Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series) Read online

  Joe rubbed his cheek. “Thanks.”

  “You’re a nice man.”

  “So are you,” he replied, and they both laughed as he tried to cover with, “for a girl, I mean. I mean, a woman. A young woman.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “You’re very smooth.”

  “Enough.” He waved at her. “I surrender. But I appreciate the vote of confidence. I’ll do everything I can to keep earning it. Your mom totally floats my boat.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Norwich University is the nation’s oldest private military college, created in Norwich, Vermont, in 1819 as the American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy, and since moved to Northfield. Its founder—Joe always relished this fact—was a local man who’d been thrown out as superintendent of West Point for advocating a citizen soldiery over the aristocratic officer class favored at the time. It was yet another indicator for Joe of his beloved state’s stubborn devotion to common sense and pragmatism over trendiness, fashion, or elitism.

  But he’d not traveled to this hilly, austerely designed campus to pay homage to tradition. He was here to see Marcus Perry, who, according to Lester, had served with Ben Kendall’s outfit in Vietnam and at about the same time. In a team discussion earlier, they’d agreed that interviewing Perry might be a stab in the dark, but better than losing more time searching for other Signal Corps alums farther afield.

  Based on every statistic available for similar kidnappings, each hour that passed ate into the Filson family’s chances of survival.

  Joe parked near the library and began heading uphill on foot toward Jackman Hall, where, during a phone call an hour earlier, he’d been told to meet Perry in his office. Jackman anchored one end of a large, green, rectangular commons that formed the campus’s primary parade ground on top of a mesalike hilltop. The parade ground was lined by two severe if photogenic rows of opposing buildings. It was built to impress—and succeeded, if your tastes ran to authoritarian. As Joe trudged nearer to the building blocking the far end, with its columns, cupola, and carillon tower next door, he easily imagined the cadenced display of cadets across the central green expanse, wheeling in lockstep to shouted commands. On the basis of that memory alone, he drifted back in time to his own days at boot camp, and being hectored and disciplined into becoming an integral part of a fighting force.

  He finally reached Jackman Hall, passing several cadets who were saluting a professor in passing, and climbed the interior staircase. He came to a large, dark, wooden door labeled COL. PERRY—HISTORY, knocked, and entered without waiting for a response.

  The white-haired uniformed man who looked up at him from his desk fixed him with a disapproving stare. “And you are?” he asked.

  “Joe Gunther. VBI. We spoke on the phone.”

  Perry nodded once, stood, and circled the desk to greet Joe as an equal, ushering him into one of two leather guest chairs and taking the other for himself. The office appeared airlifted from central casting, its walls lined with battle flags, portraits of men in uniform, assorted weapons of yore, and boxed awards and medals. Every flat surface was littered with military paraphernalia, from dummy hand grenades to scale models of jeeps, cannon, and even a motorcycle. It was comfortable, lived-in, and as male as an old sleeping lion.

  “Thank you for meeting on such short notice,” Joe began.

  “Not a problem,” Perry replied. “I’ve accommodated the spontaneous all my life. It’s part of the job and something I like anyhow. Keeps me on my toes.”

  “The plaque on your door says ‘History’,” Joe continued. “That what you do now? Teach history?”

  “Not military history, like most people think,” Perry explained. “U.S., although I admit that my students don’t have much difficulty derailing me into telling war stories when they think I’m getting boring. I get my revenge come exam time. It balances out.”

  Joe pointed to several decorations and insignia on the wall. “And you were in Vietnam,” he said.

  “I was. Three tours. You serve?”

  Joe nodded. “Not there.”

  The tone of his response ended further inquiry. Old combatants have an instinct for whether fellow vets want to talk or not. This was clearly a case of the latter.

  “You said you had a problem,” Perry said instead. “How can I help?”

  “My research told me you served in the Signal Corps.”

  Now Perry nodded. “Yes. It’s called COMCAM nowadays, for Combat Camera. Very catchy, and it gives them another acronym to abuse, so who could resist?”

