She stopped to examine his Page Thirteen, the chronological listing of assignments and administrative actions. The final entry caught her attention. Galantz had been officially declared missing in action on I June 1970 by direction of the Chief ‘of Naval Personnel.
An official MIA, she thought. Wait a minute. There should have been an investigation conducted by his parent command, Naval Forces Vietnam, following his disappearance in the Rung Sat zone. It would have been a JAG in vestigation, which meant it should have been forwarded to Navy JAG for final review. To the very office you’re working in, she reminded herself. So their own archives ought to have a copy. She kicked herself mentally for not thinking of this before.
She put a call into OP-32. First, she verified that the admiral had returned to the Pentagon from Admiral Schmidt’s house. Then she left a message with the duty yeoman that she would be in her office until eighteen hundred and that she had the Galantz file, and that it had a picture. Then she made copies of the file for the front office and called one of their yeomen to come down to pick up Admiral Carpenter’s copy. Then she waited. The IR office was empty. Train n Rensel had apparently not returned from the NIS heidvo quarters over in the Navy Yard. Everyone else appeared to have gone for the day.
Thirty minutes later, the OP-32 yeoman called back and asked her to come down to Admiral Sherman’s office. She locked up and hurried down there.
“Appreciate your hanging around, Karen,” Sherman said as his deputy went out and closed the door behind him.
“Actually, if that record isn’t classified, perhaps we could go somewhere else. Otherwise, my staff is going to have to hang around.
They can’t secure the divisional spaces if I’m still here.”
“Yes, sir, of course. The JAG spaces are already secured.
Let me think-“
“How about the Army-Navy Club? It’s fifteen minutes by Metro. We could have a drink and discuss what we’re going to do with this information. I need one after this afternoon.”
Thirty minutes later, they were ensconced at a comer table in the second-floor lounge of the Army-Navy Town Club. Karen showed him the three parts of the personnel record, then let him peruse it for a few minutes.
Sherman extracted the print of the official black-and white photograph from the record and put it down on the table in front of him. He spent some time studying it.”Me picture had been taken of then Hospital Corpsman Third Class Galantz in 1963, which meant he had been advanced quickly to HM I by the time of the incident. It was not a very clear picture, having been printed from a microfilm frame, but a steely determination was evident in the man’s face. He looked almost Eastern European, with closecropped unruly black hair and intensely dark, if not black, eyes.
“Did you see that last entry on the Page Thirteen?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Formally declared MIA.”
“Do you remember precisely when he came to see you that night in San Diego?”
“Yes, I do. It was February 1972.”
Karen nodded. “I’m embarrassed to say I thought of something earlier today,” she said. “His parent organization should have done a command JAG investigation when he first went missing. A copy of that investigation should ultimately have come up to Navy JAG for final review. I did a quick search of the Navy JAG archives index for investigation reports dating back as far as 1970, and, in fact, I have found something, or at least an index listing of something. I can’t get it until Monday, but there’s definitely something on file in our archives.”
“That’s terrific, Karen,” he said, his face lighting up. He looked as if he had seen a ray of hope. She realized that he had probably begun to doubt his own memory of those events long ago. Then she pressed ahead with the first of the two questions she really wanted to ask. “Do you believe now that Elizabeth Walsh’s death was a homicide?”
He sighed again and then nodded.
Karen was silent for a minute. Then she took a deep breath and asked the other question that had been on her mind since talking to Train.
“First Elizabeth,” she said slowly, her voice almost indistinct in the rising background noise of the lounge. “And now Galen Schmidt. Your lady friend, and then your mentor.” She looked over at him, waiting for him to understand.
He frowned and then put his drink down. She thought she saw his hand tremble.
“Galen? Are you suggesting-“
“Admiral, I don’t know what to think,” she said hurriedly. “Other than that’s a lot of coincidence. Two people dying, unattended, within a week, both connected to you in a significant and personal way.”
“Judas Priest!”
She leaned forward. “The police are saying that Admiral Schmidt’s death showed no evidence of being anything but a heart attack. And his own doctor participated in the examination, and he says it was a heart attack. A notunexpected heart attack. It’s just-“
He was nodding slowly. “Yes, I see where you’re going with this. And you’re right, perhaps more than you know.
Galen Schmidt was more than a mentor. I followed him to job from the Bureau. He was my personal pillar of a sea strength when my wife finally hit bottom with the drinking.
He kept me from making all the political mistakes ambitious officers usually make. Even when he had to retire, I kept going back to the well. it’s fair to say that he became the father I lost when I was growing up.”
Karen nodded. “But the question is, if someone did something to Admiral Schmidt in order to hurt you, he would have had to know about this relationship.”
He shrugged. “That wouldn’t be difficult, I guess. It was well known in my professional circles that Galen Schmidt was my sponsor when I went up for flag.” He paused thoughtfully. “You’re right: It’s a reach. I can understand his being able to discover Elizabeth. But I can’t see an exenlisted man knowing about the inner workings and hidden Mechanisms of the flag-selection process.”
She thought about that for a minute. The waiter came by and the admiral raised his eyebrows in her direction, but she shook her head. He did the same and asked for their tab.
“But just suppose,” she said, “just suppose that Admiral Schmidt became a target of opportunity, that Galantz has been planning and plotting for a long time, but that part of the plan was to murder Elizabeth, and then see what you did. And when you went to Galen, especially the night you got the warning letter, the admiral became the next target.”
She watched as he thought this through, but then he surprised her. “If that’s true, you’d better start watching your back,” he said. “And I guess we’d better have another sitdown with the Fairfax cops. I hate to say it, but maybe they better take another look at Galen Schmidt’s heart attack.”
She felt a chill of apprehension as Train’s words of warming echoed in her mind. She had been with Sherman when he visited Elizabeth’s house.
And at the church. And at the restaurant. And someone had made the phone call to bring in the police when the admiral found the syringe. She looked up. He was watching her intently. She tried hard to keep her face composed, but either Sherman was being stalked or he had to be the killer. But why?
She shuffled the service records in front of her. “We have to ask the police where that nine-one-one call came from,” she said, stalling. “The one summoning a cop car to that parking lot.
“Yes indeed.”
“But only if the syringe and what was in it was important, I I she pointed out. “I mean, it wasn’t likely that the cops would have arrested you for doing dope in the parking lot, an admiral in full uniform.”
He considered it for a moment. “So maybe we were not the focal point of that phone call?”