The Night Crew (33 page)

“You had to have a pass issued by the counterintelligence officer at the battalion headquarters,” he confirmed. “Maybe Ashad sent the files before he died. Did you ever consider that?”

“Yes, that’s certainly possible. But it would be professional suicide for Ashad to blow the whistle on himself, not to mention causing the dismantlement of a program that he, himself, had constructed. That doesn’t entirely disprove it. But the doubt factor does go way up.”

He looked down and, using his utensils, he toyed with the food on his plate a moment. When he looked up he suggested, “You’re assuming that Ashad was entirely rational. He wasn’t. The night crew . . . that was his operation, his brainchild. What kind of a mind conceives of such a thing?”

“I’m afraid that’s just not persuasive, Nate. The night crew and its activities, perverse as they were, benefited Ashad. He was, in your own words, selfish and self-interested.” I shook my head. “No, I just don’t see it.”

He then had another thought, and tried it out. “Another thing I never mentioned before, because I didn’t want to impugn the reputation of a man who died for his country, but near the end there I thought Ashad was going mad.”

“Mad?” I asked. “Are you saying mad as a generalized term, or as a clinical expression of nuttiness?”

“Insane, nuts, unglued . . . that’s exactly what I’m getting at. He wasn’t acting rationally. He became . . . forgetful, experienced nightmares, frequently complained to me about trouble sleeping. It was becoming more and more difficult to have a lucid, coherent conversation with him.”

“And do you have an opinion about the cause of this mental derangement?”

“I’m certainly not a trained psychiatrist, but, yes . . . I suppose I have formed an opinion. Guilt. He was consumed with it. As I said, at that time I had no idea about the existence of the night crew, or of their activities, or of Ashad’s role in those activities. But in retrospect, knowing what I now know, what all of us now believe . . . I think Ashad’s conscience was eating him alive.”

This did not sound at all like the Amal Ashad I had met only an hour earlier. That man was too arrogant and full of himself to experience an iota of guilt or remorse. I asked Willborn, “So you don’t believe it was . . . say, someone who might’ve been jealous of Ashad’s success, who disliked Ashad, both personally and professionally, and who wanted to destroy him?”

“No.” He stuffed another bite of pork chop in his mouth. “To be honest, I find that theory entirely irrational and silly. Don’t you?”

“I’m just throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks, Nate. But this session is already proving both beneficial and illuminating.” I paused a moment to let him worry about the meaning of that. I then said, “I have a few more off-the-wall ideas. Would you care to hear them?”

It took a moment for him to reply. “If you think I can be helpful.”

“Very good. The next one deals with General Yazid Palchaci and his death. According to the coroner he was murdered sometime late during the night of 20 December. Further, he was beaten to death with a blunt, heavy object, most likely a baseball bat, which were fairly common objects at Al Basari, both for the recreational activities of the troops, and also, for use by the guards as deterrent symbols with the inmates.”

He nodded, indicating he was following my logic.

“Now, unknown to the killer, there actually was a witness to Palchaci’s murder.”

“There was?” He took a deep breath. “I was under the distinct impression that nobody knew anything about that night.”

“Yes, that had been the case, Nate. But as so often happens with criminal conspiracies,” I explained, “one of the accused has experienced a change of heart, which attended a change in their testimony. This witness informed me that he or she overheard the murder, and the murderer.”

“Is that right?”

“The witness confirmed that the killer did use a baseball bat. My witness was in another cell, making a pot of coffee, and overheard every hit and blow. If you’re interested, Palchaci’s killer was definitely alone, and definitely a male.”

Though he did an admirable job of controlling his facial muscles you could see in his eyes that he never expected to hear that there was a living witness to Palchaci’s murder. All these months thinking he was free and clear, and suddenly, a witness changes her mind, and suddenly, he’s got one foot on the gallows. He couldn’t resist asking, “Does your witness know the name of the killer?”

I thought about lying to Willborn but that wouldn’t serve my purpose. “No,” I answered, choosing a different lie and shaking my head. “Only that the killer was definitely not Mike Tiller or Danny Elton. The witness is quite certain of this.”

