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

  Morgan pressed his lips together without comment.

  “I think you liked Ben,” Joe suggested, lowering the tension.

  Morgan conceded, “He was a good guy.”

  “Did you two hang out? Earlier?”

  “We weren’t buddies, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But…”

  Morgan returned to studying the screwdriver. “He cared. Most of them didn’t. It mattered to him what we were doing over there.”

  “And it did to you, too,” Joe stated.

  His response was almost inaudible. “Yeah.”

  “Bob,” Joe began. “I’m hearing what you’re not telling me, filling in the gaps. Ben wasn’t hit by any Viet Cong bullet. You weren’t even on the lookout for enemy fire.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Joe tried again, purposefully keeping his voice low and even. “What happened that day may have been routine, but it didn’t begin with shots from the village, did it?”

  Silence. The screwdriver kept turning.

  “There was shooting, nevertheless,” Joe said.

  Morgan nodded.

  “Wasn’t this a case of an American unit taking out a village that posed no threat?” Joe asked, adding, “It was the Delta. There was a lot of that going on down there. Passions were hot. The brass wanted body counts. Ambitious colonels were moving up the ranks at your expense.”

  Morgan didn’t react.

  “Am I right?” Joe pushed him.

  Another near whisper. “Yeah.”

  “That’s good,” Joe encouraged him. “We’re on the same page. But Ben stepped out of line, somehow. He was squashed.”

  Morgan let out another sigh, but remained quiet.

  “Tell me,” Joe urged him. “People are still suffering from this. I’m working on two homicides, maybe three, including Ben’s. Others have been tortured, kidnapped, almost killed—all because of what you know. We need to stop this, Bob—together.”

  The other man looked up. “Ben’s been murdered?”

  “Just a few days ago. Help me now like you wanted to help him. If I’m right, something started back then that’s going on to this day. You know what it is, Bob.”

  Morgan moved his lips soundlessly at first, his eyes filled with tears. He managed to say, “I can’t.”

  Joe got to his feet and gave him a stern look, changing tactics. “Think about that long and hard.” He handed him a business card. “You get tired of what you’ve got on your conscience, call me. I’ll meet you anytime, anywhere. In the meantime, consider yourself under a microscope. Whatever problems you think you have now have only just started.”

  He walked to the door, but paused to face his host once more. “What was your unit?” he asked sharply.

  Instinctively, Morgan rattled it out as he’d once regularly recited his serial number.

  “And the name of your commanding officer?”

  Morgan hesitated.

  “I can look it up,” Joe said, maintaining the stern tone.

  “Lieutenant Joyce.”

  Joe stood motionless, waiting.

  “Jack Joyce,” came the murmured follow-up.

  Joe left without further comment. In the car, returning to Vermont, he called Sammie Martens. “Do me a favor,” he asked her. “Get me everything you can on a Robert Morgan, DOB 6/20/1946. Go as deep as you can; pull out the stops on favors and contacts. We’re not going for prosecution here. It’s purely investigative, so use everything you can think of. I need leverage. The faster, the better.”

  “Got it,” she said.

  “Also, take this down,” he said, and repeated the information Morgan had given him concerning his unit and its commander. “Maybe you can sic Willy onto that. I’m after what they did in Vietnam, before, during, and after the date that Benjamin Kendall was injured there. I need combat involvements, roster of names, anything he can find.”

  “Damn,” she commented. “We are going back in time.”

  “That’s the crux of this, Sam. It’s all about what Ben Kendall knew.”

  “And what he photographed?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Any luck?” Joe asked Sammie as he entered their Brattleboro office, having silently run a gauntlet of reporters in the parking lot.

  She didn’t look up from the computer screen. “Not if you’re looking for a smoking gun. You didn’t tell me what you were after specifically, but so far, Mr. Robert Morgan is about as bland as his name. I found a minor speeding ticket dating back years. There seems to have been an alcohol problem a long, long time ago, after he got out of the service, that landed him in a little hot water—disturbing the peace, trespassing, evictions from a bar or two—but it’s all ancient history. I had to make phone calls to get that stuff, since it predates computers. Lucky for us, he’s lived in Peterborough his whole life, as has my primary source.”

