Brian Haig - PrivateSector

“Good pals.”

“Uh-huh. She was special, y’know?”

“I know.” When you have extended discussions with former boxers, go with the flow. Too many hard shots in the noggin get the circuits a little scrambled.

That was his excuse.

My dog ate my excuse.

“She did me favors,” Felix informed me. “She was a lawyer, y’know.”

“Yeah. I went against her a few times. Those were my bad beatings.” He chuckled.

After a moment, I asked him, “What kinds of favors, Felix?”

“Legal things. I don’t read so good. My eyes… I probably got hit hard too many times. She filed some papers with the VA so I could get medical benefits… invested some cash for me. I don’t got much, only she made sure it was safe. Never was too good about those things.”

“You’re a vet?”

“Yeah. Korean War.”

I dug into my pocket and withdrew a business card. “I’m a lawyer, too. You need anything, I’m available.”

“Appreciate that.” He stuffed the card in a pocket.

We stared at the sky awhile longer. The night was clear, the normal fumes and pollution banished by a cold snap. Bright stars, a chalk white half-moon, a full and unencumbered view of a spectacular universe. Yet I think Felix and I felt a common twinge of guilt, even remorse, relaxing in front of Lisa’s townhouse, stargazing, while her body was reposing in a morgue.

Janet finally emerged, eyes red and puffy, as though she’d been crying. We walked back to the management office. None of us said anything.

But Janet remarked to Felix as we got in the car, “Don’t call the police until we tell you to.” She placed a hand on his arm. “Can you do that?”

“I gotta repair that window.”

“Please do. But nothing to the police yet, okay?”

“Uh… okay.”

Anyway, Felix dug my card out of his pocket and peered at it, until I recalled that he couldn’t read. I said to him, “My name’s Sean Drummond. I’ll call in a few days, okay?”

“Uh, okay.”

We departed. Possibly it was, as I mentioned to Janet, a case of bottom-feeding crooks tossing the home of a deceased person. The world is filled with foul sorts who profit in the misery of others. Or possibly the robbers were hopheads who trashed the place in a dope-induced frenzy.

A more dubious mind, however, might suspect that the chaotic tossing was in the nature of a ruse to disguise a more calculated and painstaking search of Lisa’s belongings. But why the sheer disorder and destruction? Far safer to put everything back in place, neat and tidy, exactly as Lisa Morrow lived her life, right?

Unless.

Unless something needed to be taken away, something that had to be studied, something that had to be examined in privacy. Lisa’s personal computer, for example. Army lawyers are notoriously overworked, and Lisa probably brought work home, and she would’ve been careful to have all the modern software protections, like a password entry that would require time and a skilled nerd to get past. Under that scenario, the TV, microwave, jewelry, and so forth were lifted to disguise the true purpose of the break-in.

The law breeds lawyers to respect facts and exercise skepticism about conjecture, hunches, and so forth. A leads to B, which leads to C, but A doesn’t leap to Z. And I might have considered it far-fetched had Janet not just persuaded Felix to withhold reporting the robbery. A to Z, right? She had just involved Felix in a crime, not to mention me, and, incidentally, herself.

So we sat together in my elegant leased Jaguar, her having certain suspicions, and me entertaining certain suspicions, neither of us sharing, so to speak. I didn’t like this silly game, but I was forced to play along-for the time being.

But Janet Morrow struck me as smarter than this. When we walked through that apartment, she had bypassed the other thefts and damage, headed straight for the bedroom, and noted only that the computer was stolen. Arbitrary? I think not. Dropping bread-crumbs for clueless Sean Drummond? Possibly.

But if Lisa had been murdered by a garden-variety serial killer, why would he break into her apartment and steal her things? Trophies? Or did someone else do the theft? Was there a relationship to her murder? I was getting a headache.

Also, I was getting a better bead on Miss Janet Morrow. That ladylike exterior, those lovely Boston manners, and those oh so properly reasoned responses concealed a truly conniving mind. Her sister Lisa once informed me that my approach to life was bull-headed. I took it as a compliment, though I’m not sure it was intended as such. Janet Morrow was a spider, building a web, and slyly collecting the men and pieces she felt she needed to solve this crime.

But another thought struck me. I had thought I knew Lisa fairly well. We had worked together for long days and nights on an investigation that was dangerous, tense, and in the end forced us both to search deeply into our souls about who we were and what we believed. I had seen her in court and around the office countless times, flirted with her intermittently for two years, and yet, I was quickly realizing, I had only scratched the surface.

Since her death, I had met her family, learned she had the big-time hots for me, that she was planning on leaving the Army to join a civilian firm, and that she was the type to take a duckling with broken wings under her care.

I was falling in love with Lisa Morrow, after the fact.

On my desk the next morning was a message from Barry informing me of a ten o’clock meeting in his office. Also a long manila envelope, containing an aerial photo of a few tiny specks in the middle of a big, blue ocean. A sidebar note said, “Johnston Island Atoll, look it up on the Internet: Behave. Clapper.”

Has that guy got a sense of humor or what? Actually he doesn’t, so I looked it up on the Internet. Average population around 100, all but a tiny handful being civilian contractors who rotate through on two- or three-day stints. The atoll contained a facility for the destruction of chemical weapons, a process with so many safeguards and catch-alls that the Army guaranteed it to be, like 99.999 percent accident-proof. That other. 001 was, I presumed, why it wasn’t next to New York City. After the last chemical weapon was destroyed, the article continued, the atoll was slated to become a bird sanctuary for whatever kind of idiot bird wanted a perch on the highly prestigious endangered species list.

Clapper can be very annoying.

However, that reminded me, and I called his office and asked his executive assistant to run down Lisa’s previous assignments and task her former offices to conduct a file search for all sex cases she had handled or been involved with. I implied I was doing this at the behest of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division.

What was interesting was that the executive assistant did not say he had already received such a request-ten demerits for Spinelli.

As it was, I was fairly certain the whole drill was a complete waste of time. But in murder investigations the most unlikely routes sometimes turn out to be the path to a killer.

Speaking of a waste of time, the Pentagon naturally has a manual that details its procurement and protest procedures, and I spent the three hours before Barry’s meeting reading it cover-to-cover. I was a little tired of Mr. Bosworth rubbing my nose in shit, and if you want to beat the home team on their own turf, you have to work at it a little.

I entered Barry’s office at ten on the dot, and he looked up and said, “Well, well… look who’s finally shown up.”

What the…? Four people were already seated around his conference table, jackets on the backs of chairs, empty coffee cups and water bottles strewn about.