“I’m wondering if that’s what happened to Dell. Julie called him ‘weak.’ Right from the first, during that plebe summer. She says he appeared to be struggling. If someone combined that opinion of him with an innuendo that he was also a homosexual, he could end up feeling really cornered.”
Ev nodded. “But that would imply suicide, not homicide.”
She shook her head. “I just don’t know. From an outsider’s perspective, all I see are lots of windows, but I can’t see anything inside. But the civilian system’s saying there might be a murderer in there.”
“I can’t see that,” Ev said, shaking his head. “When I was there, there were some plebes who got through plebe year who shouldn’t have. We all knew it. Guys with no moral fiber. Liars. Shirkers. Some ex-enlisted who knew how to get by. Guys who held the system in visible contempt. But we also knew that the system would eventually catch up with them: They’d cheat on an exam, or lie, or do something else that would get them sideways with the honor system. And that’s what happened.”
“You’re implying that most midshipmen believe in the ‘system,’ as you call it.”
“Basically, they do. We do. I think West Point says it better than we do: Duty, honor, country. Midshipmen are proud to be there. They want to serve their country. They hold the profession of arms to be an honorable endeavor. They’ll bitch and moan about the red-ass nature of daily life in Bancroft Hall, but down deep, they believe in it.”
“And yet we have a homicide investigation in progress. We think, anyway.”
He sipped his coffee and tried to think of a way to explain what it was like inside Bancroft Hall. The hivelike relationships among the upperclassmen, the plebes, the commissioned officers of the executive department, the companies themselves. A civilian just wasn’t going to understand all that. Liz was looking at her watch.
“Tomorrow’s a workday, unfortunately,” she said. “I’d better go.”
“Thanks for sharing that tape with me,” he said. “Or most of it, anyway.”
“She meant well, I think. I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything.”
He saw her out, then went back into the kitchen to clean up. The evening had not gone the way he’d envisioned it. He paused over the trash can, his hands full of pizza wrapping. Liz suspected that Julie was holding something back. Surely his daughter understood the danger of that.
He dropped the stuff into the trash can and put the silverware and coffee mugs into the dishwasher. What he hadn’t said to Liz was that there was another explanation possible in the Dell matter: that this wasn’t a case of a consensus decision on the part of the upperclassmen to drive out an unworthy plebe, but perhaps the work of a single upperclassman, some secret bastard who’d managed to fool the system long enough to rise to firstie status. As much as he would defend the Naval Academy, the midshipmen, and their sense of pride in being part of that duty, honor, country ethic, he knew as well as anyone who had actually been inside that the kids were very different today from when he’d gone through. He’d met enough of Julie’s classmates to know that they had experienced more of life than he ever had at that stage. If an evil kid, evil in the Columbine sense, was smart enough to get through the academic program without having to lie, cheat, or steal, he could play havoc in the military school culture of Mother Bancroft. The system was, after all, based on trust and expectations, and Ev had encountered a couple of midshipmen in the past few years who occasionally dropped the mask of military subservience long enough to reveal quite another attitude. What had happened to Brian Dell might have been the work of one of those gifted, smiling psychopaths who live in plain sight and fool all the people all the time until they do something truly unspeakable.
He shook his head to drive away that unsettling thought. With four thousand talented American kids in there, of course it was possible. It was just not likely.
You hope, he thought.
Jim Hall reached the grating entrance behind Mahan Hall at just after eleven o’clock Thursday night. He’d told only the chief that he’d be going into the tunnels tonight, not wanting to alert Public Works. Bustamente had asked Jim to page him once he came back out, but he had not seemed otherwise concerned.
The grating was at the right-rear edge of Mahan Hall, beneath an embankment of grass. During the winter, it exhaled a column of steamy air into the Yard, with the thickness of the column a function of how many steam leaks there were down there. Tonight, the column was visible but not very dense. The windows of the nearby academic buildings were illuminated, in contrast to those of Alumni Hall, which was pretty much at darkened-ship. The difference being in who was paying the lighting bills, Jim thought. The night was misty, with no wind and a promise of real fog later on. The light at the top of the chapel dome was already framed in a halo of moisture. The midshipmen were, theoretically anyway, bedded down in Bancroft Hall for the night.
He was dressed in a one-piece engineering-maintenance jumpsuit, with a black knit watch cap on his head, tropical-weight Marine combat boots, and black leather gloves. He hadn’t bothered bringing his cell phone or pager, because the reception in the tunnels was nonexistent. He did carry a Marine combat knife strapped to his right leg, two Maglite flashlights, one large, one small, on his belt, and a Glock strap-holstered in the small of his back. He wore a small lightweight backpack, in which he had a bottle of water, a battery-powered motion-detector box, a compact first-aid kit, and one can of black spray paint.
He lifted the grating that covered the slanting steel ladder, slipped underneath, and then let it back down. He descended the ladder into a concrete pit that ended in a steel door. He had the series key to this and the other Yard entrance doors, courtesy of the chief. For fire-fighting purposes, one key opened all the grating access doors. It also meant that anyone who could get a copy of this key would have free run of the tunnel system, although Jim knew that some of the main communications centers had additional locks. He suspected that there might be other access points inside Bancroft Hall, but he had not found them yet.
He closed the door behind him and looked around. He was standing in a small vestibule facing the main passageway in a T junction. He looked both ways down the tunnels. There were sixty-watt bulbs encased in steam-tight globes every twenty feet, and their yellow light seemed to accentuate the subterranean atmosphere. The only bare concrete visible was on the floor, as the sides and the overhead were covered by cable bundles, various-sized conduits, water pipes, and thickly lagged steam pipes. There was a hum of electricity in the air, audible against a background of hissing steam and the occasional clank of thermal expansion in the pipes. The air was humid and smelled of ozone and old pipe lagging. The pipes were marked at intervals with their contents and pressures. A ribbon of corrugated steel deck plates ran down the center of the five-foot-wide floor, under which ran the main sewage-pumping system.
He consulted his map and turned right, going fifty feet or so to the first dogleg turn to the left, toward the town of Annapolis. The walls being sufficiently covered by the utility lines, there was no room for any graffiti, but he checked anyway, probing the overhead and electrical panels with his Maglite for any signs of spray paint. The tunnel along this branch was one of the modern ones. It was eight feet high, but all the cables and pipes slung along the ceiling made it feel smaller than it was. Behind him, the main tunnel stretched back toward Bancroft Hall, where it branched out into several different loops and legs to the academic buildings nearer the river.
He stopped at the dogleg and listened. He had been careful to walk on the concrete and not the deck plates, but the only sounds came from the steam lines. He stepped around the corner and came to a major telephone vault, a concrete room that branched off the main tunnel and held a bank of signal-relay cabinets, as well as power amplifiers and hundreds of junction switchboards. Its steel door was framed by two large fire extinguishers. The regular keys to the vault were held by the fire department and the telephone company’s contractor, with a firefighters’ master override box superimposed on the regular locks. Jim did not have the keys to the vaults with him tonight, although he had been into every one of them in the past. Any midshipmen who came down here probably wouldn’t want to get into them. They would have other things on their minds.