  Joe removed his coat and hung it from the rack near the door. “How ’bout financials?”

  She finished typing and pushed her chair back from the desk enough to cross her legs and fix him with a gaze. “Nice house, nice cars for him and the wife, no bankruptcies or lawsuits or lottery winnings, no sudden unexplained spikes in income, no official inquiries or audits from the IRS, no over-the-top insurance settlements.”

  “What’s he do for work?”

  “Custodian at the local elementary school.”

  Joe sat at his desk near the small room’s only window. “That’s it?”

  “Far as I can tell. He may be up to something under the table, but I spoke with the chief over there, who’s been with the PD for just under a thousand years, and said that he knows Morgan from the VFW and having gone to high school with him. He also said the guy keeps a really low profile. The chief thought it went back to Vietnam—that the war messed with his head. But he stressed that Morgan’s just quiet and retiring. Not violent.”

  Joe stared thoughtfully at his desk top.

  “What?” Sam asked.

  Joe raised his eyes. “It’s a disconnect. I just left him. Something’s eating at him, big-time, but he’s scared to let it out. Did you get anything on the wife? I should’ve asked you to look into her, too.”

  Sam smiled slightly. “I did, anyhow. Not much to find. She doesn’t work, volunteers for their church, is a member of both the garden club and the historical society. They married about ten years after he got out of the army, have one daughter who lives in Florida, and seem like candidates for the world’s dullest soap opera—As the World Grinds On. She’s a homie, too—born and bred in Peterborough—with a background as humble as his. What did you mean by a disconnect?”

  “They present like upper middle class,” Joe told her. “Not like people making ends meet off a custodian’s salary.”

  She raised an inquiring eyebrow. “Trust fund?”

  “You find evidence of that?”

  She conceded the point, partially. “No, just the opposite. Like I said, humble roots. The chief described the backgrounds of both of them, and it was pure poverty hollow. But unusual financial information is harder to find than the public record stuff. I’m just saying one of ’em might’ve gotten lucky somehow—legitimately or otherwise.”

  “Were you able to get Willy started on Morgan’s military background?” Joe asked.

  “Yep. I’m not exactly sure where he is, but he texted me that he was on it. What’s going on, anyhow?”

  “You read about my meeting with Marcus Perry? I posted it to the case file yesterday—the part where he mentions the official action report concerning Ben Kendall’s injury.”

  Sammie scowled. “I thought it was missing—that there were only a couple of letters referring to the firefight.”

  “Right. One of which states that Bob Morgan was at the scene and helped load Ben onto the medevac chopper. That’s why I wanted to talk to him, especially when I heard that he lived nearby. That conversation should’ve been simplicity itself, e
ven with the passage of time. Instead, he was hinky as hell, doing everything he could to avoid laying out a straight story. I left with the distinct sensation that there was no firefight, and that Ben Kendall was shot by one of his own. It’s got to have something to do with his photographs—Morgan admitted that both Ben’s cameras were open and empty when he reached him. Morgan knows more than he’s telling, and the additional wrinkle that he lives beyond his means and won’t come clean strikes me as interesting.”

  Sam opened her mouth to speak, but Joe added, “Plus, I don’t think it has anything to do with any trust fund, legit or otherwise.”

  “So he was bought off for what he saw there?” she asked.

  He heard her incredulity, and didn’t argue against it. “I know. When you say it out loud, it sounds like a stretch. But that’s why I asked Willy to dig into the squad’s background—to see if there’s a context.”

  “Could be,” said Willy from the doorway.

  They both turned toward him.

  “You do love that creeping-around shit.” Sammie laughed at him.

  “Hey.” He smiled, entering and hanging his coat next to Joe’s. “Old dog, old tricks.”