  “But the unit’s duties were to photograph the war, is that correct?”

  “Basically, yes. But it didn’t usually consist of taking the fancy portraits we saw in Life and Look magazines. Those were mostly shot by photojournalists, not that we didn’t contribute a few. First and foremost, we were the eyes and ears of theater command. That meant a million pictures of buildings, facilities, roads and railways, basic infrastructure—you name it.

  “Not,” he added suddenly, Joe thought almost defensively, “that we didn’t regularly get our asses shot off. We were supposed to be in the gunfire and we all carried weapons. It was up to us to choose between shooting a picture or a bullet in a crisis, and woe be it for the poor bastard who chose wrong. You’d catch hell from the brass for missing the photograph, and even worse from your buddies for being a shutterbug at the wrong moment. It was tough sometimes.”

  “Sounds it,” Joe said supportively. “Were you permanently assigned to the same unit?”

  “Oh, no. They moved us around. That was part of the problem. No time to bond and build trust. We’d get dumped into a bunch who treated us like the plague—our cameras might as well have been beaming a direct signal to Command. It took time to show we were just like them—grunts who could take a beating and watch their backs when it came to it. But we usually weren’t given the chance to prove that.”

  “Did it ever really get bad?” Joe asked, getting closer to why he’d come. “Did the troops ever get pissed off enough to do something?”

  “Like a fragging?” Perry countered without hesitation.

  “I suppose,” Joe hedged slightly, not wanting to move too fast.

  “While I was over there, we never lost a man, one way or the other—which I guess is a bit of a miracle. There were close calls, and I won’t say that a couple of them might not have been friendly fire situations. Passions can run hot in a combat zone, especially a politically charged one like Nam.”

  “Did you ever know a man named Benjamin Kendall?” Joe finally asked.

  “Slightly,” Perry said readily. “I saw him at Fort Meade more than I did in-country. That’s where we trained. But we never buddied up. Interesting you should bring him up, though.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He took a bullet and was shipped out. He came the closest to jinxing that stat I gave you a minute ago, about not having lost a guy while I was over there.”

  “Do you recall the details?” Joe asked.

  “Of how he got shot? It wasn’t fragging or friendly fire, if that’s where you’re going. He was part of a patrol. I don’t remember where. Somewhere in the Delta, I think. It was the same old story: A platoon comes up on a village, maybe suspected of harboring VC, maybe not. Shots are fired, all hell breaks loose. Kendall caught a bullet in the head.” He reflected briefly. “Talk about bad luck. He was the only platoon member hit.”

  Joe looked at him closely. “Hit, period? Or hit, seriously?”

  “Period, as far as I know. The only one. That was pretty common—a low casualty count. Don’t get me wrong, it was a pisser of a war—bad to fight, impossible to win, and high casualties overall. But the number of dead compared to other conflicts we’ve been in, like the two world wars and Korea—I’m talking pure statistics here, involving the years committed versus casualty rate ratio—wasn’t as bad as some people think. All I’m saying is that there were many hostile encounters where our casualties numbered in the single
digits.”

  Joe considered what he’d said—and more, how he’d said it—before observing, “What happened to Kendall seems to have left an impression. What’s it been? Over forty years? Concerning a man you barely knew? You pegged on his name right off.”

  Perry’s already ruddy complexion darkened. “What’re you implying?”

  Joe decided to use a little body language, and so stood to be near one of the wall-mounted flags. He looked down at his host. “It’s not an implication,” he said, hardening his voice. “It’s a straight question: Why the instant recall? You may not have known Ben Kendall personally, but you do know something, Colonel.”

  Perry glanced at his hands and scratched his jaw before responding. “It was a stand-out event for our unit. Ben’s injury was a shock, and there were questions.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  He crossed his arms. “We mostly wondered. Ben had a reputation.”

  “So you did know him more than just in passing.”

