The Night Crew, page 33
part #7 of Sean Drummond Series
The truth was right there in front of me, if I had only cared to look—it was in what she chose to read. Those Hollywood publicity rags that extolled a life of beauty and glamour and wealth that was as make-believe as it was seductive to such an unformed young mind. Or the romance novels filled with women who were saved from their wretched circumstances by a lusty, brawny Adonis who promises to love and adore them forever. It is called escapist literature for a reason, and for most, that is all it is—a brief, imaginary interlude that dissipates the instant your fat, unshaven lout of a husband bellows for dinner, or your whiny child howls for you to change his poop-filled diaper. But for Lydia, I thought, it had become something more than that; it had become the sustaining lie of her universe.
In her mind, and in her heart, Danny Elton was that barrel-chested, rock-jawed stud that permeates the modern romance novel—handsome, muscular, a man’s man—a woman’s savior if you’re willing to let your imagination play with the pixels a bit. After all, he was good-looking enough in a coarse way, and manly in that way that some rednecks exude a certain stupid virility. But, I suppose, when you’re drowning, a frayed life vest can be every bit as tempting as a luxury liner.
And when Lydia danced and pranced, naked, in front of Danny, in her head, she was Madonna gyrating her loins to seduce the gaping multitude, or Catherine Zeta-Jones taunting Richard Gere in Chicago. And that, it struck me, is what I had observed in those elusive expressions on Lydia’s face in the photographs. It was all a dream, make-believe—but it was real enough for her. She was no longer plain, squatty Lydia Eddelston from Justin transported to a steamy shithole in Iraq; she was in a faraway place where Danny Elton was Robert Redford, and Lydia was the smoking hot enchantress, the answer to his dreams.
Unfortunately, those dreams had turned into a nightmare for her, for the four other accused, for the army, and for the entire nation. It was time to separate the truth from the fantasy, and I knew how to do it.
I looked at Lydia and continued, “I don’t know if you’re repressing your memories, or trying to hide your past out of shame and remorse. But it no longer needs to stay hidden, Lydia. Talk to me. I’m not judgmental, and anyway, you were a victim, a young girl who could not protect herself from a larger predator. There’s no shame in it, Lydia. Talk to me.”
She sat silently, her face perfectly still, her eyes frozen on the tabletop. She appeared either unwilling, or unable to address this charge.
Time to twist the knife a little deeper. “I know what you did at Al Basari. I know you were trying to keep Danny Elton as a lover, and I know he chose June over you, and I understand how much that frustrated and infuriated you. You tormented and humiliated the prisoners the same way Danny was humiliating you.”
Tears were running down her cheeks now. She actually started to sniffle.
I knew what she wanted to hear, and I told her, “Danny Elton is a bad man, Lydia. He’s a bully, a louse, a liar. He used you and he abused you. He abused you sexually, and even worse, he abused you emotionally. You gave him everything a man could want, did everything he asked you to do. That he couldn’t see your beauty, and your love for him . . . Well, he never deserved you in the first place.”
She was nodding now. “He’s an asshole!” she told me. “I did! I gave ’im ever’thing. I only wanted to please ’im . . . make ’im happy . . .” She reached up and wiped a sleeve across her runny nose. “He treated me like shit.”
“Yes, and those you thought were friends, like June Johnston, they were even worse, weren’t they?”
“She’s a mean bitch!” Lydia yelled. “I trusted her, y’know?”
“Yes, and she stole Danny and rubbed it in your face in front of everyone.”
She was furious now: her fists were clenched and her face was red. “She knew how I felt ’bout Danny. I tole her. She always talked like she understood that.”
I nodded my head. “And all the while, she was plotting to take him away from you.”
“She couldn’t wait to flash her tits’n ass in Danny’s face. And that dumb fool, Danny, he was too stupid to see what a big phony she wuz. She don’t care nuthin’ about him.” The tears had stopped now, replaced by raging anger. “She ain’t nuthin’ but a lyin’ whore.”
