Without Warning (3 page)

But it was her husband that the jury and everyone else believed had done it, and on some level she felt that she should have seen what he was capable of, and done something to have prevented it. Even more amazing, in her gut she still believed he was innocent of the murder, though not the affair. He had admitted to the affair.

Katie had always liked Jake; as a teenager she even thought she loved him and that they would someday marry. Now they would be working together, with more personal contact than they’d had since the tragedy.

She dreaded it.

I’m a war hero, you can ask anyone. Except me. It’s almost like an official designation, created to separate the “true heroes” from the other men and women who put their life on the line, but inexplicably without that recognition. And there are no shades of gray, no one is “sort of” a war hero. It’s like being an MVP, or a Super Bowl champion. You either is, or you ain’t.

It has been determined that I “is,” and that is a fact that I’m reminded of just about every day. First of all, there’s a Navy Cross sitting in my dresser at home. It’s the highest medal a Marine can receive after the Congressional Medal of Honor, and it’s for “valor in combat.”

I don’t display it; I keep it buried in a drawer. Since I don’t have a “valor drawer,” I keep it in my underwear drawer. But every day that I put on fresh underwear, which is every day, there it is. Maybe I should get a tie drawer and put it in there; then I’d never see it.

My knee reminds me of my hero status as well. It hurts every time it rains, or gets cloudy, or humid, or not. It was one of three places shrapnel was embedded in my body, and even though my head and chest wounds were what had kept me in the hospital for almost six months, my knee pain is what has lingered.

But the most irritating of the reminders of my unwanted hero status are the ones that come whenever my name gets in the paper, or on TV. Doesn’t matter what it’s for; it could be that I gave out a traffic ticket to some big shot, or got a cat down from a tree. Every time they mention me, they refer to me as “war hero Jake Robbins” and usually summarize the exploits that got me that exalted position.

I was Marine Captain Jake Robbins back then, leading an MP unit stationed in Afghanistan, sixty miles east of Kabul. Our job was to patrol the area, setting up checkpoints and the like, while our fellow Marines were out finding Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters to kill. Of course, the enemy’s job was to kill us first, and on that particular day, they did their job better than we did.

They ambushed a Marine unit and had them pinned down. We were in the immediate vicinity and we went in to help. In the initial burst, three of our guys were killed, and most of the others, including myself, wounded. I got a bunch of our guys out of there, though, carrying a kid named Willie Zimmer, from Nebraska, on my back.

For some reason, living was never that important to me; it still isn’t. It’s not that I want to die, not even close. I just know that I’m going to, and the timing is less crucial to me than it seems to be to other people. I think I made a judgment that the guys I brought out wanted to survive as much or more than I did, so I helped them do it.

Besides, Marines did stuff like that every day, and the ironic thing is my efforts got more publicity than most because of a failure. In addition to the three guys that were killed, a newspaper reporter embedded with the combat unit was also wounded in the ambush and didn’t make it out. His name was Randall Dempsey, and in the chaos that day I hadn’t even seen him.

The enemy spent the next month using Dempsey as a publicity tool, parading him before their cameras, having him make speeches denouncing the US. Then they announced that they had killed him and bragged about it, as if having executed a defenseless journalist was somehow a triumph for their cause. It was disgusting, but it attracted attention, and somehow made my getting the other guys out seem more heroic and important, since they might have suffered the same fate.

Dempsey’s family sued the government and apparently won a large judgment. I’m not sure if their victory was a result of some kind of government negligence, or if the Defense Department simply didn’t want his widow and son to be in the newspapers for months, a reminder of the disastrous operation.

I was pleased when it was finally resolved, because then it kept me out of the papers as well. I didn’t like publicity then, and I don’t like it now.

Unfortunately, when the media got ahold of this capsule business, it was going to bring me and my heroism back into the spotlight, and I wasn’t relishing it. But there was nothing I could do about it.