  “Did you mean that?” Joe asked. “About a context?”

  “Yeah,” Willy told them. “I been working my little black book, far from here,” he gestured around the office. “And all the taps and wires that’re hangin’ off our phone lines.”

  Sam rolled her eyes but made no comment. Willy’s obsessive distrust was at once famous and—nowadays—difficult to dispute.

  “And?” Joe asked leadingly.

  “I still got feeds comin’ in,” Willy explained. “So this is preliminary. But it is interesting.” He settled in behind his corner desk and placed both feet on its untidy surface. Only here—as if in protest against the confines of an office—did his compulsive neatness abandon him.

  “On the day Ben caught his bullet,” he went on, “he was tagging along as part of a two-fireteam squad, or eight guys—including two sergeants—under a lieutenant. Not the standard setup, but they played fast and loose out of habit back then, and Ben being there as an official photographer probably helped. Not only that, but there was a civilian with ’em, too.”

  “A civilian?” Joe asked. “That’s the first we’ve heard of that. Who?”

  “A writer. Officially a reporter—at least he was attached to some bullshit newspaper from nowhere—but as far as I can figure out, he probably pulled strings to get out there so he could write the great American novel. Everybody I talked to so far says he never filed a single article, but scribbled in a notebook like he was writing War and Peace. Anyhow, he made the whole unit eleven men, total—the squad, the looie, Ben, and the writer.”

  “What was the writer’s name?” Sam asked.

  But Willy shook his head. “That’s the damnedest part. Nobody remembers. We can find out—can’t be that hard. But he obviously didn’t make much of an impression. And,” he added with a telling half smile—the cat with the canary—“he died that day.”

  It had the expected reaction. Joe and Sam exchanged glances as Sam said to her boss, “I thought you said there was no hostile fire.”

  “I said I thought so,” Joe corrected her.

  “And I think he’s right,” Willy added.

  “Two friendly fire casualties?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know how friendly they were,” Willy countered. “From what I know right now—and the reason I counted off how many guys were there that day—is that only six of the original eleven are alive today. Ben and the writer are dead, and three others that I got feelers out for.”

  “Is Jack Joyce one of the six survivors?” Joe asked.

  “And how,” Willy confirmed. “I don’t blame you for knowing nothing about politicians, since they’re all such assholes, but he’s a hotshot senator, down in D.C.—has been for years. He’s also a millionaire—or whatever they all are. A million’s probably chump change now.”

  “So, not counting a follow-up with Bob Morgan—which will definitely be happening,” Joe said quietly, “that leaves five more to interview, including a senator.”

  He checked his watch and stood up. “I better get out of here. Rachel wants to keep going on her project and record the last of the excavation of Kendall’s house. I said I’d put her up for as long as that takes, rather than have her driving back and forth.”

  “I’d still have her under lock and key,” Willy said bluntly. “You’re playing with fire.”

  “Where there’s one hit team, there may be more?” Joe asked before addressing his own question. “I don’t disagree. I ran it by Allard, but he said we don’t have the funding if I can’t articulate a threat. With Niles under arrest, I don’t have that.”

  Willy stared at him, incredulous. “You can talk the clothes off a nun.”

  “Charming,” Sammie muttered.

  “Say what you want,” Joe insisted, “he still wouldn’t play. The way I see it, we’re kind of splitting the difference anyhow. The excavation’s a crime scene, cordoned off and guarded around the clock, and she’ll be in my care the rest of the time. Not to mention that only her mother knows she’s down here.”

  “And everybody she texts and Facebooks and tweets and Christ knows what else,” Willy groused.

  “I asked her for radio silence,” Joe told him. “She didn’t screw around when we had her in the safe house.”

  He walked to the coat rack and paused. “Willy, keep the pressure on about those squad members. As much information as you can get, any way you can get it.”

  “Already rollin’,” Willy said.

  “And Sam? Dig into the writer. Who he was, what he was doing over there, everything and anything—any way you can think of.”

