Murder at the Pentagon (21 page)

“A message?”

“Somebody from the detention center says that your client, Captain Robert Cobol, wishes to speak with you.”

“Now? He wants to speak with me now?”

“That’s what the caller said.”

“Who is the caller? What’s his name?”

“Sergeant Davis.”

“Did he say that something is wrong there?”

“No. All he said was that Captain Cobol wanted to speak with you.”

“Thank you very much,” Margit said.

She sat up in bed. So did Jeff. She told him what the call was about.

“You aren’t going, are you?” he said.

“I don’t know. I’ve been concerned about Cobol.” She told him of Silbert’s comments, and that a medical corpsman had visited him. “I planned to go over there tomorrow.” She glanced at a digital clock-radio. “Which is today.”

“Then that’s what you should do. Let’s go back to sleep. I’m sure there’s nothing so important that you have to race there tonight.”

She knew he was right, and her feelings were in conflict with her more sober thought. She was drowsy, which made the decision for her. She kissed him. “I love you,” she said.

“And I love you,” he said. “Come on, back to sleep. World War Three can wait.”

Margit was up at six. She left Jeff sleeping, went to the kitchen and made coffee, and carried a cup of it onto the terrace. The sky was heavy, the clouds gray bordering on black. It had not been a good sleep. She’d awakened many times. Once—it might have been three, maybe four, o’clock—she’d considered getting up and driving to McNair. Silly, she’d told herself. Cobol would be asleep, and the guards at the detention center would not be amenable to a visitor showing up at that hour.

She showered, put on a change of clothing she’d brought to the apartment, and went to the bedroom, where, gently, she shook Jeff awake. He opened his eyes and said in a cross voice, “What?”

“Sweetheart, I’m going to run home, and then go to see Cobol.”

“Ah, come on back to bed,” he said, attempting to pull her down next to him. She resisted. “No, I really have to go. Will you be here most of the day?”

“I guess so.”

“I’ll call when I get back.”

She changed into a blue jumpsuit at her BOQ and headed for McNair. It wasn’t until she was about to turn into the small parking lot across from the detention center that she realized something unusual was happening.

She stopped halfway into the lot and peered out her window. Military police vehicles with roof lights flashing flanked an air-force ambulance. “Wait a minute,” she muttered, parking her car in the first available space, leaping from it, and running toward the commotion. The front entrance had been cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape, the warnings to stay clear in air-force blue. Military police blocked her progress.

“I’m Major Margit Falk, defense counsel for Captain Cobol. He’s inside there.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” one of the guards said. “You’ll have to talk to him.” He pointed to an army major who stood next to the ambulance. Margit went to him and introduced herself.

“Yes, Major Falk,” the major said. “I’m Major Jenko.”

He looked as unpleasant as he’d sounded on the phone.

“I’m here to see Captain Cobol. What’s happened?”

“There’s been an accident,” Jenko said coldly, looking beyond her.

“To Captain Cobol?”

“He’s dead.”

His words had the same impact as if he’d struck her.

“He hanged himself early this morning,” Jenko said. “It’s under investigation.”

“Where is he? The body?”

“Still inside.”

“I want to go in,” Margit said.

“Sorry. It’s off-limits.”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing. This man was my client. You can’t deny me access to him.”

Jenko narrowed his eyes. “You want access to a dead body?”

So much anger welled up in her that the only alternative
to striking back at him physically was to turn and walk away. She returned to the front entrance and stood welded to the sidewalk, her brain a series of short circuits that rendered her incapable of processing what she’d just learned.

The sight of a lieutenant coming out of the building cleared those circuits. He was one of the officers in charge of the detention center; she’d dealt with him before.

“Lieutenant!” she shouted. “Lieutenant, please.”

He detoured from the direction he’d been walking and came to her. “Major Falk, Captain Cobol’s defense counsel. I just heard what happened.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How could it happen?” she asked. “Prisoners aren’t allowed anything in their cells to hang themselves with.”

“We don’t know what happened. His mother was here yesterday to visit. Maybe …”

Flo Cobol bringing her son something with which he could kill himself? It was an absurd contemplation. Still, what was the answer? She asked the lieutenant what Cobol had used.

