P Deutermann - Darkside

“Well, there’s a one-way street,” he said with a smile. “But that wasn’t a definite no.”

“You shouldn’t infer anything from what I said or didn’t say, Mr. Hall, especially when I’m crouching down behind lawyer-client privilege. Is that where your investigation is going right now?”

“It’s not my investigation, Ms. DeWinter,” he reminded her. “I’m just helping the NCIS with its inquiries.”

She gave a short laugh, finished her scotch, and stood up. “Thanks for your time and the wonderful scotch,” she said. “It seems we’re too much on opposite sides of this thing to share information.”

He got up to show her out. “You could always ask Agent Branner,” he suggested with a straight face.

“Oh, right, sure I could,” she said, and they both laughed. Over in his cage, Jupiter chuckled agreeably.

Jim followed her up the companionway. She was tiny, but extremely well made. Up on deck, she glanced around. “Nice boat, Mr. Hall. Consulting pays well, I take it?”

“Consulting pays nothing, unfortunately,” he said. “Guess I’m not doing it right.”

“You must be doing something right,” she said. “I don’t think Agent Branner suffers fools gladly.”

“Agent Branner hunts fools on her days off, for fun and pleasure. You shouldn’t attach any significance to my being in this picture, Ms. DeWinter. I’m helping her read the mids when she interviews them. Sometimes they speak in code. Mids don’t think much of civilians.”

“So I’ve discovered, talking to Julie.” A large yacht glided by under power, headed out of Annapolis for the bay. They watched it for a minute. “The more I get around the Academy, the more I think it’s an anachronism in today’s America.”

He nodded. “It probably is, although I think there’s still a place for duty, honor, country in today’s America. Maybe especially in today’s America.”

They both glanced over at the gray mass of Bancroft Hall. The stoical buildings, with their regimented squares of light in rows and columns, dominated the shoreline of Colonial Annapolis. Jim watched the lawyer out of the corner of his eye. Her head came up to about the level of his upper arm. She seemed to be making up her mind about something. He could just detect her perfume.

“Look, Mr. Hall-”

“Call me Jim, if you’d like.”

“Okay. Jim. I’m a civilian. I was married to a military guy once, but he didn’t go here, so I’ve got the same problem that Branner has. Basically, I’ve been hired to keep the system, as everyone seems to call it, from railroading Julie Markham.”

“I suppose that’s possible,” he said slowly, thinking of the commandant. “But Branner sure isn’t approaching it that way. I believe she’s looking for answers.”

“Do you?” she asked. “Or maybe you’ve been invited into this investigation for another reason.”

“Which is?”

“Most of my clients are politicians in trouble. I know how that system works. Whether you know it or not, you might be running top cover for Branner.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Suppose they’ve already decided to lay this off on Julie. Outsiders perceive a midshipman’s death as an Academy failure. This way, they’ll have you to stand up and say that, no, Branner didn’t just go through the motions. You can say you were there and that she conducted a fair and square investigation. Defend her, like you did just now.”

“I still don’t get it,” Jim protested. “I think she is conducting a fair and square investigation.”

“Or she’s going through the motions for your benefit, the decision having been made by the commandant that Julie Markham’s going to take the fall.”

“Branner’s not that devious, counselor. What you see is what you get with her, like it or not.”

“Well, tell me this, then: Whom does Branner work for, as the resident agent for NCIS at the U.S. Naval Academy?”

He thought about it. Her government paycheck came from the NCIS, of course, but her performance ratings would be cosigned, at the very least, by…by-the dant. The dant was the customer. She watched him work it out.

“Who’ve you been talking to?” he asked.

“Ev Markham, for one. Julie’s father. He’s a grad, too, and he’s worried.”

Jim nodded. Professor Markham. “He the one who hired you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, look. I appreciate your insights. But I’m going to continue helping Branner, if she wants me to. I can give you this much: If I see any signs that her investigation is some kind of Kabuki, I’ll call you. Fair enough, Ms. DeWinter?”

“More than fair. And now you can call me Liz.”

“Good deal. Why only now?”

“You just showed a flash of fair play, Jim. Were you by any chance a Marine before you took this security officer job?”

“Aw shucks, does it show?”

“My first ex was a Marine fighter pilot,” she said. “You can take the guy out of the Marines, but you can never take the Marines out of the guy.” She stepped through the gate, being careful of her footing. “Thanks for seeing me this evening, Jim. And if you sense…well, what we talked about, I’d really appreciate that heads-up. Julie Markham doesn’t deserve this.”

“I hope you’re right about that,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it might not be a railroad deal here. It might not be the system. It might in fact be Julie.”

She frowned. “Julie what?”

“Has Julie Markham been absolutely straight with you? Completely forthright? No signs of deception? At all times?”

Liz pursed her lips but didn’t say anything.

“Uh-huh,” he said, nodding. “Stay tuned, counselor. We might all be wrong about what we’re seeing here.”

Liz thought about it, then shook her head. “I don’t think so. My bet stays on the Academy trying to whitewash this, find somebody they can pin it on, and then make sincere pronouncements about closure.”

“Well, I guess we wait and see,” he said. “You have a good evening, Liz.”

She smiled up at him and left. He went back down the companionway, closing the hatch behind him.

Goddamned career women, he thought. Lawyer Liz insisting he call her by her first name, Lock and Load Branner insisting she didn’t have a first name. But both world-class manipulators, if not ball-breakers. He recalled the image of Liz steaming up the pier, tiny but definitely sexy, and yet she’d driven right over him. No wonder she was an ex -wife. Maybe it was something in the Annapolis drinking water.

Jupiter let out an unhappy screech when Jim came back into the lounge.

“Don’t you start, feather merchant,” he growled. “I’ve got places to go tonight.”

At 10:50 P.M., Jim stood in the main tunnel. Ten more minutes, he thought, and then the PWC will do its thing. In the past forty-five minutes, he’d walked the entire length of the main tunnel, from the Bancroft Hall sector, where the rocket had been fired, all the way to the King George Street access doors. He’d tested all the electrical access panels, the two doors to that big air-conditioning compressor chamber, and the doors on every one of the telephone equipment cabinets. He’d checked out each of the cross tunnels for signs of intrusion. The only thing he hadn’t done was to pull up the steel deck plates lining the center of the main tunnel, and only because that would have taken all night.

He didn’t expect his runner to be on the move on a Monday night. The town bars would be pretty much dead as the party-hearty crowd sobered up after the weekend. Midshipmen would be grappling with the start of the working week, recovering from Monday-morning pop quizzes and getting some much-needed sleep after the exertions of weekend liberty. The motion detectors were still in place, but he had disconnected the receiver box and had it in his backpack.