The Death Trust

TEN

Masters’s NCMP noncoms were continuing their task of archiving Scott’s papers.

“Who’s this Captain François Philippe?” Masters asked, looking at the Whiteboard where I’d transferred the list of people I’d made in my notebook.

“Medical officer. He’s the guy Scott had perform an unofficial autopsy on his son’s body here at the base hospital. What’s your French like?”

“Très bien. Pourquoi?”

“You’ve got the job. Would you mind giving him a call and asking him about it? He doesn’t speak much English, apparently.”

“Sure.”

“Here’s his number.” I opened my notebook and gave her the Post-It.

A USAF sergeant seconded to the NCMPs hovered on the edge of our conversation. He was a large man with short orange hair that reminded me of shoe-brush bristles. Politely, he said, “Excuse me. Special Agent Masters? I’ve got the chief medical officer on the line. He’d like to have a quick word.”

Masters took the handset, spoke briefly into it, then hung up. “General Scott’s body is being released later this morning.”

“How far away is the hospital?” I asked.

“A ten-minute drive, give or take.”

“Let’s go, then,” I said. Instead of calling this François Philippe, we could pay the guy a visit. Maybe, with all this talk of autopsies, the CMO’s ears were burning. We had a full day ahead and the morgue at Landstuhl Medical Center was on my list of places to see anyway. It was a couple of miles south of Ramstein. We took a Humvee.

The weather was much like the previous day’s, with little cotton-ball clouds, a low mist, a touch of sunshine, and a procession of rainbows. It all reminded me of the lid on a chocolate box. “See anything else interesting in Scott’s records?” Masters asked.

“Plenty. He conversed with two previous presidents as if they were best buddies. He had a wide circle of friends in politics, most of them people he flew with who went on to Congress or the Senate after leaving the military. He was a prolific letter-writer — wrote to his son every two weeks. There are citations, awards, requests from charities and associations — he was a meticulous record-keeper. And then it all stopped.”

“What did?”

“The letter writing, the keeping of records — it all stops.”

“Are you saying you think someone has beaten us to them? Already?”

“What I mean is he suddenly had no time left to write to anyone. He just started producing figures. Numbers. Pages and pages of numbers. He became preoccupied with something — like it was driving him crazy.”

Masters pulled over momentarily in order to let a convoy of rigs loaded with tanks pass.

“You familiar with that Spielberg movie—Close Encounters of the Third Kind?”

“Sort of,” she said.

“Do you remember how the people in it get obsessed with the flattop mountain the aliens are going to land on? It’s all they think about? They dream about it, draw it, become consumed by it?”

“Vaguely.”

“Well, that’s like our general. Scott was consumed by something. I have no idea what it was, but it was big and it was scaring him.”

“You have a good imagination, Special Agent.”

“Okay, okay, so the scaring thing I made up.”

“Apart from the numbers puzzle, did you find anything else of interest?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact.” I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out several sheets of folded computer printout.

“What’s that?”

“Computer printout,” I said.

Masters gave me a look of flat boredom. “You know, getting anything out of you is like pulling teeth.”

“Would you please? I’d appreciate it.”

“The printout?” Masters asked, doing a fair job of keeping her exasperation reined in.

“Oh, right. So…which airport has the designation RIX — Romeo Indigo X-ray?” I asked, wrestling with the printout.

“I think that’s Riga International — Latvia,” said Masters, her interest ignited. “Why?”

“This is a printout from Ramstein’s air traffic control flight log for a period last year — fourteen months ago, actually. There are several flights marked out in the month of December with green highlight pen. They’re all C-130s heading off to Riga — RIX. I found it in one of the boxes with a handful of flight-progress strips — the little strips of paper the air traffic controllers use to help them identify aircraft as they’re handed from one flight information sector to another.”

“Don’t patronize me, Cooper. I’m air force too, remember?” Masters kept her eyes on the road, but I could sense it took a force of effort.

“Sorry. I was just thinking aloud, that’s all. Y’know, if you listen hard enough, you can hear the gears whirring.” I pointed to my forehead.

“Forget it,” she said. “So…Riga…”

“Riga,” I repeated. “I don’t know why Scott highlighted these flights, or even if it was him who did the highlighting. It was just in with his papers…” I wasn’t sure where I was going — round in circles, probably.

Masters turned off the road and into a broad parking lot laid out before a large, utterly charmless four-story block designed by someone who probably should have chosen another career. She pulled into a bay and turned off the ignition. “Look, I was thinking last night after I dropped you off…I want to talk to you — about me and General von Koeppen. Sort of clear the air.”

