The Death Trust Page 10

  I thought he was going to say he’d prefer those hands to be connected to living arms, given that we’d just passed a gurney carrying a collection of assorted detached limbs, pushed by a woman who was so blasé she could have been cruising an aisle at Wal-Mart, but he refrained. Instead, he opened a door. Warm air and light beckoned from within. We’d crossed back over into the land of the living. I never thought I’d be so pleased to see bored individuals yawning at their computers. The major took a seat behind a PC with a Garfield clinging to the side of the monitor with sucker feet, and an “I NY” sticker on the plastic frame above the screen. His screensaver was a cocker spaniel whose eyes reminded me of Lamont’s—red and sad. “Okay, now, let…me…see…” he said as he clicked through several files and folders till he got the one he was after. His fingers clattered over the keyboard and the screen filled with a table, orange type on a black background. “Here we go. Captain François Philippe.” A list of autopsies completed by the captain during his time at Ramstein filled the screen. Lamont paged down till he came to the end—Philippe’s last month at the facility. “Well, that’s strange…” he said.

  “What is?” said Masters, quicker than me on the draw.

  “As I said, yes, I do remember Philippe talking about doing this autopsy—quietly—for General Scott on his son. I would have thought he’d have at least made a record of his findings, but there’s nothing here.”

  “Could the record have been erased if it were on the database?” asked Masters.

  “No, Major, not here. And maybe not anywhere. The program gives us some leeway to alter things while the autopsy is underway, but, once the work is done and the pathology is complete, the save button is hit and that’s that. We have no access to the main database from our end. Zero. It’s all hubbed back at the U.S. Department of Defense. And I doubt even those guys could change or delete things. You don’t want to be screwing around with death records, otherwise how will Saint Peter know who’s coming to dinner, right?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Can you call up the original autopsy report?”

  “Sure. Let me see…Scott…Scott…”

  The screen pulled up a list of Scotts. There were plenty of them who were no more, but only one Peyton.

  “Nothing too out of the ordinary here,” said Lamont. “Don’t know why General Scott would have wanted a second opinion, but…” He shook his head. “According to this, the U.S. Army Hospital at Baghdad did the autopsy as per standard operating procedure, and he was then issued a death certificate so that the IRS could drop off and go find another host to suck on. They bagged and tagged him, put him on a plane, and sent him home.”

  “Cause of death?” I asked.

  “Massive trauma caused by an argument with a land mine. The sergeant seems to have come off second best. Chest wounds, sliced aorta, et cetera.”

  “You don’t know anything about Peyton Scott being decapitated?”

  “No. The paperwork doesn’t lie.”

  “Can you tell me who signed off on the autopsy?”

  “Sure.” He scrolled down. “A Captain Homer Veitch.”

  “You know him?” I asked.

  Lamont glanced sideways at me. “It’s a big army.”

  Okay, dumb question. “You don’t see a lot of soldiers here who’ve been autopsied back in Iraq?”

  “No, sir. If they’ve already had an autopsy performed, they don’t make it down here and we don’t see any paperwork. If they come to Ramstein, it’s mostly because they’re in transit.”

  “What about other autopsies Captain Veitch has performed. Can we look at records of them?”

  “Sure.” Lamont shrugged. His fingers stroked the keys and the screen refreshed. “Hmmm,” he said.

  “What?” I asked, leaning forward.

  “Nothing: screen’s blank. The autopsy Veitch performed on Peyton Scott is the only one he has done. None before, none since.”

  “What does that tell you?” I asked, needing it spelled out.

  “Can’t say for sure,” said Lamont. “Veitch might have stepped on a land mine himself ten minutes after finishing with young Peyton and ended up under someone else’s knife. The circle of life, y’know.”

  “Is that likely, Captain?” asked Masters.

  “Not really, no, ma’am,” he said.

  I made a note to check on this Captain Homer Veitch, but I had a gut feeling the guy never existed.

  “Anything else I can do for you, sir, ma’am?” Lamont said, swiveling in his chair to look at us both.