“So it was a near miss.” He relaxed back into his seat. “There were . . . what? Nearly nine to ten thousand males in the prison that night.”

“Nearly all of whom were either locked in their cells, or in the chained-in compound outside the prison walls.”

“All right, I stand corrected,” he replied. “So maybe five or six hundred American males are left, any one of whom could’ve murdered Palchaci.”

“Essentially, yes.” He leaned even further back in his chair, and his muscles visibly relaxed with the relief of knowing he’d caught a lucky break. This was not how I wanted him, so to tighten the screws a bit, I posited, “Of course, a more thorough investigation should quickly narrow that number down to a workable pool of suspects.”

“And how will that work?”

“It’s actually not all that hard, Nate. For one thing, it had to be somebody who had free and unrestricted entry to the prison. Two, the killer knew when Elton and Tiller left the cellblock to drop by the dining facility for a late night snack. As it happens, June and Andrea also had left minutes earlier to go back to their tents, which might be how the killer knew the coast was clear. He might have had the whole night crew under observation, waiting for the moment to strike. Do you see the conclusion this leads to, Nate?”

“No . . . maybe you should explain it.”

“The killer had to be someone who knew all about the existence, the activities, and the habits of the night crew. He knew, for example, that Sergeant Elton often carried a bat, so, by using a bat to kill Palchaci, he probably reasoned that Elton inevitably would become the prime suspect. And he believed that once Danny and Mike left the cellblock he could be alone with Palchaci.”

“That sounds like a lot of unproven assumptions. I really hope this isn’t a preview of how you normally solve crimes and defend your clients.”

“It all depends, Nate. Sometimes it’s a straight road, other times you’re stumbling through a foggy maze. Very often, the killer, out of either remorse, or the inevitability of detection, steps forward and offers a confession. It saves everybody a lot of time and trouble, makes us all look good, so to reward this forthright behavior we might shave a few years off their sentence.”

He looked at me and said nothing. But this description, vaguely suggested as it was, must have sounded to him like an invitation to confess, which it also was. If he decided to take a pass on my offer, it made it harder on everybody. But in an ironic way, if he took my offer, he made it harder still.

To reinforce my offer, I said, “When that doesn’t happen, Nate, we throw around ideas until one of them looks good, we get the bad guy, and we throw away the key. In this particular case, however, with the whole world watching, and where our suspect may have committed multiple premeditated murders, a ride on the hot seat is a real possibility.” I looked him in the eye and emphasized, “A voluntary confession might be the only way to avoid that outcome.”

He glanced down at his plate, and I could see he was wrestling with himself.

When he looked up, he said, “It’s just not very . . . reassuring that you would consider such crazy ideas.”

“Yes, but that is how it works, Nate. We start with the loopy stuff, and sooner or later, some of it starts to look frighteningly sane. Now, here’s an even stranger one. Do you want to hear it?”

“Uh . . .”

I took that for a yes. “Say you had a promising young interrogator, he’s ambitious, he has hopes and dreams of a long military career, but he’s under unbearable pressure from his bosses, and is getting terrible performance evaluations, because none of his cases are talking. So to afford him an opportunity to correct this impression, his so-called partner gives him Palchaci as his case. The General is one of the highest profile targets in the entire system. Senior officials in the Green Zone keep asking why this man isn’t talking. So this young interrogator spends months trying to get Palchaci to crack. When the normal methods fail, he goes to Danny, and he begs and pressures Elton to do whatever it takes—it worked for Ashad after all—so they beat him, and eventually, they put the old man through the night crew’s special wringer. Unfortunately, none of it works. Palchaci continues to lecture our young interrogator on the stupidity of the war, and he even has the temerity to complain that the special treatments aren’t decadent enough for his tastes.”

I paused for a moment. Willborn appeared to be transfixed, hearing me describe something he thought only he knew.

I said, “Just imagine, if you will, how satisfying it would be for this young officer to take a baseball bat and beat that man to death. Every blow would feel so well-deserved. Palchaci was, after all, a bad man, an evil man, a man who had done so much harm, and killed so many people. And now, adding to his crimes and misdeeds, he was derailing the career of an ambitious young officer.”

