High Crimes

“I want you to know exactly what tests I’ve run. I used a really quite sophisticated system from Kay Elemetrics, a Computer Speech Lab Model 4300B, to run the oral and spectrographic analysis of the voice, and I matched it against the samples your husband gave me over the phone.”

“It’s him, isn’t it?”

“I looked at things like frequency on the vertical axis, and, in the time domain, the trajectory of formant structure, the consonant-vowel couplings. Pitch, which reflects vocal-fold oscillation and is represented by the vertical striations in the spectrograms—”

“Damn it, is it Tom’s voice?”

“Yes, it is,” the expert said quietly. “I used twenty-two different words, and I got nineteen very good matches based on the number of formant structures.”

“How certain are you?”

“Ninety-nine percent, I’d say. But I’m still not done with my tests, and there’s one more thing I need to check.”

Eight o’clock the next morning. In the long sterile conference room at the brig, the only one where there wasn’t a camera.

“I need the truth now,” she said.

He grimaced. “Come on, Claire—”

“No. Tell me the truth. Did you say that?”

“Of course not. We weren’t out in the field the day after the massacre, we were back at the hooch. And I never carried the radio — that wasn’t my job.” He smiled and sandwiched her right hand between his. “Come on, honey.”

“That’s your voice.”

“They faked it somehow.”

“You can’t fake that, Tom. That’s your voice.”

“Well, I didn’t say all that stuff.”

“And you’re telling me the truth?”

He withdrew his hands. “I’m telling you the truth,” he said softly.

“Promise me.”

His eyes expressed hurt. “My God, you think I did it, don’t you? They’ve turned you around, haven’t they? They’ve gotten to you — my own wife!”

“Come on, Tom!” she shouted. “I don’t know what I think! What about the gun?”

“We’re not still talking about that, are we? You proved how easily they could have—”

“Forget what I did and said in there. Forget my courtroom tricks. It’s just you and me now.”

“You showed how they could have substituted the barrel.”

“Don’t get legalistic on me. Did you kill those people?”

“Claire—”

“Were you ordered to do it? Is that why everyone’s covering up, to protect the general?”

“Claire—”

“If you were ordered to do it — well, that’s not really a defense, but we could argue mitigating factors, and—”

“And you think I massacred eighty-seven people?”

She looked at him, not knowing what to say. “Promise me that’s not you on the tape.”

For a long moment he looked at her, his eyes at once wounded and furious. “I am not a monster, Claire,” he said.

There was a loud knock on the door. She opened it to find Embry standing there, out of breath, holding a sheet of paper.

“What have you got there?” Claire asked.

“You asked about Hernandez’s medical records a couple of days ago,” Embry panted. “I had a buddy of mine check around — they were at the Pentagon dispensary, like I thought. He just faxed this over.”

“You got his shrink records?”

“No,” Embry said. “Better.” He grinned, then broke out into laughter. “Much, much better.”

The forensic tape expert, Leonore Eitel, was a petite and dignified-looking woman, slight to the point of tiny, silver-haired, with oversized round black spectacles. She wore a perfect dove-gray suit.

“If you would please stand in front of the witness chair, raise your right hand, and turn and face me,” Waldron said. The attorneys and the judge were meeting in a separate evidentiary hearing, a 39(a) session. “Do you swear that the evidence you shall give in the case now in hearing shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

“I do.”

Claire then took Leonore Eitel through her credentials, which were extensive and impressive. Then Eitel stated her findings: that the voice on the tape was indeed that of Ronald M. Kubik, a.k.a. Thomas Chapman.

“And what else, Ms. Eitel, can you tell us about this tape recording?” Claire asked.

“Well, to begin with, using a spectrum analyzer, I detected a sixty-cycle hum on the recording.”

“What’s the significance of that?”

“That’s the sound made by line power. That tells us that the voice was recorded on an electrical, plugged-in tape recorder, as opposed to a battery-operated one.”

“But couldn’t that hum have come from the tape recorder used by the Signal Corps, the people who allegedly taped the broadcast off the air?”

“No. If the speaker’s voice had been broadcast over a field radio and then recorded off the air, I wouldn’t have picked up that hum where I did. I can demonstrate precisely what I mean.”

“Thank you, but for now, let’s move on. Could this hum have been caused by copying the original?”

“No. I’ll explain—”

“In a few moments. What else did you observe?”

“The band width was different from what you’d expect to see from a voice broadcast over the air. The range of speech and microphone characteristics was markedly different, in terms of frequency response, from what you’d see in a radio transmission.”

“Is that it?”