Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series) Page 24

  She looked around. “No kidding? Your wife loaded? You have a trust fund?”

  His face flushed.

  The point made, Joe took his turn, laying a file folder on the coffee table and saying before Morgan could respond, “We been brushing up on our homework, Bob, since you chose not to cooperate.” Joe stared at him. “Even though you felt guilty about it.”

  “What?” Morgan said.

  Joe didn’t address the question. “I told you I was investigating several felonies in connection to what happened in Vietnam, including Ben’s death. Which makes me wonder: You keep in touch with any buddies from back then?”

  “What?” he repeated.

  “Simple question,” Paula pressed him.

  “Ian Faulkner, for example,” Joe said, extracting a photograph and laying it face up on the table, oriented toward Morgan. “That’s a picture of the car crash that killed him, soon after you all got home. No explanation of why he was covered in booze but had none in his bloodstream, and no explanation for the paint smear where the other car hit him and forced him off the road.”

  Morgan didn’t touch the picture.

  “Andy Weiss,” Joe intoned, placing another picture between them, this one a close-up of an obviously dead man. “Found at home, around the same time. Ruled to be a natural—a heart attack. Did you know Andy had a bum ticker? Funny the army missed it during his physical.”

  Bob whispered mournfully, as if to himself, “Oh, Andy.”

  “You hear the question?” Paula asked.

  “No, I didn’t know about a bad heart,” Morgan said quietly.

  “That’s because it was fine,” Joe announced, although he had no proof of that. “His death was just too uninteresting to pursue at the time, and they found heart meds next to his bed, although not prescribed to him. Course, he was no Slim Jim, so why bother investigating? People weren’t as thorough as they tend to be now.”

  “Bummer for you,” Paula commented.

  Morgan looked back and forth at them, as they’d anticipated with their seating arrangement.

  “Bryan Cosselli,” Joe said to recapture his attention. He laid down another picture. “That’s him hanging in his garage—again, same time period. Suicide note and everything. You know Bryan to be down in the dumps when you served together?”

  Morgan shook his head slightly.

  “Yeah,” Joe agreed. “His mother didn’t think so, either. Still, hard to argue with a note.”

  Joe placed a copy of the short note onto the growing pile as Morgan murmured, “I guess.”

  “Except that this one is typed, and there wasn’t a typewriter in the house.”

  Morgan rubbed his forehead.

  “You connecting the dots here, Bob?” Paula asked.

  Joe sat forward. “What did Bryan, Andy, Ben, and Ian have in common, Bob, that they all deserved to be murdered?”

  Morgan remained silent, his hands clenched between his knees.

  “You were friends with Andy,” Joe said. “I could hear it in your voice.”

  “Yeah,” he whispered.

  “What?” Paula demanded.

  He looked up at her. “Yes. We were friends.”

  “Well, somebody killed your friend,” she said.

  “And Bryan, and Ian, and Ben,” Joe added. He placed a crime scene photo of Jennifer Sisto on the low table, tied spread-eagle and semi-nude on her apartment floor.

  Morgan turned his face away.

  “Look at it,” Paula ordered.

  “Focus on the face,” Joe suggested. “That might make it easier. She’s an older woman there. This just happened. But maybe something about her features rings a bell.”

  Baffled, Morgan took a closer look. But he shook his head.

  “You know how it is in combat,” Joe reminisced. “Guys show each other snapshots of their kids, wives, girlfriends. Ben Kendall ever show you a picture of his wife?”

  Morgan blinked, caught off guard.

  “That’s her, after she was tortured to death. Recently. In Philadelphia. Ben ever talk about her? Or about Philly?”

  “A little.”

  “Yeah, I know what that’s like—shooting the breeze, talking about what’ll happen once it’s over, pretending that nobody’s going to catch a bullet in the meantime, feeling guilty that you hope it’s the other guy and not you. Am I right?”

  Morgan nodded.

  “And then something does happen, and it’s not the way you figured. The wrong people die, the world stops being the same, and you’re left with all this crap in your head—ghosts reaching out, accusing you of not having done the right thing. You still see Ben Kendall at night, Bob? You still see the hole in his head? All the blood?”

