47
The Captain’s Conscience
Dear Mrs. Guaman
I have thought for a long time about whether to mail this letter. It may cause you great pain, and it may destroy my own career, but, after much agonizing, I have decided it would be a breach of my oath—as a doctor, as a soldier—to withhold this information from you.
It was my sad duty to examine the remains of your daughter, Alexandra, whose body was found along the verge of the Main Supply Route that connects the Green Zone to the Baghdad airport. Medics from the 4th Brigade combat team found her and brought her to our hospital inside the Green Zone, hoping to make an identification.
Forgive me for writing to you in a blunt fashion. Your daughter was found naked, with burns across her face and torso, as if she had received phosphorus burns from an IED. However, it troubled me that I did not see signs typically found in people who die as a result of burns; nor would an IED have burned off her clothes. While my staff submitted her fingerprints and DNA for identification, I began her autopsy.
The next day, her identity was determined, and we learned that she worked for the Tintrey Corporation. A representative from the company came to collect her body to prepare it for return to her family. I gave him a copy of my preliminary report. At that time, I was still waiting for results of various forensic tests, including analysis of semen found in her vagina, and for her blood work.
The following morning, I had a call from Colonel Cleburne, my own commanding officer, ordering me to destroy my autopsy report. No reason was given other than that Tintrey was a civilian operation and that the Army budget was stretched too thin to take on civilian autopsies. The Colonel informed me that he had also ordered the laboratory to end its tests on the various fluids we had sent over.
I deleted the report from my computer, as commanded, but I did not destroy my printed copies. After long and anguished deliberation, I have decided to send you my preliminary findings.
I regret being the transmitter of such difficult news, but I believe no good is ever served by burying the truth.
Sincerely,
Edwards Walker, MD, Captain, U.S. Army
Attached to the letter was a photocopy of the report. I skipped to the end, to the summary, which explained that Alexandra was a “healthy white female in her twenties, with burn marks over 30 percent of her body, whose body had been found in the midst of metal fragments that might have been the remains of a bomb blast. Medics thought at first that she had been killed by a bomb, but, upon postmortem analysis, we discovered she had been bound and strangled before death.”
I flipped through the detailed medical examiner’s report.
DIAGNOSES: 1. Manual strangulation. A. Petechial hemorrhages, conjunctival surfaces of eyes. B. Hyoid bone fracture.
2. Postmortem full and partial thickness burns to 30 percent of the total body surface area.
EVIDENCE OF INJURY: Distal right portion of the hyoid bone palpably & visibly fractured with prominent associated recent hemorrhage extending downward to the right thyroid cartilage.
CLINICOPATHOLOGIC CORRELATION: The lack of thermal injury to the larynx and bronchi indicates that the victim was not breathing at the time of exposure to the fire. Given the damage to the hyoid bone, and the petechiae found on the conjunctivas, the evidence is consistent with death by strangulation, with subsequent attempted disposal by burning.
On the posterior aspect of the right forearm is a linear 3- × 1-inch contusion with a 1- × ?-inch abrasion in its center. Wrists show evidence of binding ligature injuries.
The captain believed Alexandra had been sexually assaulted. He found semen in her vagina and pubic hairs of a different color than her own. However, as he had written at the end of his letter to the Guamans, the lab had been ordered to end all analyses of blood and other fluids. As a result, there was no toxicology report and no rape kit.
I lay back in the sofa bed, staring at the ceiling. There were spider-webs in the corners and a trail of web hanging from the drapes. Cleanliness is next to impossible, one of my college friends used to say, and she was right.
I pictured Cristina Guaman and her husband reading Captain Walker’s letter. Tintrey had sent Alexandra’s body home to them, telling them their daughter had died of burns from an IED, burns so bad that they advised against viewing her body. With the horror of that news still fresh in their minds, they suddenly learned that Alexandra had been raped, murdered, and then set on fire and left in a public place so that everyone would assume she had been the victim of an Iraqi assault.
Who had left her there? Who had violated her, killed her, tried to cover the murder up? Her boss, Mossbach? The programmer, Jerry? Whoever it was, Tintrey knew. They had put pressure on Colonel Cleburne to end the forensic investigation and destroy the report.
When Cristina and Lazar Guaman got Captain Walker’s letter, they must have tried to find out why his report was so different from what Tintrey had told them. Had they considered an exhumation so they could order their own autopsy by an impartial pathologist?
Maybe Cristina called Tintrey’s office up in Deerfield. Or maybe it had been Ernest, Ernest, the good and loving brother before his injuries took his mind from him. I wondered again whether Ernest’s accident had been arranged, if he’d been run down deliberately, targeted as the one person who might really push for an investigation into his sister’s death. I’d never be able to prove it one way or the other, but it might be important to find out the timing of the accident—had he been injured before or after the Guamans received Walker’s letter?
However it happened, as Cristina and Lazar were agonizing over how to handle the pathologist’s report, Rainier Cowles suddenly arrived, waving a large check under their noses.
Take this. It will cover Ernest’s medical care, with enough left over to send Clara to college as Alexandra wished. All you have to do in return is never discuss Alexandra’s death with another living soul.
Nadia had been furious. Blood money, she’d called it. She and her mother fought so wildly over taking the money that Nadia felt she had to move out. Clara hadn’t been privy to the details, either of Captain Walker’s letter or Rainier Cowles’s offer. She was told simply that she must never discuss Alexandra’s death with anyone.
It had taken over a year for Nadia to feel strong enough to read Alexandra’s journal. But when she did, the description of her sister’s unhappiness, and Alexandra’s ongoing torment over her sexuality, drove Nadia to desperate action. She made a crucifix with a doll’s head, her sister, superimposed on Christ’s body.