“There’s no need,” I said. “Unless you know something about the guy that’s going to help us crack this nut, I don’t need to know.” I had the feeling Masters was embarrassed about her relationship with von Koeppen. But everyone makes mistakes. Hell, I married mine. “So,” I said. “Who are we seeing here?”

Masters took a breath and let it out. “A Royal Canadian Air Force major by the name of Pierre Lamont,” she said.

“A Canadian. Great, I love Canadians, especially those wacky French Canadians.” Actually, I don’t. If there’s one thing I dislike more than a Canadian, it’s a French Canadian. And even the Canadians agree, which is one of their few redeeming traits. “Have you heard the one about the two young boys playing in the front yard of their Toronto home when the neighbor’s Rottweiler hops the fence and starts attacking one of the boys?”

“No,” said Masters. “Do I want to?”

“We’re about to visit the morgue. Humor me.”

Masters looked at me in a way that said it had better be good.

“So, as I said, the neighbor’s Rottweiler hops the fence and attacks one of the boys. The other boy picks up his hockey stick and smacks the dog over the back of the neck, killing it.

“News of all this gets around and soon a reporter from the Toronto Star shows up and talks to the young hero. ‘I can see the headlines tomorrow,’ he says. ‘ “Toronto Maple Leaf Fan Uses Hockey Stick to Deliver Crushing Blow to Attacking Dog.” ’

“The kid replies, ‘But sir, I’m not a Maple Leaf fan.’

“The reporter reconsiders and says, ‘Okay, how about—“Blue Jays Fan Uses Stick to Strike Out Attacking Beast?” ’

“Again the kid says, ‘But I’m not a Blue Jays fan, either.’

“‘Then what team do you like, for Christ’s sake?’ says the reporter.

“‘I’m a Montreal Canadiens fan, sir!’

“To which the reporter says, ‘Shit, well then, how about—“French Bastard Kills Neighbor’s Beloved Pet?” ’”

“Can we go now?” Masters said, without the hint of a smile.

“I’ve got others.”

“No,” she said, getting out of the Humvee.

Masters walked briskly to the hospital’s main entrance. “I’ve been here before,” she said. “It’s in the basement.”

“Where else?” I followed Masters.

We took the stairwell. It got cooler as we descended, as we closed in on the Grim Reaper’s rumpus room. We came out of the stairwell into a brightly lit hallway built for heavy traffic, and pushed through a set of double swing doors, the sort made from thick, translucent plastic sheeting. The air here was heavily laced with formaldehyde, top notes of human excrement, and various gastric odors. I was thinking death’s deodorant.

We saw some movement, a shadow on a wall, and followed it through into a concrete cave lined with stainless-steel doors. Another room split off from this main cavern, where bodies loosely wrapped in plastic were stacked two deep on shelves from floor to ceiling. In another chamber, I could see a naked black man lying on a stainless-steel bed, dark fluids seeping into deep channels. The head and one side of the corpse were crushed flat and resembled a spreading ink stain. A man in a green coat was cutting into the man’s thorax with gusto, like he was carving into a tough Thanksgiving turkey.

“Got run over by a tank,” said the voice behind us. “Although that’s not what killed him. Myocardial infarction. Can I help you?”

“We’re looking for Major Pierre Lamont,” I said, badging him.

“That’d be me.”

Lamont might have had a French-sounding name but he didn’t have the accent. He was painfully thin and I wondered if his job had permanently put him off his food. His skin had a yellow tinge, the color a specimen gets when it’s been sitting in a jar of preservative. His hair, what remained of it, was black gristle, and his red-rimmed eyes sagged in their sockets. The guy had obviously seen far too much horror for anyone to bear and if his demeanor wasn’t aware of it, at least the rest of him was. He’d clearly been down in this place too long and was in serious need of a good piece of steak and a few hours on a beach.

“Do you mind if we take a look at the body?” Masters asked.

Given that he called us, Lamont knew whose body Masters was referring to. “Body? I wouldn’t call it that, but you can certainly take a look.” We followed him to one of the stainless-steel doors. “Unlike Mr. Flapjack in there,” he motioned toward the room where the guy who ended up as chewing gum on the bottom of a tank track was being filleted, “I can’t tell you exactly what killed General Scott — put it down to a whole range of failures that happened within the split second of him being liquefied. Think roadkill.”

Major Lamont had a loud, deep voice that didn’t seem possible coming from a human built like a Slim Jim.

“Did you test for drugs, Major?”

“Yep. Found traces of paracetamol — maybe Scott had had a headache. Nothing else.”

Masters was covering off the suicide angle. Did the general take a dose of something before he went up, knowing full well his glider would fail? Make the plunge easier?

