The Whisperers (38 page)

‘It’s clear that our soldiers need help, but they’re afraid to ask for it in case it’s recorded and the jacket follows them. But the military also needs to change its attitude toward its troops: mental health screening is poor, and commanders are reluctant to allow military personnel to gain access to civilian therapists. They’re hiring more general practitioners, which is a start, and more mental health care providers, but the focus is on troops in combat. What happens when they come home? Of the sixty soldiers who killed themselves between January and August 2008, thirty-nine of them did so
after
they returned to this country. We’re letting these men and women down. They’re wounded, but the wounds don’t show in some cases until it’s too late. Something has to be done for them. Someone has to take responsibility.’

She sat back. Some of the hardness fell away from her, and she just looked tired. Tired, and somehow younger than she was, as though her distress at the deaths was both professional yet also almost childlike in its purity.

‘Do you understand now why I was wary when a private investigator, and one, with respect, whose reputation for violence precedes him, began asking about the deaths of veterans by their own hands?’

It was a rhetorical question or, if it wasn’t, then I chose to consider it as such. I signaled for another round. We didn’t speak again until it arrived, and she had poured the remainder of her first glass into her second.

‘And you?’ I asked. ‘How does it affect you?’

‘I don’t understand the question,’ she said.

‘I mean that it must be hard, listening to all of those stories of pain and injury and death, seeing those damaged men and women week after week. It must take its toll.’

She pushed her glass around the table, watching the patterns that it formed: circles upon circles, like Venn diagrams.

‘That’s why I left the military and became a civilian consultant,’ she said. ‘I still experience guilt about it, but over there I sometimes felt like King Canute, trying to hold back the tide alone. In Iraq, I could still be overruled by a commander who needed soldiers in the field. The needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, and for the most part all I could do was offer tips on how to cope, as if that could help soldiers who had already gone far beyond the possibility of coping. In Togus, I feel like I’m part of a strategy, an attempt to see the bigger picture, even if the bigger picture is thirty-five thousand soldiers already diagnosed with PTSD, and more to come.’

‘That isn’t answering the question,’ I said.

‘No, it isn’t, is it? The name for what you’re implying is secondary trauma, or “contact distress”: the more deeply therapists involve themselves with victims, the more likely they are to experience some of their trauma. At the moment, mental health evaluations of therapists are practically non-existent. It’s self-evaluation, and nothing more. You know you’re broken only when you break.’

She drank half of her wine.

‘Now, tell me about Harold Proctor, and what you saw out there,’ she said.

I told her most of it, leaving out only a little of what Edward Geagan had revealed, and the money that was discovered in Proctor’s cabin. When I was finished, she didn’t speak, but maintained eye contact. If it was some kind of psychiatric trick designed to wear me down and blurt out everything that I’d kept hidden since childhood, it wasn’t working. I’d already given away more than I wanted about myself to her, and I wasn’t about to do it again. I had a vision of myself closing a stable door while a horse disappeared over the horizon.

‘What about the money?’ she said. ‘Or did you just forget to mention it?’

Clearly, the state cops were more susceptible to her wiles than I was. When next we met, I’d have a word with Walsh about maintaining some backbone and not coming over all giggly when a good-looking woman patted his arm and complimented him on his weapon.

‘I haven’t figured that part out yet,’ I said.

‘You’re not dumb, Mr. Parker, so don’t assume that I am. Let me suggest what conclusions I think you may have come to, and you can disagree with me when I’m done. You believe that Proctor was storing items in his motel, possibly, even probably, drugs. You believe that the cash in his cabin was a payment for his services. You believe that some, or all, of the men who have died might also have been involved in this same operation. Joel Tobias makes runs in his truck back and forth across the Canadian border, so you believe that he’s the likeliest transport link. Am I wrong?’

I didn’t respond, so she continued talking.

‘And yet I don’t think you’ve told the police all of this. I wonder why. Is it because you feel some loyalty to Bennett Patchett, and you don’t want to besmirch his son’s reputation unless you absolutely have to do so? I think that may be part of it. You’re a romantic, Mr. Parker, but sometimes, like all romantics, you confuse it with sentimentality. That explains why you’re cynical about the motives of others.

