“It was my pleasure, Mr. Nelson.”
He put the phone down, exhausted at the effort of sounding so well-spoken for so long. But he had it. Tangible, objective proof of a contentious relationship between Tom Constable and the Strongs immediately prior to the killings. It wasn’t something he’d made up, some “interpretation” that an old man who saw conspiracies in the choice of public restroom toilet paper had come up with. It was real.
Also real: “items” or “relics” of interest to TomC. That would be whatever it was that had been taped to the frame of Ozzie Harris’s box spring for thirty-odd years, which now, in play, had the power to change lives and move mountains—of Tom Constable’s money.
It was clear what had to happen next.
Whatever it is, Constable has it.
So I’ll go get it.
33
It had been a quiet few days as David waited for the return of the photo and the report from the Rochester lab. He’d broken a minor item: his friend Bill Fedders—boy, was that guy wired or what?—had heard from somebody that Nick Memphis had a somewhat neurotic relationship with another sniper, a man named Bob Lee Swagger, who had, briefly, been the number one Most Wanted man in the country, fifteen or so years ago, and who, when the case against him for the murder of a Salvadoran archbishop was disproved, disappeared. Evidently this Swagger and Memphis had had adventures and engaged in some barely legal shenanigans, which somehow redounded with great credit to Memphis and got his career back on track.
But the point was that Swagger—“Bobby Lee Swagger,” the name sounded like someone had run an algorithm on every NASCAR driver in history, Banjax joked—had somehow had a Svengali-like hold on Memphis, and maybe Nick’s reluctance to push forward the case against Carl Hitchcock was some kind of psychological projection; he saw Hitchcock and Swagger as the same man, that tough-as-nails southern shooter marine NCO type so appealing to the immature mind.
“I mean, it seems funny on the face of it,” Bill had told David at lunch at Morton’s. “Memphis is an educated professional of great attainment, and evidently this Swagger is kind of a cowboy type, unlettered, cornball, barely a high school education, but possessing some magic charisma that certain types of people fall for every time.”
“Weird,” said David, who could make no sense of it at all. He hated the kind of man he sensed this Swagger to be, some kind of macho blowhard who radiated aggression and stared down every man in the room. Football captain, cop, jock, that kind of guy, hopelessly obsolete in America today, but too dinosaur to realize he was dinosaur. Dinosaurs: not too keen on self-awareness.
“But if you think about it, it makes a little sense,” explained Bill. “Think of it as the puppy and the cat. The puppy comes into the household where the cat is a god. The cat can do anything—leap, fight, climb, race, hunt, kill—and he does it with utter disdain, ignoring the puppy, as if the puppy is too insignificant to notice and completely unable to ever impress him. And that is how the relationship is cemented in each mind, forever and ever. But what happens over time is that the cat grows old and feeble while the puppy grows into a sleek, magnificent animal that dominates every single transaction it enters. It has become the god. However, when it looks at the scrawny, desiccated, mangy old fleabag of a cat, with its rotted teeth and bloated stomach, it still sees deity. For him, the cat will always be the god, even if to the whole world, the cat is long past its prime and headed to the sharp end of the vet’s needle.”
“Maybe I could do a piece on that relationship. A holding story. To keep the scandal in the news.”
“I’m sure there’s not much on this Swagger. But there might be a little.”
David worked it hard and came up with more myth than reality. No one had ever written a book about Swagger, and he’d never been the marine celebrity with the SNIPR-1 license plate that Carl Hitchcock had been, he was no gun show autograph seller and nobody had ever named rifles, ammo, or shooting matches after him, but it didn’t take long to establish his bona fides as a war hero. He’d been a real mankiller in Vietnam, and two sources confirmed some ambush of a North Vietnamese unit heading toward a Green Beret camp. He’d won the Navy Cross for that. His kills were fewer than Carl’s, to say nothing of that new guy, Chuck McKenzie, but still, he’d spent a long time in the boonies.
David shivered inwardly. These guys, where do they come from? They spend all that time alone, crawling through swamps and up mountains, just to snuff out another man’s life. What was the point? What did you get out of it? It seemed somehow creepy. What was the difference, really, between them and the DC snipers, those two fruits who’d roamed the Beltway picking off people randomly while living in a car? Okay, the marine wore a uniform, but really it was the same thing—the same charge, that kick a fellow got from playing God and watching somebody else a long way out die of his own agency.
But after Vietnam the record got vague for this Bob Lee Swagger. There was a divorce on the record in South Carolina in 1975, and a few DWIs and minor scuffles with the law around the same time—drinking problem was written all over these years—and then silence, as if the guy had disappeared to reinvent himself. There was a Soldier of Fortune magazine story not available on the Internet now, because this Swagger was litigious; some Arkansas lawyer had beat the publishers of that magazine out of a substantial sum, and try as he could, David could never come up with the copy. Then there was that very odd business in 1993 with the Salvadoran. Again, it was hard to know what was real and what was fantasy. What was documented didn’t make a lot of sense, and the way the case had disappeared without a trace gave the odd impression of some kind of government entity at work. Intelligence? The Bureau? Now it was said Swagger was retired and lived a quiet life as some kind of businessman in the West. But nobody really wanted to talk, and David kept running into a wall of silence, along the lines of, “Well, Bob Lee’s not the sort who likes attention, and I love him too much to disappoint him. If you knew him, you’d know what I mean. So why don’t we just agree to end this conversation right now.”
