A Knife Edge

by David Rollins

  I watched the other MPEGs and opened the photos. The dates on the files indicated Ruben had his girlfriend and Staff Sergeant Butler under close observation for the ensuing eight-week period leading up to his death. There were even a couple of MPEGs taken through the lens of a night-vision monocle, McDonough and Butler looking as green as tree frogs as they slid around on each other in the backseat of her Chevy.

  So which hypothesis did this discovery support?

  “The colonel is in, sir,” said Lyne, breaking in on my train of thought.

  “What? Sorry, who?”

  “Colonel Selwyn. You asked earlier whether the colonel was in. Well, she's in.”

  “OK, thanks,” I said. I had to tell her I was leaving town. And there were also the discoveries found on Ruben's iPod. The old good-news, bad-news thing. I wondered what she'd want to hear first.

  THIRTY

  Give me the bad,” Clare said, a realist. Her hair was pulled back off her face in a tight ponytail, accentuating her strong cheekbones. She was dressed in BDUs. I found it impossible not to think about what she might be wearing under them. A framed photo of her son sat on her desk, his innocent, big brown eyes following me. Sorry, kid.

  “I'm leaving tomorrow,” I said, straight out. “Orders.”

  “And the good?” she replied, without the slightest flicker of regret evident. Clare Selwyn wasn't the type who'd be standing on a train platform waving anyone good-bye with a tear-sodden hanky, unless it was her son.

  “That doesn't bother you? The fact that I'm leaving?” I said.

  “Of course I'm disappointed. The sex was pretty good, but this is the Air Force.” She shrugged. “What can you do?”

  The sex was pretty good. Pretty good? I'd have said amazing.

  “So, the good news?” she asked again, this time with a frown.

  I took her through the discoveries on Wright's iPod by showing her, loading the QuickTime MPEGs up on her computer. “So what do you think?” I said when we'd gone through them all.

  “I think you should spend your last evening in Fort Walton Beach with me,” she said, using that command tone of hers.

  “For some more of that pretty good sex?”

  “Who said anything about sex, Vin? I'm just talking about a home-cooked meal. You're probably not going to get one of those for a while. And maybe we can talk about the case.”

  “Sure,” I said. She was toying with me. Cat-and-mouse might be another of Clare's little games. The thought of having dinner with her was a distraction. It took a moment or two to lift my head out of her pantry and get back to Ruben Wright. “The further I get into this case, the more I'm wondering about the other side,” I said.

  “What other side? What do you mean?”

  I stood and walked to the window. There were clouds in the sky now, white on top and gray beneath as if they couldn't decide which sort to be. “Right from the get-go we both believed the most likely scenario was that someone who jumped with Ruben cut him out of his harness. Butler seemed our best suspect because of the flashlight and his injuries.”

  Clare nodded. “I've just completed the tests on that flashlight, by the way. The red lens material you recovered near the crime scene belonged to it.”

  “So no surprises there,” I said. “On the face of it, you'd have to say Butler's our man. Except…”

  “…except for what we now know about Master Sergeant Ruben Wright.”

  “Yeah.” I made the points on my fingers. “One: He had MS, a fact he'd kept from the Air Force. It was the aggressive variety, so he didn't have long till the Air Force evened the score and had him medically discharged. Two: He'd discovered his girlfriend was saucing Butler's sausage. Three: The ultimate insult to a guy like Ruben—he discovered that McDonough was pregnant with Butler's kid. My guess is that it might even have been Butler who gave him the news. Four: Amy McDonough was the sole beneficiary of Ruben's will, a will he tried to change at a time that roughly coincided with the date of the first home movie of Butler and McDonough making like turtles up the beach.”

  “So now you think that perhaps Ruben Wright, to get back at his cheating girlfriend and the English staff sergeant, killed himself in such a way as to frame Butler in the role of perp?”

  “A reach, isn't it?”

