The Night Crew (23 page)

Mr. Helner laughed. He surprised me and said, “I always wanted to do that. How does it feel?”

“Therapeutic. Give it a try.”

He seemed to shrink. “The whole parking lot is under camera. I’ve got three more years till I retire.”

I got in the car, started the engine, and drove away, out the gate first, then took a right and proceeded about three miles to the town of McLean, where I pulled into the crowded parking lot of a Rite Aid and put the car in idle.

I pulled out my cellphone and brought up the pictures I had taken only thirty minutes earlier, at Williamsburg Elementary School. I hadn’t had time to check them yet, so I did—and there, front and center, two times, I had Amal Ashad with his forefinger pointed at his kids, then once, in a third shot, just before he climbed back into the van, he turned and appeared to be looking directly at me.

The pictures were a little off-centered and gauzy, but all in all, they were good enough for government work, or more relevantly, for making a very damning impression on a jury—especially that third shot. The expression on his face said everything that needed to be said.

Obviously, he knew I was there, and obviously this scared the shit out of him.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Next, I placed a call to my old office, specifically to Lila, the security agent at the front desk who pretended to be a receptionist, and had a gun in the top drawer, a black belt in her past, and probably knew ten ways to kill you using sesame seeds. She was quite pretty, and also happily married, but she liked to flirt, as do I, so in a building of tight-lipped, tight-assed bureaucrats, we made an interesting couple.

I identified myself, to which Lila replied, “Drummond? . . . Drummond? Sorry, I don’t know that name. He’s been wiped from human memory. A nonperson.”

I replied with false innocence, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really, Sean? When I came in this morning, there was a firmly worded directive on my desk stating that your security creds have been yanked, and I should spank you if you try to enter.”

“This is a joke, right?”

“Did I mention it’s signed by Phyllis? I believe the last joke she told was in 1923.”

“Oh . . .”

Lila laughed, then went silent a moment, then said, “Look, I’m really going to miss you around here.”

I said, “I need a favor.”

“Gee . . . I don’t know. Your name’s really mud around here. I don’t want any trouble with the thought police.”

“Just a phone number. Margaret Martin.”

“Where does she work?”

“Somewhere in the puzzle palace. What office oversees torture?”

“The office of professional ethics?” She giggled.

“Lesser forms of torture.”

“I guess a simple phone number won’t get me in any trouble, right?” When I did not respond to that questionable assertion, Lila told me, “Hold on.”

I held, while Lila looked up the number.

“Got it,” she said. “She’s in the Directorate of Operations. Her title says Director of Support Services.”

“Support Services? Is that the Agency’s euphemism for yanking out fingernails and playing squash with your balls?”

“Now, now, Sean, you know we don’t do that stuff.”

No, you have somebody else pull down their pants and play with their wee-wees. Of course, I didn’t say that—instead I said, “No, you ask them politely who’s planning on bombing New York and wait patiently until they tell you.”

“Well, sometimes a knee in the nuts improves the male memory. Take my husband, for instance. So . . . you want the number or not?”

She gave me the number and I wrote it down.

When she finished she warned, “Be careful, Sean. Powerful people are pissed at you.”

Thanks for the newsflash, Lila. “Speaking of which, you know a guy named Helner?”

“Mark Helner? Sure, I used to work with him.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Well, he’s short and fat and obnoxious and—”

“I know all that.”

“You’ve met him, huh? Well, I was about to add very sly, brutally ambitious, and totally ruthless. And efficient—he’s the type who smiles as he sends a boxcar full of people to reeducation camp . . . or, to take another example, the type who can pull your security clearance overnight and end your career. I hope he isn’t one of the people after you.”

“Worry about him, Lila. This is me. Mothers warn their kids to be good, or big bad Sean will get them.”

There was a long pause before she remarked, in a noncommittal tone, “Uh-huh. Well . . . watch your ass anyway. Helner doesn’t play fair.”

“Right.” I hung up and pondered what to do next. I started with a brief inventory of my problems, or, as a less congenitally cynical person might say, the minor challenges I had to overcome.

