“Well, the prosecution is calling Hernandez as an eyewitness to the atrocity you allegedly committed. If he’s as believable as his CID statement, we’re in trouble.” She adopted a carefully neutral, professional tone.
“And what, he says I did it? I was some kind of mass murderer of eighty-seven civilians?”
“Yeah.”
“I told you, Colonel Marks gave the order to waste the whole village. ‘To teach ’em a lesson,’ he said. Hernandez was the XO, Marks’s loyal number two-it wouldn’t surprise me if he was one of the shooters. I wouldn’t participate in the cover-up, so they turned the tables and blamed me. That’s what this is all about. It was thirteen years ago, for God’s sake, I don’t know why they don’t just let it go away.”
“The Criminal Investigation Division interviewed the entire unit. They must have interviewed you, too.”
“Sure they did. They interrogated me at length, and I told them the truth. Obviously I didn’t do a statement for them.”
“And you didn’t report this to anyone? The truth, I mean?”
“Report to who? You don’t know the military. You keep your mouth shut and your head down and hope for the best.”
“But some of the guys in the unit must have seen you on the other side of the village. Some of them must know you weren’t there.”
“You’re not going to get anyone to testify to that. Either they took part in the massacre, or they’re part of the cover-up. They probably all have deals, immunity, whatever. You can find that out in discovery, can’t you?”
“They’re required to tell me. You didn’t have any friends in the unit? Any guys who might have refused to deal, but agreed to keep silent? Who might be willing to help you out now?”
“I liked maybe three guys in the unit. One or two of them I’d call friends. You know I don’t make close friends easily. Anyway, how do I know they didn’t fire at the villagers.”
“Tom,” she began. “Ron.”
“You can call me Ron, if you want,” Tom said softly. “If you’d feel more comfortable.”
“I know you as Tom. But that’s made up, isn’t it?”
“It’s the name I chose, not the one my parents gave me. I became Tom with you. I sort of like being Tom.”
“Tom, why should I believe you? Really. You’ve lied to me for six years, as long as I’ve known you. Really.”
“I lied about my past. To protect you from the kind of crazies who don’t fuck around. Who if they heard the slightest whisper that I was alive and living in Boston would have tracked me down and killed me and everyone around me. I should never have fallen in love with you, Claire. I should never have ruined your perfect life, me, with my horrible background-”
“You didn’t ruin my life.” Tears misted her eyes. She exhaled slowly.
“Claire, I’ve been thinking a lot about who might know the truth. About what really happened. There is a guy.” He bit his lower lip. “Someone who knows about what really happened. He’ll have the proof. He knows the Pentagon’s trying to cover this up. I’ll bet he can turn up the documents for you.”
“Who?”
He took her pencil and scribbled a note on one of her legal pads. He whispered: “Keep this name locked up. Destroy this paper. I mean, flush it down the toilet.”
She glanced at it. Her eyebrows shot up.
“Tom,” she said, “I have to ask you something else.” She told him about the grisly incident with the neighbor’s dog and the mailbox back in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Tom closed his eyes, shook his head slowly. “Come on. I did live off-base, they got the right address, but I bet, if you try to track this supposed ‘neighbor’ down, you’ll find he doesn’t exist.” His eyes were moist. “Claire, we need to talk.”
“Okay,” she said guardedly.
“Listen to me. You are my rock right now. When Jay took off, I was there for you because I valued you as a friend. I’ve tried to be a rock for you, because I love you. But now I need you. I can’t tell you how hurtful it is that the person I love most in all the world doubts me.”
“Tom-”
“Let me finish. I’m utterly alone here. Totally alone. And if it wasn’t for you, your faith in me, I don’t think I’d make it. I really wouldn’t.”
“What does that mean?” she asked softly.
“Just that I don’t think I’d live through it if I thought you didn’t believe in me. I need you. I love you, you know that. Deeply. When this is over, if I pull through this okay, we’re going to get our life back. I need you, honey.”
She felt the tears spring to her eyes, and she hugged him, hard. She felt the sweat rising hotly from his shoulders.
“I love you, too, Tom,” was all she could say.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The library in the rented house was the real thing, an old-house, old-money library. Linen-white-painted bookshelves that held not just the requisite leather-bound antiquarian volumes in sets of ten and twenty and fifty, but real books as well, recent and not-so-recent hardcover editions, mostly politics and history, no fiction in sight. The sort of books that the owner of the house, right now perhaps drinking un caffè macchiato at a café in Siena, probably actually read. His library was the century-old prototype of Claire and Tom’s modern study back in Cambridge.
Captain Embry, dressed in civilian clothes (brand-new deep-indigo jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, both neatly pressed), sat on a hard chair at a side table, taking notes with a chewed Bic pen on a legal pad. Grimes (once again in his 1970s orange Day-Glo sweater) was sunk deep in a floral-upholstered wing chair, legs splayed.
Claire sat, smoking, at the immense oak library table, surrounded by law books: Military Rules of Evidence Manual, Military Criminal Justice: Practice and Procedure, Manual for Courts-Martiaclass="underline" United States. “So all the prosecution is planning to present at the 32 hearing”-already she spoke like an old hand-“are those seven CID statements and one so-called eyewitness, this Jimmy Hernandez guy, to corroborate? That all?”
“Yeah,” Grimes said. “The government doesn’t have to present everything they got. Just enough. Remember, all they got to do is demonstrate there’s enough probable cause to go on to a court-martial. It would be dumb for them to present more than the bare minimum.”
Embry put in: “The idea is, we’re supposed to try to knock it out.”
“Which ain’t gonna happen,” Grimes said. “No matter how hard we try. So consider the 32 as the government’s tryout, their audition. We get the chance to scope out their case in advance, see what they put on the table. Cross-examine to point out all the weaknesses.”
“What about the other six members of Burning Tree who gave statements?” asked Claire. “Why aren’t they being called as witnesses?”
“One, they don’t have to,” Grimes replied. “Any witnesses who are ‘legally unavailable,’ meaning more than a hundred miles away, don’t have to appear. Two, the government doesn’t need ’em.”
Claire nodded. “Can they surprise us? Pop something on us at the hearing?”
Embry said, “Normally they give you the evidence as soon as they get it.”
“Yeah,” Grimes said, inspecting the ornate detail on the vaulted ceiling, “or they might give it to us a day or two before. But I doubt they’re going to surprise us at the hearing. They want to be able to say they gave us everything in advance.”
“Anyway,” Embry said, “if they do drop something on us, we ask for a continuance, that’s all.”
“Same as a civilian court,” Claire said. “But what about Article 46 of the code? The equal-access clause?”
Grimes lowered his head and turned slowly to regard her. “Someone’s got the UCMJ on her bedside table.”
“We get ‘equal opportunity to obtain witnesses and other evidence’ blah blah blah, right?” Claire said.