“Prudhomme seems comfortable with that scenario.”
“It’s a big risk, sir.”
“The risk is Prudhomme’s. Perhaps the decision about how to proceed with his defense ought to be his as well. I suggest you present him with your theory and see how he reacts.”
“I’m not sure defense theories go over too well when you’re in the post detention cell, sir.”
“He won’t be there for long. General Slaight is going to release him about an hour from now. He will be returned to the barracks under room arrest pending trial.”
“That leaves us with the problem of timing. We are gambling that they will arrest Rose before Prudhomme is court-martialed.”
“What have you been taught concerning criminal procedure, Harper? From the standpoint of the defense, that is.”
“Throw down a basic load of defensive firepower. Delay. Evade. Request investigative resources. Demand the right to travel to interview character witnesses.’’
“And when you are denied?”
“Heat up the keyboard and file appeals.”
“You can tie up Percival and his prosecutor for months with a little imagination.”
“Sir, I’m glad you recruited me to come back here and teach law. It’s a little like clerking for a good judge.”
“I will take that as a compliment, Harper.”
“It was intended that way, sir.”
“Bottoms up. I am hearing the distant call of a hot meal and a decent bottle of red.”
Patterson laughed out loud. Outside of the tiny community of law professors at West Point, who in the world could have known that guys like T. Clifford Bassett still strode the earth? He was a dinosaur, huge and omnivorous and nearly extinct, and Patterson relished every moment he spent roaming the wilds of the law with him.
CHAPTER 44
* * *
AFTER HER emergency-room shift was over Saturday evening, Major Vernon went home, fixed a frozen pizza, and got some much-needed sleep. She returned to the hospital on Sunday morning to check on the tests she had ordered. Jacey’s X rays were negative. Her blood work showed an elevated white-cell count, but that was to be expected. Her vital signs had returned to normal, and Mrs. Slaight reported that she had slept most of the night. Jacey’s room-mate and several other cadets from her company showed up to see her, but Major Vernon sent them away. She didn’t want Jacey facing the kinds of questions her friends were likely to ask until later.
When she returned that evening, she found Jacey’s father sitting alone in the room. General Slaight nodded toward the bathroom. “First time on her own. She’s much improved, doc.” The bathroom door opened and Jacey came out tying her hospital bathrobe.
“You’re looking better, Jacey,” said Major Vernon.
Jacey made her way slowly to the bed and her father helped her lie down. “I’m pretty sore, but I guess that comes with the territory.”
Major Vernon took her pulse and listened to her heart and lungs. “Did you eat anything?”
“A little. It hurts to swallow.”
“You’ve got some cramping in the stomach muscles. It’ll go away pretty soon.”
“I’m hungry, but I just can’t eat.”
“Hunger’s a good sign. It means your adrenaline is leveling out.”
“I don’t want morphine. I’m starting to like it.”
“It’s like expensive wine, Jace,” Slaight teased. “You’ve got to avoid the good stuff, or you’ll develop a taste for it.”
“I’ll give you some Lorcet. It’s effective and there are few side effects.”
The bedside phone rang and Slaight answered. He listened for a moment, said, “Right, thanks,” and hung up. He kissed his daughter and held her hand. “I’m going to have to leave you two alone for a while. They need me down at Headquarters. I’ll bring your mother with me when I come back, Jace.”
“Okay, Daddy.”
He flipped his thumb, signaling Major Vernon to follow him outside. “Stay with her until I return, will you?”
“I’ll be glad to, sir.”
When she went back into the room, Jacey was bending her left knee. The look on her face said it was a struggle. “How long am I going to feel like this, doctor?”
Major Vernon sat down next to the bed. “Maybe now’s a good time to talk, Jacey. Are you up to it?”
“Kind of.”
“Why don’t you start by telling me how you feel?”
“Sore. Everything aches. Like my knee feels like there’s this weight holding it down.”
“I understand that you’re in pain. I was asking how you feel inside. You’ve been through something no one should have to experience. Can you tell me how you feel about it?”
