“Beatty rode his bike a long way to see his former fiancée, Laura Cotter,” Venuti said. “Why would he do that?”
“He’s looking for someone he can trust.”
“She left him. Why would she help him now?”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because she was his fiancée, and when he imploded she had to give up on her dreams after burning through most of her youth with him. Sometimes people get an attitude after that.”
“Are you sending agents to talk to her?”
“Read this first, and then we’ll talk.”
Venuti slid a piece of paper toward me.
“A Dr. Bernard Frederic sent that to us. I talked to him today. He works for the VA and treated Beatty for PTSD. He felt compelled to contact us.”
The letter was addressed to an air force general, handwritten on the kind of lined paper you used to see in a schoolroom. It was written in bold blue ink. You could tell that even with this scanned copy. I read slowly. Beatty called the air force’s actions evil and said he would “take action on my own, if I have to.” Nothing was specific about the action, but the language was colored by grandiosity and anger in a way I’d never heard him speak.
“Just your basic letter to an air force general, right?’ Venuti asked.
I laid it down on his desk.
“If he sent this, how did the doctor get it?”
“It was never sent.”
“Laura, the fiancée you just asked about, mentioned a letter once that was written as a therapy a doctor had proposed. If this is that letter, I don’t think it was ever intended to be sent.”
“He wrote it.”
I read the letter again. He started by arguing that it was not only the right thing to do, but it was inherent in the air force code of honor to acknowledge the wrongful killing of an American citizen. I skipped down to a particularly inflammatory paragraph near the end.
“If the air force command fails to do this, then those who know the truth must defend it at whatever cost, in whatever circumstances. It is unacceptable to me to take the coward’s course and forget or deny what we did. If the air force fails to take action and acknowledge this wrong, then I will do whatever is necessary.”
“Grale.”
I laid the letter back down.
“What else do you know about Laura Cotter?”
“That it was very hard for her to leave him. She’s a great human being. The manager in the trailer park where Beatty lives is already giving tours of Beatty’s trailer to TV crews. Don’t bring the media down on her.”
I saw I wasn’t getting through and had another thought.
“Laura has an older brother in Denver. Why don’t we give him a call? He might be able to give you a better sense of Beatty than I can. Google the name ‘Van Cotter.’ He’s in the oil business in Denver.”
In an online photo taken at his Denver office, Cotter wore cowboy boots, jeans, and a light coat. He looked tanned and healthy and a bit like a throwback to an earlier era. Venuti found a phone number and, though he seemed to think it was a waste of time, he went along with it. He put the call on speakerphone as I pulled a chair over.
Cotter’s first words after I said hello were, “You calling about Jeremy?”
“My supervisor and I are.”
“I hear you’re looking for him.”
“He spent all day yesterday at our office,” I said.
“Then I must listen to the wrong news stations. I heard he escaped capture earlier this morning and is wanted for questioning about Al Qaeda connections. Al Qaeda connections, hell, he’s killed more of them than damn near anyone in the country.”
“He was with Laura today,” I said. “Has Laura talked to you about Jeremy recently?”
“To tell the truth, she never talks about him. When he hurt her the way he did, he lost me, and Laura knows that.”
I saw Venuti’s tight smile. Just what he wanted to hear, but Van Cotter continued.
“Time has gone by, and I don’t really hold it against him anymore. We don’t give those drone pilots enough respect. Do you remember the book All Quiet on the Western Front? When I was growing up, it was required reading. I’ve forgotten the author’s name, but I’ve never forgotten his note at the beginning. I remember it word for word.
“‘This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure for those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.’
“That’s stayed with me, Paul. I think some of the morally ambiguous things we do now with such impunity have consequences that fall hard on our soldiers, and we don’t acknowledge them the way we should. Drone pilots live in that arena. I can understand what happened to Jeremy. If he went to see Laura, it was probably just to be near her. Hell, when I feel blue, I’ll call her. I’ll call her now. If I learn anything, I’ll let you know.”