One Drop of Blood

by Thomas Holland

  Special Agent Michael Levine returned to his Bureau-decreed exile in Memphis. He told his supervisor that he had hit a wall with his investigation, and his final report, which had probably been round-filed in less time than it took him to print it out, recommended that the case be placed in an inactive status pending the generation of new evidence. His inability to crack the code on the Jackson–John Doe murder hadn’t materially helped his chances of reassignment back East, but oddly he didn’t seem concerned. The weather had begun to moderate somewhat—even if only a little—and he found some level of physical comfort in that. More important, his attitude had changed around the office. He affected an air of contentment that none of his colleagues could quite understand. It was as if he’d finally run his personal demons to ground.

  Robert Dean McKelvey traveled home to an office littered with a dozen brush fires, all of which required a level of undivided attention that he found himself absolutely unable to muster. He’d hardly spoken to anyone and certainly hadn’t mentioned the events of the previous week. When questioned about his moody silence, he told people that he didn’t feel well, and that certainly was the truth.

  He had only been back to work five days when the package arrived. Truth be told, he had been expecting it, though he hadn’t known what he was expecting or what form it would take when it arrived. But he knew it would come. In fact, he was surprised it had taken as long as it did.

  “You got a package from the F-B-I. Some guy named Levine.” Peggy always entered his office as if she had just tripped on a raised threshold. Kind of a lunge and a hop mixed with a focused purpose. She was carrying a red-white-and-blue Federal Express box, which she dropped onto the topmost stratum of work on his desk. “I signed for it,” she remarked—almost as an afterthought, just in case Kel thought he needed some clarification—as she turned and exited. It had taken her less than five seconds and now she was on to her next task.

  D.S. passed her in the doorway. “You got a couple?” he asked, being sure to avoid colliding with the accelerating secretary.

  “No,” Kel replied, “but go ahead anyway.”

  D.S. moved a pile of reports on the swivel chair in front of Kel’s desk, stacking them on the floor, and settled in. He’d been wanting to talk to Kel for several days but could tell that the time wasn’t right. Now he decided to test the water. “You following this storm that’s headed for Louisiana? Might hit New Orleans they say. Looks like a big one.”

  Kel didn’t answer.

  “Suppose we’ll get called if it does? I mean, like we did with the tsunami over in Thailand…”

  Kel sighed. “Doubt it. I suspect FEMA and the folks in Louisiana have got it covered.”

  “Still, wouldn’t hurt to have some of our guys on standby.”

  “Tell, me, D.S., you come in here to talk about some storm, or you got somethin’ else on your mind?” Kel’s voice had an edge of impatience that he regretted but which he also couldn’t control.

  Davis Smart paused and then pushed ahead. “Actually, yeah, there’s something else. While you were gone, I did a lot of thinking about the remains from the Evans and Trimble case.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t,” Kel said quietly.

  D.S. squinted. “You know something I don’t?”

  “You ever ask yourself who gave us the right to meddle in people’s lives? Scratch open old wounds?” Kel asked as he opened the FedEx box. He didn’t remove the contents, but dropped the box onto his desk and pushed it away.

  “You asking that as a scientist or a philosopher?”

  Kel snorted. “I’m neither. I’m just a man who writes reports.”

  D.S. gave that a moment and then responded. “Well then, what do you plan on writing in your report on this one?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Wish I could. You know, it simply doesn’t add up right. If you remember where we left off a couple of weeks ago, we’d agreed that Jimmie Trimble probably wasn’t adopted—and I assume,” he paused and looked closely at Kel, “I assume that if you found out something to the contrary while in Arkansas, that you’d share it with me.” Reassured by the silence, he continued. “Okay, so where does that leave us? We’ve got remains out on one of our tables that don’t match either the Evans or the Trimble DNA references. Right? But it has got to be someone. So, if it’s not Evans or Trimble, then maybe it’s someone that isn’t listed as missing in Vietnam? What do you think the chances of that are?”

  Pretty damn good.Kel kept this thought to himself. Out loud he simply vented an acknowledging sound.

  “The way I piece it together,” D.S. continued, “is this: we have remains from the Evans-Trimble loss location in Vietnam, we recover a dog tag for Evans, so we know it’s a good recovery. Right location and all. The remains are those of a young male—definitely not an indigenous Vietnamese—and there are no other recorded U.S. ground losses within thirty or forty klicks of the site…”

  He paused again but when Kel didn’t respond—didn’t even blink—he resumed. “I mean, think about it…it’s not a local Vietnamese, and it’s not Evans or Trimble. So it’s got to be someone we don’t even know is missing; someone we’re not even looking for; someone who’s not on our MIA list.”

  “Or a misidentification,” Kel said quietly, still not making eye contact with his deputy. “Ever think about that?”