One, somebody was still out there, still trying to kill me, possibly. No progress had been made toward finding out who the killer was; so far, the only meaningful progress was scraping up the bodies this guy clipped. Were the severed ears only a harmless warning, or official notice that Katherine and I were next on the grim reaper’s list? This seemed like a not inconsequential question. But only the killer knew the answer, and I didn’t want to learn what he was thinking the wrong way.

Two, we were no closer to deciding how guilty our client was, or was not, or on solidifying a trial strategy, which hinged very much on getting a grip on the former issue. Our interviews with two other members of the night crew indicated Lydia was, indeed, very guilty and further, that the other members planned to pin the rap on the dumbest, most vulnerable participant. This was a contest Lydia won hands down. They seemed to be claiming that it was her willfulness, her brainchild, and they had merely followed her lead. In the sentencing lottery, Lydia was being lined up for the long stretch.

And if all that weren’t enough, three, I now had the CIA on my ass. I knew the big secret, and their only hope of covering it up was covering me up. I could picture the meeting going on at the top floors at Langley at that moment, Amal Ashad wracking his brain about how to go back to being dead, and his bosses scratching their heads about how to make me dead.

Handling the Drummond quandary was apparently Mark Helner’s issue and I recalled Lila’s warm and eloquent description of him—ruthless and brutally ambitious, and he doesn’t play by the rules. I regarded Lila as a sound judge of character—she liked me, right?—and it struck me that it would not be a waste of my time to worry about Mr. Helner. Pulling my CIA easy pass was probably not the only thing he had up his rather ample sleeve. As our Mafia friends like to say, the best witnesses are the dead ones.

And last, though not least, Katherine. Dear, sweet Katherine. Did I love her? Despite her maddening qualities and our promiscuously contentious history together, yes, I was pretty sure I did. Enough to marry her? Well, that was a different question. She had not exactly given me an ultimatum as much as she had given herself one, which, in this case, added up to pretty much the same thing.

So, worst case. I could lose this case, lose Katherine, and lose my life, none of which were mutually exclusive. Best case . . . well, I could win the case, outlive the killer, and still end up with a life sentence. Said otherwise, could Sean and Katherine move past a decade of venomous bickering and incestuous competition to build a happy, blissful union? This did not sound promising. This sounded, in fact, like either the plot for a particularly rancid soap opera, or the formula for a mutual homicide pact.

Anyway, I pushed that troubling thought aside to focus on a more pressing question; specifically, why would the CIA cook up the phony death of Amal Ashad? To hide and/or cover up something, obviously. But what? What secret could be so big and so bad to merit such an effort?

And on a more selfish note, was my beloved institution, the army, involved in the cover-up? Now that I had made myself persona non grata with the CIA, it seemed like a good time to consider whether I still had a paycheck and a checkered career to return to. Regarding the army’s connivance in this conspiracy, I thought not. The CIA was genetically addicted to conspiracies. But that wasn’t the army way. The army is too incompetent and systemically clumsy to be conspirational, for one thing. As the saying goes, military intelligence is an oxymoron. For another, the fact that the army was taking all the heat over this affair did not imply willing or, as I was learning, even acknowledged participation.

No, I thought, the army was being cuckholded by the Agency. Amal Ashad had been brought in to help out, then, once that help turned toxic, and the cat was leaving the bag via the leaks to Melvin Cramer, the Agency got cold feet and left the army to take the bows from the stage.

For, if I believed Danny Elton, Amal Ashad was the Svengali behind the twisted shenanigans of the night crew. Serious, for sure, but was his involvement really shameful and scandalous enough for the Agency to construct such an elaborate charade just to conceal his role? Perhaps. Never underestimate the lengths a public institution will go to get out of the way of an incoming shitstorm. Yet my instincts were telling me there was something more here, that whatever Ashad did was far more sinister and portentous than merely prodding and encouraging a few corruptible soldiers to do naughty things in the dead of the night.

I thought about that a little more. Whatever it was, why didn’t the Agency just write Ashad off and let him take the fall? Describe him to the press and to congressional investigators as a formerly reliable agent who snapped, went rogue and off the reservation, burn any documents that might implicate anyone else at the Agency, and follow the Agency motto: deny, deny, deny.

Said otherwise: What did Amal Ashad have on the Agency?