Jacey’s eyes wandered, finally settling on the television, which was showing CNN with the sound off. She was holding her sheet in one hand and twisting it with the other. “I guess I just can’t believe it happened to me. I mean, you’re not ready, you know?”
“No one is. It’s not part of the curriculum.”
Jacey stayed focused on the TV. “It’s not like I’m suffering. I just feel so humiliated. I can’t get the thought out of my mind that he did this to me. I can see his eyes. He’s watching me, and I can’t stop him.”
“You’re talking about helplessness.”
“Worse. It’s like I’m a little girl, and my mother’s telling me to hold on to her hand, and I’m letting go and running away from her, and all of a sudden I can’t see her and I’m scared and all I can think of is, I should have listened to her. I should have minded her. I should have been nice.”
“Are you thinking that there was something you could have done?”
“Not really.” She let go of the sheet and pressed it smooth with her open palm. “It’s like, violence is a bargain, it’s always on sale, and West Point is Wal-Mart. What did I expect? Sorority teas and lawn parties? I mean, I’m a customer.”
“Guilt is a natural thing, Jacey. It’s a warning mechanism. You feel guilty because your body is telling you to.”
When Jacey dropped her eyes from the television, they had filled with tears. “I don’t want anyone to see me like this.”
Major Vernon took her hand. “Like what?”
She pulled her hand away. It was shaking. “Like this.” She threw back the sheet, exposing herself.
Gently, Major Vernon touched Jacey’s shoulder. “Tell me what you see.”
“I couldn’t wipe myself. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.”
“Tell me why.”
“Why? You’re asking me why?”
“You’re asking yourself, Jacey. It’s like breathing. You take air in, and you exhale. Ask and answer. Ask and answer. In and out. In and out. Doubt is part of life’s rhythm.”
“I don’t have any doubts. All I have is hate.”
“Who do you hate, Jacey?”
“I hate my arm. I hate my stomach. I hate my knee. I hate my ribs. I hate my . . . vagina.”
“Ask it. Do I hate myself?” She moved her hand from Jacey’s shoulder to her wrist. Gently, she lifted Jacey’s wrist and placed her hand on her thickly bandaged ribs.
Jacey looked down. Her fingers were bony, splayed like the rays in a child’s drawing of the sun. She closed her fingers, feeling the coarse threads of her bandage. She watched, as if a spectator at a sporting event, as her other hand moved slowly from the mattress to the other side of her body, finding her rib cage. Her hands moved together, coming to rest on her sternum. She turned her head and found Major Vernon’s eyes with hers. “I used to lie in bed at night when I was a kid, tapping my ribs with my fingers, counting one, two, three, four, five, over and over until I fell asleep. I can remember it like it was yesterday.”
“It was yesterday. I came in here last night, and you were lying in this bed just as you are right now, sleeping. You are the same person you were, Jacey. You have your mother and your father and you have your friends and you have your life.”
&nb
sp; “Am I being ridiculous?”
“You are being yourself. All you have to do is heal and you’ll get to know yourself again. I think you’ll probably be surprised.”
“At what?”
“How easy it is to love someone you’ve been with all of your life.”
Jacey looked at her hands. She reached down and touched her thigh. A clear fluid leaked from her bandage. She lifted her finger and touched it to her tongue. It was salty. There was no pain, only the intimacy of self.