  She’d already returned to her computer keyboard. “Got it, boss.”

  * * *

  Joe met up with Rachel Reiling and Lester Spinney at his home on Green Street, in Brattleboro. Lester had been heading back from Burlington to his family in Springfield, and offered to take Rachel all the way to Brattleboro as a favor—officially ducking Bill Allard’s prohibition on more expenses relating to the young woman’s security.

  Rachel seconded Allard’s opinion as she got out of the car. “This really isn’t necessary, you know? I could’ve driven here myself.”

  Joe instinctively gave her a hug. “Yes, you could’ve, but thanks for catering anyhow. You have a nice way of making hopelessly old worrywarts feel better.”

  She laughed and pushed his arm playfully. “Oh, please.”

  Lester handed him a small overnight bag from the back seat, which Joe lifted easily into the air. “This it? Aren’t you staying for more than one night?”

  Rachel patted another bag hanging from her shoulder, holding her computer and camera gear. “My mom trained me well. I’m a very practical packer, if you don’t mind seeing me in the same outfit for days on end.”

  “I do not,” he reassured her, unlocking the front door to his small house. He ushered her inside, saying, “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right in.”

  He turned to Lester after she’d closed the door behind her. “Trip okay?”

  Les smiled. “As in, did I see anyone in my rearview mirror? No, Willy’s opinion notwithstanding.” He looked around them. “I’m impressed you don’t have any reporters camped out here.”

  Joe sighed. “Either courtesy or ignorance on their part. Don’t know and don’t want to know. Willy’s still hyper about the lurking forces of evil?”

  “I see his point,” Lester conceded. “There’s no reason to think someone else won’t come after her. I feel like we should hang a sign around her neck like they stick on car windows in New York: NO RADIO. Only, with her, I guess it would have to be: NO WHATEVER IT IS YOU SORRY ASSHOLES ARE AFTER. She is a trouper, though—upbeat the whole trip.”

  Joe extended his hand in thanks. “You’re no slouch, either, Les. Thanks for tacking on an extra hour to bring her h
ere.”

  Lester shrugged and returned to the driver’s seat. “No sweat. Happy to make an end run around Allard.”

  Joe leaned in slightly. “Everything okay at home? How’s Dave holding up at the academy?”

  Spinney shook his head. “He’s hangin’ in there, I guess. I haven’t been able to talk to him. Anytime he’s at home, he’s sleeping. I still think the academy’s good for him,” he added after a pause. “And so does his mother, more importantly.”

  Joe stepped back from the car and waved. “Well, give them my best, and thanks again for making the detour. Sorry I’ve been keeping you away from them for so long.”

  Lester started the engine. “All’s good. Part of the job.”

  Joe watched him back out of the driveway before following Rachel inside. He found her investigating the contents of the refrigerator.

  “Hungry?”

  She straightened to look at him. “Can I call you Joe?”

  “Of course.”

  She grinned. “Well, Joe, I don’t know how you’ve lived this long.” She gestured toward the fridge. “This makes dorm food look organic.”

  He returned the smile and reached for the phone. “Pizza—my treat.”

  A half hour later, they were sitting across his coffee table from each other, eating a pizza loaded with choices Joe never would have imagined, much less selected.

  Rachel seemed as interested in his reaction as in the food itself. “Can you stand it, or are you just being polite?”

  “Both,” he admitted. “But it’s much better than just standing it. It’s not bad. Just a little … more complex than I’m used to.”

  She laughed. “Mom said you could be diplomatic.”

  “Uh-oh,” he said. “That sounds like faint praise.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “From my mom? Not hardly. She thinks you’re wonderful that way. She’s like the most undiplomatic person I know, so it’s a good thing in her book.” She paused before adding, “She thinks you’re wonderful in lots of ways.”

  He felt his cheeks flush. “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Rachel spoke guilelessly. “Anne and I talked about the effect you’ve had on her, and we’re really happy. Not that she ever said it, but we think she was kind of lonely.”