“And now, just like you, she’s carrying his baby.”
Lydia looked at me. “If I had a gun, I’d blow her stupid head off.”
“I can certainly understand why you feel that way,” I told her. “And to make matters worse, now the two of them are blaming everything that happened at Al Basari on you. They’re claiming it was all your idea, Lydia. They’re both going to testify that you pushed things much farther than they wanted to go. It’s not the truth, but that doesn’t matter. It’s two against one. It’s what the court will believe.”
“You think?”
“Danny and June have already told me as much.” I awarded her a look of resignation. “It’s sad. You’ll end up in prison, and they’ll probably run off and get married.”
Her response was to look across the table at me with an expression of shock. “Married? You think they’re . . . uh . . . uh . . . ?” She took a number of deep breaths. I could see she was starting to lose it.
Before she had a total meltdown, I leaned back and said, “But you don’t have to let it go down that way, Lydia. You shouldn’t let them win. You need to come clean. I can’t protect you if you withhold the truth from me.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” she wailed.
“I know that, and I know what happened, Lydia. I know they pushed you to do those things. I know they taunted you, and I know they shamed you into it. I know they gave you no choice.”
As I had observed on the tape, this wasn’t strictly the truth. But Lydia Eddelston, as Katherine had inferred, was brittle, and I didn’t want her cascading into an emotional collapse; that meant composing an alternate moral reality to replace the one I was deconstructing, one she could feel, if not content to inhabit, at least not totally uncomfortable in.
“That’s the plain truth,” she told me. “Sometimes I’d tell Danny I didn’t like to do that stuff . . . and he, uh . . . he’d jus’ tell me, ‘Hey, baby, it’s jus’ a thang.’ Said he loved me.”
I quickly asked, “Did Danny kill General Palchaci?”
She stared at me for one of those interminably long pauses, then said, “Uh-huh . . . yeah, he did.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yep . . . I know he did it.”
“How? When?”
“It was near the end. He . . . y’know, Danny . . . he never could get that old guy to break. He tried, and he tried . . . it pissed him off somethin’ awful.”
“Why did it piss him off so much? Surely General Palchaci couldn’t have been the only prisoner who refused to talk.”
“Cuz that Captain, he kept tellin’ Danny that that general was the most important guy to git talkin’. Said we wuz wasting our time on all them other prisoners. Said that general knew more’n all ’em. He kept pressurin’ Danny to git that guy to open up.”
“Captain Willborn told him that?”
“Sure did. So Danny, he finally got all fired up, and he gave the old guy a special session. He—”
“Special session?” I interrupted. “Is that different than a special treatment?”
“Yep. That wuz when Danny or the interrogators gave somebody the treatment on their own. Y’know, without us.”
“Us?” I asked, “I presume you’re referring to yourself, June, and Andrea. Right?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “That night, it was jus’ him’n Mike and the prisoner. Danny said he’n Mike were goin’ to the dining facility for a snack . . . but that ain’t what they did. They had this empty cell down near the backside. Sort of off there . . . all by itself.”
“Were you present?”
She nodded. “It was real late, though. After June and Andrea had left.”
“So you were the only one present to witness the murder?”
Again, she nodded. “I could hear what was happenin’ down there, though. Danny, he always used to carry this steel baseball bat . . . like that badass sheriff in that old movie . . . uh . . .”
“Walking Tall?” I suggested.
“I guess. Danny even slept with that bat. Anyways, he’n Mike, they wuz takin’ turns whackin’ away at that old man.”
“How long did this last?”
“I wuz makin’ coffee in the lounge cell, and I wuzn’t checkin’ my watch or nuthin’. It . . . it wuzn’t like half an hour, though. More likely five minutes, or thereabouts.”
“And you could hear what they were doing?”
“Well . . . not ever’thing.”
“Did you see anything?”
“Nope. Like I tole you, Danny and Mike said they wuz goin’ to the mess to git some food, so I stayed in the lounge.”