As for Swagger, there was a listed phone number; he called it, got a frosty-sounding woman who would give him nothing at all and kind of frightened him, truth be told. His usual phone charm didn’t cut him any slack with her.
In the end he turned out a little piece that page one wouldn’t take, but it did keep the story alive on the From Washington page until the news from the lab arrived. His story simply pointed out that Memphis had a history of involvement with “sniper types,” as this “Bob Lee Swagger” certainly was, and it didn’t ask, there being no justification for pointed observations in a legitimate news story, whether an agent with known connections in the “sniper community,” including a long-standing friendship with one of its legends, was an appropriate choice to investigate a series of sensational murders whose perpetrator was suspected to have come from that community. Maybe an editorial writer would pick up on it, and the next day, indeed, one had.
It wasn’t the lead editorial, but even an off-lead got noticed in the Times.
We wonder what is going on at the Federal Bureau of Investigation these days. The Bureau, charged with investigating the heinous deaths of four Americans whose only crime was that they used their constitutional rights to protest a war that was both a tragedy and a mockery, turned that investigation over to the stewardship of an agent whose experience put him more in sympathy with its alleged perpetrator than with its victims.
As the Times reported yesterday, Special Agent in Charge Nicholas Memphis, who ran the investigation that quickly identified former marine sniper Carl Hitchcock as the primary, indeed only, suspect, has long enjoyed a relationship with another well-known marine sniper, Bob Lee Swagger, formerly of Blue Eye, Arkansas. One doesn’t begrudge Memphis his choice of friends, but at the same time, perhaps one should begrudge the Bureau its choice of executives. In matters of such importance, it would have been better for all concerned if the Bureau had selected an agent in charge whose connect
ion to the act of sniping—the cold murder of a human being, guilty or innocent, at long range for something called “military necessity,” though too often neither military nor necessary in application—was more distant and less inclined to be tarnished with emotion.
Perhaps that is why the investigation has apparently fallen off the tracks and a final report, which all Americans must regard as an act of closure to these final, horrible war crimes, is nowhere in sight.
That got him the usual invites to the usual talking head roundtables—he was getting pretty good at it—but he passed that night because, well, because he too felt some combat fatigue; it had been a nerve-rattling few weeks, and he knew his career hung in the balance. It was still unclear whether he would ultimately join, in Howell Raines’s memorable phrases, the culture of complaint or the culture of achievement that prevailed in any given newsroom.
I am so close, he thought.
And when his cell rang and he looked at the caller ID and saw a Rochester area code, he thought he might have a heart attack. It had to be the lab. He’d appended a note with his number, asking for notification. He knew he just couldn’t face opening a FedEx package with no idea in hell what it contained, especially as the whole office would be secretly watching.
“Banjax.”
“Mr. Banjax, hi there, it’s Jeremy Cleary up at Donex, in Rochester.”
“Oh, hi” was what David came up with, so lame, his heart tripping off in his chest.
“Yes, you’d sent us a note; you’d asked for a call with our preliminary findings, before we sent out the final report?”
“Yes sir. Yes, I did. Do you have information for me?”
“I do.”
“Well, gee, let’s have it, Mr. Cleary.” He felt his heart bounce into overdrive.
“We find nothing.”
That was it?
What, nothing?
“I don’t understand. I’m not sure of your nomenclature. Is that good or bad? Is it real or not? Is it authentic or what?”
“Oh, you don’t know much about this, I see.”
“No, not a thing. Is nothing good or bad? There’s a lot riding on this.” He had not told them he was with the Times because he didn’t want that influencing their interpretation. Instead, he was just a David Banjax, of the given address of the bureau, Washington DC.
“Well, what we do is track fractal discrepancies. We examine by electron microscope, infrared scanner, spectroscope, even digitally break it down to sound waves and look for noise. That’s what your money buys you.”
“Okay, well, nothing would mean . . . authentic, right?”
He held his breath.
“We don’t operate in terms of ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic.’ What you get from us is a report of a digital forensics inspection. We look at a number of things: the smoothness of the images, patterns of relationship between adjacent pixels in the images. Altered images have distinct differences between the edges of the images and the original area next to them. We look at the length of the shadows, the color consistency; we measure the lighting to see if it is consistent in various parts of the image. We look deeply in the eyes of the people to see the reflections that appear there and determine if they are consistent with the rest of the photo. We search for clone-stamped areas of an image—parts that are so similar to each other as to make them suspect of having been the same image from the original area. The lab also assumes that all original photographs have ‘noise’ to some extent, and the noise has a certain consistency. Introducing a piece of another photo will give a different noise level and pattern that cannot be detected by the naked eye. If we had the original neg, we would be able to analyze much more information.”