  Joe reached out and tapped the stack of pictures. “And what about the others? They got home before they died. Did you know they didn’t truly survive?”

  Morgan stayed frozen in place, and Joe suddenly knew why. “You did know, didn’t you, Bob? You’ve known all along. Maybe not how. Maybe not the details.” He pawed through the images, spreading them out. “You didn’t know they’d strung Bryan up like a dead deer. Or poisoned Andy. Or terrorized Ian, ramming his car as he fought to control it, their headlights blinding him from inches away. But you knew they were dead.”

  Morgan sat hunched on the sofa, his entire body like a closed fist.

  “Didn’t you?” Joe yelled, making Bob and Paula jump.

  “Yes.” It was barely audible.

  “While the rest of you were taken care of financially,” Joe stated.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve been living with that ever since.”

  A tear ran down Morgan’s cheek, and spilled onto the knuckles of his hand.

  Paula’s voice was soft when she spoke, completely at odds with her tone earlier. “Talk to us, Bob. Get it off your chest. It’s not like it’s a secret anymore. We just need a few details confirmed.”

  “What happened in Nam?” Joe asked.

  Morgan looked at them haplessly. “If I tell you, I’m as dead as them, and so’s my family.”

  Joe waved that away. “You’ve got it the wrong way around. You tell us what happened, and we’ll get the guy responsible. We just did that with these two.” He laid out mug shots of Niles and Watson. “One’s dead; the other’s never getting out. You ever see them before? A couple of hit men?”

  Bob shook his head. “No.”

  “They came after a few folks in Vermont, like Ben.” Joe reached out and tapped the photo of Jenn Sisto. “And they killed his ex-wife. But they’re done for now. We nailed their asses.”

  “There’ll be more,” Bob said gloomily.

  “We know that,” Joe answered him. “They’re just blunt instruments. We get the man winding them up, and it’s over. And you and your wife and daughter get to live without fear.”

  Paula spoke in the same soothing tone as before. “We get it, Bob. It was a lousy choice—you either lived with the guilt, or died because of what you knew. But there were fringe benefits with the guilt, ’cause you got paid. That it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Good,” she said, almost happily. “Well, that gravy train’s over, as of now, ’cause we know about it. You think that whoever’s pulling the strings is gonna keep shelling out bucks when the cat’s outta the bag? Think it through. You’re screwed. If you were him, wouldn’t you take care of this problem the same way you did years ago? Right after Nam?”

  “I suppose.”

  “We can protect you and your family,” Joe joined in. “Provided you help us out.” He paused to let that sink in, before repeating, “Tell us what happened.”

  The request this time seemed to deflate him, almost as much as it had set him on edge earlier. He slumped in his seat, his eyes unfocused, his hands opened in his lap.

  “I’ll never know what life might’ve been like without that day,” he began. He looked up for emphasis. “And not because of anything I did. That’s the craziest part. I even talked
about that with some of the others. We didn’t do anything. We were just there, like we had been for months before and—for some of us, at least—for months after. But nothing was ever the same again.”

  Joe and Paula remained silent, letting him navigate through his own narrative.

  “It was a standard recon,” he went on. “We’d done them so many times, it was almost routine. We joked about how stupid it was—heading out, finding some village. Usually no more than a few hooches clumped around a fire pit. Sometimes, every once in a while, when we were part of a platoon or something bigger, there’d actually be some action—somebody really shooting at us.”

  He looked up and grinned incongruously. “They did do that, you know? They did fight, now and then, like crazy bastards. They won the fucking war, didn’t they? It wasn’t just us, wandering around in the bush killing people. People think that’s all we did—murder innocent women and children before we were forced to quit by protesters back home. Well, we did murder people—both sides did—but it was a real war, with atrocities to spare.”

  He paused.

  The cops remained quiet.