“Tell me what you could hear, Lydia.”
She seemed to think about this. “A guy’s voice sayin’ stuff to that old man. And the noise of the beatin’ . . . y’know, these loud whacks, only more squishy-soundin’ . . . sorta like when you throw watermelons on the ground. I didn’t like it none. Even stuffed my fingers in my ears.”
“Did you ever witness with your own eyes what they were doing?”
She shook her head. “I tole you, I wuz fixin’ coffee.”
“And are you sure the voice you heard was Danny?”
“Sounded like Danny.”
“How far away were you?”
“I dunno. That empty cell was on the far side of the cellblock. Probably like thirty cells away.”
“Could you hear what they were saying?”
“I jus’ remember that Danny sounded real angry. Like I said, after I heard a few of them whacks, I tried not to listen. I plugged my ears shut.”
“Did Danny ever mention what happened that night to you? Ever discuss what he and Mike had done?”
“Nope, never.” She looked away for a moment. “Never really asked him about it, neither. Don’t guess I really wanted to know ’bout that night. That guy, he died, right?”
Right. I changed topics and instructed Lydia, “This next question is going to be as difficult for you as it will be uncomfortable for me. But it’s important to know the truth. Were you sexually abused as a child, and by who?”
She looked back at me, and, while she did not physically recoil, mentally she certainly took a big step back. She was willing to open up about a brutal murder, but she didn’t want to touch the topic of incest.
I allowed her a moment to overcome her inhibitions and, when she didn’t, I said, “I’m sure your parents ordered you never to talk about this. Maybe your father, or your mother, or both, threatened you to protect the family secret.”
By the way she began biting her lip I could see that Lenore and Silas had done exactly that, and Lydia was struggling to get past an injunction she had obeyed for God knew how long. Of all the crimes in the world, incest brings forth the most conflicted feelings for the victim because, after all, the victim is torn by loyalty to the very loved one who raped her, by the eternal shame of having submitted to acts that both nature and society find grotesquely abhorrent, and because a young child, in order to survive and not go entirely mad, has to banish the memory of what was endured into some dark corner of the mind, to repress it, very often to make it disappear.
Often the father who abuses his daughter is, by day, a perfect parent, adoring, caring, even doting, the guy on the sideline at the kid’s soccer match who cheers her on and takes her to the ice cream parlor afterward. It is only at night, after the lights go out, that he becomes a monster. Thus, just as the victim’s fate is separated by day and night, by lightness and darkness, it becomes more and more difficult to illuminate what truly happened.
I continued in a more forceful tone, “But that no longer matters, does it, Lydia? You’re twenty years old. You’re all grown up. You’re a soldier, and you’ve gone to war. You’re on your own, a woman, an adult in the eyes of the law, and certainly in my eyes. You don’t have to be afraid any longer.”
She leaned back in her chair, and I allowed her the time she needed to get past her reluctance. She eventually took the first tentative step. “I never liked it much.”
“Of course you didn’t,” I reassured her.
“I tried to git him to stop, but he . . . he jus’ wouldn’t.”
“Who wouldn’t stop, Lydia?”
“You got to promise you won’t hurt him, okay? I know what he did wuz wrong, but you cain’t tell nobody.”
“I can’t make that promise, Lydia.” I asked, “Who was it that abused you? Your father? An uncle? Who?”
“Wuzn’t my pa, no.” She added, after a moment, “Wuzn’t Uncle Clete, neither.”
“You’re sure, Lydia? You can and should tell me the truth.”
“Pa beat me sometimes, but he never did any of that other stuff.”
“All right. Who did do that . . . that other stuff?” I asked, adopting her neutral euphemism for being repeatedly raped.
“Jimmy . . . my big brother. When I wuz real little, he’d touch me . . . you know, he’d feel my privates. Wuzn’t till I wuz nine or ten, ’fore he started goin’ all the way.”