She sought out the Body Artist, who left her feeling even more helpless. Nadia wanted someone who could talk to her about her adored sister, but the Artist was like a black hole: she drew emotions in, but reflected nothing out. Nadia’s anger kept growing. She started coming to the club and painting on the Artist, painting the fire that had burned her sister, the fire that burned inside Nadia herself as rage. I could feel Nadia’s helplessness and fury. I could imagine why she did what she did, but I couldn’t imagine a way to prove it.
I went to my bedroom, where Clara was deeply asleep, fingers still clutching Peppy’s fur. Peppy softly thumped her tail, but she seemed to realize she shouldn’t leave the girl. Clara didn’t stir as I tiptoed into my closet to put the autopsy report into the safe.
I went to the kitchen and surveyed the backyard, returned to the front room and looked up and down the street. No one seemed to be watching my building.
I climbed back into the sofa bed, checked that my gun was easy to reach, and switched off the lights. I was so tired that the bones in my skull felt as though they were separating, but I couldn’t relax into sleep. I was trying to tie together the many threads I’d been unknotting for the last month. The threads became yarn behind my sand-filled eyelids. Olympia Koilada was scarlet, attached to the metallic pewter of Anton Kystarnik by her heavy debts so that Rodney Treffer—a nasty mustard color—had free run of the club and the Body Artist.
Everything came through the Body Artist. She was a blank canvas where people imagined whatever they wanted. Usually an erotic fantasy, but Kystarnik used her as a message board, Nadia used her to display her grief.
Chad Vishneski had gone to see the Artist for entertainment, for erotic relief from his war traumas. And then he saw the Achilles logo and thought Nadia and the Artist were taunting him. It was a typical reaction of someone in psychic distress: everything in the world around you is about you.
I sat up. Chad and Alexandra had never met. It was the luck of the draw that Chad came to Club Gouge the night Nadia began her drawings.
I imagined a scenario. When Chad was in Iraq, he had seen the Achilles logo every time he and his squad inserted the shields into their vests. Then he saw Nadia painting the same logo at Club Gouge.
He freaked out, got thrown out of the club, came home furious with the world and furious with the shield maker, and shot at the shield. He wasn’t testing it, as I’d thought at first: he was taking out his rage on it. And then he saw that the bullets had gone right through the shield. And he realized his buddies had died because their protection was a sack of sand.
So he blogged about it. Someone at Tintrey, monitoring references to the company in the blogosphere, came on his postings. And then Gilbert Scalia and Jarvis MacLean actually felt afraid.
Alexandra’s murder had been a minor problem. A lawsuit by the Guamans might have made for unpleasant publicity, but it wouldn’t have threatened the future of the company. They’d dispatched their outside counsel, Cowles, to buy off the Guamans, and considered that problem solved. Indeed, other private contractors had been able to avoid both civil and criminal damages from claims of rape from their employees, which made Tintrey’s payout to the Guamans almost an act of benevolence.
But Chad’s outbursts threatened Tintrey’s very future. They had grown to a multibillion-dollar empire through their Defense Department contracts. Jarvis MacLean and Gilbert Scalia could watch their stock fall through the floor if word spread that his company had sent our overstretched troops sand-filled body armor, no more protection against a sniper than a wet sock at the beach. Even if Tintrey had finally started delivering the fullerene nanoparticle-filled shields they advertised, a persnickety member of Congress might demand an inquiry, might see that they lost DOD support.
Scalia and MacLean summoned Prince Rainier to a council of war. Chad needs to be shut up, for keeps. No threats or blandishments, such as they offered the Guamans, would work here.
With Rainier’s help, they thought it through and came up with a brilliant plan: dispose of two birds with one bullet. Shoot Nadia, frame Chad for her death, then make it look like he committed suicide by lacing his beer with roofies. Just another PTSD Iraqi vet who took the violent way out. The neighbor who thought there was too much of the MYOB said two men in overcoats came home with Chad. Scalia and MacLean? MacLean and Prince Rainier? Not Kystarnik’s leather-clad thugs, at any rate.
And then they’d rummaged through his things and found the Achilles vest, which they dumped in the garbage. They just hadn’t noticed the shot-up shield in the bottom of the bag. They left poor Chad full of beer and roofies, gave him six or seven hours to die, and called the cops.
Only Chad had survived. And John Vishneski had hired me.
It was seven in the morning. I could hear street noises as the neighborhood came to life. Jake would have landed in Amsterdam by now. I wished I was there, in the world of music, not here in the world of violence.
I turned off the phones and went to soak in the bath. With a hot washcloth over my eyes, I tried to imagine how I could get Rainier Cowles to tell all. Nothing came to me. I could imagine getting him to meet with me, I could imagine him ambushing and shooting me, but I couldn’t think up a wedge that would induce him to talk. He was more likely to hire Rodney to kill me, Chad, and maybe even poor young Clara.
The Body Artist had her own story, her own loss, her own cons and frauds. She was the center of this particular web. Although I was pretty sure she was, well, not an innocent bystander but an unconnected bystander, I wanted to talk to her.
As I lay in the tub, I began to try out scenarios that would flush out the Artist, get her to appear for one last melodramatic performance. As the water grew cold, one idea occurred to me. I didn’t like it; it made my flesh crawl even in my tub. But it might work.
I dried off and climbed back into the sofa bed, swaddled in a soft robe that had been Jake’s Christmas present to me. This time, I fell instantly down a hole of dreamless sleep.