His commander, Lieutenant Colonel Smothers, had described Sanchez as an outstanding officer. But like the rest of the performance reports in Sanchez’s packet, the two signed by Smothers put Sanchez squarely in the middle of the pack. So much for open disclosure.
After I’d been sitting beside the pool for an hour, I saw two bodies steaming up the road, their arms flailing wildly and their legs kicking up and down with great fury. Morrow was in the lead, and the closer they got, the more wildly Delbert’s arms fluttered and whipped, as though he could pull himself through the air to catch up with her. Like I said, these two were very competitive creatures, and both were heaving like draft horses by the time they finally made it to my lounge chair beside the pool. Morrow had on a pair of those skin-hugging nylon runner’s pants, and I have to be honest, she fit into them like they were meant to be fit into. If I were Delbert, I would’ve stayed right behind her the whole way, simply because the view was majestic. But that was me. Delbert was too pure for that kind of stuff.
“Have a nice run?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Morrow heaved out. “Jus’”-puff, puff, puff-“great.”
Delbert was bent over beside her and looked about ready to spill his guts.
“How about you, Delbert?” I asked.
“Nah”-puff, puff, puff-“I… uh”-puff, puff.
“You what?”
“Torn hamstring”-puff, puff.
“Ah, I see. A torn hamstring, huh? Could that be why Morrow beat you?” I said, saving him the trouble of having to spell it out, which it didn’t seem he was going to be able to do for the next few minutes.
Puff, puff-“uh-huh.”
Morrow made no reply, only straightened up and made a very exerted effort to get her breathing under instant control. This took her only about six or seven seconds, and then she was standing there perfectly erect and composed. I guess she figured that if Delbert wasn’t going to accord her a legitimate victory in the race, the least she could do was win the post-run-regain-the-composure contest.
I checked my watch. “We’ve got about thirty minutes before we’re supposed to meet our first suspect.”
The two of them headed upstairs to their rooms, while I loitered beside the pool for another fifteen minutes before I went upstairs to climb back into my uniform.
The Air Force detention center at the air base put the Army to shame. It was damned close to being a luxury hotel, with cable TVs in the cells, separate showers and toilets, and a nice, modern eating hall. I’d seen Army barracks housing innocent soldiers that looked like rickety slums compared to this.
The warden, a chubby Air Force major, met with us before we were permitted to interview his prisoners. He seemed like a nice, amiable fellow and had a double chin that vibrated as he talked. He had lots of kind things to say about Sanchez’s A-team. They had been model prisoners, very polite, very soldierly, very well behaved.
I told him I was sure he had kept the team separated since their detention. He said something real evasive and instantly tried to change the subject, so I got real close to his face and asked him. “These prisoners have been quarantined from one another, haven’t they?” He said no, that the team members were allowed to exercise together, and that three hours a day they were allowed to commingle in the common room. I asked him what idiot had allowed them to commingle. He blushed deeply and said that privilege had been specifically authorized by the Tenth Group commander, General Murphy.
Sanchez’s team was being investigated for conspiracy, among other charges, and any penologist would know that standard procedure called for co-conspirators to be kept strictly separate, so they can’t connive on their alibis. The Air Force major knew a very serious taboo had been violated, and after his blush gained a few shades of darkness, he asked me if I wanted to see a copy of the authorization order from General Murphy. This was his way of covering his ass and staying out of deep doo-doo. I said that I sure as hell did, that I wanted the original, that it had better be waiting for me when I was done, and that I was hereby countermanding the order.
What I really wanted to do was kick the crap out of this chubby little Air Force major, who had just given Sanchez and his team an extra week to mature a common alibi, and thereby made my job about a hundred times harder.
We were then led to a room where we were asked to wait. About three minutes later, Captain Terry Sanchez was led in. He wore battle dress, without manacles or restraints. The Air Force sergeant who led him in then discreetly disappeared.
Sanchez stood frozen beside the doorway as though his feet had sunk into the concrete floor. He studied us like we were lions who had come to devour him. He looked thinner than he had in his photo, and his eyes were harder, less sorrowful, almost tight. Being accused of mass murder can have that effect.
“Captain Sanchez, I’m Sean Drummond, chief of the investigating team, and these are the other two members, James Delbert and Lisa Morrow. Please have a seat,” I said, indicating for him to sit across the table from us.
He walked wordlessly across the floor and fell into the chair.
“This is just a preliminary interview,” I said. “We’ve been told you waived the right to have counsel present. Is that correct?”
“That’s right,” he answered, and his voice broke a little.
“How’s your family doing?” I asked, trying to help him relax.
“They’re fine.”
“You getting to talk to them regularly?”
“Often enough.”
“How are you being treated?”
“They’re treating me fine, Major. Why don’t you cut the crap and get to your questions.”
There was no anger on his face, but he was tightly wound up, like a man being led to the scaffold who just couldn’t bring himself to exchange pleasantries with the crowd.
I smiled back nicely. “Okay, we’ll get right down to business.”
“Good.”
“We have just a few opening questions,” I said, placing the tape recorder on the table between us. “If, at any point, you don’t want to answer a question, that’s your right. I must warn you, however, that this is an official investigation, and if anything you say turns out later to be false, that can result in additional charges.”
Delbert and Morrow shot me a pair of “that was a fairly stupid thing to say” kind of looks. The man was already facing thirty-five charges of murder, among sundry other serious offenses, and here I was threatening him with chump change.
Had Sanchez been anything but an officer in the United States Army, then Delbert and Morrow might have had a point. But he was. And he therefore was likely to feel a certain stiffening in his backbone from my warning. An officer’s integrity was still a cherished relic.
“I understand,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “Please start with the mission of your team when you went into Kosovo.”
He leaned forward and cupped his hands tightly in front of his lips, which any professional interrogator will tell you is exactly the kind of gesture a man might make when he’s preparing to tell a few whoppers. So much for my warning.
“We were part of an operation called Guardian Angel. The KLA company we’d trained was being put into operation. Our job was to accompany them and provide assistance.”
“Assistance? What kind of assistance?”
“Continued training, help with planning operations, that kind of thing.”
“Weren’t they well trained enough to handle themselves?”
“No.”
I withdrew a piece of paper from my bulging legal case. “I have here a copy of the evaluation you gave that team when their training ended. That’s your signature, isn’t it?” I asked, pointing at the tight, almost childlike scrawl at the bottom of the page.
He barely glanced at it. “Yes.”
“You said here they were ready.”
He stared coldly at the paper. “What I said was that they met the minimal standards each KLA company had to attain before they were certified.”