Lamont cracked open the fridge and pulled out the tray. Inside were two square stainless-steel tubs of what looked like ruddy omelette mixture, with a few chunky knucklebones thrown in. One of the tubs had hair in it.

“Voilà,” Lamont said as if presenting the plat du jour.

“Shit,” said Masters under her breath.

Lamont pushed the tubs back into the Westinghouse. “They’ll need to line his coffin with plastic,” he said cheerfully.

I could feel the clammy sweat, that hot and cold feeling of phobia coming over me. This is what happens when you fly. See? In my mind I could picture Scott plummeting in his plane, being dragged down by the hand of gravity. Except it wasn’t Scott pinned in the Perspex bubble of the glider; it was me. I was “projecting,” as my ex would have said — empathizing. The crash had reduced the man to a couple of bowls of pudding and all I could think about was myself, my own fears surfacing and threatening to overwhelm me. I had to get a grip, concentrate, redirect, or lose it completely. “Major,” I said, “do you have a Captain François Philippe working here?”

“Did. Nice fella. Shame about what happened to him.”

“What happened to him?”

“He transferred out around twelve months ago. Died in a house fire soon after.”

“Oh,” was all I could manage.

“Mother, father, sister — all killed. Electrical fire in the roof, apparently.”

Was it that imagination of mine again or was there a fair bit of nonrandom death going on? “Do you know anything about an autopsy he performed on General Scott’s son, a marine combat sergeant KIA in Baghdad?” I asked.

“Yeah, I did hear something about that. We can check the records, if you like.”

“Thanks,” I said. Masters was looking at me, frowning, but it was more a frown of concern for my well-being than the displeasure I was used to seeing on a woman’s face. It made a nice change. I knew I looked green, like one of the many people down here gone well past their bury-by date, but the worst of it had passed. I’d be okay and I conveyed as much with a nod.

Lamont made his way through a series of chambers filled with stainless-steel racks waiting for somebody, or, should I say, some body? “You expecting a few guests?” I asked as we entered the fourth room.

“No. You’ve gotta remember, this place was built when the folks back home thought the Russkies were going to pour across Germany in their tanks. Turned out the only thing the Russians could pour was vodka, but how were we to know that back then? We’ve got enough space here for five thousand dead at any one time. These chambers are like the Energizer bunny — they just go on and on.”

We passed several men and women wheeling gurneys carrying corpses covered in plastic. Many had suffered massive and obvious trauma — the wheelees, not the wheelers. “We occasionally get a little extra work from Iraq. The overload. We’ve certainly got the facilities, but a few more hands would be good.”

I thought he was going to say he’d prefer those hands to be connected to living arms, given that we’d just passed a gurney carrying a collection of assorted detached limbs, pushed by a woman who was so blasé she could have been cruising an aisle at Wal-Mart, but he refrained. Instead, he opened a door. Warm air and light beckoned from within. We’d crossed back over into the land of the living. I never thought I’d be so pleased to see bored individuals yawning at their computers. The major took a seat behind a PC with a Garfield clinging to the side of the monitor with sucker feet, and an “I NY” sticker on the plastic frame above the screen. His screensaver was a cocker spaniel whose eyes reminded me of Lamont’s — red and sad. “Okay, now, let…me…see…” he said as he clicked through several files and folders till he got the one he was after. His fingers clattered over the keyboard and the screen filled with a table, orange type on a black background. “Here we go. Captain François Philippe.” A list of autopsies completed by the captain during his time at Ramstein filled the screen. Lamont paged down till he came to the end — Philippe’s last month at the facility. “Well, that’s strange…” he said.

“What is?” said Masters, quicker than me on the draw.

“As I said, yes, I do remember Philippe talking about doing this autopsy — quietly — for General Scott on his son. I would have thought he’d have at least made a record of his findings, but there’s nothing here.”

“Could the record have been erased if it were on the database?” asked Masters.

“No, Major, not here. And maybe not anywhere. The program gives us some leeway to alter things while the autopsy is underway, but, once the work is done and the pathology is complete, the save button is hit and that’s that. We have no access to the main database from our end. Zero. It’s all hubbed back at the U.S. Department of Defense. And I doubt even those guys could change or delete things. You don’t want to be screwing around with death records, otherwise how will Saint Peter know who’s coming to dinner, right?”

“Okay,” I said. “Can you call up the original autopsy report?”

“Sure. Let me see…Scott…Scott…”

The screen pulled up a list of Scotts. There were plenty of them who were no more, but only one Peyton.

“Nothing too out of the ordinary here,” said Lamont. “Don’t know why General Scott would have wanted a second opinion, but…” He shook his head. “According to this, the U.S. Army Hospital at Baghdad did the autopsy as per standard operating procedure, and he was then issued a death certificate so that the IRS could drop off and go find another host to suck on. They bagged and tagged him, put him on a plane, and sent him home.”