‘But you’re also a crusader, and that fits in with your romantic streak. That crusading impulse is essentially selfish: you’re a crusader because it gives you a sense of purpose, not because it serves the larger requirements of justice or society. In fact, when your own needs and the greater collective need have come into conflict, I suspect that you’ve usually chosen the former over the latter. That doesn’t make you a bad person, just an unreliable one. So, how’d I do?’

‘Close on Proctor and Tobias. I can’t comment on the second bout of free analysis.’

‘It’s not free. You’re going to pay for my drinks. What have I missed about Proctor and Tobias?’

‘I don’t think it’s drugs.’

‘Why not?’

‘I talked to someone who’d know if there was an attempt to increase the local supply, or to use the state as a staging post. It would involve squaring things with the Dominicans, and probably the Mexicans too. The gentleman to whom I spoke would also look for his cut.’

‘And if the new players just decided to dispense with the niceties?’

‘Then some men with guns might be tempted to dispense with
them
. There’s also the question of supply. Unless they’re growing bud themselves across the border, or are importing heroin straight from the source in Asia, they’d have to deal with the current suppliers somewhere along the line. It’s hard to keep those kinds of negotiations quiet, especially when they might threaten the status quo.’

‘If not drugs, then what?’

‘There might be something in their military records,’ I said, avoiding the question.

‘I’ve looked into the records of the deceased. There’s nothing.’

‘Look closer.’

‘I’ll ask you again: what are they smuggling? I think you know.’

‘I’ll tell you when I’m sure. Go back to the records. There must be something. If you’re concerned about the reputation of the military, then having the cops uncover a smuggling operation involving veterans isn’t going to help. It would be better if the military could be the instigators of any action against them.’

‘And in the meantime, what are you going to do?’

‘There’s always a weak link. I’m going to find it.’

I paid the tab, on the assumption that I could run it past the IRS as a justifiable expense if I claimed not to have enjoyed myself, which was largely true.

‘Are you driving back to Augusta tonight?’ I asked Saunders.

‘No, I’m staying in the same place that you are,’ she said.

I walked with her across the road to the motel.

‘Where’d you park?’

‘On the street,’ she said. ‘I’d ask you in for a nightcap, but I have no booze. Oh, and I don’t want to. There’s that too.’

‘I won’t take it personally.’

‘I really wish that you would,’ she said, and then she was gone.

Back in my room, I checked my cell phone. There was one message: it was from Louis, giving me the number of a motel, and the room in which he was staying. I used the room phone to call him. The main building was locked up for the night, and I wasn’t worried about anyone listening in. Nevertheless, we kept the conversation as circumspect as possible, just in case.

‘We had company,’ he said after Angel passed him the phone. ‘Two for dinner.’

‘They make it to the main course?’

‘Didn’t even last until the appetizers.’

‘And after?’

‘They went swimming.’

‘Well, at least they did it on an empty stomach.’

‘Yeah, can’t be too careful. Now it’s just the four of us.’

‘Four?’

‘Seems like you have a new career in relationship counseling.’

‘I’m not sure my skills are up to helping you with yours.’

‘We find ourselves in that much trouble, we’ll make a suicide pact first. In the meantime, you need to get over here. Our friend has turned out to be quite the conversationalist.’

‘I promised the state cops I’d hang around until morning.’

‘Well, they’ll miss you, but I think you need to hear this more.’

I told him it would take me a few hours to get there, and he said that they weren’t planning on going anywhere. As I drove out of the lot, a light still burned in Carrie Saunders’s room, but I didn’t think that it burned for me.

IV

 

H
e’d spent too long in just about every vehicle the army had to offer, and knew their strengths and shortcomings, but he was eventually brought in to fill a vacant spot on Tobias’s Stryker squad
.

