“I’d rather solve cases.”
Brady laughed and I smiled, and the brutality of the bombings and all the darkness I’d carried into the dawn receded just a little. Maybe it was Brady’s laugh calling up better times. He was a big guy with a deep laugh and a head as bald as a bone. I’d been ready to jump down their throats for this pimp phone call to get whatever lead I had, but Brady’s voice reminded me that we were in it together.
“I’m looking for a freelancer we may have been tipped about in early June, but not in the context of what happened. The tip came from a confidential informant we’ve worked with before. I’m not clear where he got it. I can’t even find him right now. Our agent killed in the secondary bombing was working with him, and I’ve been going through her notes. It could be he was hustling us as he’s done before, but he’s missing and there are other things unexplained. I’m looking for the bomb maker, Carl. That’s my focus.”
“We’ll get it run for you today.”
“Thanks, and somewhere out there, we’ll catch up.”
Maybe we would. Most likely we’d never get the chance, but it was good to know Brady was still there.
Midmorning, Venuti asked me to sit in on a meeting with Dr. Frederic, the psychologist for the VA who had treated Beatty for PTSD. Frederic chose a seat at the end of the table and pulled two files from a briefcase. He consulted notes as he recalled Beatty as a paranoid, angry patient suffering from alcohol dependency. He talked about the letter he’d copied Venuti, and then told us he’d agreed to this meeting because of what he called “the very real possibility that Jeremy Beatty was capable of violence.” His notes included the Hakim Salter drone strike, which he termed the precipitating incident and Beatty’s account of it as delusional, so I had to ask.
“Did you ever talk to an Australian drone pilot named Phil Ramer?”
“There is no Phil Ramer. There never was. He existed only in Jeremy’s mind. Stress can create events that have the quality of reality. We can carry them as memories.” He tapped the file in front of him and said, “I have notes on this.”
He read aloud from notes he’d made after a conversation with an air force officer at Creech Air Force Base who had told Frederic that he didn’t know of a pilot named Philip Ramer. The officer hadn’t denied Ramer’s existence, but Frederic heard it that way. I could tell him I was trading calls with Ramer but didn’t see the point, and Frederic had already moved on.
“Let’s talk about the present,” he said. “Jeremy Beatty lives in a remote corner of a trailer park. He has covered the windows of his trailer in heavy black plastic and gutted the interior to reshape it to a militaristic fantasy. This is classic withdrawal from society, provoked by an anger catalyst. It’s a foretelling, a kind of preconfession, if you will. View the events through that prism, and the timing makes sense. Getting from here to a confession is what you’re wrestling with.”
He was authoritative and certain, and when it was clear he wasn’t finished with his lecture, I made a show of checking my phone, and then shook my head as if time had slipped by and I was late. I gathered my things and stood. As I went out the door, an agent apologized for not quite grasping the prism concept. The last thing I heard was Dr. Frederic say, “Perfectly understandable. Let me put it in simpler terms.” No doubt he did.
21
At noon my phone rang. The front desk said a Laura Cotter was holding and asking to talk to me. I said, “Put her through.” I hadn’t talked with Laura for a year and a half, but her heartfelt sympathy for my loss reconnected us. The compassion in her stood out. Some have to work at it, but a few like Laura are born with generosity wired in. I’d forgotten how much I liked the timbre of her voice.
“Two FBI agents came to see me,” she said, “and I’m not going to draw you into it, but they want dirt on Jeremy. They asked about the letter Dr. Frederic asked Jeremy to write when he was being treated for PTSD. They shouldn’t even know about that. It wasn’t supposed to be mailed anywhere. It was part of his treatment. He was supposed to express all of his anger toward the air force. How did the FBI get a copy?”
“It’ll end, Laura. We’re looking in a thousand directions right now.”
“But Jeremy of all people—”
“I know.”
“The agents were after any incident I can remember where Jeremy was unstable. There’s only one, and I didn’t tell them. Is that bad? That was when he burned his uniforms. He said, ‘Let’s go see the sunset in the desert.’ We stopped at a Chevron for gas on the way out of town. I thought it was for his pickup, but it was to fill up a two-and-a-half-gallon gas container. Did he ever tell you about this?”