Simple Genius

As they walked outside into the sunshine, Champ said, “I can pick you up day after tomorrow around nine if the weather holds.” He adjusted his glasses. “Uh, on the way back I know a nice little restaurant that actually has a pretty decent menu.”

Michelle eyed the man’s tall, lanky frame. He would certainly have had the physical strength to kill Rivest by using a plunger to hold the drunken man underwater until he drowned. But as Sean had said, Champ had an alibi for the time of the murder.

Or did he?

CHAPTER 59

“YOU SEEM TO BE the resident expert on Camp Peary around here,” Horatio said. He was seated across from South Freeman in the latter’s office.

“Yeah, but these days nobody wants to listen,” South said bitterly. “Let the CIA do whatever the hell it wants to. I just keep my head down now before it gets blown off.”

“Well, most Americans want to be safe by any means possible.”

“Yeah? Don’t get me going on that logic; it won’t be pretty.”

Horatio went over briefly what Sean had filled him in on when he and Michelle had visited South Freeman. “Now he wants to know what other history there is about the place that might not be widely known.”

“That fellow’s interested in Monk Turing’s death, right?” Horatio nodded. “Well, I am too. And if anything I tell you helps break that case, I want an exclusive. And I mean exclusive. Put my weekly rag back on the map, man, I’m telling you.”

“I’m not sure I can speak for Sean on that.”

Freeman immediately scowled. “Then you can get the hell out of here. I don’t hand out favors for nothing; goes against all my principles.”

Horatio hesitated only for an instant. “Okay, I’m making an executive decision. We break the case using something you gave us, you get the story first. I can put it in writing if you want.”

“Writing doesn’t mean shit with slick lawyers hovering around.” South held out his hand for Horatio to shake. “I like to look a man in the eye and press the flesh on it. You screw me later I’ll come and kick your ass.”

“What a sweet-talker you are.”

South said, “So what are you really interested in?”

“Well, why don’t you go through it chronologically? I know some about the CIA and Camp Peary, but what about before that? I understand the Navy trained Seabees there for World War II but was there anything else going on?”

“Oh, yeah, a lot going on. Like I told your buddies, there were two towns over there, Magruder and Bigler’s Mill. Magruder was named after, what else? A Confederate general; seems to have been a trend down this way.” He snorted. “My parents obviously had different reasoning when they named me South.”

“South Freeman,” Horatio said. “Clever.”

“Yeah. Anyway, Bigler’s Mill was built on the site of a Civil War hospital. So the stage was all set when the Navy came knocking on the door.”

“I wonder why the military picked that area?”

“You mean aside from it being occupied by colored folks who didn’t have any voice? Well, you got a lot of cheap land, water nearby-we are talking the Navy after all, and the C amp;O Railway ran a spur track down from Williamsburg and made Magruder’s Station.”

“Why was that? For bringing sailors and supplies down?”

“Yep. Most folks don’t realize that back then the railroad was how most troops got around in this country. But there was another reason for the spur.”

“What was that?”

“When the Navy operated the place it also held a military stockade.”

“Stockade? You mean a prison for American soldiers who’d committed crimes?”

“Nope. It was for German prisoners of war.”

“Germans?”

“They were sailors mostly. They came from subs and ships that were sunk off the East Coast. Crazy man Hitler thought these fellows had been killed of course. That’s why all the secrecy. The government didn’t want anybody to know those Germans were being held there.”

Horatio said, “Why? What was the big deal?”

South pointed at him and grinned. “Now that’s the sixty-four-thousanddollar question, ain’t it?”

“You’ve obviously thought about it. What’s your take?”

“Well, there’s an obvious one. If we were getting those boys to talk, spill secrets or capturing them with Enigma codebooks the German navy was using, then Hitler and his cronies would move heaven and earth to kill them. And make no bones about it, there were a lot of German spies and assassins over here then. At the very least it seemed that the tide in the Atlantic war turned about the time those POWs showed up at Camp Peary, so I’m betting our boys got them to talk about the Enigma code.”

“What happened to the prisoners after the war ended?”

“I figure some of them went back to Germany. I mean after the war what was the point in holding them? But I don’t think all of them went back to Germany. What was back there except dust, rubble and chaos? And people thought they were dead anyway. So I think some of them just stayed in America.”