CHAPTER 45
* * *
BY THE time they released Jacey from the hospital on Wednesday, the entire Corps of Cadets knew about the events of Rutgers weekend and people were taking sides. While it surprised Jacey, it was no shock to Ash when they found out how many cadets, especially those in the Second and Fourth Regiments, had lined up behind Rose. Few of them were female, but support for Rose cut across class lines and included most of the firsties who lived in the north end of the barracks. Jacey at first wrote it off to sexism and the typical cadet tendency to follow the herd, but Ash felt differently. As Chairman of the Honor Committee, Rose had power. Cadets were in awe of the kind of power that carried Rose almost daily to the office of the Commandant of Cadets for one-on-one meetings. Ever since they were plebes, all cadets had been inculcated with respect for the Honor Code and those who administered it. Rose was their man. Guys in his company spread the word that Jacey had pissed off some punks in Newburgh in a traffic incident, and they taught her a lesson. Prudhomme was a pussy-whipped little fool. He was covering up for Jacey’s misdeeds by attacking the Honor Chairman. The strength of the rumor campaign was remarkable. By the end of the week, Jacey swore to Belle that she could see people in their own battalion whispering at their mess hall tables when she walked by. Belle told her she was crazy, but it was the truth. People in the Third Regiment had been gotten to. A friend of Belle’s on the volleyball team who was from the Fourth Regiment told her that Rose was using the Honor reps to spread the rumors. Ash was friends with the rep from Belle’s friend’s company, and he called him to check out what Belle had heard. When the rep heard Ash’s voice, he mumbled something about a Chess Club meeting and hung up.
Agent Kerry meanwhile was hitting dead-ends like they were lane reflectors on a highway. His microscopic examination of the clothes and shoes seized from the motel room produced nothing. The foot-print casts didn’t match any of the shoes belonging to either Rose or Favro. He tried a half-dozen Eddie Bauer stores within a hundred-mile radius of West Point, and no one recognized photographs of Rose or Favro. He tested the trunk of Rose’s car for fiber and hair evidence, and found nothing that matched Jacey’s uniform or the blanket that had been thrown over her. He was about to give up on the physical evidence when something caught his eye. He brushed past the olive-drab blanket and knocked it off the top of his filing cabinet. When he reached down to pick it up, he noticed that a triangular wedge had been torn from one edge of the blanket. On a hunch, he put the tear under the microscope. There was a tiny sliver of steel imbedded in the wool. He removed it with fine tweezers and isolated it on a slide. It was crescent-shaped and razor sharp. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. It wasn’t until the next day when his car failed to start and he lifted the hood that it came to him. He was checking the bolts on the battery-cable connectors when he felt a sharp pain in his thumb. He stepped back into the sun. A tiny piece of flashing from the end of one of the quarter-inch bolts was stuck in the soft, fleshy part of his thumb. When he got to the office, he took it upstairs and slipped it onto the slide next to the piece of metal from the blanket. They were almost exactly the same. Somewhere there was a triangular wedge of olive-drab blanket stuck to a quarter-inch bolt in a car trunk. He went back down to the parking lot and checked the trunk of his own car. It was probably one of the bolts that held the taillight assemblies in place. In his car, they were out of sight, tucked under the curve of the rear fenders, almost impossible to reach without a socket on a four-inch extender. If the car that carried Jacey up into the woods behind Delafield was anything like Kerry’s, the little piece of fabric was probably still there.
It was literally a thin scrap of evidence to hang his hopes on, but it was all he had. Kerry took off and drove down to New Jersey, where he started canvassing the rental-car agencies around Bound Brook. By that afternoon, he had covered Piscataway, Middlesex, and Edison. He spent the next day working the area around Rutgers: New Brunswick, North Brunswick, Somerset, Highland Park. No one recognized the photographs of Rose and Favro. Most of the agencies let him check their records, and that didn’t turn up anything either.
When Kerry drove back to West Point, his spirits were at an all-time low. He had a meeting with Captain Patterson scheduled for the next morning. There was nothing new to give him, other than a promise that he would keep looking.
ROSE HAD removed his bandages and wore the stitches in his face like a badge of honor. Guys he didn’t even know came up and high-fived him. The plebes in his company paid him the singular cadet honor of short-sheeting his bed, and one morning made a production of presenting him with breakfast in bed on a silver tray they had pilfered from the mess hall. The members of the Honor Committee froze Prudhomme out of their meetings. Rose spent the better part of one day going through the regulations on Honor Committee procedure, trying to see if there was a way they could vote Prudhomme off the committee. There wasn’t. He had to be voted off by his own classmates in his own company, and that was unlikely, given the fact it was also Jacey Slaight’s company, and a vote against Prudhomme would be seen as a vote against her as well.
