Paul had a point, I supposed. The last time I’d gone off half cocked, I’d ended up getting kidnapped, along with my eighty-something mystery writer friend, Nadine Gray, a.k.a. L. K. Bromley. But this time there were no high-speed chases, no broken bones, no harm done. I was home, safe and sound, Domestic Diva on Duty. No need to endure one of Paul’s silent, wounded I-told-you-so looks.
After dinner, while Paul the Penitent cleaned up the kitchen, I carried my second glass of wine down to the basement office and powered up the computer. I checked my e-mail, but there was nothing but a Thinking of You e-card from Emily and the usual trash caught up in my spam filter.
After I emptied the trash, I clicked on Google, dug the While You Were Out slips out of my pocket and typed the 443 number that belonged to the caller named Chris on the query line. As I anticipated, there was no phonebook listing. If, as I suspected, the number was a cell phone, it wouldn’t be listed in any telephone directory, AT &T, Google, or otherwise.
Surprisingly, however, Google found quite a few hits for the number on standard Web pages, some going back as far as three years. At one time the 443 number belonged to someone selling used cars on the Internet, but his name was Ed, not Chris. Maybe there had been a typo in the number; or perhaps the number had once belonged to Krazy Ed’s Kleen Kars before it was reassigned to Chris. I moved on, paging through the truncated entries, clicking on each for details.
It’s amazing what ends up on the Internet, I thought, as I Googled around. (I’d Googled myself once and found minutes of a meeting I’d attended years ago at Whitworth and Sullivan. In the year 3000, colonists on Mars, if they should care to do so, will be able to determine exactly how I felt about hiring a stress management consultant back on Earth in 1998.)
Chris’s full name, I learned from Google, was Chris Donovan, and his 443 number showed up in the telephone lists of several church and gay rights organizations. If Google was correct, Chris Donovan attended St. George’s Episcopal Church in Arlington, Virginia, served in a financial capacity on its fifteen member vestry, and in his spare time did volunteer work for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and Lambda Legal Defense Fund.
Well, well, well, I thought. Maybe in her position as SAVI officer, Jennifer Goodall had contacted this Chris Donovan for help in advising Emma Kirby about issues related to her sexual orientation; perhaps she’d even arranged for Emma to talk to Chris Donovan or someone at SLDN or Lambda Legal.
I jumped from my chair and ran to the foot of the stairs. “Paul! Come here a minute! There’s something I want to show you.”
When Paul joined me, I filled him in briefly on Chris Donovan, telling him that I’d gotten Chris’s name from one of Jennifer’s neighbors, which was true, as far as it went.
“Marisa thought Chris might be a boyfriend,” I told my husband, “but now I think he’s someone Jennifer consulted with.”
I pointed to the website for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. “It says here,” I read, “that SLDN is a ‘national, nonprofit legal services, watchdog, and policy organization dedicated to ending discrimination against and harassment of military personnel affected by Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and related forms of intolerance.’”
“A noble endeavor,” Paul commented, “but what does SLDN have to do with you, unless there’s something you’ve been meaning to tell me?”
“I’m thinking,” I said, backpedaling as fast as I could in an attempt to protect Emma’s privacy, “that in her position as SAVI officer, Jennifer might have contacted this Chris person about one of her cases. If Jennifer had been advised to report someone up the chain of command for being homosexual, or for harassing a homosexual, that might have been a strong motive for that somebody to kill her. Other than me, I mean.”
“But DOD has an antiharassment action plan.” Paul flashed a crooked smile. “The faculty’s had its consciousness raised several times about this plan since it first came out in 2000. As I recall, military chaplains and health care providers etcetera are given clear instructions not to ‘out’ service members who come to them for help.”
“Tell that to Marine Lance Corporal Blessing,” I said, tapping the monitor with my finger. “He was discharged for asking a military psychologist questions about sexual orientation. The psychologist, it says here somewhere, was just following the guidelines in the Navy’s General Medical Officer Manual.”
“That’s the Marine Corps, Hannah, not the Naval Academy.”
“I know that, but something must have been going on with Chris Donovan in relation to the Academy.” I clicked the back button a few times. “Here it is: Donovan’s also associated with-at least electronically-a group called USNA Out. It’s a Naval Academy alumni group-not sanctioned by the Academy, no surprise-whose mission is to mentor gay midshipmen still bound by Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
“And this, too.” I followed another link. “Someone named Chris Donovan is also loosely connected with an outfit called PlanetOut, which helps LGBT military personnel protect their online communications from Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell discharges.”
Paul frowned. “What’s LGBT?”
“Lesbian, Gay Men, Bisexual, and Transgendered People.”
“Well, excepting for animal husbandry, that should about cover it.”
“Paul, do be serious!”
“Sorry.” He rested a hand lightly on my shoulder. “It’s just that I can’t tell you how much I don’t care about someone’s sexual orientation. It’s simply not on my radar screen. And as for gays in the military, was it Barry Goldwater who said, ‘You don’t have to be straight to shoot straight.’”
“Couldn’t agree with you more,” I said. “Gay soldiers are fighting and dying in Iraq right this minute, and keeping mum about their sexual orientation in order to do it.”
I stared at the monitor for a moment, trying to organize the thoughts caroming around in my head. “But it’s entirely possible that I’m barking up the wrong tree by pursuing the gay angle. Someone suggested to me that this fellow, Chris, is a friend or former colleague of Jennifer Goodall.”
Paul scowled. “Someone?”
“Never mind, just wait!” I typed St. George and Arlington into Google and instantly found myself back at the Web page for St. George’s Episcopal Church. A few clicks later I sat back and pointed to the monitor in triumph. “There!”
Paul leaned forward. His ear brushed my cheek and his breath blew warm across my neck as he read aloud from the brief bio Chris had posted when he ran for his position on the St. George vestry. Then he whistled. “So, when he’s not working with gay rights organizations, Chris is a civilian personnel specialist working at the Pentagon.”
“Interesting, no?”
“Very.”
“So if Chris Donovan is, or was, a civilian working at the Pentagon about the same time as Jennifer Goodall, he might have known her.”
“Hannah, the Pentagon is a huge place. I’ll bet you twenty-five or twenty-six thousand people work there. That’s bigger than half of the cities in America.”
“Yes, but if you read that bio carefully, Mr. Ives, you’ll see that at one time or another, both Chris Donovan and Jennifer Goodall appear to have worked in the Navy’s office of Weapons Acquisition and Management, the same department that’s now headed up by a certain Admiral Theodore E. Hart. From the dates, I’d guess that their time in that office didn’t overlap, but still, I think that’s interesting, don’t you?”
Paul pulled up a chair and sat down on it, hard. I had him completely on board. “Type this in,” he instructed. He gave me the URL for a Web page accessible to Academy staff and alumni only. I did as I was told and found myself at a page where I could type in the name and/or class year of any Naval Academy grad.