“Cause of death?” I asked.

“Massive trauma caused by an argument with a land mine. The sergeant seems to have come off second best. Chest wounds, sliced aorta, et cetera.”

“You don’t know anything about Peyton Scott being decapitated?”

“No. The paperwork doesn’t lie.”

“Can you tell me who signed off on the autopsy?”

“Sure.” He scrolled down. “A Captain Homer Veitch.”

“You know him?” I asked.

Lamont glanced sideways at me. “It’s a big army.”

Okay, dumb question. “You don’t see a lot of soldiers here who’ve been autopsied back in Iraq?”

“No, sir. If they’ve already had an autopsy performed, they don’t make it down here and we don’t see any paperwork. If they come to Ramstein, it’s mostly because they’re in transit.”

“What about other autopsies Captain Veitch has performed. Can we look at records of them?”

“Sure.” Lamont shrugged. His fingers stroked the keys and the screen refreshed. “Hmmm,” he said.

“What?” I asked, leaning forward.

“Nothing: screen’s blank. The autopsy Veitch performed on Peyton Scott is the only one he has done. None before, none since.”

“What does that tell you?” I asked, needing it spelled out.

“Can’t say for sure,” said Lamont. “Veitch might have stepped on a land mine himself ten minutes after finishing with young Peyton and ended up under someone else’s knife. The circle of life, y’know.”

“Is that likely, Captain?” asked Masters.

“Not really, no, ma’am,” he said.

I made a note to check on this Captain Homer Veitch, but I had a gut feeling the guy never existed.

“Anything else I can do for you, sir, ma’am?” Lamont said, swiveling in his chair to look at us both.

“You could print me out a copy of the autopsy on Peyton Scott,” I said.

“Sure.” Lamont called it back up on screen and hit command-print. The HP LaserJet whirred and a yellow sheet slotted into the tray.

“Anything else?” I asked Masters.

“Actually, yeah,” she said. “Do you remember the photo of a series of body bags lined up on the apron here appearing in The Washington Post?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Were they on their way down to you here?”

“I can’t recall for sure, Special Agent, but we were getting a fair bit of overflow work from Iraq at the time.”

Masters took this in.

“You done?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so,” said Masters.

“Me, too. Captain, we’d appreciate it if you’d keep all this quiet.”

“Keep what quiet, sir?” he replied, blinking, as if I’d just hit him with the Men in Black light.

Masters and I took the elevator up in silence. It was big enough to garage an Abrams Main Battle Tank, more evidence that at one time a veritable stampede of dead people was expected to come this way. I was looking forward to seeing the sunshine, but I’d have settled for sleet. It was just good to be away from that place.

I pulled out the cell when we walked into the fresh air and called OSI. I eventually got through to Flight Lieutenant Bishop. I wanted to know whether he could look up army personnel records, and he told me that his position at air force security gave him a triple-A security rating. Or the equivalent thereof. I guessed that meant he could, so I gave him all Captain Homer Veitch’s particulars, which amounted to pretty much just that — the man’s name and rank.

“What did you make of all that?” asked Masters when I put the cell away.

I sucked in a lungful of fresh air gratefully, like a smoker having his first morning coffin nail, and said, “General Scott’s son died a year ago. But rumor has it the sergeant’s wounds didn’t match the autopsy report that accompanied the body.”

Masters nodded.

“And the forged autopsy signed off by Captain Homer Veitch. Who is he and why would he do that? Then there’s the Belgian, Captain Philippe. He supposedly performed a second autopsy, yet there’s no record of it. As far as the system’s aware, Peyton Scott died of wounds suffered when his vehicle ran over a land mine. Only that doesn’t exactly align with the scuttlebutt that the sergeant was decapitated.”

“And the only person who can confirm this — Captain Philippe — has conveniently died in a house fire,” said Masters.

“Yeah, it’s all very neat,” I said, “unless you happened to be one of these four dead people.”

“Who’s the fourth?”

“Alan Cobain. The journalist that took the photo of all the body bags.”

“That’s right.”

Yesterday, we had one dead general. Now we had a pyramid of corpses. My mind was recalling General Scott sloshing around in his stainless-steel tubs. He hadn’t died well, and neither had his son. Captain Philippe had also met his maker in a particularly nasty way. Cobain, too, died badly. I was thinking there was a lot to be said for ending it all in your sleep with a spilled tumbler of medicinal brandy and the electric blanket on — much more civilized. I was also thinking that something was rotten in Denmark or wherever things rot down, although it could also have been the formaldehyde clinging to my nasal passages.