Dog Tags (20 page)

“I can multitask, remember?”

I could continue to argue about this, pressing my point that we are better off with Marcus guarding the house. Or I can shut
my mouth and get into bed with Laurie.

End of conversation.

I’
VE NEVER MET HER, OR SEEN HER PICTURE, BUT
I
RECOGNIZE
K
ATHY
B
RYANT IMMEDIATELY.
Her twenty-seven-year-old face is grief-stricken. Not the kind that you feel in the first hours and days and weeks after
hearing terrible news, but rather the kind etched by months of unrelenting pain. She has learned to publicly keep her emotions
under control, but the effort of it must wear on her, and make it more difficult to summon the energy to suppress hellish
private moments.

I had called Kathy to discuss her husband’s death in Iraq, and at first she tried to deflect me by giving me the name of her
own lawyer. He is representing her in dealing with Alex’s estate, and in settlement negotiations with the US government regarding
a possible negligence lawsuit she might file.

I finally persuaded her that I was more interested in the cause of the explosion than in the financial entanglements that
have followed it, and she agreed to meet with me. Her chosen location was here, at the food court of the Garden State Plaza
Mall in Paramus, a large area of fast-food restaurants that collectively contain more cholesterol than your average third-world
country.

I’m a few minutes late, since I don’t know where in the mall the food court is, and I wind up parking as far away as is possible.
Then I have to decipher the mall directory, which helpfully tells me with an arrow where I am, which would be good news if
where I am is where we are meeting. It’s not, and by the time I figure out where I’m going, and then trek over there, I’m
late.

She’s sitting at a table when I arrive, and after we say our hellos, I get us a couple of coffees from the Coffee Bean. “Thanks
for seeing me,” I say when finally settled in.

“I’m not sure what it is you want.”

I smile my charming Carpenter smile, a guaranteed funk remover if ever one was invented. “I’m not, either,” I say. “I’m just
asking questions until someone gives me an answer that I can use.”

“Okay.”

“I’m afraid I’ll be asking you about the circumstances surrounding your husband’s death. I hope that’s okay.”

“When you think about something twenty-four seven, talking about it doesn’t really make it any worse.”

I nod my understanding, even though it’s hard for me to relate to what she has been through. When I was twenty-seven, pretty
much the most tragic event in my life was when the Giants lost a play-off game.

“Has anyone in the government given you an explanation for how it happened?”

She nods. “Yes, someone from the State Department called the first week, and then again after the investigation was completed.”

“What did they say?”

“That this teenager blew herself up trying to kill the oil minister, and that Alex and Mr. Freeman were in the wrong place
at the wrong time. And that while every effort was made to prevent it, it’s a dangerous country, and not every lunatic can
be stopped.”

“So they didn’t admit negligence?”

“No. My lawyer said they wouldn’t, and they didn’t. They didn’t say much more than I could read in the paper.” She pauses,
then, “Not that I read the papers.”

“Why did Alex go on that trip?”

“Because Mr. Freeman asked him to; Alex worshipped Mr. Freeman,” she says.

“Do you know why Mr. Freeman asked him? There were other people in the company higher than Alex.”

She shrugs. “I don’t really know, other than it was a late decision. For some reason the spot opened up. And since Alex’s
job included dealing with the oil markets, I guess he was a logical choice. Mr. Freeman seemed to think of him as a protégé.
Alex was on the fast track.”

She says this with a hint of scorn, so I ask her about it. “You didn’t approve of Alex’s job?”

“I guess I had mixed feelings about it. It was incredibly stressful, and I could see the effect it had on him. He had trouble
sleeping… stomach problems… especially in the last couple of months. It’s tough when his health and the quality of our lives
seemed to depend on the price of things like oil or gold.”

“Your feelings don’t sound particularly mixed,” I point out.

“Now they’re not; losing the person you loved more than anything in the world at twenty-seven has a way of clearing things
up. But back then, Alex was making a lot of money, and we had this vision of him retiring early, so I bought into it. Mr.
Freeman wasn’t even fifty, and Alex said he was going to quit soon and sail around the world. That sounded so appealing…”

“What about Jonathan Chaplin?”

“I don’t really know him. I met him a couple of times at a company Christmas party, and then again at the funeral. He was
really very nice… said all the right things.”

“Have you had contact with the company since then?”

“Oh, yes. The HR person called me a number of times, to see if I needed anything, or if there was anything they could do for
me. And they needed Alex’s papers dealing with work, so they could transfer it on to someone else.”

“You gave them everything?” I ask.

“Whatever I had. He took some things with him on the trip, so I don’t know where they are, and I didn’t give them his personal
papers, of course. That’s something I need to go through when I’m ready.”

“Was Alex nervous about going on the trip?”

She shakes her head. “Very. I told him not to go, but I don’t think he ever considered it. He would never turn down Mr. Freeman.”

We talk a little while longer, but she really has nothing to tell me that can help Billy, and I don’t have the sensitivity
or the power to help her. The only consolation she can seem to find on her own is in the fact that Alex and Freeman were killed
instantly. She thanks God that they didn’t suffer, but doesn’t seem to ask Him why they died.

I’m sure she’ll eventually move on, but it’s going to take a while, and involve a lot more pain.

When we say our good-byes, she says she hopes she’s been of some help.

“Absolutely,” I lie.

