Michael Mcgarrity - Slow Kill

A cluster of stark concrete buildings, each ornamented by ground-to-roof pillars and connected by glassed-in breezeways known to the staff as gerbil tubes, defined the main campus. Three high-rise towers served as student dormitories, all within easy walking distance of the classrooms, pool, gym, dining hall, and conference halls in the various buildings laid out in a tight geometrical pattern.

The grassy lawns and stands of trees that surrounded the buildings didn’t suppress the Spartan feeling. Woodlands bordering the athletic fields and outdoor shooting ranges were rigorously pruned back and held in check. North, behind the red-and-white-striped water tower, the forest spread down to a lake, reserved for the use of military and academy personnel and their families.

In the reception area of the administration building, Kerney’s credentials were reviewed again and a temporary visitor’s pass was issued. While he waited for his escort, he wondered if J. Edgar, the groundhog who lived in one of the enclosed patio areas, was still in residence.

A secretary from the Leadership and Management Science Unit came through the glass door and greeted him. The woman wore the conservative attire favored by the FBI, a pair of black slacks and a white blouse with a subdued bow around her neck. She led him through a maze of hallways and breezeways to a suite of offices, where he was introduced around to the few staff members who were at their workstations.

Assigned to a small office crammed with three desks, chairs, and file cabinets, he settled in to prepare for his two-week stint as a visiting instructor. First, he looked over his schedule. He would teach two morning-long classes, attend a three-hour seminar on terrorism, participate in a roundtable discussion on leadership development, and speak at an evening conference on community policing for midsize law enforcement agencies. All in all, it was light duty with plenty of free time built in.

Classes were already in session, and his first order of business was to attend a luncheon meeting with full-time and visiting faculty in the executive dining room. He reviewed the list of assigned instructors. Edward Ramsey, of the FBI Law Enforcement Communication Unit, was scheduled to teach an afternoon class next week on public speaking and media relations.

Kerney wondered if he was the same Ed Ramsey who’d once headed up the Santa Barbara PD. The instructor resumes inside the three-ringed binder of student course materials confirmed he was. That meant it should be easy to approach Ramsey and engage him in conversation. He’d be interested to learn if Ramsey knew about his meetings with Captain Chase. He hoped so.

He put the binder aside, took out the lecture notes he’d prepared before leaving Santa Fe, and started adding to them.

After a lengthy morning meeting, Sara returned to her cubicle at the Pentagon to find George Spalding’s military service jacket on her desk. Known as a 201 file, it contained, among other things, information on Spalding’s military training and occupational specialty, performance ratings and promotions, awards and decorations, medical/dental records, pay and allowances, permanent duty assignments, and disciplinary actions.

The file confirmed Spalding had been a graves registration specialist and not a military policeman. According to his performance ratings, he’d been a marginal soldier at best; so much so that, had he survived his tour of duty in Vietnam, he would have been denied a Good Conduct Medal. However, he was awarded the National Defense and the Vietnam Service medals.

While Spalding was in Nam, his promotion from private first class to specialist fourth class had been delayed due to a CID investigation into missing personal effects of soldiers killed in action. He’d been cleared of any wrongdoing, but a sergeant in his unit had been tried and convicted for theft under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Sara made copies of Spalding’s dental charts and the CID report for Kerney, put them in her briefcase, and reviewed her notes from her latest meeting with the brass, which had been a rehash of her original marching orders.

Her immediate boss, a brigadier general, had made it clear that none of the closed sexual assault cases would be reopened. Everything in the report to Congress was to be forward-looking and proactive. He wanted loopholes closed, coordination improved, policies defined, protocols recommended, training proposed, staffing patterns detailed, and nothing more.

Post commanders could be interviewed only to gain feedback about how the system could be improved. No case studies of actual investigations were to be included; only a statistical model of the investigations, with graphs and charts, would be incorporated in the report.

She’d griped to Kerney about the decision by the brass to sanitize the shoddy sexual assault investigations, and her dissatisfaction with the assignment was deepening. The agenda was pure face-saving, buck-passing, Teflon-coated gamesmanship.

Sara had come to her Pentagon post as a realist, knowing full well that not everyone in command operated ethically or honestly. But she was saddled with a petty, childish tyrant of a boss, who was more interested in making rank than doing the right thing.

Two choices faced her: She could play the marionette, get her ticket punched, and move up a rung on the ladder. Or she could exercise initiative and risk short-circuiting her career.

Her gut told her that she really didn’t have a choice. No woman willing to serve her country, who’d been viciously assaulted and violated while performing her duty, deserved anything less than justice. The shackles put on her by the higher-ups were unacceptable. She would have to find a way to push the envelope and try to force the brass to confront a reality they dearly wanted to avoid. How to do that without scuttling her career was the question.

She touched the glass jar of seashells she’d collected from the beaches in Ireland. A memento from their honeymoon, it brought back happy memories of early morning walks with Kerney along the wild, misty western coast, whitecaps breaking in ink-black water against the shore.

She turned her attention back to Spalding’s 201 file. The CID investigator, Chief Warrant Officer Noah Schmidt, who’d cleared Spalding of any involvement in the decades-old stolen property case, might very well be an important source of information for Kerney.

She put in a request to personnel to see if Schmidt was a lifer still on active duty or retired military now working as a civilian for DOD or a branch of the armed services. Then she called the Defense Finance and Accounting Services in Kentucky, which handled military retirement pay, and the Armed Forces Record Center in St. Louis, and asked for a fast check on the man. Hopefully, she’d know something by the end of the day.

Down the hall, Master Sergeant Wilma Lipinski, who worked for Sara, was at her desk. With twenty-eight years of active duty service, Lipinski had recently rotated into the Pentagon from a first sergeant posting with a military police company. Only exceptional noncoms were authorized to stay in the ranks for thirty years, and Lipinski was one of them.

“Ma’am?” Lipinski asked as Sara stepped into her cubicle.

“Have you read my briefing summary on our new assignment?” Sara asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Lipinski replied cautiously. A sturdily built, middle-aged woman, the daughter of a retired Chicago fireman, she’d won the Bronze Star for valor while serving in Bosnia.

“What do you think about it?” Sara asked.

“On or off the record, Colonel?”

“Off the record, Sergeant.”

“It sucks, ma’am.”

“Exactly,” Sara said, taking a seat. “How many of the sexual assault cases are still carried as active?”