Answer that question and Sean Drummond, too, would have the Agency by the balls. And as with life, so it goes with big institutions: once you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds follow.

Only four days ago I was sitting in an o-club bar with nothing more pressing on my mind than figuring out how to get into the knickers of a comely college teacher; now I was overdosing on plotlines, any of which, or all of which, could prove hazardous to the career, not to mention the health, of my favorite hero—me.

Chapter Twenty-Four

I decided, before making the long trek back up to West Point, to pay a brief visit to Justin, West Virginia, birthplace and home of record of PFC Eddelston, and the one place where, I hoped, I could get a bit more background, and some clarity on young Lydia before she matriculated into the dominatrix of Al Basari.

After nearly three hours of driving, I ended up in a small burg in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains, a place that seemed to match in every respect the dyspeptic description Lydia had provided me earlier.

According to the Internet, Justin had a total population of 723 with an average family income of $22,354, which placed it somewhere down there on the socioeconomic pole. The average home value was $65,000, a mixture of freestanding buildings and trailers, the latter apparently the domicile of choice. They could rename this town shithole and be accused of putting on airs.

I had the address of Lydia’s family in my pocket but decided to do a little noodling with some of the locals before I dropped in on her ma and pa, who I did not anticipate would be all that forthcoming or revelatory about their troubled daughter’s childhood. In my experience, all parents regard their parenting skills as above reproach and their children-gone-astray as misunderstood angels, even when that child has matured into a child-molesting serial killer. Take my own parents, for example.

Anyway, I pulled into the small square in the middle of Justin, a crossroads, really, with a mom-and-pop grocery store, a disheveled-looking bar that was already open with a parking lot full of rust-coated, banged-up pick-ups, and, across the road, the prestigious 7-Eleven described by Lydia the night I met her.

I had changed into jeans and a red polo shirt before I left Washington, and decided the bar was a more promising venue for my purposes than the 7-Eleven; someone needed a drink.

I parked and entered through the front entrance and, much like the small restaurant back in Highland Falls where Katherine and I met with Fred, our prison consultant, it was like stepping backward in time, with dim lighting, chipped and filthy linoleum floors, a bunch of ancient tables in the middle of the floor, and even older-looking booths lining the walls. The style of the décor was impoverished wreck. Apparently the federal smoking ban had not made it to Justin, because the air was nearly gray with smoke. It was three in the afternoon, and I could see why the average income in this town was so meager. Half the male residents, it seemed, had already kicked off from work, if indeed they had done any work that day.

In my clean polo shirt, and with all my teeth intact and brushed, I was badly overdressed and immediately drew every eye in the establishment. I sauntered to the bar where an older looking gent and a middle-aged woman whose profession wasn’t hard to guess were hunched over their drinks. I squeezed between them and the bartender wandered over and asked, “You old enuff to drink, fella?”

I looked at him and answered, “Scotch, neat.”

“Any particular brand?”

I was fairly certain Chivas Regal was above the waterline for such an establishment and replied, “Something that leaves my eyesight intact.”

He apparently found this humorous because he laughed before he wandered off to squirt a little hooch into a hopefully clean glass, which he deposited in front of me at the bar.

The woman seated beside me appeared to sense a business opportunity and asked, “New in town, aren’t ya, fella?”

What was your first clue, honey? She was somewhere between thirty and fifty, though it was difficult to be precise. Triple coating of makeup, blown-out hairdo circa 1980, and she was moderately attractive, or at least had once been before life and a serious addiction to either drugs or booze had given her looks a weather-beaten patina. But if you’re looking for insights in a small town, the local whore beats the town librarian any day. I informed her, West Virginia style, “Just passing through, ma’am.”

“Uh-huh. Well, where you from?”

“Nowhere,” I answered. “I’m in the army.”

“Oh . . .” she said, as though I had just asked for a quickie for God and Country.

“I’m a lawyer,” I clarified, and that seemed to perk up her interest.

“Well, I always like lawyers. Got business here?”

“I’m representing a girl from Justin. Lydia Eddelston. Know her?”

“Guess ever’body knows ever’body hereabouts.” She added, with a scowl, “Sure got her tits in a wringer.”

“How well did you know her?”