When I get back to the office, I call Colonel William Mickelson, Erskine’s immediate superior back when Erskine was alive
enough to have one. General Prentice had told him I was going to call and cleared the way, so he gets on the phone right away.
Having a general on your side is like having a military genie.

I tell him why I’m calling and offer to come down to Washington at his convenience, providing I’m not in court. He doesn’t
seem thrilled by that, and mutters about how busy he is. But he tells me
he’s going to be in New York next week for a speaking engagement, so we make arrangements to meet then.

I doubt that I’ll learn much more than what was in the report, but it can’t hurt to try. If he’s evasive, I’ll just keep mentioning
how close I am with the general.

“I’
M TEMPTED TO SAY WE CAUGHT A BREAK.”
Laurie says this as soon as I walk in the house. I didn’t even have a chance to say,
Honey, I’m home,
or ask how little Ricky’s soccer practice went.

“So go ahead and say it,” I say. “Actually, you can say it over dinner.”

“There is no dinner. I’ve been working. I thought you could bring in Taco Bell.”

“You clearly don’t have this domestic-bliss thing worked out yet. Tell me the break.”

“Sam’s been trying to find the soldiers who were discharged as a result of the explosion in Iraq. It’s been hard, which is
probably revealing by itself. But he managed to trace down one of them, Tyler Lawson, to a condo in Albuquerque, New Mexico.”

“Good.”

“So I used a few connections, and wound up talking to a detective out there. It seems Lawson went to Vegas a couple of weeks
ago, checked into a hotel, and played some blackjack.”

“Why are you only ‘tempted’ to call it a break? Sounds like a full-fledged one to me.”

“Because he might be another murder victim. The first night he was there, he disappeared. Security cameras in front of the
hotel showed him getting into the passenger seat of a car with a guy, and they drove off. That’s the last anyone has seen
of Lawson.”

The story isn’t making perfect sense to me. “Why would Vegas cops have checked the security tapes? People leave those hotels
early all the time, usually because they’ve lost money. Did they suspect foul play?”

“When Lawson never checked out, they went into his room. All his stuff was there, and the safe was locked. So they opened
it and found two hundred thousand dollars in cash. With that kind of money involved they obviously became suspicious, which
is why they checked the tapes.”

“Any idea who the driver was?”

“No. He seemed to know where the cameras were, and never gave them a good shot at his face. They traced the plate number on
the car; it was rented at Avis with a fake driver’s license and credit card.”

“But Lawson got in the car willingly?”

“According to this detective, yes.”

This is a potentially big development, though “potentially” is the key word. Five soldiers left the army as a direct result
of negligence that day in Iraq, and one an indirect result; if two of those six, Erskine and Lawson, were subsequently murdered
within a short period of time, then that would be way beyond an enormous coincidence. And it would be great for Billy, since
he was an involuntary guest of the county when Lawson disappeared.

Of course, there’s no proof that Lawson was murdered; for all we know he may be at the Cathouse Ranch. On the other hand,
it’s a fact that people don’t generally leave two hundred grand behind in hotel safes.

We’re also very far from certain that we will be able to introduce any of this as evidence. My hope is that Eli will open
the door to our
doing so, by bringing in testimony about the alleged grudge Billy was holding against Erskine for his injury in the explosion.
But Eli may stick strictly to the physical and eyewitness evidence, and then it’ll be much harder to bring in all this Iraq
stuff.

“We need to find the other four soldiers,” I say.

Laurie nods. “I know. Sam’s working on it; he’s got more things he can try. But for the moment they’ve disappeared.”

“That’s significant by itself. The average guy being discharged from the army wouldn’t likely be wealthy enough to go on a
round-the-world cruise. He’d have to make a living, unless he had money from some other source.”

“The kind of money Tyler Lawson had.”

“Right.”

Although it doesn’t change the effort I’ll put into defending him, my confidence in Billy’s innocence is starting to increase.
If Lawson was murdered, my theory would be that there was a conspiracy to make the explosion happen, and now the conspirators
are being silenced.

It’s the kind of story juries like to hear, but unfortunately judges don’t allow stories. They allow evidence.

I’m feeling guilty that Tara and Milo have been cooped up in the house. It’s way too dangerous to take Milo outside for a
walk, and I haven’t been taking Tara very often, because I don’t want to make Milo feel bad.

Laurie and I bring them into the backyard and throw tennis balls to them, but there isn’t that much room to run. Milo is amazing;
he jumps and grabs the balls in midair and never misses. Tara, on the other hand, is content to amble over and pick up the
balls after they roll to a stop. She unfortunately has inherited my energy level.

All this activity makes me hungry, so I head over to Taco Bell to get dinner. I’m back with a bunch of burritos and quesadillas
within fifteen minutes, and we chow down immediately.

We’re finished by eight thirty, at which point I make a terrible mistake. I pour us some wine and then turn on the television
without knowing in advance what channel it is tuned to. This is like a lawyer asking a witness a question that he doesn’t
already know the answer to.

Major faux pas.

What comes on the screen is a black-and-white movie. Worse yet, it’s the
beginning
of a black-and-white movie, and Laurie sees it before I can turn it off. Laurie is constitutionally incapable of not watching
a black-and-white movie; it could be the worst film ever made, but if it’s in black and white it has a built-in status that
demands her reverence. If they filmed
Santa Claus Slasher
in black and white, Laurie would consider it a work of art.