  “You could print me out a copy of the autopsy on Peyton Scott,” I said.

  “Sure.” Lamont called it back up on screen and hit command-print. The HP LaserJet whirred and a yellow sheet slotted into the tray.

  “Anything else?” I asked Masters.

  “Actually, yeah,” she said. “Do you remember the photo of a series of body bags lined up on the apron here appearing in The Washington Post?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Were they on their way down to you here?”

  “I can’t recall for sure, Special Agent, but we were getting a fair bit of overflow work from Iraq at the time.”

  Masters took this in.

  “You done?” I asked.

  “Yes, I think so,” said Masters.

  “Me, too. Captain, we’d appreciate it if you’d keep all this quiet.”

  “Keep what quiet, sir?” he replied, blinking, as if I’d just hit him with the Men in Black light.

  Masters and I took the elevator up in silence. It was big enough to garage an Abrams Main Battle Tank, more evidence that at one time a veritable stampede of dead people was expected to come this way. I was looking forward to seeing the sunshine, but I’d have settled for sleet. It was just good to be away from that place.

  I pulled out the cell when we walked into the fresh air and called OSI. I eventually got through to Flight Lieutenant Bishop. I wanted to know whether he could look up army personnel records, and he told me that his position at air force security gave him a triple-A security rating. Or the equivalent thereof. I guessed that meant he could, so I gave him all Captain Homer Veitch’s particulars, which amounted to pretty much just that—the man’s name and rank.

  “What did you make of all that?” asked Masters when I put the cell away.

  I sucked in a lungful of fresh air gratefully, like a smoker having his first morning coffin nail, and said, “General Scott’s son died a year ago. But rumor has it the sergeant’s wounds didn’t match the autopsy report that accompanied the body.”

  Masters nodded.

  “And the forged autopsy signed off by Captain Homer Veitch. Who is he and why would he do that? Then there’s the Belgian, Captain Philippe. He supposedly performed a second autopsy, yet there’s no record of it. As far as the system’s aware, Peyton Scott died of wounds suffered when his vehicle ran over a land mine. Only that doesn’t exactly align with the scuttlebutt that the sergeant was decapitated.”

  “And the only person who can confirm this—Captain Philippe—has conveniently died in a house fire,” said Masters.

  “Yeah, it’s all very neat,” I said, “unless you happened to be one of these four dead people.”

  “Who’s the fourth?”

  “Alan Cobain. The journalist that took the photo of all the body bags.”

  “That’s right.”

  Yesterday, we had one dead general. Now we had a pyramid of corpses. My mind was recalling General Scott sloshing around in his stainless-steel tubs. He hadn’t died well, and neither had his son. Captain Philippe had also met his maker in a particularly nasty way. Cobain, too, died badly. I was thinking there was a lot to be said for ending it all in your sleep with a spilled tumbler of medicinal brandy and the electric blanket on—much more civilized. I was also thinking that something was rotten in Denmark or wherever things rot down, although it could also have been the formaldehyde clinging to my nasal passages.

  ELEVEN

  We need to go see
Harmony Scott,” I said as we turned onto the road. It was after eleven-thirty, and by the time we drove to K-town it would be well after midday.

  “Okay,” said Masters, stopping and executing a three-point turn in a gap in the traffic, “but shouldn’t we at least phone ahead first?”

  “What, and spoil the surprise?”

  Masters glanced at me, this time without comment. She was getting used to my ways. We changed vehicles at the parking lot and took my rental. I made a protest about minimizing the wear and tear on Masters’s purple people-eater, but the real reason was that I like to drive. Being a passenger makes me feel like I’ve lost control, an admission Brenda’s Colonel Squeeze would have had a field day with. We drove through the security checkpoint and turned onto the open road.

  “So what was going on with you back there?” said Masters.

  “Back where?”

  “In the morgue. I really thought you were going to lose it. What’s that all about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Sure looked like something to me.”

  I glanced at Masters. Was she enjoying herself? Yeah, she damn well was.

  “I had oatmeal for breakfast and seeing the general like that, well…”

  “Bullshit, Cooper. You’ve got issues with something. Why can’t you just give it up?”

