“I guess. Shit. I’m going to miss lunch.”
He could hear the formation bells ringing out in the halls. “I believe you already have. Get going. And call me back.”
He hung up and stood there for a moment. He was grateful that the departmental office complex was empty. Everyone else, including Dolly now, had gone somewhere, either for lunch or to work out. There were individual offices for the department chair, who was a Navy captain, and for each full professor. There was also a conference room, and some smaller shared offices for newer faculty and visitors. There were no students hanging around, either. Unlike students at a civilian college, midshipmen had their time strictly regulated: They were in Bancroft Hall, out on the athletic fields, or in class in one of the academic buildings. Midshipmen rarely spent time lingering around the departmental offices.
He walked over to his own office to make sure his cell phone was on, wondering what the hell this was all about. The commandant of midshipmen’s office was in Bancroft Hall itself. He and his deputy, Captain Rogers, directly oversaw every aspect of the midshipmen’s daily life through a chain of command comprised of commissioned officers who were designated battalion and company officers. The four thousand midshipmen were assigned to six battalions of five companies each. Having been a midshipman, Ev knew that a summons to the commandant’s office was trouble, plain and simple. With her high academic standing and her athletic achievements as a competitive swimmer, Julie was one of the stars of her class, so this wasn’t likely to be about a conduct offense. Another large-scale cheating episode, perhaps? God, he hoped not. The Academy didn’t need another one of those, especially after all the ongoing controversy over the ethics and honor courses.
Forty-five minutes later, his suspicions were confirmed. Julie called in on his regular number. She asked in a wooden, stilted voice if he could come over to Bancroft Hall.
“Certainly,” he said, not liking her tone of voice. “But what’s going on?”
“Can’t talk,” she said, lowering her voice. “I’ll meet you in the rotunda. We can talk there.”
“Five minutes,” he said, and hung up. He left a note for Dolly that he had been called away on an urgent personal matter and would be late for the departmental meeting. Then he grabbed his suit coat and hustled out the door.
Julie was waiting for him in the spacious main entrance to Bancroft Hall, the eight-wing, five-storied marble and granite Beaux Arts dormitory complex that was home to the nearly four thousand midshipmen composing the Brigade. She was standing to one side of the ornate marble-floored entrance, looking small beneath the massive naval murals lining the cavernous rotunda. He felt a small pang in his heart when he looked at his daughter: Julie looked so much like her mother-medium height, dark-haired, pretty, and bright-eyed, except that right now she wasn’t so bright-eyed. Her face was rigid with what looked to him like massive embarrassment. Fifty feet above her head was a twenty-foot-wide color mural depicting battleships under air attack in World War II. It somehow seemed appropriate.
He went to her and saw that she was struggling to contain tears. A couple of passing midshipmen, youngsters, with a single anchor insignia on their shirt collars and arms laden with books, glanced at him in his civilian suit and tie but kept going. Being sophomores, they wouldn’t necessarily know he was faculty, so he looked like what he was: a visiting father, here to talk to his daughter. A freestanding wooden privacy partition masked the side hallways leading back into the Brigade hallways. He saw a lieutenant he did not recognize standing next to the executive corridor partition, watching them. Probably someone from the Executive Department. Given the weird acoustics of the rotunda, he was close enough to eavesdrop.
“Want to go somewhere?” he asked softly, eyeing the watching officer.
“Can’t,” she said through clamped jaws. “They say I have to meet some people from NCIS in a few minutes.”
That stopped him. NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Emphasis on the word Criminal. “NCIS? What the hell, Julie?”
She looked right at him, keeping her back to the lieutenant and her voice low. “That plebe who jumped this morning? They’re saying it had something to do with me. The commandant just put me through some kind of interrogation. It’s almost like they think I’m responsible. You know, for what he did.”
“Good Lord. Did you even know him?”
“Only sort of,” she said. “I mean, he’s a plebe. Was a plebe, I guess.” She turned and glared pointedly at the lieutenant. The young officer finally stepped back behind the partition to give them some privacy. That was his Julie: not one to take crap from anybody.
“Why do they think that?”
She shrugged. “They say there’s something that ties him to me.”
“Like…”
“The dant wouldn’t say. It was like ‘We’ll ask the questions; you answer.’”
He started to say something but stopped. The word had gone through the entire Academy like quicksilver before first-period classes. A plebe named William Brian Dell was dead, the victim of a fall from the roof of the eighth wing. And now there was something that tied the victim to Julie?
“I don’t know what’s been going on since the incident,” she said. “But they sent for me just before I called you. The dant just sat there. Captain Rogers did the talking. Asked if I knew him. I did remember him from plebe summer detail. His name was Dell. Like the computer company? He was in our batt. Had him come around a few times, but then, I don’t know, I quit running him. He seemed to be flailing. I didn’t think he’d last.”
Julie had been a member of the prestigious plebe summer detail, a small cadre of rising seniors who ran the seven-week summer indoctrination program for the incoming class of plebes. The objective of plebe summer was to turn civilians into midshipmen. It was an exhausting regimen, during which the plebes got a taste of what was coming when the full Brigade returned from its summer cruise. But only a taste-the reality was worse. Up at West Point, they called their version of it “Beast Barracks.”
“So what-you were helping him?”
She turned away for a moment. “When I called you this morning, I didn’t know it was Dell. Who jumped, I mean. Anyway, they started in asking if I knew Midshipman Fourth Class Dell. I told them, yes, I did. Then they told me he was the one who fell. They keep saying ‘fell.’”
“They probably don’t know yet, Julie. They’re going to have to do an investigation.”
“They seemed pretty insistent that he fell, like they’d heard the scuttlebutt going around and were laying down the party line. You know, play down any suicide angle. But then-”
She stopped. The lieutenant was back.
“So they’re bringing in NCIS?” he asked. “Are they accusing you of something?”
“I don’t know. That’s what’s pissing me off. And the dant wasn’t exactly being friendly. You know, what’s happened has to be someone’s fault, because of course it’s going to embarrass the Academy. But NCIS? Should I have a lawyer or something?”
Ev hesitated. Whenever a Navy service member was seriously injured or killed while on active duty, it was standard procedure for his command to initiate a so-called line-of-duty investigation. NCIS normally would not be brought in unless the authority convening the investigation thought that the incident was the result of criminal or suspicious acts.
“And they won’t tell you what this so-called tie is between you and Dell?”
“No. I asked. They said that was privileged information for the moment.”
Ev didn’t like the sound of that. The lieutenant was signaling something to Julie. As Ev turned to see what was going on, the commandant himself appeared and headed toward them. Ev felt Julie stiffen to attention by his side.
Jim Hall perched on the edge of the conference room table, a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand. He was trying not to stare at the female NCIS agent’s legs, but it was difficult-she was sitting rather carelessly in the armchair at the head of the conference table while she read the report from the ER, and the view was expansive. Her partner, a young-looking black guy, who was sitting in one of the side chairs, saw Jim peeking and grinned at him. What the hell, Jim thought. She has great legs, even if she is a cop. Correction: special agent. As in Special Agent Branner. No first name, apparently. Branner was the head of the Academy’s local NCIS office. She shook her head and looked up.