“Did you have enough to make a call?”
“Well, our technicians don’t make calls. They measure, they tabulate, and they issue a finding. In this case, the finding was nothing.”
“So nothing is good?”
“Nothing means we can detect under various of our testings no indication of the presence of fractal discrepancies which would suggest photo manipulation techniques have been employed. Is it genuine? Well, that’s the kind of contextual decision you have to make. That’s about history, provenance, even trust. Not our department. What I’m telling you is that we will issue a bonded statement, and defend it in court if so required, that we discovered no meaningful evidence of photo manipulation in the photo you sent us. If that’s your definition of ‘authentic,’ then you have your ‘authenticity,’ Mr. Banjax.”
“Nobody doctored it?”
“You’ll never get me to say that. What you will get me to say is that at the level of detail of which our laboratory is capable—the best in the country in commercial use—there is no tangible evidence of fractal discrepancy.”
“To me, that would be authentic.”
And to the Times, that would be authentic too.
Suddenly the air was sweet and chilled, and oh so much fun to breathe.
I did it, he thought. I got him. I got Nick Memphis.
34
It was not a good day, but then there’d been few good days for Task Force Sniper since the suspension of Nick and the arrival of the Robot. The Robot had a name but no one ever said it; he was, it was alleged, human, just as they all were; he just never showed it. He was the director’s designated enforcer, who was sent to trouble spots in the Bureau with instructions to make the trouble go away and make all the people who were making the trouble go away as well. His means were generally not pleasant. Like his namesake, he accomplished this task with mechanistic grinding and trampling; it was said that he could walk through walls and that heat rays burst from his fists when necessary.
It wasn’t that the Robot was on the warpath. He was never not on the warpath, the warpath being the state of his life and career. It was that this particular day, he himself had gotten a prod in the butt from the director about the Task Force Sniper report, and since it fell to the team of Chandler and Fields to write it, and since Fields was a bum writer, it fell really to Chandler, and she felt everything grinding downward upon her.
“You can’t move any faster?” the Robot demanded.
“Sir, it’s writing. It’s more nuanced; you have to find the best ways of saying things; you have troubles and problems and you have to reconcile conflicting evidence on nearly every page. It’s not like something you can just do.”
“It’s not a novel. It doesn’t need a style. It’s not supposed to fly along. Nobody’s publishing it except a Xerox machine.”
“Yes sir, and I’m not Agatha Christie either, but it’s got to make sense, be smooth, hang together, and give its readers a clear view of the case and our conclusions. That takes time.”
“Is your support up to par?”
Of course it wasn’t. The problem was Ron Fields, a brilliant operator, a former SWAT hero with more than a few gunfight wins to his credit, an up-and-comer of the Nick school, decent and true and modest and funny, but . . . he seemed kind of dumb. He was certainly no writer. A giant in the professional world, as her coauthor he became a kind of erratic junior member, lazy and mysteriously absent, and his warrior’s reputation made it difficult for poor new girl Starling to cope.
On the other hand, she had a terrible crush on him, as she did on Nick, and she was never going to be one of those headquarters snitch bitches who rises on complaints of others’ ineptitude.
“Agent Fields is a fine collaborator, sir.”
“There are a lot of people in Washington who want this thing on their desks yesterday. I only tell you what you know, but I tell it in a loud voice in case you’ve forgotten it. If you need help, sing out. I’ll get you interns, secretaries, typists, the works. I’ll even hire John Grisham.”
“I’ve just got to get it right.”
“I know you liked Memphis. Everybody liked Memphis. But you can’t let any affection for him frost your efforts for me and your job on this assignment. I’ve heard it said that the task force agents a
re dawdling because they want to see Memphis cleared of these charges and are waiting to see if someone on the new suspect list takes the investigation in another direction. Tell me that’s not true.”
“Sir, I’m just working as hard as I can, that’s all.”
“Okay, okay, get back to it. Why are you wasting time on me?” And with that the Robot lurched onward, looking for another target to destroy, slightly frustrated because the girl had not crunched under as he’d thought she might.
And the other thing: he had her dead to rights. She had been stalling dreadfully, trying to keep from reaching the last page, and getting the sign-offs by the others. Because once the report—this report, with this conclusion—was issued, it became the narrative, the official version, even if she and most of the others weren’t quite sold on it. But it seemed everyone in Washington wanted this poor guy Carl Hitchcock hung out to dry and all the evidence accepted as planned. The only way to halt that narrative was to halt the report that encapsulated it; that was its primary marketing tool. So she was in the absurd position of subverting her own biggest professional break because she didn’t quite believe in what was being said. And because she felt something for Nick; he’d been decent to her and he always apologized when he called her Starling, even though everybody now did and would forever.
But there wasn’t much more she could do. Wiggle room was down to zero.
The narrative, as they wanted, was all but done. It was exactly what everybody said was called for, a professional indictment of Carl Hitchcock, all i’s dotted, all t’s crossed, each bit of damning evidence assembled in its place, properly weighted, admirably described, the chain of events transparently clear: how this old warrior had cracked and gone off to reclaim the kill record.