  Definitely enjoying herself.

  Having a phobia about flying is not something an officer in the air force readily admits. I had good reasons for that phobia, too. And I was just starting to feel a little better about getting airborne—the trip across the Atlantic in the C-21 was proof of that. I only needed three sleeping pills to take me out rather than a handful. But then seeing General Scott’s glider smashed into fiberglass splinters, and then the general himself—the way he’d ended up—brought it all back, my last tour in Afghanistan. And the feeling was not pleasant. I remembered the ragged fighting on the mountaintop, firing out the back of a C-47 helo, protecting a bunch of injured U.S. Special Forces pinned down by Taliban fighters high in the mountains, me firing on them as they jumped and slid across the scree toward soldiers cut off from the main body, their knife blades slashing and glinting in the sunlight. And I remembered suddenly being knocked to the checker plate by a hit that felt as if a sledgehammer had driven a railway spike through my chest, and I was being whipped and thrashed around on the end of my lifeline like a trout fly, wheezing bubbles of foaming blood through the sucking hole in my chest, the helo in a vicious spin, going down, falling…

  “I said are you okay?”

  I realized suddenly that we had stopped and that I was sweating, hunched over the steering wheel, gripping it with white-knuckle anxiety. A truck flashed by with its horn blaring, raising in pitch as it swept past, trailing a vortex of air that rattled our windows and rocked the Mercedes. I also noticed that Special Agent Masters wasn’t enjoying herself so much anymore. I eased some pressure onto the accelerator pedal and we picked up speed. I checked the rearview mirror. I could easily have caused a pileup. “Yeah, I’m okay,” I said.

  “No you’re not,” she said. “Want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.”

  “You sure?”

  “Look, maybe some night when we’ve drunk a bottle of something distilled in Kentucky.”

  “Okay.”

  “And we’re both naked in the Jacuzzi.”

  Masters faced me and shook her head. “Don’t you ever give it a rest, Cooper?”

  In this age of sexual harassment, I got away with that caveman comment because I’d just damn near killed both of us, and a little levity, even if sexual in nature, seemed like small beans. But the image of Masters and me naked in the hot tub persisted. In the cinema of my mind, she was sitting with her arms tightly folded across her breasts and a frown superglued to her face. Our relationship had thawed but the figurative water was still icy. But I was happy to stay in the tub because it took my mind off that morning in Afghanistan.

  “So, the widow Scott,” said Masters when we reached the edge of K-town after several miles spent in silence. “What do you want to do?”

  “I wouldn’t mind taking a snoop around outside. Do you think you can keep her occupied?”

  “I’ll try. How much time will you need?”

  “Five minutes—ten at the most. I want to have a look at General Scott’s car, the old Mustang.”

  “You know, Major, you are incredibly sexist,” said Masters smugly.

  “Am I? Why’s that?”

  “Why couldn’t the Mustang be Mrs. Scott’s car?”

  “Well, I guess it could, but I doubt it.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because its license plate says GLIDER.”

  TWELVE

  I watched from the car as Masters walked up the cinder path and made her way around the fountain. I lost her until she climbed the steps to the porch and stood in front of the door. She rang the bell. Rang it again. Thirty long seconds later, the door opened a fraction. I could see her having to talk her way inside. Eventually the door opened wide and the darkness behind it swallowed her.

  I got out of the rental and took the driveway. The cinders crunched underfoot, so I detoured onto the grass. The neighborhood here was quiet and serene, the kind of place where the day’s single biggest event was the arrival of the mailman. Off to the south, the Palatinate Forest made the hills look as if they’d been upholstered with dark green fuzz, and the usual riot of rainbows—or whatever the collective noun is for a bunch of the things—hovered overhead. The air was calm and the sun’s thin light shining between the purple and gray clouds held a rumor of warmth.

