He backed off a step. “Chief Warrant Spinelli.” But he swiftly recovered his lack of manners and said, “And your rank don’t mean shit to me. Get in my way and I’ll charge you with obstructin’ a criminal investigation.”
Okay, fine. I needed someone to be angry with, and he’d do nicely. I reminded him, very coldly, “Mr. Spinelli, is it not proper military etiquette for junior officers to salute their seniors?”
Well, his eyes narrowed, but his hand did slowly crawl through the air to his forehead. For about five seconds I let him keep it there before I returned it. Power is a funny thing-one minute you have it, and the next, a bigger dog comes loping into the neigh-borhood and craps on your favorite lawns.
“Lieutenant, how were you notified?” I asked Martin, who was barely concealing a smile.
“Somebody called 911 from a cell phone. It was transferred to my station.”
“Do you know who?”
“No. They apparently didn’t want to be involved.”
“And what time did you notify the military police about Captain Morrow’s body?”
“Right after the call. Nearly thirty minutes ago.”
I let that revelation hang for a moment before I said to Spinelli, “Fort Myer is only five minutes away.”
“I came when I got the call. It’s none of your business, Major.”
Back to Martin, I said, “Lieutenant, I’d like to express the heart-felt appreciation of the Armed Forces. Mr. Spinelli was tardy, and this kind of cooperation shows your professionalism.” To Spinelli I added, “You will now try to act equally professional. You will conduct a proper handoff of evidence and responsibilities. You will handle this task with courtesy and grace. Have I made myself clear?”
Lieutenant Martin tipped his head and left to inform his people.
My eyes stayed on Spinelli. I informed him, “The victim is Captain Lisa Morrow, a personal friend. So listen closely, because I will only say this once-mess up this investigation, Spinelli, and I will fuck up your life. This is not an idle threat.”
“You know the victim?”
“What did I just say?”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you a witness?”
“No. I overheard one of them mention her name and I offered to identify her.”
“Ain’t that a fuckin’ coincidence.” His eyes shifted in the direction of Lisa’s corpse. “What happened?”
“She was murdered.”
“How do you know?”
“Because unlike you, I saw her body. Her head is twisted at an impossible angle. Somebody snapped her neck.”
“Uh-huh.” He turned back and studied me. “Wait here. Don’t even think of leavin’.”
I leaned up against a car. It had been an unseasonably tepid December filled with clammy, rainy days and dull gray skies. But the warm snap had broken the day before; the night was cold and beautiful, a full moon, a star- filled sky, and I stared up at the heavens and cursed.
Guilt. The circumstances were irrelevant; the guilt was unavoidable and overwhelming. Had I arrived on time, I’d be sitting with Lisa in a cozy bar swapping drinks and laughs and stories. I wondered if she was standing around and waiting when it happened. I wondered how it would’ve turned out had I come twenty minutes earlier.
Spinelli’s voice echoed through the night, hazing and bullying the local cops. Martin’s people began leaving as more and more MPs began showing up, establishing a cordon around the crime scene, and proceeding through the paces of cataloging a murder. I felt as though I had just swallowed broken glass. A woman of extraordinary talent and great beauty had been left dead on the wet pavement like a piece of crumpled garbage.
I thought of Lisa’s face, yet for some reason I could not recall her as I always knew her, as I wanted to remember her: happy, smiling, lively, and self-assured. Her death mask was inside my head, and I could not drive it out. The eyes, they say, are the windows into the soul. I believe this to be true, and, in fact, the feature that had struck me most profoundly the first time we met were her eyes, a very deep, nearly unnatural green. They were striking eyes, and I had observed on many occasions the powerful effect they had on men, women, and often, to my chagrin, on juries.
I had an odd and sickening suspicion that her killer had posed her body after her last breath. As I mentioned earlier, her body appeared to have simply collapsed, yet the killer may have twisted her neck afterward, wrenched it a few more degrees so that observers of her corpse could not miss her eyes-eyes no longer filled with life and tenderness but with shock and betrayal.
The shock I understood. Her death was probably sudden but not pointless, and that was registered in her expression. It was the look of betrayal that haunted me to my soul.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A very long and chilly hour passed before Spinelli got back to me.
He approached with a nasty smirk, withdrew a small notebook from his pocket, flipped it open, and yet, I noticed, there was no pen or pencil poised in his other hand.
He asked, “How’d you say you knew the victim?”
“I told you… we worked together. I was meeting her here to discuss a new assignment.”
He smiled. “Yeah, shit… you did tell me that.” He saluted. “Well, you can go.”
If I had had an ice pick in my pocket, I would’ve buried it in his forehead. But I had to settle for pouncing over to my car, climbing in, and peeling out of the parking lot with an angry squeal of rubber.
I went straight to the phone when I got to my apartment, called the Pentagon switch, and asked the operator to connect me to General Clapper’s quarters at Fort McNair, a tiny base along the
D. C. side of the Potomac that hosts the National Defense University and a number of quarters for general officers.
Clapper picked up on the third ring and I said, “General, it’s Drummond.”
Long pause. “This better be important, Drummond.”
“It is. Lisa Morrow was murdered tonight.”
He did not respond to this startling news.
“I just left the crime scene,” I informed him.
Still he did not respond.
“The murder occurred around 9:00 P.M.,” I continued. “Somebody broke her neck. Her body was found in North Parking, beside her car. Her purse was missing.”
After a pause, when he finally did respond, it was a technical question. He asked, “Who’s investigating?”
I did not perceive this as coldness on his part. I knew Clapper regarded Lisa very highly, that he had been cultivating her for a very bright future, and this news was a bitter shock. But in the Army, business comes before both pleasure and grief.
“The Alexandria police responded, then CID arrived and took over.”
“Where’s her body?”
“I don’t know where they took her.” I allowed him a moment to assimilate this news, before I said, “I’d like to ask a favor.”
“What?”
“I want to notify her family. Also, I’d like you to assign me as their survival assistance officer.”
“All right.” Although he and I both knew this was hardly a favor.
As you might expect, few organizations match the Army on the issue of death. Practice makes perfect, and the Army has had several centuries and millions of opportunities to work through the kinks. The notification officer is the guy who shows up on the doorstep to notify parents and spouses that their loved one has just been shifted on Army rolls from “present for duty” to “deceased.” The survival assistance officer comes along afterward to help arrange a proper military burial, to settle matters of the estate, insurance, death benefits, and so on.
These are not duties that draw volunteers. A notification officer gets to share in the family’s look of shock, the onset of grief, the emotional outpouring that is always discomforting and that sometimes turns ugly. It can be a touchy situation, and the Army of course has a manual that instructs one how to inform a family to set one less