There had been a lot of crap tossed at the Stryker, usually by the kind of shitheads who subscribed to gun magazines and wrote letters to them about the ‘warrior class,’ but soldiers liked the Stryker. The seat cushions sucked, the a/c was like the beating of fly wings, and there weren’t enough outlets to run DVD players or iPods for an entire squad, but it was superior to the Humvees, even the up-armored ones. The Stryker offered integral 14.5mm protection from anything the haji could throw at it, with additional cover from RPGs provided by a cage of armor eighteen inches from the main body. It had the M240 at the rear, and a .50 cal that rocked. By comparison, the Humvee was like wrapping yourself in tissue and waving a .22
.

And that kind of stuff mattered, because against every rule that he had ever been taught about urban warfare, the army had them marking the same patrol routes at the same times every day, so the haji could set their clocks and, by extension, their IEDs, by them. By this point, it wasn’t a matter of if they were going to be hit on a given day, but when. The upside was that, following a hit, the vehicle was automatically returned to base for repairs, so the squad could rest up for the remainder of the day
.

The transfer to the Stryker squad had been Tobias’s doing; Tobias, and the man named Roddam. Tobias had earned his sergeant’s stripes and was squad leader. He wasn’t a jerk, though: he even scored them some beers, and getting busted for drinking was a serious offense. You might pull an Article 15 for a fistfight, or borrowing a vehicle without permission, but alcohol and drugs merited judicial punishment. Tobias’s own neck was on the line over the beer, but he trusted them. By then, though, he had become familiar with the way Tobias operated, and he knew that the beers were a way of softening them up. Tobias had his own unique spin on Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there was an equal or greater reaction expected. They would pay for those beers, one way or another, and Roddam was the one who was going to extract the payment
.

Roddam was a spook of some kind. Baghdad was overrun with them, both genuine and charlatans, and Roddam was a little of both. He was private, not CIA, and he didn’t talk much about what he did, like any good spook. He said that he worked for a small outfit called Information Retrieval & Interpretation Services, or IRIS, but Tobias let it slip that it was basically a one-man operation. IRIS’s logo, not unexpectedly, was an eye, with the world as its pupil. Roddam’s cards boasted offices in Concord, New Hampshire, and Pont-Rouge, Canada, but the Pont-Rouge office turned out to be little more than a tax scam with proximity to an airfield, and the Concord office was a telephone and an answering machine
.

Roddam was ex-Agency, though: he had contacts, and he had influence. Part of his role in Baghdad was to act as the middleman between the army and the smaller contractors, the ones who didn’t have their own transport networks and were trying to keep their costs down so that they could bank a bigger share of whatever they were overcharging Uncle Sam to begin with. Roddam arranged for the transportation of anything on which the big boys like Halliburton didn’t already have first dibs, from a box of obscure screws to weapons that were required, for whatever reason, to bypass the regular transport channels
.

That paid his bills, and more, but it wasn’t his main area of expertise: Roddam, as it turned out, was an expert in interrogation and information analysis, which explained the origins of the name IRIS. There were too many Iraqis in custody for the regular intelligence guys to process, so the little fish were thrown to Roddam. If you got enough little fish, and cross-referenced whatever information could be gleaned from them, it was possible that a bigger picture might be constructed from the individual pieces. Roddam was some kind of genius at analyzing the information coaxed from prisoners, sometimes without them even knowing that they’d revealed anything crucial. Roddam would occasionally deal with prisoners himself, usually in an effort to clarify a point, or in an effort to make a solid connection between two apparently random pieces of information. He wasn’t a thumbscrew and waterboarding kind of guy. He was patient, and soft-spoken, and careful. Everything he learned went into a computer program that he had created, and for which Iraq was to be the testing ground: it collated key phrases, minor operational details, even turns of phrase, and cross-referenced them in the hope of establishing patterns. Army intelligence and the agency would feed him their scraps too so that, over time, Roddam came to know more about the day-to-day operation of the insurgency than just about anyone else on the ground. He was the go-to guy, trusted as a virtual oracle. In return, what Roddam wanted, Roddam got
.