“Looks like a sash, maybe from a bathrobe.”

Margit saw Jenko start toward them. The lieutenant saw him, too, “Sorry about your client, Major,” he said. “I can’t say any more. This is going to be some mess.”

Jenko saw them separate and turned away. Margit took the occasion to pursue the lieutenant again. “Lieutenant, please tell me …”

“No comment,” he said, obviously aware that he’d already said too much.

“Sergeant Davis. Is Sergeant Davis inside?”

“Davis? We don’t have any Sergeant Davis.”

“Yes, you do. He left a message for me with my base locator last night that Captain Cobol wanted to speak with me. That’s why I came here this morning.”

“Ma’am, there is no Sergeant Davis assigned to this facility. Excuse me.”

“All right, clear the area, clear the area!” someone barked. Margit watched a stretcher, carried by two enlisted men, come through the front door, down the steps, and to
the ambulance. Beneath the sheet, Margit knew with deadening certainty, was the body of Captain Robert Cobol. She felt anger again, but it quickly dissolved into despair of such intensity that she wondered whether she could continue standing. She watched the doors to the ambulance close and saw it drive away.

She walked slowly to her car, looking back a few times, tears stinging her eyes, teeth clamped tightly shut. She paused and placed her hands on the auto’s roof and took deep breaths. It was inconceivable that this could have happened. It shouldn’t have happened. It made no sense.

She drove in the direction of Bolling but changed her mind halfway there and headed for the Pentagon, where she went to her office and opened the safe in which all materials bearing on the Cobol case were kept. She removed Cobol’s personnel file, placed it on her desk, stared at it for a while, then opened it. There he was, his I.D. photo. Smiling. Alive.

Four hours later, after she’d reviewed everything from the safe, some of it more than once, she picked up the phone and started to call Jeff. Instead, she dialed a number that rang in Mackensie Smith’s study.

Margit sat in Mac and Annabel’s kitchen that night. In the center of the table was a large pot of lamb stew, compliments of the chef.

“Sorry,” Margit said. “It’s delicious, but I just don’t have much appetite.”

“I wouldn’t either,” said Annabel. “It’s horrible what happened.”

Margit leaned back and rolled her fingers on the tabletop. “I keep going over and over it in my mind. Every time I do, it makes less sense. He would not have hanged himself, even if the means to do it had been accidently left in his cell.”

“There’ll undoubtedly be a full investigation,” Smith said.

“Sure,” Margit said. “Full. It’ll be behind closed doors, and they’ll come to whatever conclusion they want. Like what happened with my father.”

Mac and Annabel stopped eating and looked at her.

“I guess I never told you about that.” She recounted for her friends the unceremonious departure from the service that had been forced upon her father. “It was a travesty. And it killed him.”

“That’s very sad, Margit,” Smith said. “But you can’t extend what happened with him to the Cobol situation. Every bureaucracy—military, civilian, it doesn’t matter—likes to keep its dirty laundry from public view. That doesn’t mean the results in this case will be less than honest.”

“I know that,” Margit said, her rising level of exasperation causing her voice to do the same. “I don’t want to be cynical. I want to believe that I didn’t know Cobol, that he was capable of taking his own life, maybe even had been planning it. I can tell myself that all I want, but it doesn’t stand up to what I feel.” She became reflective; there was palpable sadness in her voice. “When my father was forced to retire, I hated anything military. The sight of a uniform made me sick. But then you grow up a little, you mature, and you realize that you can’t broad-brush any organization because of the actions of one person. This colonel who did my father in could have been a vice president at any corporation, in any branch of government, or in a university. I came to realize that. Maybe that’s why I decided to make the military my career. I remember thinking at my commissioning that I was going to make sure that the air force had one officer who wouldn’t lie, or hold a grudge, or play dirty pool.”

“Whom have you spoken with about Cobol’s death?” Annabel asked.

“My boss, Colonel Bellis.”

“What did he have to say?” Smith asked.

“He was sympathetic enough. He said he knew this was upsetting to me. But he also said that it meant I no longer had to handle an assignment I didn’t want in the first place, and that I could get back to the job for which I’d come to the Pentagon.”