  Clare gave a noncommittal shrug. “Like you, I think I'm almost convinced enough not to be totally convinced about murder.”

  “There are a couple of other issues I don't have answers to,” I said.

  “And they are?”

  “Ruben never did get around to changing his will. It would help to know why. I also want to know where he kept his MS drugs. The fact that we haven't found them means that he either disposed of them on the morning of the day he died, or they were kept someplace secret and we just haven't located them yet.”

  “What would be the significance of him getting rid of them?”

  “If he dumped his medications, then a reasonable conclusion would be he knew he wasn't coming back. The fact that we haven't found them could also mean that he didn't want anyone to know he was on medication for MS. We might never find them.”

  Clare nodded. “Hmm…”

  “Would an autopsy have told you he had MS?” I asked.

  “Perhaps, if we knew we were looking for it,” Clare said. “But a human body that hits the ground at around a hundred miles an hour ain't pretty. Organs are practically liquefied on impact. Finding something as subtle as reduced myelin on cranial nerves would be kinda iffy.”

  I put my hands behind my head and looked out her window. A file of trainees triple-timed past on the roadway, heads down, looking inside themselves for something extra. I said, “I dunno … it's real unlikely a healthy CCT hotshot would cut his own harness.”

  “But it's also conceivable that a dedicated soldier who sees his career in the crapper and himself in a wheelchair might,” she said.

  “You really think it's possible Ruben killed himself to set up Butler?” I asked as I watched a young airman using a toothbrush to paint the rocks marking the edge of the road white. I wondered if he'd be expected to clean his teeth with it later.

  “It's possible,” Clare said. “You're the investigator, Vin. The question is, which of those answers would you want to lock in?”

  Neither of us said anything for a few moments while we both chewed over the options. Then a question unrelated to the current investigation rose out of my subconscious the way a body stuffed in a trunk and sunk in a river can pop to the surface. “You mind answering a question related to another case?”

  “Sure, if I can.”

  “You had much experience with badly burned bodies?”

  “Depends. What do you want to know?”

  “Is it possible a body can get so badly burned that identification through DNA ceases to be an option?”

  “How was this particular body burned?”

  “Major gas fire.”

  She nodded. “DNA is not invincible. It fact, it's pretty easy to destroy, and fire is as good a means as any. Gas burns at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. If the fire is sustained, and the temperature is high enough, like in a gas fire, the body ends up deep-frying in its own fat. Eventually, if this cooking continues, the body broils away happily like any piece of meat left in the oven too long, and it gets turned into carbon. If that happens, there's no DNA left. In a fire like that, you probably won't get dental records, either, because the head will have been burnt off. The same with the hands, arms, and legs. Fingerprints will be the first things to go. Identification is going to have to come through some other means. Does that help?”

  “It's going to help me turn vegan.”

  “So,” said Clare, “where do you go from here?”

  “The Pentagon.”

  “Not you, the case …”

  “Which one?”

  “Which one do you think?”

  “On this one? That's it for me, Clare. I'm done. It's up to the next guy.”

  “Wh
at next guy?”

  “My replacement.”

  “This one's going to end up in the freezer; you know that, don't you?” Clare gave me the how-could-you? look.

  “You know, I don't want that to happen, either. I've got a couple of thoughts, but you'll have to see them through, if you can.”

  “Such as?”

  “You'll need the local PD and maybe a court order or two.”

  “We've got a reasonable relationship with the local cops. What you got in mind?” Clare asked.

  I told her about a few of those things—phone and bank records for Amy McDonough and Juan Demelian, Ruben's attorney. Others I kept to myself on account of they had more to do with what was on tonight's menu over at her house.

  I returned to the train wreck that was my makeshift office. I had quite a bit to do before leaving Hurlburt Field, a major task being the rationalization of my expenses onto a DD Form 1351-2 for e-mailing to the GAO. For one thing, my wallet was so stuffed with receipts it felt like I was sitting on a shoe. For another, I was almost broke. I also had to see that Ruben Wright's effects were packed back into storage, and write up my notes on the case for that next guy, if there was a next guy.