Since even decorated war heroes have to eat, I stopped for a pizza on the way home. Actually, I’m not sure that’s the right way to put it. I stop at Luigi’s Pizzeria just about every night, so it’s in reality part of my normal drive. Without Luigi’s as a way station, I might get lost trying to find my way home.

The owner of the place was there, as he always is. He doesn’t go on vacation, doesn’t take a sick day, doesn’t even seem to take a coffee break. Not ever. I have been there hundreds of times, and he’s been behind the counter every time.

His real name is Ralph. I once asked him who Luigi was, and he shrugged and said “Nobody. But who’s going to go to a pizza place named Ralph’s?”

Ralph considers himself my buddy, a relationship that was cemented three years earlier, on a rainy Tuesday evening. I was off duty, and two fairly large, quite drunk individuals came in and started hassling him. They weren’t from this area, but that wouldn’t have mattered to Ralph, who doesn’t like to be hassled. He told them to leave, at which point one of the large, drunken idiots pushed him, and the other took out a knife.

I got up and identified myself as a police officer. I didn’t show my badge, because I didn’t want to get pizza grease from my hands on it. There is more oil in one of Ralph’s pizzas than the average carburetor. I don’t think the badge would have had much effect anyway; these guys weren’t the type to impress easily.

The same clown who pushed Ralph decided to push me, which was somewhat different than pushing Ralph. I interpreted that as assaulting a police officer, so I punched him twice. One hundred percent of the punches broke something, one his jaw and the other, two of his ribs.

I relieved his friend of the knife, which seemed to sober him up fairly quickly. He then backed off, which kept him out of the hospital. The whole thing wasn’t a big deal; it would have been just another day’s work had I been on the job, but Ralph never forgot it.

Since then he shows his gratitude by putting my pizza in the oven the moment he sees my car pull up, so it’s ready in maybe ten minutes. He also doesn’t seem to charge me for toppings, but I’ve never confirmed that, because I usually just get plain cheese.

The routine is that I have a Diet Pepsi and talk to him while I wait, mostly about sports. I used to have trouble understanding his fake Italian accent, but I’ve gotten pretty good at it with time. He calls me “Jakey,” probably because he thinks he sounds like Tony Soprano when he does.

My normal custom is to eat four pieces of pizza, but only two of the crusts. It’s part of my strict weight-control regimen, and I’ve been pretty successful at it. I’m six one, a hundred and seventy-five pounds, but if not for the fact that I play racquetball three times a week, I’d have to cut out crusts entirely. And probably pizza as well.

When I got home that night I stuck to my regimen and ate half the pizza, then wrapped up the other half and put it in the refrigerator. I’d have it for breakfast the next morning, same as always. I kept cereal in the house, but it was only for those rare times when I’d go out for dinner the night before and not get a pizza. I had no plans to retire as a cop and become a nutritionist.

For the first time in a long time I was anxious to get to the office the next morning. I like my job, but it had become repetitive and not terribly exciting. The situation with the time capsule certainly changed all that, and I was looking forward to tackling it.

In terms of the case itself, there was no real urgency to it. The victim had been dead a long time—hopefully we’d find out exactly how long—so the trail had long ago gone cold. Most cases, if they’re going to be solved, are solved within forty-eight to seventy-two hours, or at least great progress is made within that time frame.

I hadn’t done the math, but if the murder happened around the time the capsule was buried, then we had missed that window by close to forty thousand hours.

I had left Hank behind to run a computer check on missing persons reports in the area, covering the years since the capsule was buried. Hopefully we’d be able to narrow that time frame down considerably; for now we were just trying to get a jump on things.

In the meantime, I searched my memory bank for anything that might fit, but I came up blank. Certainly over the last few years we’d had missing persons, runaways and the like, but I had no idea if any of those people was reduced to a rubble of bones on top of the capsule. And obviously, the unlucky victim did not even have to be from around here.

My memory search didn’t do any better on suspects, either. Clearly Roger Hagel would have to be considered, since he was a confirmed murderer. I doubted he’d ultimately be implicated, though, since his killing of Jenny represented more a crime of passion and revenge. There had been no evidence of any previous illegal activities, much less murder.

