High Crimes

Claire put down the page she was reading and felt lightheaded. She excused herself and located the women’s room in the corridor outside. The “head.” She staggered to a stall and was sick. Then she washed her face at the sink with a brown block of army-issue soap.

20

As she waited to be admitted to the brig, she found herself lost in thought.

It is shortly after their wedding, on their honeymoon, in fact. They are checking into the Hotel Hassler in Rome, at the head of the Spanish Steps, on the Piazza Trinità dei Monte. She’d wanted to stay at a more modest pensione nearby, the Scalinata di Spagna, but Tom insisted they treat themselves to some serious luxury. The reservation, however, has been lost. A screwup. The suite he’d reserved is no longer available. The most they can offer, with deepest apologies, is a “junior suite.” Tom flushes, slams his fist down on the counter. “We made a reservation, goddamn it,” he thunders. Everyone in the lobby turns, appalled and fascinated. The reservation clerk is all apologies, flustered, humiliated. He almost dances before them. Tom glowers terribly, but then, just as quickly as he ignited, he cools. He nods. “See what you can do,” he says.

There are other times, she now remembers.

The time when his assistant at Chapman & Company confused the date of a lunch meeting with a big-time potential investor so that Tom missed the appointment. He flew into a rage, became abusive, and fired her, but then relented a few hours later and hired her back.

The time when a neighbor accidentally swerved his Range Rover into their lawn and gouged out a rut. Tom came storming out of the house, face dark with fury, but by the time he reached the neighbor’s car he seemed to have cooled down.

The time when, as he was walking with Annie in Harvard Square, she reached out to pet a dog, and the dog growled and snapped at her, and Tom grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck until it yelped. The owner protested angrily; Tom set the dog back down, and it slunk away, tail between its legs. “Don’t you worry about anything,” he said to Annie.

There were dozens of such incidents, but what did they mean? A man who didn’t want his perfect honeymoon spoiled. An overly exacting boss. A meticulous homeowner. An overprotective father. In the course of marriage — even a relatively brief one, as theirs had so far been — you witness anger and sadness. You see the best in your spouse, and you see the worst. Tom had a quick temper, but he’d never directed it at her, never at Annie, and he’d always managed to contain it.

And then there was the way he had paralyzed the U.S. Marshals agent who had pursued him at the shopping mall. No doubt it was his Special Forces training. Had he really been unnecessarily brutal? They were trying to imprison him for a crime he insisted he hadn’t committed. He hadn’t killed the man.

Even the ruthless way he’d fought off the marshals at the lakeside cabin in the Berkshires — but was that anything more than self-protection, the survival instinct?

Did all these things really make him a killer?

“Hey, where’s the rest of my team?” Tom asked. He’d begun to exhibit the occasional flash of joviality, which for some reason irritated Claire. They met in the small glass-walled room that adjoined his cell. This time they had removed all restraints, presumably as a sign of respect to her.

“Just me right now,” Claire said quietly. “I want to know about La Colina. What really happened.”

He cocked his head, squinted. “I told you—”

“I’ve just read seven statements. They’re all substantially the same—”

“They’re probably identical. The military can be clumsy in their forgeries.”

“Who’s Jimmy Hernandez?”

“Hernandez? The executive officer of my detachment. Marks’s number two. Kid from Florida, son of Cuban immigrants—”

“Is he honest? A truth-teller?”

“Claire,” Tom said with exasperation. “Honesty is a relative concept to these people. Their CO tells them to fart, they fart. And if he tells them it’s gardenias, they’ll say it’s gardenias. Hernandez is Marks’s asshole buddy. He’ll say whatever Marks tells him to say.”

“Well, the prosecution is calling Hernandez as an eyewitness to the atrocity you allegedly committed. If he’s as believable as his CID statement, we’re in trouble.” She adopted a carefully neutral, professional tone.

“And what, he says I did it? I was some kind of mass murderer of eighty-seven civilians?”

“Yeah.”

“I told you, Colonel Marks gave the order to waste the whole village. ‘To teach ’em a lesson,’ he said. Hernandez was the XO, Marks’s loyal number two — it wouldn’t surprise me if he was one of the shooters. I wouldn’t participate in the cover-up, so they turned the tables and blamed me. That’s what this is all about. It was thirteen years ago, for God’s sake, I don’t know why they don’t just let it go away.”

“The Criminal Investigation Division interviewed the entire unit. They must have interviewed you, too.”