“Used to see her around. I know her daddy much better,” she admitted, a statement that revealed something about the marriage between Mr. and Mrs. Eddelston, not to mention the social limitations of this lady’s trade. She looked perplexed, then informed me, “That guy next to you, I’ll bet he knows her ’bout as good as anybody.”

“Does he?” I glanced at the man to my left.

“More’n likely. Ole Hank was the principal of Justin High ’fore he retired last year.”

Preoccupied as he was with his drinking, Hank did not appear to be paying attention to our conversation. To get his interest, I stuck my hand in his face, in the space between his lips and his glass. He turned and stared at me. “What do you want?”

“A quick conversation.” When this did not elicit an enthusiastic response, I amended that to, “Let me buy you a drink.”

I didn’t have to ask twice, because he accompanied me to a booth on the wall, where I quickly introduced myself and explained my purpose for visiting Justin.

To break the ice I asked him a few questions about himself. His full name was Henry Livingston, and though he preferred to be called by his given name of Henry, the locals had a hankering for Hank. I hate to generalize, but in small backwater towns such as this, multisyllabic names tend to be equated with putting on airs.

Anyway, Henry had been the high school principal for twenty-six years, which included duty as the science teacher and guidance counselor. He had not been born and bred in Justin, but in Wheeling, and he noted in a disapproving tone that only 3 percent of the town residents had been to college, and only 35 percent had matriculated from high school.

He had a West Virginian drawl, but it lacked both the country thickness and careless vernacular I associated with Lydia’s speech. Physically, Henry appeared to be in his early to midsixties, though as with the lady at the bar, albeit hopefully for different reasons, he had aged unkindly with a large gut, sparse though messy hair, and a face that had set into a deepset scowl that I thought reflected a mixture of resentment and disillusionment. It was, as I implied, a face of discontent, of a man living only because he wasn’t yet dead. To underscore this impression, it took three glasses of gin to plow through to this point in the conversation. At this rate, it won’t be long, Hank.

Before he could become incoherent, or his liver give out, I asked Henry, not Hank, “How well did you know Lydia?”

“The high school’s only got like 180 students so I guess I got to know all the kids pretty well.” After a brief reflection he informed me, “Troubled girl.”

“Troubled in what way?”

“Messed up family for starters. Her folks ain’t exactly the kind of parents you’d call ideal.”

“Ah, I see.”

He stated, “Her Daddy’s a real mean cuss, and her mom’s a rotten drunk,” oblivious to the fact that he was working his way through his fourth gin since we’d sat in this booth. He shrugged and added, “Always suspected she got abused a lot as a kid.”

“Abuse is a broad term. What kind of abuse?”

“She had . . . well . . . she had a few what you might call behavioral issues at the school.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Hard to describe. Lydia was a pretty poor student. Her teachers thought she was dumb, and maybe hampered by some mental disability, ADHD, or something like that. Her test scores certainly suggested somethin’ wasn’t right. Tell you what, though—she ain’t nearly as dumb as she appears.”

“Was that the issue?”

He took another long sip and appeared to contemplate my question. He leaned forward and lowering his voice, whispered, “Look, what I’m about to tell you is on the down-low, okay? I was the guidance counselor so it was my job to check these sorta things.”

“Of course,” I replied—which is lawyer-speak for “I will respect the confidentiality until it suits my purposes to do otherwise.”

“I guess there ain’t no polite way to say this. Lydia was banging a few of her teachers. And she was real aggressive about it, guess you’d say. She’d go visit their homes late at night, and nearly rape ’em.” His face folded into a deep frown of regret. “Hadda fire one of them teachers. Ole Ted Ebersol. Too damned bad, too. That Ted could teach a dog to meow. Would’ve fired the other two I found out ’bout, ’cept then we’d of had nobody to teach geometry or social studies.”

“Okay. Was this known in the community?”

“As a fact, nope.” He leaned his head back and took a deep sip. After a long swallow, he admitted, “Oh, there was rumors, of course. Small town like this, folks are always yakkin’. Course I spoke to her Pa about it.”

“And how did he react?”

“Hollered at me to git my nose outta her affairs. Said it was her pussy and how she chose to use it was her business.” He raised his eyebrows and tipped his glass at me. “Funny thing was, cain’t say he was all that surprised by it.”

