High Crimes

“Oh, sure. The machine gun is usually issued with a spare barrel. Sometimes you might have a whole sack of barrels. They’re interchangeable. They also deteriorate. After a while, you throw them away.”

“So this particular machine gun might have been issued with two separate barrels?”

“Correct.”

“Possibly more.”

“Possibly.”

She gave Embry a sidelong glance. His eyes gleamed with, she thought, pride. “Mr. Coultas, are machine-gun barrels serialized the way guns usually are?”

“Sometimes. I’ve seen it.”

“But is this one?”

“No.”

“It’s not marked.”

“No.”

“So do you know whether this exact barrel was issued along with this exact gun?”

Coultas shook his head in bafflement as he stroked his receding chin. “I’d have no way to know that.”

“But you do know that they’re easily switched?”

“That I do know.”

“Mr. Coultas, granting for the sake of argument that this is the barrel that was used to fire the projectiles you’ve so carefully studied — isn’t it possible that someone might have switched barrels?”

“Well, I suppose so, yes.”

“You suppose so?”

“It’s possible, yes.”

“So someone might have taken this gun, with this particular serial number stamped on it, and actually put on it the barrel that was used to fire all those rounds?”

“I can’t rule it out.”

“It’s possible?”

“Theoretically, yes, it is.”

“It’s not difficult to do?”

“No, it’s not.”

“It would, in fact, be quite an easy thing to do, wouldn’t it, Mr. Coultas?”

“Yes, it would,” he said. “It would be very easy.”

“Thank you, Mr. Coultas. I have nothing further.”

45

The weekend, at last. Some much-needed time off. She tried to sleep late but couldn’t. She awoke before seven and realized the phone hadn’t rung in the middle of the night. Progress. Or maybe they took weekends off. She ran a very hot bath in the big old white porcelain tub in the master-suite bathroom, whose floor was tiled in tiny black-and-white octagons as in a grand hotel of old, and took a long soak. She was tempted to bring some work into the tub with her, maybe a transcript, but then forced herself not to. She needed a break. She needed to let her fevered brain rest a bit. She needed perspective on the case. So she closed her eyes and soaked away the bruises and the aches. She thought about Tom, wanted to visit him at the brig, but knew that Annie needed her even more right now.

Then she got into jeans, a sweatshirt, and sneakers, and took Annie out to breakfast in Georgetown, just the two of them. They left without notifying Devereaux, who was probably still sleeping.

“When can we go home?” Annie asked. She was making designs on her pancakes with the squeeze bottle of syrup.

“You mean Boston?”

“Yeah. I want to see my friends. I want to see Katie.”

“Soon, honey.”

“What’s ‘soon’?”

“A couple of weeks. Maybe sooner.”

“With Daddy?”

She didn’t know what to say now. No, she wanted to say. Not with Daddy. Daddy’s kangaroo court will probably find him guilty and sentence him to life in Leavenworth, where you’ll be able to visit him once in a while. It will tear your life apart. And that’s if Mommy’s able to get the sentence reduced from death. All the while, Mommy will be fighting uphill battles, writing and filing briefs like one of these half-crazed prison legal scholars, taking the case to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals, and higher and higher, all the way up to the Supreme Court. While the family’s resources dwindled away, because Harvard would have fired her, which she was sure would happen any day now. Probably at some point, once they were out of the military system, the verdict would be overturned; it surely couldn’t stand up, the government’s case was a joke. But Daddy would certainly not survive prison, because too many people wanted him dead.

“Of course with Daddy,” she said, and tousled Annie’s miraculously soft, glossy brown hair. “Now, when you’re done with your pancakes, we’ll go to the zoo, okay?”

Annie shrugged as if the idea didn’t appeal to her.

“You don’t like the zoo?” Claire said.

Annie shook her head.

“You’re still upset with me.”

“No, Mommy. I’m angry with you.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t, Mommy. You always say you know, but you don’t.” Her eyes shone. “You said you were going to be home more, but you’re still always gone.”

“You wanted me to play with you last night, but I had to work with Mr. Grimes and Mr. Embry and Uncle Ray. I know.”

“How come you’re always working?”

“Because Daddy’s on trial,” she said. “They want to lock him up in the jail for a long, long time, and it’s up to me and my friends to make sure they don’t do that.”

“But why does it take so long?”

A tough one. “Because the people who want to put him away are bad guys, and sometimes they lie.”

“Why?”

Claire thought about that one for a long time. Finally she said, honestly, “I don’t really know.”