She sighed and placed a call to Sherman’s office. She was put on hold.
Then there was a click. “Admiral Sherman.”
“Admiral, thank you for taking a moment. I wanted to let you know that I’ll be calling the Fairfax County Police this afternoon to see ‘what I can find out about their investigation. Basically, my tasking is to find out if they are going to continue with it or declare victory and go home.”
“That sounds reasonable,. Commander,” he said. “It wasn’t exactly clear after the meeting what they were going to do. ” t
“No, sir, it wasn’t.
Anyway, I’m going to be in contact with them, low-level sort of thing.
They may choose, of course, not to give me the time of day.”
“That would tell you something, wouldn’t it?” He was silent for a moment. “Look,” he said. “I’m going over to her house this evening.”
There was another short silence on the line. “To Elizabeth’s house,” he continued. “Elizabeth Walsh. I’ve got this need to see where it happened-her accident. I don’t know if that makes any sense-“
“Yes, actually, I do understand, Admiral,” she interrupted. “Frank, my husband, had a heart attack in a hotel lobby.” She heard a sharp intake of breath, although Sherman said nothing. “I got to him in the hospital, but he never … surfaced, as they put it. A week later, I found myself standing in that hotel lobby. There was nothing to see, of course, but I felt that need just to, well, go there.”
“Yes, exactly. I can’t explain it, either,” he said. There was a thread of relief in his voice. “Elizabeth and I weren’t married, of course, but we were pretty close. I’m having trouble with this notion that she just fell down the stairs.
Anyway, if you’re going to try to get some info on what happened, you might want to see the uh, scene, as it were.”
She tried to think if there was any reason not to go there.
Then she agreed.
“Okay,” he said. He gave her the address. “That’s in Reston. Do you live in northern Virginia?”
“Yes, sir. Great Falls.”
“Oh. Okay. I live in Mclean.” He gave I her directions, then told her he still had a key.
That was interesting, she thought. She wondered if the police knew that.
“I can find it,” she said. What time will you be there?”
“I’m supposed to be at Mrs. Klein’s house-she’s next door, on the left, as you face it-at seven this evening. Let me give you her phone number.” she copied it down. “Will Mrs. Klein be going into the house with you, Admiral?” she asked.
“She might, although I haven’t asked her. But I thought that would be a good idea. Or maybe You can, I don’t know.
But I’m just thinking I shouldn’t be in there by myself just now.”
“Yes, sir, that probably wouldn’t be a good idea.”
There was another moment of silence. “Right. Okay, I’ll see you there.
I’ll be in civvies, by the way.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll see you there.”, She hung up, wondering if she should tell von Renset about this. She looked out of her cubicle, but he wasn’t in sight. She asked the yeoman where Mr. von Rensel had gone.
“Anywhere he wants,” the yeoman said with a grin.
“Actually, into the checkin pipe, Commander. Building pass, parking pass, Opnav security briefing, then Crystal City for the other stuff.
Probably be back tomorrow-if he’s lucky.”
Okay, so much for that, she thought, wheeling her chair back into her cubicle. We’ll just have to go meet the admiral on our own.
Train von Rensel waited patiently in the line for parking passes down on the Pentagon concourse. After nearly twenty-five years in the federal and military bureaucracy, he was resigned to the all-day routine of checking into a new organization. As the line shuffled forward, he reviewed his first meeting with Admiral Carpenter. The old man had pulled no punches about his disappointment with Train’s predecessor.
Only the onset of a terminal disease had prevented Beasely from getting fired outright back to NIS.
Train had been just as direct: NIS had sent Beasely in the first place because, at the time, NIS had been at war with Opnav, as the Navy’s headquarters staff was known. Carpenter had then shared his perspectives on the new political situation.
“Your boss and I have made a deal. NIS and Opnav need to bury the hatchet somewhere besides between our respective shoulder blades. In effect, we’ve signed a peace treatyshared computer network and database systems, much closer coordination between their investigations and our field attorneys. Your assignment is part of this. Your boss promised me a player. You’ll work directly for me. You’ll be stashed in Investigations Review, which is about as bland as we get here in JAG.
Does that square with what you’ve been told?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve been detailed to be your freelancer, with complete access to the top people in NIS.”
“And I see you’ve worked in Naval Intelligence, with a secondment to the FBI. So I can presume you know your way around town?”
“Reasonably well, Admiral. Always learning new and interesting things, though.”
Carpenter had smiled at that response. Any Washington old hand who thought he had seen it all was, by definition, not yet an old hand. This business ‘with the homicide cop was another matter. Commander Lawrence was right: That cop didn’t really appear to want the admiral for the death of Elizabeth Walsh; otherwise, the meeting would have been in a much smaller room with much brighter lights. And yet they obviously felt that the Walsh woman had met with more than just an accident. And that homicide cop was interesting: not what Train would have expected from a county police force, even in the upscale northern Virginia area. He would have pegged Mcnair for an FBI guy, or maybe even Treasury.
He looked at his watch. This was Tuesday. Whole thing would probably blow over by the end of the week, which is when he might, if he was lucky, also be done with admin checkin. And he had thought NIS admin was bad Karen arrived early in Reston, having misjudged the traffic, and parked across the street to wait. The town houses were tastefully done, with sculpted front gardens and mature trees interspersed with faux gaslights. Sitting alone in, the car, of depression watching commuting husbands and wives driving by on their way home, she felt the familiar wave , approaching.
Karen had been born and raised in the Washington, D C., area, moving around the city and its suburbs as her parents’ careers prospered. Her mother had been a special-education teacher who worked in both the private and Oublic school systems. Her father, now drifting peacefully in a Chevy Chase nursing home, had been an attorney with the Federal Power Commission for thirty years, which is how Karen had come to meet J. Franklin Lawrence.
Marriage to Frank had come much later in life than she had ever planned, after she had already spent ten years in the Navy’s JAG corps. She had been thirty-four, Frank ten years older. He, had been divorced for three years ac when they met at a weekend barbecue at her parents’ place in Chevy Chase. Frank had been interesting, funny, wealthy, and desperately lonely, although it had taken some time for him to reveal that. She had just been selected for lieutenant commander and assigned to the Navy headquarters staff at the Pentagon for the first time. She had met several really great guys in the Navy over the years, but by the time she met Frank, she was profoundly aware of what the typical Navy marriage entailed: months of separation, perpetual money problems, and increasingly intense career pressures.
Frank the civilian had been a perfect fit. Her only real disappointment was not having had children, but they had both agreed from the outset that neither their careers nor their respective ages would be very suitable for child rearing. She had been old enough to keep her own counsel on this subject, and she had to admit that their well-to- do lifestyle had assuaged whatever sense of loss she had experienced along the way. Now that Frank was gone, she reluctantly acknowledged an almost guilty sense of relief that she was not facing the prospect of raising teenagers without a father.
She looked at her watch. It read 6:45. She felt somewhat conspicuous sitting alone in her car on a residential street at twilight, flanked by a row of town houses on either side.