“So you suspected he was sexually abusing his own daughter?”

“Well . . . I ain’t no expert or nothin’.”

“But I sense that you formed an opinion, Henry. Would you care to share it?”

Apparently so, because Henry confided, “Well, I spoke to some of her grade school teachers and they tole me little Lydia did lots of inappropriate things in school.”

“What kind of things?”

“Sexual stuff you don’t much see from little kids. You know, touching, showing off her privates, that sort of thing. The boys in the school took to callin’ her Nurse Lydia, on account of her sluttiness.” He got a pained look in his eyes. “Guess you know them’s all tell-tale signs of a girl who got raped, or molested at home. Tell the truth, I wasn’t the least bit surprised to see Lydia’s pictures in all them newspapers and news shows, doin’ that awful stuff they say she was doin’. Ask me, that girl was bred to be like that.”

“And did you report these suspicions?”

“To who?”

“The police. Social services. To somebody with the authority and resources to investigate and intervene.”

“Couldn’t,” he replied. “Didn’t have no proof. Hell, her folks wasn’t likely to change, anyway. Like I said, her ole man is a real mean cuss.”

Henry put down his glass and looked at me. Despite that easy rationalization, he obviously knew that he should have reported his suspicions regarding the perversities occurring in Lydia’s home and, had he done so, maybe the authorities would have intervened, and maybe Lydia might have gotten professional help, and maybe Sean Drummond wouldn’t be sitting across from him now.

A man has to have illusions in order to become disillusioned. I had the sense that at one time Henry had tried to run a good school and push his students to graduate and make something of themselves, to escape from a town with maybe ten college graduates and where only one of four adults hadn’t dropped out of high school and life. I’m sure he had some successes, some bright, shining kids who beat the odds and pulled themselves out of the wreckage of poverty and alcoholism and hopelessness that seemed to permeate this sad community. Just as I’m sure he had his hopes crushed hundreds more times by kids who never had a chance, no matter how hard Henry tried to fix their lives. I wasn’t here to judge him, but it looked like he was judging himself, and he did not like the results.

Somehow, I doubted having Lydia Eddelston as his most famous graduate was going to wash away his regrets.

But a visit to Lydia’s parents now seemed less like a waste of my time. I should get a look at the monsters who’d sent their child like a guided missile into the army.

I dropped a fifty on the booth table, then stood, content that Henry, or Hank, if you prefer, could keep drinking for another hour on my dime. I thanked him for his help and started to walk away before I remembered one other small matter he might be able to help me with. I looked down at him and said, “Incidentally, Lydia married a kid out of high school. It lasted only a few months before they got divorced. Do you recall the name of the boy she married?”

Henry was shaking his head long before I finished that explanation. “Willy Packer. Weren’t no divorce though.”

“Right. Then what was it?”

“A funeral. Car accident. Willy drove off a cliff.”

A warning bell went off in my head, but I did my best to appear merely curious, rather than alarmed. “Why would Lydia tell me it was a divorce?”

“Guess you’ll hafta ask her. But I should’a warned you that Lydia and truthfulness, they ain’t even mildly acquainted. I never knew what went through that girl’s head.” He knocked on his own head a few times. “Tell you what, though. She ain’t all right up there.”

I left Henry and got back in my yellow Prius, then punched her parent’s address into the navigation system, which drew a blank. I leaned out the window at an elderly lady passing by on the sidewalk, and inquired, “Could you please tell me the way to 313 Hollowbrook Road.”

She shrugged.

I modified my request to, “I’m looking for the home of Silas and Lenore Eddelston.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?” she asked, not all that kindly. She then gave me directions, which I followed, ending up on a dirt road about two miles outside of town, a rustic, unpaved trail that I followed for nearly a mile off the paved road, until I ended up in a junkyard of dead cars and rotting refrigerators and long-defunct washing machines, and, amid all these industrial corpses, a double-wide trailer on cinderblocks that seemed to be leaning awkwardly to the left. It was like driving to the end of the world, where all of the carcasses of the planet’s greatest consumerist nation came to die.

I climbed out of the car and went to what passed for a front porch where I knocked on what passed for a door. I heard what passed for a voice holler, “Lenore, you git that.”