Rose felt especially gratified that Prudhomme’s attack on him had derailed Kerry’s investigation of the Monday-night theft of the E-mail disks. He knew he was vulnerable if Kerry kept after him. He had no alibi for the seven-to-eight-o’clock hour. Everyone seemed to have forgotten that Monday-night football was early that week due to a West Coast game. Nearly the whole company was downstairs in the TV room watching the game, which had made it easy to slip into Jacey’s room, get the disks, and get out without being seen. He had seen one plebe coming out of the sinks when he was turning down the stairs, but it didn’t look as if the plebe saw him. He had worn his white parade gloves while he was in her room, so he knew he hadn’t left any prints.
The really delicious thing was, it looked like the whole Dorothy Hamner thing was being shoved on a back burner while Percival worked up his case against Prudhomme. He had set out to put the fear of God in Jacey Slaight, and the way things were turning out, he had succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings.
Favro was his only worry. He had avoided Rose ever since they were released from custody at the Provost Marshal’s office. It was starting to look bad. Prudhomme had attacked both of them. Favro should have been basking in the support they were getting. Instead, he spent most of his free time in his room. Rose stopped by one night to ask him if he wanted to go to a movie. They were playing one of the Lethal Weapon movies, perennial cadet favorites. The theater would be packed. Some of the guys on the Honor Committee had suggested they show up at the movie. They promised to start an ovation when they came in. It would look great, a show of solidarity against that animal Prudhomme. But Favro wouldn’t go. Rose asked him what was up. Favro just shrugged and told him he still felt a little dizzy from the concussion. Rose pegged that as top-grade bullshit. Favro didn’t like what he had heard on the grapevine about Jacey Slaight getting raped. Rose thought about telling him to grow the fuck up, but he decided against it. Favro would either come around by the time Prudhomme was court-martialed, or Rose would remind him of that night at the lake with Dorothy Hamner and the role he had played. That would straighten him out.
Gibson was playing it very, very cool. They continued their Honor Code meetings every other day or so. Gibson never breathed a word to Rose about Jacey Slaight or Prudhomme or Dorothy Hamner. They were like two eagles soaring above the rest of the Academy on a warm curr
ent of clear air, free from the niggling worries and scrambling below them. Rose had learned a lot from Gibson over the last couple of years, but now he was learning something he would never have guessed in a million years. If you treat problems the right way they turn into opportunities. It was as if he and Gibson were being rewarded for keeping focused and calm in the face of adversity. Gibson had once warned him that the way of a warrior was a treacherous path only a few could negotiate without fear. That was where dignity and honor came from. You did what you had to do. Gibson said consequences were an empty scabbard. Your will, honed to a razor edge, was your sword.
CHAPTER 46
* * *
SAM HAD watched with amazement as Jacey recovered so quickly from what must have been an experience beyond any terror Sam could imagine. As a little girl Jacey used to climb trees and ride her bike along narrow trails in the woods, and during the winters when there was snow she would drag her little sled to the top of the highest hill she could find, come rocketing down, wreck the thing in a snowbank, and get up and do it over again. Her legs were always black and blue, and Sam couldn’t recall a time when she didn’t have a cut or a scrape bandaged somewhere on her little body.
Now she had rebounded from the kidnapping like it was a fall from a tree, or a spill on her bike. Sam didn’t know whether to be proud of her or frightened that she seemed not to have absorbed the lesson a close call was supposed to teach you. Jacey seemed more worried about the charges Ash faced than her own injuries. Sam paid a visit to Major Vernon, who had continued to see Jacey throughout her stay in the hospital despite the fact that she wasn’t her primary physician. Major Vernon explained that some young women react to trauma as if charged by it, and Jacey seemed to be one of them. She warned Sam to be on the lookout for a delayed reaction like depression, but also told her that Jacey might not suffer such a reaction at all. People were different, she said, and female cadets were some-times in a class all by themselves.
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