  Perry looked up. “I knew about him. A few of us had started carrying second cameras—off the books, officially. The fancy photographers were getting big bucks for their stuff. We were way more in the thick of it than they were, and getting squat—same pay as everybody else and shit from our own people for being Signal Corps. It ticked us off. We started selling shots on the side. The brass didn’t care,” he emphasized, again as if Joe had said something. “They were dealing with so much other crap—drugs, wholesale theft, smuggling, prostitution … murder, even. People have no idea what was going down in those days.”

  The reviving memories stirred the colonel to rise as well, and stride back and forth across the room as he spoke. “An army of teenage draftees in the middle of a foreign country where, from basic training onward, you’ve been programmed to think, ‘Gook, gook, gook.’ Can you imagine? And in the middle of the ’60s? The drugs, the rock and roll? These guys were getting shot at and blown up by people they’d been told to hate, didn’t understand, and who didn’t identify themselves as combatants.”

  He stopped and held his forehead for a moment, gathering himself. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I haven’t thought about all that in quite a while.”

  Joe moved to the windowsill and sat on the ledge. “I do understand.”

  “Yeah—well, you’re one of the few. Everybody else? Damn. Vietnam might as well be the Crimean War, for all they care. I feel like I saw hell on earth. And now?” His chin dropped and he shoved his hands into his pockets. “I don’t know. I can’t figure out how to put it in perspective.”

  He cast a look at Joe. “That’s why I became a history teacher. I’m either trying to find some anchorage, or maybe I’m just hoping it’ll fade away and leave me alone.”

  “I’m sorry to have churned things up,” Joe said. “But I still need to know about Ben.”

  Perry’s tired, creased face turned plaintive. “Why, for Christ’s sake? Who gives a good goddamn?”

  Joe briefly considered how much to divulge. “I do, Colonel, because Ben’s been murdered, and I’m wondering if his time in the military played a role.”

  Perry’s mouth fell open. “Murdered? Recently?”

  “Yeah.”

  The old colonel returned to his chair and sat down heavily. “Jesus. It just never goes away.”

  Joe stayed where he was. “What can you tell me? You said he had a reputation.”

  “I told you about how some of us were freelancing, selling shots to the magazines. Ben had something else going. Like I said, this is all secondhand. I wasn’t lying about not knowing him. But the word was that he never sold a thing to anybody. He was building an archive.”

  “Why?”

  Perry rotated both hands palms up. “Who knows? Given the times, my bet was it was political. That was the scuttlebutt when he got shot.”

  “You ever see any of these pictures?”

  “No one did that I know of.”

  “So, an American may have shot him?” Joe asked.

  Perry scowled. “Rumors were flying. I heard he was a blackmailer, or an agitator for the peaceniks back home, or that he’d attacked a villager and wouldn’t stop until he was shot. Who knew what to think? Most likely, he was doing his job and caught a bullet from some VC running away. But because he was such a weirdo, so wrapped up in himself and isolated, no one would give him that much credit. It had to’ve been about something underhanded. But what, nobody knew.” He sighed. “And now you tell me it’s still going on, and that he’s been killed because of it.”

  “We don’t know that any of it’s connected,” Joe tried to make clear, choosing not to disclose that all of Ben’s work showed peaceful countryside vistas and gentle portraits of locals. “What happened to him over there changed him forever, so we don’t know what he may or may not have gotten into. But somebody needs to be held accountable for his death. I understand that you have no memory about where he was assigned when he was shot, but there have to be ways to find out—”

  Perry interrupted him. “I can do that. I still have contacts.” He reached over to grab a pad off his desk.

  “Can you go further and get me everything you can about him?” Joe persisted. “Reports or summaries about his getting wounded?”

  Perry was making notes. “Sure.”

  Joe rose, returned to the chair, and handed Perry his business card. “I’m sorry to say that time’s of the essence. What happened to Ben might happen to others if we don’t get a leg up fast. I can’t go into details, but the ball’s still in motion.”

