The lady lawyer was probably right: This would blow over once they ruled it a suicide, and that would be that.
You hope, a voice echoed in his head.
Conscious of thinking in circles, he checked to make sure his fish wasn’t burning. C’mon Julie, he thought. Call me.
Jim Hall tossed the remains of a greaseburger extravaganza into the pier Dumpster as he walked through the darkness toward his boat. He lived aboard a thirty-six-foot Pearson ketch. His father had owned a large boat-repair yard in Pensacola, and he’d spent his childhood in the yard, learning everything there was to know about steel, aluminum, and wooden hull repairs, diesel and gasoline marine engines, and the byzantine economics of the boat business, from small runabouts all the way up to large commercial fishing boats. He’d restored the ketch after buying it at an insurance auction for one-tenth its initial price. He’d been living here in the Bayside Marina ever since his original assignment as the CO of the Academy’s Marine detachment, which meant he’d been a resident of Crabtown for going on six years now.
He let himself through the wire gate at the head of the pier and made his way down the gangway to the floating portion of the pier. His boat, at nearly forty feet, took up almost one entire side of the pier, its graceful bow looming over the sun-bleached planks and bobbing inflatable fenders. He automatically inspected the mooring lines as he walked down its shining white length. He was proud of his work on the Chantal, which had been named for the hurricane that had brought the boat to him, literally. He was equally proud of the fact that he owned her outright, unlike his three neighbors on the other side of the pier, who were never more than one or two bad days on Wall Street away from being ex -owners. He disarmed the alarm system, using the keypad at the top of the gangway, and then let himself in through the railing gate. As soon as he stepped aboard, there came a throaty squawk from inside the main lounge. Guard parrot on the job, he thought.
Jim changed into jeans and sweatshirt, turned on the air conditioning to refresh the air down below, and then took a small scotch up the companionway to the awning-covered cockpit and plopped himself down in the large captain’s chair. Jupiter, his double yellow-headed Amazon parrot, was perched on the left shoulder of his bird vest, where he began his preening ritual. Jim had to keep his glass on the upwind side to avoid the silent rain of fuzz, down, and other feathery debris that always accompanied the nightly preening session.
“You’re a dirty damned bird,” he muttered.
“Dirty damned bird,” Jupiter croaked, unmoved by epithets.
The evening was cool and clear, and the water was relatively quiet. Someone was having a small party two piers over, and he could hear the background music, but the live-aboards in this marina were pretty considerate about not making too much noise on weeknights.
It had been an all-around ugly day. Unsure of the police protocol, he’d not stayed for the NCIS interviews, nor had the two agents-no, special agents-asked him to. He was the Academy security officer, but they were the investigating agency. They had made that “exclusive jurisdiction” point several times to anyone who would listen, especially Flasher Babe, who was apparently very sensitive about her bureaucratic prerogatives. The local Annapolis cops backed out with what to Jim felt like unseemly haste, but he supposed they had enough on their plates without getting entangled in what was sure to become yet another Naval Academy media success.
He had secured the impact zone, his term for it, as best he could for the NCIS Crime Scene Unit, and also the boy’s room on the fourth floor of the eighth wing. Only later in the morning had he thought to secure all access up to the wing’s rooftop gallery. Agent Branner had been upset about that, forcing him to remind the two ace investigators that they hadn’t directed him to secure anything. The grumbling subsided after their CSU came up virtually empty at the end of the day. There were no evidentiary questions to be explored down on the plaza, where the boy had actually landed, the cause of death being copiously obvious, even after the efforts of a medical decontamination unit. The plebe’s room had apparently produced no evidence of a crime.
The choleric Captain Robbins had spent the afternoon in a marathon meeting with his executive staff. Jim had tried to duck out, but Robbins wanted everybody present for duty. The Academy’s Public Affairs officers, knowing what was coming, had spent a lot of time preparing everyone for the inevitable media onslaught. The commandant himself had crafted the approved spin: The investigation team assumed it was an accident but was going to also look into the possibility of suicide. Given what he had seen of the plebe’s remains after impact, Jim thought that was going to be a tough call.
He shook his head. Suicide didn’t compute. Here was an eighteen-year-old kid who had successfully navigated the annual service academy admissions wars, and now he was a smashed pumpkin in a drawer over at the Anne Arundel County morgue. There were over ten thousand applicants each year for each of the academies, twelve hundred of whom were finally appointed after a grueling year and a half spent dealing with the competitive admissions process. Granted, plebe year at the academies was a rough road, as he knew from personal experience. But to have achieved sustained success for twelve years of primary and secondary school in academics, extracurricular activities, student government offices, athletics, and then the Academy appointment process, and then to jump off the roof? The Academy typically graduated 76 percent of an entering class, which meant that three hundred or so mids fell to attrition out of every entering class. Usually, they either failed academically or decided that the program was too hard and opted out on their own. But suicide?
He’d been intrigued by the one interviewee, the bright-looking female first class midshipman-what was her name? Mark something. Markingham? Admittedly, he hadn’t paid that much attention to her name. But she was going to be one important way into the investigation, given that the deceased had been wearing her underwear. On the other hand, he thought, if this was something more than a suicide or accident, and you were a bad guy and wanted to implicate somebody in a crime, that was one sure way to do it. But that meant murder, and Jim simply could not envision any motive for murder within the Brigade of Midshipmen. The possible exception would be a boy-girl thing, and even that was remote. Midshipmen did date other midshipmen, but usually within their own year group. It was sufficiently unusual that even the mids called it “dark-siding.” And plebes weren’t given time to think about dating.
Jupiter shook his feathers out, producing a veritable cloud of parrot dust. Jim waved his hand in front of his face and was rewarded by a love nip to his left ear.
“What’s your act, bird?” he asked, looking up sideways at the bird’s beady-eyed face. Jupiter ignored him and began to gnaw on one of his claws, gripping harder with the other one. Jim was glad for the padded bird vest. Jupiter could really grab if he wanted to, as some of Jim’s lady friends had found out. Jupiter wasn’t a bad parrot; he was simply Jim’s parrot.
He finished his scotch, grateful for its ability to overcome the queasy-greasy feeling in his stomach. Tomorrow will probably be worse, he thought. Tomorrow the press will be into it. He suddenly felt very tired.
“C’mon, bird,” he said, getting up out of the chair. “It’s tree time in the city.” He swept the bird off his shoulder and onto his right hand, then held the parrot over a sand-filled trash can, where Jupiter did the right thing. “Good bird,” he said.
“Good bird,” Jupiter acknowledged, and they went below.
At nine o’clock that evening, Ev was in his study, correcting some student papers, when he heard Julie bang through the kitchen screen door and call for him.
“In here, Julie,” he called back, placing the papers in a folder and closing it. She came in a moment later, dressed in full sweats. Her face was bright red, almost the color of the reflective vest she wore over her hooded shirt. She dropped the headless eight iron she carried to ward off unruly dogs and flopped down in one of the big leather chairs. Both she and the chair let out an enormous exhalation.