favro and Reade were both at the party.”
“Yeah. But here’s the thing. Favro is in the Second Regiment, and Reade comes out of the Fourth Regiment. Rose is in the Second Regiment. I couldn’t find any irregularities in the cases the Third Regiment has sent up through them. A couple of them they dismissed, and three of them went to a full hearing, one forwarded by Favro, the other two by Reade. Of those three, one cadet was found guilty, and the other two were acquitted. But what I’m thinking is, if these guys are pulling any funny business, they’re doing it within their own regiments. I don’t think I’m going to find anything unless I get my hands on the Second and Fourth Regiment Honor files.”
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