Nate Willborn had stopped eating now. His plate was pushed to the side, but he was still holding the knife and the fork in his hands, as though he didn’t know what to do with them, or with himself.

Eventually, he insisted, “Except Palchaci wasn’t my case. He was Ashad’s.”

“Is that so? You’ll have to forgive me because, as you’re aware, Major Mary Ingle has blocked me from viewing the interrogator’s assignments. And the daily logs kept by you and Ashad are, of course, missing.”

“I’m telling you he was Ashad’s case. So I think, according to your scenario, Amal Ashad should be your most promising suspect. Everything you have described applies as easily to him, as . . . say . . . to me.”

“I certainly recognize that, Nate. In fact, this is why I haven’t yet brought this analysis or the suspicions that emerge from it to the attention of Army CID. I don’t want to impugn the character and reputation of a promising young officer who may have done nothing worse than have the bad luck to be in the proximity of a lot of reprehensible behavior.”

He was now watching me very closely, like a man who just fed his last dollar into a slot machine, knowing a jackpot is a million-to-one shot, but still unable to tear his eyes from the spinning symbols.

I told him, “In a case like this, what I normally do is dig deeper. Once you understand the motive, it becomes fairly easy to understand who did the killing. The why takes you straight to the who.”

“Is that right?”

“There are a lot of people I can talk to, and plenty of promising leads I intend to follow up on. For instance, given the new witness testimony and these new revelations, I am now confident I can persuade a judge to overturn Major Ingle’s injunction and release the interrogation assignment logs to me, or at least to Army CID, to confirm who was responsible for Palchaci’s interrogation. Further,” I continued, “I can confidently rule out Amal Ashad as the killer of Major Weinstein and Captain Howser. Dead men tell no tales, and neither do they commit murder, right?”

“I suppose that’s sound reasoning.”

“But is there a causal link between the killing of Yazid Palchaci, the exposure of the night crew’s activities to a well-known reporter, and the murder of the two army lawyers? I don’t know. But had both Weinstein and Howser begun to suspect the same man as Palchaci’s murderer, or had they both met with the actual killer and created the fear in his mind that he was at risk of exposure, that could certainly tie all the murders together.”

Clearly he knew now that the case against him was very strong, and I had described enough loose ends to hang him. When he finally looked up from his plate, he said, “This is a very complicated case for you, is it not?”

“Homicide cases always start off complicated, Nate. You have a victim and you have a killer, but between the apprehension and the conviction, you have motive, modus operandi, unpredictable witnesses, evidentiary issues, a judge, an opposing attorney, and a jury. You build one block at a time and eventually, you have seven members of the court martial board nodding at every word you say.” To reinforce that point, I noted, “For instance, I have yet to check Major Weinstein’s files and records, but when I do, I may find that he also met with the killer shortly prior to his death.”

“I never met him,” he said without any attempt at conviction, as though, at this point, he was merely reading off a script long after the audience had left. “Nor did I have any reason to kill him.”

“Yes, well, the FBI can check and see which suspect may have traveled to Colorado and Northern Virginia on the days Howser and Weinstein were murdered. Once they have a name and a photo, it’s amazing what they can dig up. If you drive through a toll stop, say on 95 going south, and they have your license plate number, very often, there is a picture of you behind the wheel. If you stop at a highway rest stop or stay in a hotel, nearly all of them have cameras these days, and there you are, in living color. Charge cards leave records. Once shown a photo, waitresses and hotel attendants remember a face. If you took a flight, there’s a record. I must tell you, Nate, it’s really hard to kill people in this day and age, and not leave a trace. There’s always something.”

“Yes, sir,” he answered. “I encourage you to do exactly that. I’m innocent and the deeper you probe, I’m confident that I’ll be vindicated.”

“That may well prove to be the case, Nate.”

“But from this discussion I have the sense that you have a lot of circumstantial evidence that you think points at me.”

We exchanged stares for a moment. “Yes, it definitely does look that way, Nate.”