So while I was in a hurry to proceed, at this point all I could really do was prepare and wait. The forensics would be important, and my hope was that they could tell us a lot about the victim. So far I knew nothing, not the sex, age, cause of death, or when the murder was committed.

I had full confidence in Danny and our coroner, but our physical resources were limited, and I figured eventually we would have to turn to the state or even federal labs for some assistance.

It seemed unlikely that the contents of the capsule would tell us anything. For all I knew, the murder happened nearby, and the freshly dug hole represented a convenient place to dump the body. But we would certainly open the capsule and examine the contents, just in case.

I settled in to watch the Red Sox game, and it was in the fifth inning when the phone rang. It was Danny Martinez calling from the lab, and the first thing he said was, “Do not tell me the Sox score; I’m TiVo’ing it.”

“Then tell me you got the bones to talk.” Danny often said that dead bodies sometimes talked more than live ones.

“You just got to ask the right questions, Chief.”

“What have you got?”

“Too soon, but I’ll have something for you first thing in the morning.”

“Seven o’clock?” I asked.

“Perfect,” he said. “We’ll do a three-way at Connor’s office?”

He was talking about Russell Connor, the county coroner. It’s a busy office, chronically understaffed, as Connor repeatedly says to anyone who’ll listen. He spends half of his time telling people how little time he has. I’m amazed that he would have made a long dead body such a priority.

“How’d you get him to look at it so fast?” I asked.

“He’s afraid of me. Is the game worth watching?”

“You told me not to tell you.”

“Don’t tell me who’s ahead; just tell me if the game is worth watching.”

This is dangerous territory. Anything I tell him can lead to certain assumptions, which are subjective, and which he might not consider valid. “What constitutes worth watching?”

“Just tell me if the Sox are getting blown out.”

This was not an easy call; at the time the Red Sox were down 6-0. It’s a steep deficit for most teams, but with the Sox’s strong hitting, the chance that they would come back, while remote, was certainly there. If I told him they were getting killed, and then they came back to win without Danny seeing it, he would never forgive me. “They are not getting blown out,” I said.

“Good. See you at seven.”

He certainly didn’t ride in on a white horse. Not even close. George Myerson actually drove a green Volvo, five years old. And on Wednesday nights, he didn’t ride in to the rescue, he rode in to the Barkley Inn in Marston for his weekly liaison with Mara Woodall.

That was OK with Mara; George was decent to her, gave her nice gifts, and wasn’t an asshole. Besides that, he was affectionate, attentive and not bad in bed. So she recognized that he provided her with something that she needed and looked forward to.

Almost every Wednesday night.

The fact that George was married was not something that pleased Mara, so she didn’t spend much time thinking about it. It wasn’t that she wanted more from George, and she certainly would never want to be Mrs. George Myerson. God forbid.

She just didn’t see herself as someone who was interested in coming between a man and his wife, so she rationalized that wasn’t what was going on in this relationship. If George wasn’t seeing Mara, she reasoned, he would be seeing someone else. And since that someone would likely be more demanding, Mara’s presence was actually doing George and his wife a favor.

The routine was familiar. They would meet for a drink, which would become dinner, which would become a trip up to the third-floor room for another drink and very familiar sex. The entire process took about three hours, including the perfunctory good-bye kiss.

They had missed the two previous weeks, due to George being too busy with business. For an insurance agent, Hurricane Nicholas was an overwhelming event, and Mara fully understood. She was even surprised that he was able to make it this particular Wednesday.

To George’s credit, he didn’t talk much about work, even at that hectic time. He always steered the conversation to Mara and her life, and she figured it was because he didn’t want to mention his own wife and kids. But she was grateful for the attention, and if she had any curiosity about his existence during the one hundred sixty-five hours each week that they weren’t together, she hid it well.

So this Wednesday evening was pretty much like all the others, and when they said good-bye in the parking lot, she had no reason to think it would be the last time she would see him.