back porch paint is old and dried out. There should have been some tiny flakes of that paint in the carpets. None of the windows had been kicked in, right? The back door lock is a Baringer.
They use a peculiar steel alloy for their keys. If somebody had picked the lock, there should have been physical evidence of foreign metal-alloy particles in that lock, or in any of the locks. Stuff like that.”
“But there wasn’t?” Train asked.
“That’s right.”
“This sounds like a pretty thorough examination,” the admiral said. “But I don’t understand the premise. If this was an accident, none of this evidence would be there in any event.”
“Ah, yes,” Mcnair said, leaning forward. “But from a forensic perspective, that place was hinky.
Like’fingerprints?
Well, we did find fingerprints-hers, Mrs. Klein’s, and, incidentally, even some of yours, Admiral-but only upstairs.
Remember what I said about physical evidence a mirfute ago? That there wasn’t any? We didn’t get a single fingerprint lift downstairs. None.
Zero. Zip. And you know what else? Mrs. Klein, the nice old lady who says she goes over there all the time to have coffee, shoot the breeze, whatever?
Mrs. Klein says she always comes over via the back porch.
They’re connected. She even has a key. Her porch paint is like Miss. understand,” Sherman said. “Except for the very obvious trail she left when she found the body, there were no other signs of that paint in the Walsh kitchen, or in any of the rugs on the main floor. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything in those rugs. Very little dirt. And no sand or bits of moss from those bricks in her front walk. Assuming Miss. Walsh came home via her own front door that afternoon, there should have been something, see?”
Karen twisted anxiously in her chair. This was beginning to sound like something far different from the cut- and-dried accident they had been talking about all along.
“Admiral,” Mcnair continued, “this may be painful to hear, but there was something wrong with Miss. Walsh’s clothes, too, besides what you told us about the slippers.”
“Her clothes?” he asked, obviously baffled now.
“Yes, sir. We found none of the things on her clothes that should have been there after a working day in the office-no dandruff, no loose hairs, no foreign fibers on the seat of her slacks from an office chair, no ink smudges on her fingers, no residue of toner from a copy machine or a laser printer on her hands or sleeves. Now you know most Washington people can’t spend a day in the office without touching a Xerox copy of something, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And in. addition to all the stuff that collects after a day in the office, there’s the ride home on the Metro. She took the Metro, didn’t she? There was a fare card in her purse.”
“Yes, she did. Park and Ride from the West Falls Church station. “
“Well, okay. You come home Friday at rush hour, it’s back-to-back, belly-to-belly, right? But her street clothes were clean-much too clean.
No one else’s hair. No traces of another human being anywhere on her collar or her raincoat. We checked.”
“Like somebody had vacuumed them?” Karen asked.
Mcnair gave her a look, as if to say she had just incriminated herself.
“Maybe. Or the clothes she was wearing weren’t the clothes she wore to work.”
“How about her shoes?” Train asked.
Mcnair smiled. “Bingo,” he said softly. “Oh, we found shoes aplenty up in the closet, but none that showed evidence of having been worn to the office that day and then exchanged for slippers.”
Karen let out a long breath. “So can’t you check with the people in her office, find out what she was wearing that day?”
“We did,” replied Mcnair., “Slacks, blouse, sweater. But no one remembers exactly which ones, which colors. One guy said gray; another guy said dark. They were mostly men in the office. You know how it is, Commander: Men never notice a woman’s shoes. And you review investigations, right? You know how poorly even eyewitnesses’ statements correlate.”
Karen knew only too well. “Yes, I do. How about her vacuum cleaner?”
“New bag.”
“Ah,” she said, understanding what he was trying to say.
“So the evidence in this case is backward. It’s the evidence you didn’t find that’s bothering you.”
“Sherlock Holmes,” the admiral muttered. “The dog that didn’t bark.”
“That’s correct, Admiral,” Mcnair said, nodding. “So your news about the slippers is, unfortunately, entirely consistent. But until you told me about this letter, it was still ambiguous. What was this guy’s name, Admiral?”
“He was a hospital corpsman-a medic, as well as a SEAL. HMI Marcus Galantz.”
Mcnair blinked, almost as if the name meant something to him. But then he asked the admiral to spell it for him, and he wrote it’in his notebook. Then he asked another question. “Since Mr. von Rensel is here, can we assume the Navy’s working on this Galantz I angle, Commander Lawrence?” t,” That came out of nowhere, Karen thought quickly. “On getting his old service records, yes,” she replied. “Beyond that-“
Beyond that, the Navy didn’t yet know about Galantz.
“The records may be of use, and they may not,” the admiral interjected.
“My guess is that they’ll end abruptly in 1969.
Mcnair stared at him, his expression making it clear that the admiral could not go on with all this secrecy.
Sherman looked back at him for a moment and then got up, walked over to a front window, and stared out at the growing darkness. Mcnair, as if sensing a critical moment, remained quiet, watching him. Then he spoke.
“Admiral, it’s becoming pretty clear that something happened to Elizabeth Walsh, something that was not an accident. We-‘re reasonably satisfied that you didn’t go over there Friday night and do something to her. Now you’ve given us another lead to pursue, but you’re leaving too much out. We need your help. We need to make this guy real.”
And to get you entirely off the hook, Karen thought.
The admiral remained at the window, his back to them, for almost a minute. “Okay,” he said finally, so quietly that Karen wasn’t sure she had heard him. Then he turned around, and she was startled by the pain in his eyes. “Okay.
This’ll take a while.”
He returned to his chair and sat down, his eyes slightly out of focus as the memories came flooding back. Then he told them the story of the aborted SEAL pickup and that terrifying night on the river.
“Did they go back the next night?” Train asked.
Sherman hesitated. “No. They didn’t. Saigon naval headquarters called it off. They concluded that the SEAL never made the rendezvous and that the VC probably had him, which was why there was a mine ambush waiting.”
“But they were wrong, weren’t they, Admiral?” Train said. The two men stared at each other for a long moment.
Then Sherman looked away and exhaled. “Yes. They were wrong. Because three years later, the SEAL came to see me.
I was finishing up my department-head tour in a destroyer and was actually home for a change. But I remember it.
God, do I remember it. He was a memorable guy. I was sitting in my dining room, working on some overdue fitness reports.”
It had been after ten o’clock on a rainy February night, one of the few such nights in San Diego’s unvarying pattern of monotono usly beautiful weather. Sherman had been downstairs in the dining room when he thought he heard the front door open. He remembered sitting up and thinking, What the hell? I locked that door. There had been a gust of wind and the sudden sound of rain, and then suddenly a figure was standing in the entrance to the dining room, just outside the cone of light from the chandelier. Sherman absorbed a vague image of jeans and a wet black windbreaker, but the face-the face looked familiar. Only this time, there was no brown and green paint. Just