  “The thing is,” he resumed, “we did it a lot. We’d been conditioned like robots, from boot camp on up. It was ‘slopes’ and ‘rice-eaters’ and the rest, all the time. They hammered it into us. It didn’t matter what happened once we got in-country. Every local was a suspect, if not out to kill us. What the hell did we know? And what the hell did the Command staff care? To them, it was all ‘What’s the body count?’ ‘Why’re your numbers so low?’ Shit like that. People like Lieutenant Joyce were just following orders.”

  “Talk about Joyce,” Joe prompted.

  “He was an ass-kisser,” Morgan said without hesitation. “Always sucking up to the brass. Nothing they ordered was too stupid, and nothing they said afterwards was ever wrong.”

  “Sounds like the kind of officer they used to find dead in a ditch,” Paula commented. “Killed by his own men.”

  Bob’s eyes widened. “Not the lieutenant. He was a nasty piece of work. He may’ve been a suck-up to the bosses, but he was a real dictator to us. You didn’t fuck with Joyce. Plus, he had his goons. If he didn’t come after you, they did on his orders. He paid them to. He was a rich kid. We never could figure out what he was even doing there.… Until later, of course.”

  “Of course?” Joe asked.

  “The Senate,” Morgan explained. “That’s what it was all about from the start—the military career, the money, the controlling everything all the time. He wanted power. Hell, he would’ve gone for the presidency if things had worked out better, but the Senate’s all his kind of bullshit would allow. There’re more than enough stupid, nasty people in Congress. He never even stood out. But running for president? Even he knew that would be pushing it. Too many buried bodies would’ve come up to bite him.”

  “Like the time you’re describing?” Joe asked, quietly directing him.

  “Yeah,” Morgan agreed. “That was typical. We were stretched out, been humpin’ for days, the mood was bad. Lieutenant Joyce had been chewed out upstairs for some reason, and he was taking it out on us. We came on the village feelin’ ugly.”

  “Was Ben a part of that?” Joe asked. “The feeling ugly?”

  “Not Ben. He would’ve been invisible if it hadn’t been for that damn camera always in your face. The other guy, the writer…”

  “Sievers.”

  “Yeah. He was definitely a problem. All attitude and argument. I’m amazed it took so long for one of us to kill him.”

  A pause welled up, as the statement floated among them. Joe quickly said, “Go on,” to get past it.

  “Anyhow, we were pissed, and Joyce was the worst. We went into that village like we owned the place. No feelers, no caution, no preliminary scouting. We saw it, and we went in.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. It was crazy. There coulda been a hundred VC in there. We wouldn’t have known. That was the mood.”

  He hesitated, as if to catch his breath, and added, “And then he found the girl.”

  “Okay,” Joe coaxed him.

  Morgan glanced at Sagerman, as if for permission. “Well, he raped her. We were checking the hooches, she was inside the one Joyce hit, and he just went over the edge. He was on autopilot. It was like watching one of those zombie shows on TV. Without hesitation, he shot the old woman, the kid, grabbed the girl, threw her down—”

  He stopped and placed his right palm against his forehead. “I think that’s what Ben saw.”

  Joe felt his face flush, the scene suddenly coming alive as everything they’d been sorting through over the past several weeks came into focus. “And Joyce shot him,” he said without thought.

  Morgan narrowed his eyes. “Not at first. The hooch was open at both ends. Sievers walked in, same time as Ben, from the other door. Joyce saw him first, looking up as he was raping the girl. And again, just like with her, it was automatic. He just shot the guy, right in the chest.”

  “Ben saw that, too?” Paula asked.

  “Yeah. That’s when Joyce must’ve turned and shot him—in the head. I don’t know how he didn’t drop right there, but he ran. We were all running by then, toward the hooch. Everybody was yelling. A couple more shots were fired, Christ knows at what. Joyce killed the girl. I saw him do that. And then he went after Ben.”

  “How long had Ben been gone?” Joe asked.

  “A minute, maybe two. But times like that always seem longer. It coulda been a few seconds.”

  “Go on.”

  “Joyce did up his pants, pushed through us, ran outside. We were just standing there, taking it in, and then a couple of us took off after Joyce. We were worried about Ben. We’d seen him running out, covered in blood.”

