“Find out how movable he is. If he doesn’t need to be on a ventilator, or whatever, maybe I can park him with Mr. Contreras.”
“With those dogs bounding around? Victoria, you have no . . . Oh, never mind. I can’t think about it now. I’ll call Eve Rafael tomorrow. We’ll go over Chad’s situation and get back to you.”
33
A New Recruit
Petra’s voice floated down the hall toward me when I opened my office door.
“And then, she shot one of them in the shoulder and another in the stomach. Meanwhile, I was swimming across the river—I totally needed antibiotics after swallowing that water—have you ever looked at it? It’s, like, completely brown and green, with weird stuff floating on it, but, anyway—oh, hi, Vic!”
Petra was beaming. She’d been a hostess at a country club during her summer vacations from college, she’d helped run a U.S. Senate campaign last year, she’d been Olympia’s star server at Club Gouge. She knew how to smother clients in youthful charm. Tim Radke, sitting upright in an office chair, was blinking uneasily.
I held out a hand. “Mr. Radke, good of you to come out at the end of a long workday. Do you need coffee? Beer? Whisky?”
“I offered him drinks, Vic,” Petra assured me. “He only wanted tea. But we were, like, not a hundred percent sure what you wanted him to do. He logged onto embodiedart.com, and we got the message that the site was shut down—”
“I want to know if you can find out where the blocking originates,” I said, “but, before we do that, look at this and tell me if you know what it means.”
I pulled the plastic bag out from under my sweater and held it out so that the black mitt with the logo was visible. Radke frowned at it.
“It looks kind of familiar,” he said, “but—”
“I know!” Petra had ducked down to stick her head over my shoulder. “That’s the design that Nadia was painting, isn’t it? It’s got the same kind of curlicue at the ends.”
I was impressed that Petra spotted it so quickly but said to Radke, “I found this in Chad’s kit. Is it something he could have brought back from Iraq?”
Radke turned over the plastic bag. More granules trickled out of the mitt. “You know, this thing, this looks like the shields they give gunners for their body armor. We all wore armor if we went outside the Green Zone, but infantry, gunners, high-risk guys, they had these extra things that supposedly stopped most bullets. I never saw an empty one before. That’s why I couldn’t tell what it was at first.”
He went over to my desk and typed a few lines into the computer. When I went to look, he had pulled up a page about body armor, with a photograph of something that looked like a life jacket.
“See this?” He pointed at a dark line armpit-high in the picture. “It’s a slit in the armor—that’s where you stick these slabs in. They’re heavy, which is why we don’t like to wear ’em—really, you can keep these vests on only a couple of hours before you’ve sweated so much you could pass out.”
“They fill the mitts with what? Sand? Gravel?”
“It looks kind of like sand, but really it’s some kind of fancy-pants stuff they invented for body armor. Tiny particles, but superstrong when they’re packed together. The Israelis thought of them first, I think that’s what they told us.”
Radke started to open the plastic bag, but I pulled it away. “I want to get it analyzed, and there’s already a fair number of other contaminants in it from lying in the bottom of Chad’s duffel. Why would he have cut holes into it?”
Radke shrugged. “Guys do weird things when they’re bored or stressed. I saw this one guy, he got burned. And he started picking at his skin. And the next thing you know, he’s pulled all the skin off his forearm.”
“Oh, gross!” Petra’s mouth cocked open in disgust. “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“He was out of his head in pain, kept holding his rifle on us when we tried to get near him. The chaplain finally talked him down, but it was bad, man. So if Chad was coming unstuck, he could’ve started cutting up his own armor. Could’ve been testing the odds after he lost his squad.”
Survivor guilt. It made a certain sense. Better that than pulling all the skin off your own forearm.
“I just learned that a couple of older guys in suits were with Chad on Friday night, the night Nadia died. Who could they have been?”
Tim shrugged again. “Like I told you, I don’t know Vishneski that well. He grew up here. He could know a ton of guys I never met. Maybe they were friends of his mom’s. He was crashing at her place, after all.”
“True enough. But one of them had on an Army medal, a service medal, something like that. Do you know all of Chad’s Army friends?”