  The Scotts’ garage was spacious. It was dry inside, and smelled of cold concrete, gasoline, and grease, the old Mustang probably contributing two out of three of those smells. There was a workbench running the full length of the back of the garage, and various woodworking tools spotted with rust and dust lay scattered over it. The skeleton of an old chair was held in the jaws of a bench vise, the job—whatever it was—half finished. Like the tools, the chair was covered with dust, layers of it. The scene reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Pompeii. Some disaster had happened here, something that had forced the carpenter to leave in a hurry and not come back. I half expected to see a plate of food, now petrified, left behind. I knew exactly what that disaster was—the clues were up on the wall: photographs, dozens of them, showing father and son enjoying quality time together. It was almost possible to chart Peyton’s life through the photos. There was one of him as a baby in a nurse’s arms. There was Peyton the boy, throwing a ball; Peyton, the young teen, sitting in the cockpit of some aircraft; Peyton and father, fishing; Peyton water-skiing. There was also Peyton with various girls; Peyton graduating from college; Peyton in the cockpit of Scott’s glider; Peyton in the uniform of a U.S. Marines sergeant; Peyton with his squad on the biscuit-colored streets of Iraq. There was also the clipping of Alan Cobain’s article “Death Row,” with its sad accompanying picture. Father and son were undoubtedly close. I took the snapshot of Peyton in uniform and pocketed it.

  The driver’s door of the Mustang was locked, as was the passenger door. I conducted a quick search for the keys and ran my hand over the tires under the wheel arches. Nothing. I looked on the tool board, hoping to find them on a hook. The search there was also fruitless, but I found the next best thing—a thin metal bracket. I removed the chair frame from the vise and used the jaws to curl the end of the bracket into a hook. Then I opened up the space between the Mustang’s window and the door panel with a screwdriver, fed the tool down into the guts of the door, and jiggled it around until I snagged what I was looking for. The button popped up and I was in.

  I slid behind the Mustang’s wheel and had the eerie feeling of being inside General Scott’s skin. The smell of grease and vinyl—the smell of old car—was strong. I took the cell from my pocket, called up the number from the memory, and hit the green button. Seconds later, there was a muffled buzz emanating from under the
seat, not on the floor, but right up inside the springs. I had to get out of the car and kneel on the floor to get the angle. The cell stopped buzzing so I had to ring again. Eventually, on the third redial, I found it: General Scott’s private cell phone. There were one hundred and twenty missed calls indicated on the screen, and only one bar of battery power left. The thing had nearly lost its charge. If it had run out of gas completely, it might not have been found for a considerable time. Scott’s gliding and his car were part of his other life—the one outside the base. If the cell was going to be anywhere predictable, it would be somewhere in this car. That was my theory, anyway, and the intuition had paid off. “You’ve still got it, pal,” I said as I checked the cell’s received calls.

  According to the memory, there’d been only one other caller besides me. A single message had been left in voice mail, if an empty silence punctuated by breathing could be considered a message. Whoever it was on the other end had decided not to say anything and had hung up, but the automatic message service didn’t realize that and kept re-calling and re-calling to let the deceased general know that he had a message. Creepy—worse, even, than looking at photos of the dead when they were alive. I checked the cell’s phone book. No names or numbers had been stored there. This was like the Bat Phone: It had a single use only, and that was to call one specific person, the person who’d left the message of silence.

  THIRTEEN

  I followed the voices inside the house. The entry hall behind the front door was lined with polished wood panels the color and texture of desiccated cockroach. Portraits of old men and dreary landscapes painted in oils hung on the walls. If this was how the other half lived, they could have it. My one-room apartment back in Brandywine wasn’t much, but at least it had a pulse.

  I caught up with the widow and Special Agent Masters in what I took to be General Scott’s study. The room was paneled in more dark wood, and books stocked the shelves from chest height to ceiling across three walls. Like most military pilots, General Scott also had mementos of his years flying—the ubiquitous helmet and oxygen mask, and a model of the aircraft in which he’d made his combat reputation, the Douglas Skyraider. His desk was a dark mahogany number, the color of molasses. There were several photos of Peyton, photos I was now familiar with, framed on the desk and on the bookshelves. I ran my eyes across the general’s library and noted the consistent theme.