  “Who went with you?”

  “Andy.”

  “Okay. Where did you find them?”

  “Not far. Around the corner of the next hooch. Joyce was standing over Ben’s body.”

  “What was he doing with his hands?”

  Morgan looked nonplussed. “His hands? Nuthin’. I don’t know. I don’t remember him doing anything.”

  “And Ben’s cameras?”

  “Yeah. Like I said, they were on the ground, open.”

  Joe locked Morgan’s eyes with his own. “Bob. I need to hear this directly from you: What do you think happened to the film? What do you think Joyce did?”

  “I told you what he did. I don’t know anything about any film. Maybe Joyce took it. He’d just shot five people. Maybe he was worried Ben had taken pictures.”

  “Had he?”

  Morgan stared at him, helpless. “I don’t know.” He dragged out the last word into a half wail. “All we saw was him running away, all bloody, and the dead bodies in the hooch, and the lieutenant doin’ up his pants with his gun still in his hand.”

  Joe nodded several times to calm him down. “Okay, okay. What did you do next, after finding Joyce and Ben together?”

  “I just tried to take care of Ben.”

  “And you said that Ben never said anything.”

  “That’s right. He was out of it.”

  Joe kept at him. “You said Joyce was holding a gun. Did you see him fire it?”

  “It was his sidearm. He’d dropped his M16 to rape the girl. I saw him shoot her.”

  “But the thing about Joyce shooting Sievers and then Ben, that’s what you pieced together later. Correct?”

  Morgan hesitated, a growing doubt on his face. “Don’t you believe me?”

  “It’s not a matter of that,” Joe said quickly. “It’s a matter of being absolutely accurate. People’re going to try to poke holes in this.”

  “What people?”

  “The people that’ll be protecting you and working to put Joyce in jail for what he did. For that to happen, everything you say has to stand up. You know this isn’t going to end here.”

  Morgan nodded miserably.

  Joe then played his trump card, and laid out several photos side b
y side on the low table. They were the shots of American servicemen, on display at the Fleming Museum.

  “Do you know who these people are?” he asked.

  Morgan hunched over them, scrutinizing them. “Holy Jesus,” he said. “It’s us. That must’ve been the day.” He looked up and tapped a blurry figure in the background. “That’s Sievers.”

  “You sure?” Paula asked, frowning. “You can barely see him.”

  Morgan’s voice was excited. “Yeah, it is. You think I’d forget that day?” He tapped on another figure. “That’s Joyce yelling, as usual. Must’ve been earlier. The background isn’t the village.”

  This was a mixed blessing for Joe, both a confirmation and a disappointment, as his next question revealed. “Bob, you said there was no film to be found. That Ben’s cameras were empty. If these were shot the same day, where did they come from?”

  But Morgan didn’t hesitate. “Sievers,” he said, as if that explained it. “He’d agreed to carry Ben’s kit bag, since he was unarmed. It had a tripod in it, some other stuff, and it’s where Ben dropped all his exposed film. When the medevac chopper got there, I threw it in with Ben.” He gestured toward the pictures. “They must’ve been in there.”

  Joe let his words sink in before he asked, “What happened after you’d tended to Ben?”

  “We called in the chopper.”

  “What about Sievers?” Paula asked. “He go, too?”

  It turned out to be a pertinent question. Morgan took her in with an almost surprised expression. “That’s where it started getting really weird, and why—” He looked at Joe. “—I didn’t make this up. No. Joyce said to leave him. Then he got us together after the chopper left and started on this rant, telling us how everybody was out to get us, from the protesters to Command to the politicians to the gooks, and how we had to hang together, especially against people like Sievers.”

  “Sievers?” Joe said, caught off guard.

  “Yeah. He sort of worked his way around to pinning the whole thing on him, saying that Sievers had ‘almost got him’ or some shit like that, before Joyce got him first. The implication was that maybe it was Sievers who shot Ben, even though he didn’t carry a gun. It was totally crazy. He was walking back and forth, waving his arms around, talking fast. Still with the gun in his hand.”