I went back inside to hunt for a few specific items I'd seen listed with the bike on the breakdown of Ruben's effects. I found some of the items in the third box I opened. One was a digital Handycam. The batteries still held some juice. I fired it up and checked its folders. Empty. The other item was an Apple PowerBook. I pressed the start button and waited for it to boot up. I don't know what I expected to find, but whatever it was it wasn't there. Aside from a bunch of old nineties hits burned into iTunes, it was completely devoid of documents, e-mails, photos, movies. There was nothing.
I replaced the Handycam and computer in the box, disappointed. I wandered out of my office in search of Agent Lyne. I found him in a back room.
“Do you know if Colonel Selwyn's around?” I asked, leaning on the doorway. I had some news for her she might not like. Or maybe that was my ego talking. Would she care that I was leaving town? Maybe she'd strike up the band.
Agent Lyne ignored me. I called louder. “Yo, Lloyd!”
Nothing. I became aware of a distant sound that reminded me of chipmunks rioting before I saw the little white iPod buds in his ears. He had the volume turned way up. I tapped him on the shoulder, which made him jump. He turned and pulled out the buds.
“Don't think much of your old pal's taste in music,” he yelled. “Full of nineties crap.”
I gestured at him to hand it over. He shrugged and pulled the unit from his breast pocket. It was new, of course, and top of the line. I toured the playlists — Aerosmith, Metallica, Hootie and the Blowfish, LL Cool J, U2, Matchbox 20. I didn't share Lyne's problem with Ruben's music taste. On a hunch, I checked its settings. It didn't contain many songs — one hundred at most. Not enough to account for all the memory used. I checked the video folder. Empty.
I backtracked into my office, restarted the PowerBook, jacked in the iPod, and waited for everything to fire up. The icon for the iPod appeared on the computer's screen. Ruben had titled it “Sgt. Rock.” Cute. I double-clicked it and a window appeared. Inside the window there was a folder titled “Bitch.” In the folder were a large number of MPEGs and JPEGs. Each MPEG was dated. Ruben must have stored them here so they couldn't be played on the iPod's screen. I opened the MPEG with the earliest date, taken close enough to seven weeks ago. The clip opened on a slow pan along a beach, empty except for a few joggers. It was not a sunny day by the looks of things. Then the camera zoomed in on something a long way in the distance. After what seemed a moment of hesitation, the camera had come in for an even closer look. I could now make out more detail. It was a couple making out on the sand. They were dry humping each other. The person on top rolled off. I recognized the person on the bottom first. The red hair gave her away. Her dance partner turned briefly toward the camera. It was Staff Sergeant Butler. He unzipped his fly and extracted his erection, which McDonough shoved down her throat with the gusto of a plumber trying to unblock a drain. The show ended prematurely. Counting back the weeks, the recording would have been made at around the time Ruben first tried to change his will. Given that I don't believe in coincidences, the timing was at least suggestive.
I watched the other MPEGs and opened the photos. The dates on the files indicated Ruben had his girlfriend and Staff Sergeant Butler under close observation for the ensuing eight-week period leading up to his death. There were even a couple of MPEGs taken through the lens of a night-vision monocle, McDonough and Butler looking as green as tree frogs as they slid around on each other in the backseat of her Chevy.
So which hypothesis did this discovery support?
“The colonel is in, sir,” said Lyne, breaking in on my train of thought.
“What? Sorry, who?”
“Colonel Selwyn. You asked earlier whether the colonel was in. Well, she's in.”
“OK, thanks,” I said. I had to tell her I was leaving town. And there were also the discoveries found on Ruben's iPod. The old good-news, bad-news thing. I wondered what she'd want to hear first.
THIRTY
Give me the bad,” Clare said, a realist. Her hair was pulled back off her face in a tight ponytail, accentuating her strong cheekbones. She was dressed in BDUs. I found it impossible not to think about what she might be wearing under them. A framed photo of her son sat on her desk, his innocent, big brown eyes following me. Sorry, kid.
“I'm leaving tomorrow,” I said, straight out. “Orders.”
“And the good?” she replied, without the slightest flicker of regret evident. Clare Selwyn wasn't the type who'd be standing on a train platform waving anyone good-bye with a tear-sodden hanky, unless it was her son.
“That doesn't bother you? The fact that I'm leaving?” I said.
“Of course I'm disappointed. The sex was pretty good, but this is the Air Force.” She shrugged. “What can you do?”
The sex was pretty good. Pretty good? I'd have said amazing.
“So, the good news?” she asked again, this time with a frown.
I took her through the discoveries on Wright's iPod by showing her, loading the QuickTime MPEGs up on her computer. “So what do you think?” I said when we'd gone through them all.
“I think you should spend your last evening in Fort Walton Beach with me,” she said, using that command tone of hers.
“For some more of that pretty good sex?”
“Who said anything about sex, Vin? I'm just talking about a home-cooked meal. You're probably not going to get one of those for a while. And maybe we can talk about the case.”
“Sure,” I said. She was toying with me. Cat-and-mouse might be another of Clare's little games. The thought of having dinner with her was a distraction. It took a moment or two to lift my head out of her pantry and get back to Ruben Wright. “The further I get into this case, the more I'm wondering about the other side,” I said.
“What other side? What do you mean?”
I stood and walked to the window. There were clouds in the sky now, white on top and gray beneath as if they couldn't decide which sort to be. “Right from the get-go we both believed the most likely scenario was that someone who jumped with Ruben cut him out of his harness. Butler seemed our best suspect because of the flashlight and his injuries.”
Clare nodded. “I've just completed the tests on that flashlight, by the way. The red lens material you recovered near the crime scene belonged to it.”
“So no surprises there,” I said. “On the face of it, you'd have to say Butler's our man. Except…”
“…except for what we now know about Master Sergeant Ruben Wright.”
“Yeah.” I made the points on my fingers. “One: He had MS, a fact he'd kept from the Air Force. It was the aggressive variety, so he didn't have long till the Air Force evened the score and had him medically discharged. Two: He'd discovered his girlfriend was saucing Butler's sausage. Three: The ultimate insult to a guy like Ruben — he discovered that McDonough was pregnant with Butler's kid. My guess is that it might even have been Butler who gave him the news. Four: Amy McDonough was the sole beneficiary of Ruben's will, a will he tried to change at a time that roughly coincided with the date of the first home movie of Butler and McDonough making like turtles up the beach.”
“So now you think that perhaps Ruben Wright, to get back at his cheating girlfriend and the English staff sergeant, killed himself in such a way as to frame Butler in the role of perp?”
“A reach, isn't it?”
Clare gave a noncommittal shrug. “Like you, I think I'm almost convinced enough not to be totally convinced about murder.”
“There are a couple of other issues I don't have answers to,” I said.