  I was repacking the stereo into its box with foam blocks that wouldn't go back in the way they came out when the cell rang. I should have checked the screen before answering it. “Special Agent Vin Cooper.”

  “Vin.”

  That familiar voice. Hearing it was like being in an elevator that had just had all its cables cut. “Anna. Hey—how's it going?” I said as I dropped through the shaft.

  “Good. And you?”

  “Good. Happy New Year, by the way.”

  “And Happy New Year to you,” she said. “I tried to phone you.”

  “Yeah, Arlen told me.” I didn't call her on the lie.

  “So, how was your night?”

  “Pretty good,” I said. Pretty good? Jesus! “Yours?”

  “It was okay. Vin, I… I've got some news.”

  “Yeah, Arlen said you—”

  “Vin, I've met someone.”

  I should have seen it coming. She'd said she had some news. Some news usually meant bad news with nothing good to counterbalance it. I knew for certain she hadn't tried to call, though she'd probably been thinking about doing so quite a bit. “You've met someone?”

  “Yes. Someone I like.”

  “How much do you like him?”

  “Vin, don't make this more difficult than it already is.”

  I could have made it easier and told her about Clare. That would have let her off the hook, but it would also have left me hanging on it.

  “I just needed to be honest with you,” she said.

  There you go again, Anna, reading my mind, I thought. “So, how long have you been seeing this guy?” I asked. “It is a guy you've been seeing… ?”

  “Vin…”

  “It could be a chimp.”

  I heard her make an impatient tsk sound. “He's JAG. A lawyer.”

  “Oh, right, so that would make him a chump.”

  She went on to say she'd been seeing the guy for a month. A month? A JAG lawyer? It was like a joke with a really unfunny punch line. She'd been seeing the guy since long before she'd paid me that impromptu visit before Christmas. I felt my Clare-guilt absolved. What had that trip to my bed been about, anyway? Was she maybe comparing us, deciding which way to jump? Or who she was no longer going to jump?

  “Vin, I'm sorry this has hurt you.”

  I didn't say anything on account of there was nothing to say.

  “You know it wasn't working—the distance, the bad phone calls, the silences…”

  “The piano principle,” I said.

  “Piano principle?”

  “Your friend Steinway and his postage stamps.”

  “Yeah, right…”

  “I guess this makes it official, doesn't it?”

  “I guess it does,” she replied.

  Even though we'd already called time, a part of me was still hanging on to the improbable. She and I had history. We'd worked the toughest case of my career—and hers—together. The slow death of separation had finally done what bullets and a car crash had failed to do.

  “You there, Vin? … Vin … ?”

  “Yeah, I'm here … So has this JAG lawyer got a sense of humor?” I asked.

  “I… I don't know… well, yeah, he does.”

  “You don't sound too sure about it. You need to tell him my favorite lawyer joke and watch for a positive reaction,” I said. I gave her the two-lawyers-in-the-bank joke, which got a laugh. I hung up and stared at the phone a while.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The C-130's interior smell was a mélange of hot kerosene, grease, and gasoline. Up at the front of the aircraft, not too far from where I sat, a battered, tied-down Humvee leaked fluid onto the bare aluminum floor. I knew how it felt. My bladder was on the verge of doing likewise. I had the pins and needles in my fingers along with the sweats and the shortness of breath. I was well aware of the classic symptoms of avia-phobia even before reading about them in my new flying companion, Have a Nice Flight, on account of the only time I experienced them was when I sat in an aircraft. And the fact that these symptoms were “classic” didn't make me feel any better about having them.

