“What did you say?”
She hesitated, as if she wasn’t quite sure if Jack was ready to hear her theory. “My husband wasn’t so much murdered as he was…eliminated.”
“How do you mean, eliminated?”
“Silenced.”
“By whom?”
She seemed unaware of it, but her hand had become a tight, angry fist around her tissue. “That NCIS investigative report has been completely sanitized. Doesn’t it make you wonder what they’re hiding?”
“From what I understand, that kind of redaction is not unique to this case.”
“I’m sure it happens all the time. Whenever the navy has something to hide.”
She was starting to sound paranoid, but Jack measured his words. “After all you’ve been through, you’re certainly entitled to a certain amount of skepticism.”
“You may not be aware of this, but the military’s track record on homicide investigations is less than stellar.”
“That’s a pretty sweeping indictment.”
“I’m not saying they’re incompetent. I’m saying that certain people in the military are not beyond a cover- up.”
“And you know this because…”
“I was married to a career officer for twelve years. And I’ve done my homework. Did you know that the NCIS once tried to convince a mother and father that their son had shot himself in the head even though it was a scientific fact that he couldn’t have produced the bullet trajectory unless he was standing on his head when he pulled the trigger?”
“That’s appalling.”
“It gets better. In another case, the NCIS issued a finding on July ninth that a Marine’s wounds were self- inflicted. You know when they got the results back on ballistics, gunshot residue, and blood and tissue tests? August sixth.”
“Obviously, you’ve looked into this. But this isn’t a case of homicide covered up as suicide.”
“The point is, they are capable of doing whatever suits their needs. They needed my husband out of the way, but no one would ever have believed that he had committed suicide. He loved life too much. So they did away with him, and instead of calling it suicide, they make it look like his wife did it. And then they issue this so-called investigative report that’s completely full of holes. All meaningful information is blacked out in the name of protecting military secrets and national security.”
Jack gave her a long, hard look. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume a cover-up. You’re saying that the military decided not to paint his death as suicide because they didn’t think anyone would ever believe he killed himself.”
“That’s right.”
“But for some reason the military came to the conclusion that no one would have any trouble believing that you would kill your husband.”
She didn’t answer right away, obviously uncomfortable with the way Jack had dissected things. “That’s the essence of any frame-up,” she said.
“A frame-up is a huge leap. Especially when you’ve shown me no motive.”
“If you knew my husband, you’d understand my suspicions. We spent almost a third of our marriage on that little fenced-in chunk of Cuba. Year after year, I begged him to put in for a transfer. People are nice enough there, and it has a sense of community. But I hated the isolation. Oscar, on the other hand, was Mr. Guantanamo all the way. He wanted to rise as high as he possibly could right there on the island, no desire to go anywhere. Then, suddenly, that’s all out the window. Two weeks before he was killed, completely out of the blue, he tells me he thinks it’s time to leave.”
“Change of heart, maybe?”
“No. It was a lot of little things-the way he lay awake at night, the fact that he was suddenly going to bed with a loaded gun in the nightstand. He probably didn’t think I noticed these things, but I did. He was worried about something. He was suddenly acting like a man on the run. Like a man who knew something he wasn’t supposed to know.”
“Such as?”
“The military is full of secrets. And plenty of people have died trying to keep them.”
“I need more than that.”
“Then help me find it, damn it.”
She was clearly frustrated, and Jack could understand it. He rose, walked around to the front of his desk, and took a more casual seat on the corner of it, no barriers between them. “Look, you’re probably thinking that lawyers defend guilty clients all the time, so why is this guy so obsessed with guilt or innocence. But this case is-”
“Different,” she said, finishing the thought for him. “I know.”
“You understand why?”
“Of course. You want what’s best for your,” she caught herself, then said, “for my son. Just as I do. Which is why I would never-even if I’d wanted Oscar dead-I would never have shot him in our house while our son was sleeping in the next room. Deaf or not. Does that make any sense at all to you, Mr. Swyteck?”
Jack met her stare, and suddenly the silence between them was no longer uncomfortable. It was as if the proverbial light had finally come on. “Yes, it does, Lindsey. And I think it’s probably time you started calling me Jack.”
6
Alejandro Pintado was searching for good news. Literally.
As usual, his search had taken him over the Straits of Florida, a band of water some ninety miles wide that connected the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean, that separated Key West from Cuba, that divided freedom from tyranny. For more than four decades Cubans had fled Fidel Castro’s oppressive communist regime in makeshift rafts, leaky boats, or even patched-up inner tubes. They risked their lives on the high seas, many of them making it to the United States, many others succumbing to tropical storms and walls of water, blistering sun and dehydration, or sunken vessels and hungry sharks. It was a tragedy that Alejandro had seen unfold with his own eyes, starting with his first mission in 1992. He’d made two passes over a small boat. On the first, he counted nine bodies strewn this way and that, as if they had simply collapsed. His second time around a woman stirred at the bow, barely able to raise her arm. She never moved again. As best the Coast Guard could tell, a storm had washed their water and supplies overboard on the first night of their journey. In desperation they drank seawater. There were no survivors. It was no wonder that, to the exile community in Miami, the Straits of Florida were known as the Cuban Private Cemetery.
Despite the danger, they kept coming. So long as they were out there, Alejandro Pintado was determined to keep looking.
“ Key West, this is Brother One,” he said, speaking into his radio transmitter. “I have a visual.”
“Copy that,” came the reply.
Alejandro pushed forward on the yoke and dropped to an altitude of five hundred feet, his old single-engine Cessna whining as it picked up speed. The scene on the open waters below him was a familiar one, but it still made his heart race. Six-to eight-foot seas, foamy white caps breaking against a vast ocean as blue as midnight, a thing of beauty if it weren’t so dangerous. A small raft rising to the top of each swell, then disappearing between them, the white canvas sail tattered from winds much stronger than most rafters could anticipate. The craft was overloaded, of course, packed with three children, five women-one of them holding an infant-and six men. Some were standing, having spotted the plane, waving the oars frantically to get the pilot’s attention.
You are almost home, thought Alejandro, smiling to himself.
His aircraft continued to descend. Three hundred feet. Two hundred. The rafters were jumping up and down, shouting with joy, as Alejandro sped past them. He waved from the cockpit, then began to circle around.
