Karen gave him her brightest smile. “Admiral Carpenter has told me to ensure that your investigation is fully facilitated by the Navy, one way or the other.”
He nodded again. Karen almost thought he was going to offer his hand so they could shake on it, but he didn’t. He surprised her with another question instead.
“Tell me something, Commander. Does this guy Sherman think you’re on his side on this?”
Karen felt the slightest tinge of a flush start around her throat.
“Admiral Sherman wants to clear this up as quickly as we do, Detective,” she replied.
He nodded again, the ghost of a smile on his face.
“Damn,” he said. “And I thought we cops were the masters of evasion.”
Karen struggled to maintain her composure as he continued to stare at her. He had understood the setup only too well. Then he got up, signifying they were done. He handed her one of his own cards. She realized that he was almost an inch shorter than she was, but bigger than she remembered. Indeterminate age, maybe late thirties. Metallic gray eyes. An iciness back in there. A basically hard face under all that professional courtesy.
“We’ll be in touch, Commander,” he was saying. “Anything comes up you think is useful, there’s the number.”
“Thank you, Detective,” she said. “I guess I do have one more question: As things stand now, do you think Admiral Sherman murdered his exgirlfriend?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Hard to tell just now, Commander. I’m not sure what the slippers signify, if anything. But we’ll sure let you know if that’s what we conclude. “
“Now who’s the master of evasion?” she said, but he only smiled politely and escorted her back out to the reception area.
Karen tried to shrug off the Judas feeling as she drove back into town.
Sherman was a flag officer. He didn’t get to be a flag officer without knowing how the system worked. He had to suspect at least that Carpenter would be working his agenda, which would not necessarily parallel Sherown man’s best interests. As the JAG, Carpenter would have his eye on protecting the Navy. And she was not, in fact, his lawyer. So legally speaking, there were no confidentiality aspects to their conversations.
So there really wasn’t a problem here, right? Right. So why did she feel she was betraying the man?
She mentally reevaluated her tasking: gain Sherman’s confidence, tell him that she had a line into the cops and that she would alert him to anything shaking from those quarters. In return, he would tell her-what, if anything? Well, like going to Elizabeth Walsh’s house last night, where the slipper business had come up. She sighed as she drove down Route 50 toward the Beltway.
Time for a workout. She would call Sherman’s office from the athletic club to see when he had a hole in his schedule after lunch. Then the hard part: She would have to back-brief Carpenter and talk to von Renselshe hadn’t spoken to him yet today.
Ten minutes after one o’clock, Karen entered the OP-32 outer office, with a salad plate in hand. The yeoman got up and knocked on Sherman’s inner office door, stuck his head in, and then held the door open for her. Sherman was finishing a sandwich at a small conference table. His office was similar to Admiral Carpenter’s but smaller and with less prestigious furniture. He did not get up, just waved her over to the table.
“So, how did it go out there with the Polizei?”
She took a moment to summon her thoughts while she unwrapped her plastic fork and opened a carton of milk. She took a bite of salad.
“Well,” she said, “it was pretty short. I told him about your visit to Ms. Walsh’s house, and the slippers-that she would not have been wearing those slippers.”
“And?”
“Mcnair didn’t really react one way or the other, but he did make a note of it.”
“Did he seem to care that I had gone there?”
“No, sir. They’re apparently not treating her house as a crime scene. In a way, it’s kind of strange what they’re doing—or not doing, I mean.
The slippers, the laundry, the basket: All of that would have been held in a lab somewhere if this was a homicide investigation. And their would have been police seals on the house. Frankly, I don’t think there’s anything going on. Or if there is, Mcnair didn’t reveal it.”
“You’re probably right,” he said. “Did you get any hint of what those forensic ambiguities were?”
. “No, sir. But I’m almost beginning to think that that term is a euphemism for somebody’s hunch.”
He nodded thoughtfully and finished his sandwich. Crumpling up the’paper plate, he leaned back in his chair. “Do they understand that I’m a little reluctant to be Freddy Forthcoming as long as they’re acting as if I’m possibly a suspect of some kind?”
“Yes, sir. But, Admiral, I don’t think you are a real suspect.
“Then why won’t they just say so? The longer they keep this up, the bigger my political problem in Opnav becomes.”
“Cops don’t work that way, Admiral. They don’t tell outsiders anything they don’t have to. Besides, the converse is true: If you were a viable suspect, they would be acting altogether differently.”
H’ nodded again and looked away for a moment, e as if making a decision.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
“But it has to remain in confidence for now, vis-A-vis the cops at least. Are you okay with that?”
She thought fast. Here it was: the confidentiality issue.
From the cops, he’d said. Did that mean from Carpenter, too? She stalled for time by miming that her mouth was full.
“Admiral,” she said finally, “if you’re about to tell me you’re an ax murderer, then, no, that’s not going to be possible.” She thought about qualifying that, but she said nothing more. Somewhere along the line, she was going to have to face this problem. But he did not seem perturbed by her answer.
“No, nothing like that. I’m a hatchet man, myself” He smiled at her then, and she felt a little less uncomfortable.
But then his expression sobered. “Something happened last night that I think bears on this whole situation. There’s a story behind it, going back more than twenty years. I’ll give you the basics, and then see what you think.”
“This bears on Elizabeth Walsh’s death?”
“Yes, I think so. And unfortunately, it may corroborate my own misgivings about what really happened to Elizabeth. “
“I’m all ears,” she said, finishing her salad and packing up the plate and wrapper.
Sherman nodded and went to his desk. He sat down and put his palms up to his face and rubbed his cheeks.
“Last night, I went home to change before going over to Elizabeth’s.
Went through the mail. Usual stuff-bills, catalogs. And one letter.” He paused and gave her a long look between his fingers. “A threatening letter.”
“A threat? What kind of threat?”
“This relates to something that happened in Vietnamwhen I was a lieutenant. An incident that I suspect the Navy would not want to have come out, even after so many years.
So for now, I won’t disclose what it was. But because of what happened, a certain individual swore revenge-against me. And he apparently understood the old rule about revenge being a dish best savored cold.”
Karen was baffled. “And that’s what this letter was about? Revenge?”
“Yes. Back in the early seventies” this man told me he would get even with me for something we-l-had done.
But he said he would wait until I had something ‘of value to lose. And that when he came back, he would give me one warning.”
“Which is what this letter was.”