  “I understand. I’ll get on this as soon as you leave,” Perry assured him.

  Joe paused before saying, “Colonel, I do apologize for being pushy. But what you’re doing could be key.”

  Perry rested the pad on his lap and sat back in his leather chair. “I hope so. There hasn’t been a night that I don’t go back there in my dreams. And I’m not talking about the bloodshed, although that was bad enough. I used to think God existed to bring us redemption for times like these—to make it bearable. But after what I saw there, I can’t believe He had anything to do with the creation of this terrible world—or at least with creating us.”

  It struck Joe as an eyebrow-raising statement, especially within the confines of Perry’s red-white-and-blue office, and considering the calmness with which it had been made.

  Joe rose and placed a hand on his shoulder, at a loss for any comforting response. “Take care, Colonel. I can’t thank you enough.”

  But as he headed back across campus to his car, he only hoped that his thanks wouldn’t prove premature. Perry’s crisis of faith, as shattering as it had to be for the man himself, mattered little to Joe.

  He had less philosophical examples of evil to combat.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Later that night, Joe, Lester, Tom Wilson, and Willy gathered around the dining room table of the apartment they’d rented across the landing from Rachel’s new home. They were still in Burlington, for convenience, and had taken over the top floor of a four-story building, which they’d rigged with cameras, keypad locks, and other security. Sammie, yielding to the temptations of her hard-won domesticity—and with Joe’s encouragement—had opted to go back to Brattleboro to stay with Emma. Where the standard refrain in emergency services was always, “Families first,” Joe knew Sam’s situation to be trickier—for years almost beyond counting, law enforcement had been her family. Absurd as it might seem to an outsider, therefore, spending time with her daughter could be a real test of loyalty for Sam.

  “You really think Marcus Perry can bird dog that kind of information from the army?” Tom asked skeptically.

  “He wouldn’t have asked him otherwise,” Willy answered in Joe’s stead.

  “I think he can,” Joe said more civilly. “He’s spent his entire adult life working for the military, in one form or another. Man like that tends to learn the system and keep his contacts updated. I definitely think he’ll have better luck than we would.” />
  “Okay,” Tom said. “Then what do we do in the meantime?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Joe replied. “I even talked to Sam about it.”

  “Stop right there,” Willy cut in. “I can smell another of your harebrained schemes a mile off. You want her to impersonate Little Miss Shutterbug over there.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of Rachel’s place.

  “She had no problem with it.”

  “Of course she has no problem with it, Joe,” Willy said. “She’d jump off a cliff if you suggested it. You know that goddamn well.”

  Tom looked at both men in alarm, not used to their style with each other.

  “It’s not really your call to make,” Joe said quietly.

  “The hell it’s not. She’s my kid’s mother.”

  “You’d do this in a heartbeat,” Lester reminded Willy.

  Willy pointed at him angrily. “You stay out of this.”

  “Except that he’s right,” Joe said. “And it’s not like we’re asking Sam to stand in front of a firing squad.”

  “She doesn’t even look like that kid,” Willy kept pressing.

  “Exactly my point,” Joe came back. “We can only use her from a distance—set up an apartment, have her turn lights on and off, move around, just show signs of activity. They do have the same build, and we can fix Sammie’s hair.”

  “It sounds reasonable,” Tom suggested.

  Willy glared at him, and seemed about to vent all his rage on someone with whom he didn’t have to work on a daily basis. Instead, he stood up abruptly and walked over to the kitchen. “You guys are so full of it. Why pick on Sam all the time?”

  Joe watched him pretending to fiddle with the coffee machine while not actually pouring himself a cup. “She volunteered,” he told him. “I was suggesting one of the Burlington PD’s younger officers.”

  Willy turned away from the machine and stood in the kitchen doorway, his hand against the frame, as if steadying himself. “That figures,” he said resignedly. “She is such a tool sometimes.”