  “You mean someone was misidentified during the war and taken off the list when he shouldn’t have been? Yeah, could be. That’d explain why he’s not on our list. That’s sort of what I’m talking about. Whatever it is, we’ve got a case that involves someone we don’t know we’re supposed to be looking for; someone we don’t have a record on. Somebody that isn’t listed as even missing. Maybe a mis-ID, or maybe he’s CIA, some sort of spook or something.” He sighed and was quiet for a moment before leaning forward in his chair. “You know what really gets me about this case, though? What’s so aggravating? I think of all the cases where we have absolute shit to work with—a couple of little bone fragments, maybe—and along comes this one. We have everything we should need to ID this guy—the location’s right, the circumstantial evidence is solid, good remains, good DNA sequence—everything except a family blood sample to compare it to. Kinda pisses you off, doesn’t it? A damn drop of blood. All we need is a drop of blood from a relative and we can put this one to rest. If we just knew who.”

  Kel didn’t answer.

  His thoughts were focused on the open FedEx box on his desk and the sealed plastic Ziploc bag visible inside. He didn’t have to open it all the way to see its contents—a tan polyester-and-cotton sheriff’s uniform shirt, covered with dried blood and crusty flecks of brain matter.

  “Kel?” D.S. asked quietly. “Kel, d’you hear me? Said it’s a real pisser, isn’t it? Not having a blood sample.”

  “Yeah,” Kel replied, his eyes never leaving the box. “A real pisser.”

  Acknowledgments

  This whole thing started in the San Francisco airport where I was way-laid for seven hours en route from Hawaii to Bosnia. Halfway through a particularly bad paperback novel that I’d purchased at an airport bookstore, I had the sobering vision that I could write a novel every bit as bad as the one that I was reading. Upon finally getting home, I shared my epiphany with my wife, Mary. Ever my soulmate, she expressed her belief that if I were to really put my mind to the task, she was sure that I could write a novel even worse than I had imagined. I think I have proven her confidence in me to be well-founded.

  Few people knew that I was writing this book. My wife, of course, knew, as did my two sons, Pierce and Davis, who politely refrained from rolling their eyes in my presence—most of the time, anyway. Bob Mann knew. Bob is the deputy scientific director at the JPAC, and I ventured out on a limb and told him after learning that he was writing a book of his own. He kept my secret and wished me well when my spirits flagged. Jan Burke knew. She offered encouragement early on. Johnie Webb, Jr., the former deputy commander of the U.S. Army’s
Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii (CILHI), also knew some sketchy version of what was going on, but that’s about the extent of it—except, of course, for the slew of literary agents who rejected the manuscript with constructive criticism such as “unimaginative,” “boring,” “trite,” and (my favorite) “don’t make me get a restraining order because I will.” If anyone is to blame for your reading this today, it’s Linda Kenney and Michael Baden. Put on the spot, they agreed to mention me to their literary agent. Which brings me to Leigh Feldman. Why Leigh took a chance on me, I do not know, but I’m glad she did. I won’t forget.

  And while on the list of people who should have their heads examined, David Rosenthal, publisher at Simon and Schuster, should be near the head of the line. Once again, I don’t know why he took a chance with me, but I won’t forget.

  A lot of people overlook the nuts-and-bolts end. That’s shortsighted and ill-mannered. Tara Parsons, Alexis Taines, and Al Madocs of Simon and Schuster and Michele Mortimer, Ros Perotta, and Kristin Lang of Darhansoff, Verrill, and Feldman showed great patience in dealing with my literary procedural ignorance. Adrian Cronauer provided legal advice. My brother Jim drove around some back roads of rural Arkansas with me without pressing too hard about what we were doing or why we were doing it. Hugh Berryman has unwittingly been supplying rural Tennessee expressions for years—many much more colorful than any I ever heard growing up in Arkansas—and Lowell Levine has done much the same for Brooklyn.

  Having read quite a few novels (during many hours in base camps, aboard aircraft, and sitting in airports), I have often seen acknowledged praise for nearly superhuman editors who, if you can believe what you read, managed to take a pile of disjointed notes scribbled on the backs of napkins and gasoline receipts and somehow manage to craft a novel. Being sophisticated and cynical, I never believed it—until now. Thank you, Marysue Rucci. (Now that this is finished, I need those receipts back.)

  For the record, the CILHI is no more. Having existed, off and on, in one form or another since the late 1940s, the CILHI was decommissioned as an army command on September 30, 2003, only to reemerge the next day as part of the larger Department of Defense Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. The mission—to recover and identify America’s war dead—remains the same; we just use different letterhead. It is the most intellectually and emotionally satisfying job that I can imagine.

  This is a fictional story, albeit inspired by cases and situations that I have been involved in over my career. But it is fictional. That means that it originated in my feverish brain and does not reflect reality or, for that matter, the views, opinions, policies, desires, wants, hopes, dreams, aspirations, or fundamental doctrine of the U.S. Army, U.S. government, or anyone remotely connected to either. Characters in the story are just that—characters. They are composites of individuals I have known and encountered, and while some people may, out of ego or paranoia, think that they can spot similarities, I can assure them that it’s all fictional and that any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.