“How long did this last?”
“How long?”
“Yes. How old were you when it stopped?”
“It ain’t never stopped.”
“Oh . . .”
“Jimmy’s real big. He don’t really take no for an answer.”
“And your parents were aware this was going on?”
She nodded. “They tole him he better cut it out. Pa even beat him a few times after he caught him. Jimmy’s the real stubborn type, though. So Ma and Pa just made sure I got good birth control.”
I thought back to the expressions of shock and horror on Silas’s and Lenore’s face when I informed them that Lydia was pregnant. So that’s what they were thinking—they were scared shitless that their stupid son had impregnated their daughter. Talk about parental nightmares.
I asked Lydia, “Was that your primary reason for enlisting in the National Guard? To escape from Jimmy?”
“I guess. But Jimmy, like I said, he’s awful willful. He up and joined the Guard, too. Ended up in my same unit.”
“I see.” I took a shot in the dark and asked Lydia, “And what about the night you first approached Danny Elton in the bar back in Ohio, back before the deployment to Iraq. Was Jimmy present that night?”
“Sure was.” She nodded. “Figured if I hooked up with Danny, maybe he’d lay off me. Jimmy can git real ornery toward guys I flirt with . . . but Danny . . . well, he don’t take no guff off nobody.”
“And how did your brother react?”
“Oh . . . he looked real pissed, but he jus’ sat there and stewed.” She smiled at this small victory.
But this revelation opened a fresh possibility regarding the mystery that was most personal to me—who was killing the lawyers—so I asked Lydia, “Was Jimmy with your unit in Iraq? Was he at Al Basari?”
“He was gonna be, but . . .”
“But . . . ?”
“He got bumped ’fore we left. Turned out he had rickets on account of he don’t eat too good.”
“Yes, that can happen.” I asked, “When was the last time you saw Jimmy?”
“’Fore we left. Ain’t heard from him since.” She shrugged. “Jimmy never was much of one for letters.”
I had one other question. “I know you were mad at Danny and the others. Was it you who electronically forwarded the file of photos to a reporter?”
She appeared upset that I would ask this. “Wasn’t me, no . . .” she insisted, confirming what I suspected. “I never even saw them pictures . . . leastwise, not till the newspapers started puttin’ ’em in everybody’s faces. They wuz all stored in Ashad’s trailer. That’s God’s honest truth.”
I thanked Lydia and explained that her insights would be very helpful in building her defense. That wasn’t exactly true, but she didn’t need to know that.
She smiled and asked me one, and only one question. “You really think Danny’s gonna run off and git hitched to that lyin’ bitch, June?”
Are you kidding me? I drew a deep breath, then told her, “My advice, Lydia, is to forget about Danny.”
I got up, turned around, and walked out the door.
I stepped out of the interrogation room and while I walked back to my car, I pulled out my cellphone and called Chief Terry O’Reilly, chief of my security detail. The moment I identified myself, he said, “I’m not in the habit of being disrespectful to my superior officers, but you know what? You’re an asshole.”
“That’s nothing. You should hear what my friends call me.”
“Don’t bug out without telling me again. You got a death wish, or something?”
“I was fine,” I told him. “Hey, I checked the backseat every time I got in the car. I even carried my amulet in the shower.”
“The range is only five miles.”
“Oh . . .”
“Next time it’s me whose gonna cut your throat.”
I gave him a second to cool off, then said, “I need you to do me a favor.”
“Really? My balls are swinging from the colonel’s keychain on account of your skipping on me and now you want a favor.”
“I want to make amends, Chief. Come on, it’ll be good for your career.”
I then told him to notify his CID and FBI buddies and have them run an all-points check with local police to see if a James or Jimmy Eddelston was staying anywhere within a thirty-mile radius of West Point. Check the hotels, boarding houses, short-term rentals and, since Eddelston was a country boy, don’t overlook the local campsites. Also have his CID superiors check with the National Guard to see if they have a thread on him.
