“You had to go and kill a congressman’s kid,” she said. “How freaking stupid can you get?”
She looked at the latest communiqué telling her the sergeant’s psychological profile was not going to be made available to her, and slammed it down on the desk. There was something sinister about this whole case, and she had already come to the conclusion that the captain had been right. If she put any serious effort into trying to save Foster, she’d be driving nails into the coffin of her own career in the Army, and since being a JAG Officer had been her dream ever since she was a teenager and saw Demi Moore in A Few Good Men, it would be destroying everything she had worked for. That movie had defined her interest in a law career, had made her want to be part of the military justice system.
Her father, a corporate attorney who was a senior partner in a major firm, hadn’t been thrilled with her decision, but he hadn’t fought her on it, either. His attitude was that she should get her idealism out of the way during her military years, so that she could properly pursue a career that would reward her financially. It was cases like this one, she admitted to herself, that made her wonder if he was right.
She wondered what JoAnne Galloway would do, referring to Demi Moore’s character in the movie. Would she give up and let her client suffer for a crime he probably didn’t commit? Would she fight on, knowing she was throwing away her own career? Pissing off a congressman like Gibson (and even worse, a potential president) would almost certainly be the end of any hope of making a name for herself, either in JAG or in private practice.
Galloway wouldn’t care, she was sure, but then, Galloway was a fictional character who didn’t have to look into a mirror each day and think, If only I had been smart enough to walk away from Foster.
She was scheduled to go and see her client in just a little over an hour, right after lunch. She honestly wasn’t sure what she was going to say to him, and decided not to think about it while she ate. She took the file with her and left the office to head for the Officer’s Mess.
Lunch didn’t help, because as hard as she tried to avoid any thoughts about Sergeant Foster, those big blue eyes of his kept popping up in her mind. Granted, when he had told her his account of the situation, he had sounded almost like a robot, but there was something so purely innocent about him, despite everything he had seen and done in his military career, that she couldn’t help believing he was telling her the truth. That being the case, she wasn’t sure that she could live with herself if she didn’t fight for him with everything she had.
When her lunch was finished, she walked over to the stockade and signed in. She was escorted to the interview room, and sat down at the table to wait for her client. He was brought in a couple of minutes later, and took the chair across from her.
“Lieutenant,” he said. “Good to see you again, I wasn’t sure you’d be back.” He smiled at her to soften the comment.
“Sergeant Foster,” she said, “I’m gonna level with you. Everything I’m doing to try to help you is being blocked at the highest levels, and I don’t know that there’s anything I can do that isn’t going to make things worse. Are you aware that Lieutenant Gibson’s father is a United States congressman and maybe running for president?”
Noah let an eyebrow go up a quarter inch. “Seriously? No, I didn’t know. The Lieutenant and I didn’t move in the same circles, so I never heard about that.” He let out a low whistle. “Now that I know it, though, it makes sense why everything has happened so fast. I mean, I was arrested within two hours of making my initial report, which sort of discounts Colonel Blanchard’s claim that he had sent investigators out to the scene of the crime beforehand.”
Mathers felt her eyebrows crunching again. “What you mean by that?”
Noah shrugged. “Where everything happened, it’s up in a mountainous region where there aren’t any roads. Some places, we had to walk single file going out and coming back, and it took us more than four hours to walk back to the rear. Now, let’s do the math. I gave my statement at about fifteen hundred hours, but I was arrested just before seventeen hundred. Since one of the men I brought in would have had to show the investigating unit how to get there, there’s no way they could have made it out and back in that short a time.”
“Helicopter. They probably flew out, that would only take minutes.”