“Sounds pretty cold to me,” Annabel said.

“I thought it was, too, but I suppose he was only trying to point out the positives.”

“What do you think of Bellis?” Smith asked.

“Mixed emotions. He’s smart, and from what I can gather, he’s an excellent general counsel to SecDef. He’s military through and through, but there’s a soft side that leaks out on occasion. All in all? I like him.”

Smith said, “You received a message last night from your base locator that supposedly came from a Sergeant Davis?”

“Right. Only the lieutenant I spoke with this morning claims there is no Sergeant Davis.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Smith said, “unless he got the name wrong.”

“That’s possible, but I did repeat it to him. “Margit stood and went to a corner of the kitchen, where she leaned against a large refrigerator. “I should have gone to see Cobol the minute Sergeant Silbert told me Cobol was acting strangely. I should have canceled anything I had to do that day and gone right over there. Worse, when I received the call at Jeff’s apartment, I should have followed my instincts, got dressed, and headed for McNair. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.”

Annabel broke an ensuing silence. “What do you intend to do, Margit?” she asked. “What
can
you do?”

Margit raised her arms in a gesture of helplessness. “What can I do? I suppose I’ll be asked to clean out my desk Monday morning and go back to being legal liaison on Project Safekeep.”

“You don’t sound especially excited about it,” Smith said.

“You’re right. I’m not even sure I can do it.”

“Why?” Annabel asked.

“Because I wonder if I will ever be able to focus on anything again until my questions about Joycelen and Cobol are answered.”

“Maybe they’ll put you on the investigative team,” Smith offered.

“Fat chance,” Margit said. “I said I didn’t want to be cynical. I’m trying not to be. But—maybe skeptical is a better word. No, cynical is right. I have this nagging, hurtful feeling that … Cobol has been a pawn in this whole Joycelen mess. I don’t believe he and Joycelen had a relationship, and I believed Cobol when he said he didn’t know the man. I
certainly don’t believe he killed him, any more than I think he took his own life.”

“If your feelings have validity, Margit, you’re charging the military with a cover-up,” said Smith.

“If that’s what comes out of my feelings, so be it.”

She rejoined them at the table. “Cobol had his duty assignment changed at the last minute so that he was at the Pentagon the Saturday morning Joycelen was killed. Why? Who changed it? They claim Cobol’s weapon was used to kill Joycelen. That isn’t very compelling to me. How simple to switch weapons in Cobol’s apartment. He didn’t carry it routinely, only used it on the firing range, so he wouldn’t be checking it on a regular basis.”

Mac and Annabel waited for Margit to continue.

She said, “I sat in my office for four hours today going over every scrap of paper in the safe. None of it looked the same. Can you understand that? I’ve read that material a dozen times, but it all came off the page at me as though it had just been written, and I’d never seen it before.”

“Give me an example,” Smith said.

“Cobol’s personnel file. As many times as I’ve examined it, I never noticed that someone had written ‘HP-5’ in very small letters after his serial number.”

“What does that mean?” Annabel asked.

“I don’t know, but someone made that notation. I went through my
Pentagon Handbook
, which includes a glossary of terms and abbreviations. I couldn’t find it there. I checked the Pentagon phone book, which also runs a list, and didn’t see it.”

“Can you check with Personnel on Monday?” Smith suggested.

“I intend to, provided I’m allowed.”

“Why wouldn’t you be allowed?” Annabel asked.

“Because, Annabel, I think this entire investigation, beginning with my so-called defense of Cobol, is being slowed, maybe stonewalled. I can’t prove that, but my gut says I’m right.”

Smith said, “You mentioned this Major Reich. Does it strike you as strange that his whereabouts aren’t known?”

Margit thought before replying. “I suppose it does, although obviously the CIA acts in mysterious ways. Lots of their people have to go undercover to accomplish a mission. I assume that’s the case with Reich. There’s not much chance of pursuing that avenue until he returns to above-ground duty.”

“You also mentioned this psychiatrist in New York. What was his name? Half?”

“Yes, Marcus Half. I’d intended to contact him as part of my defense preparation. It’s too late now.”