  The aircraft lurched, bucking forward as the pilot tested the brakes. And then the engines screamed as only engines in C-130s can, and we turned onto the strip and accelerated. I did what the book suggested I do when in an aircraft heading down the runway. I pedaled, just like Fred Flintstone in his Flintstone car pedaled. This, according to the book, was to give me a feeling of control over my situation. It was supposed to help. It did. It helped me feel like the village idiot, especially as I only noticed the smirking loadmaster strapped into the troop seats on the opposite side of the aircraft after we'd taken off. He began flapping his arms like bird wings, which is one of the ways people lose their front teeth.

  Driving a rental back to D.C. wasn't an option. The fact that I had to get my ass up to the captain's office by 1300 hours didn't give me the chance to dick around on the nation's highways. As is often the case at an Air Force base, there happened to be a flight leaving and headed my way. Lyne got me and my well-thumbed copy of Have a Nice Flight on it.

  The book didn't recommend getting comatose with a bottle of single malt as a means of overcoming my fears, a suggestion that would have suited me just fine. Instead it recommended distraction. In the lexicon of modern weaselspeak, the book called this “thinking positive thoughts.” I put my cynicism away and gave it a go. There was the bust-up with Anna—nothing positive there. I thought about Ruben's last few months and couldn't see much good there, either. I thought about dinner the previous evening at Clare's. And I thought about how wrong I'd read it. After the night in the hotel, I believed she'd been having fun with me when she'd said I was being presumptuous about sex being on the table, or words to that effect. But no. In fact, we ate fried rice with her son, Manfred. One of the things I learned about Manny was that he wanted to be a rotary-winged pilot, ironic given what had happened to his dad. Or maybe not. Maybe it was the kid's way of conquering the loss: He couldn't beat ‘em, so he was going to join ‘em—or would when he grew big enough to reach the pedals.

  Manny was a good kid, but laying carpet would have done more for my libido.

  The closest Clare and I came to sex was dessert. She fixed us each a banana split. Given what I knew of her proclivities, this was practically pornographic.

  When dessert was finished, it was bedtime—Manny's. Clare read him a story. Afterward, we sat on her back porch, listened to the frogs in the marsh beyond the fence, and talked shop—about the case, about past cases. The conversation ran its natural course until there was only one topic left to discuss. Clare sipped her glass of wine and said, “I meant it when I said just dinner.”

  “OK,” I replied.

  She picked a small bug out of her glass that was beating its wings fur
iously, swimming in panicked circles on top of her wine. She flicked it away. “It's been fun.”

  “Yes, it has.”

  The frogs croaked in unison somewhere in the darkness until one of them missed its cue. “You were just passing through, Vin, and that made what we were doing possible. Remember?”

  I remembered. “But now I'm so passed through I'm out the other side?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I'm really going to miss you.”

  “The feeling's mutual.”

  She gave my hand a squeeze. “So we've had a nice farewell dinner. I don't want to ruin it.”

  “Can't we ruin it just a little?” I asked.

  A short while later, we shook hands at her front door—buddies. It seemed the right thing to do at the time. But now, sitting in a climbing C-130, when I needed a positive distraction, I had none. So instead I focused on a spot on the floor, ground my teeth, fought the pins and needles, and wondered why the hell I hadn't studied accounting.

  * * *

  Flying time to Andrews AFB in Washington, D.C., was a little over three hours. I stepped off the C-130 with my ears ringing, feeling like I'd spent a couple of hours rolling around inside a steel hubcap with a handful of gravel. I took a cab to my apartment. It was exactly as I'd left it—quiet and empty. The über-mold in the fridge hadn't even managed to regroup for a renewed assault. I had a quick shower, threw on my Class A uniform, and walked out the front door half an hour after I arrived. The sky was gray and so low I could almost touch it. The fingers of my left hand ached—a sure sign that snow was in the air.

  It started coming down as the cab climbed the ramp on to the Beltway. It fell slow, like white ticker tape. In between songs, the radio warned a big storm front was headed D.C.'s way. A little snow was OK. Too much and the only people who'd benefit from it were the kids who might be forced to skip school if the drifts got too deep.