The Innocent

“So you know them all, well?” Robie asked pointedly.

“No. I meant that, well, we all fought for our country. And to turn against it…” His voice trailed off and he just sat there, pudgy hands on his cheap desk, looking like a little boy who’d just been told his puppy had been run over by a car.

“Which of them have you kept in touch with?”

Siegel came out of his trance and said slowly, “Doug Biddle, Fred Alvarez, Bill Thompson, and Ricky Jones died. Years back.”

“That I know. But they didn’t live in the area. They were all spread out.”

“Yeah, but we would call each other. Exchange emails. Doug came here once and I took him around to some of the monuments. Fred got killed in a car accident. Billy put a damn gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Doug and Ricky both had cancer. Younger than me. I think it was all the crap we were exposed to over there. You know, Gulf War syndrome. I could be dying and not even know it. Every time I get a migraine I think it’s all over.”

He sank back in his chair.

Robie sat down opposite him and said, “Any of your old buddies locally that you hang with?”

“I saw Leo Broome a few times. That was a while back.”

“How far back?”

“Over ten years ago. Ran into him at a bar in Seattle, of all places. He was out there on business and I had just changed jobs and was at a seminar. He seemed to be doing okay. Think he worked for the government or something like that. Don’t remember exactly.”

“Anyone else?”

“In the Middle East I was closest to Curtis Getty. But I haven’t seen him since we got back stateside. Don’t even know where he is now.”

That would be dead, thought Robie.

“Leo Broome ever mention Getty?”

“Don’t remember. For some reason it didn’t seem like they had kept up. But like I said, that was a decade ago.”

Ten years ago, that might have been the case, thought Robie. “Anyone else? Rick Wind, for instance?”

“I read that he had been murdered. Is that what this is about?”

“Had you been in contact with Wind?”

“No. Not for years. Used to see him. But he’d gotten strange. Bought that pawnshop in that crummy neighborhood. I don’t know. It was just different.”

“How about Jerome Cassidy?”

“Nope. Haven’t heard from him since we left the Army.”

“He lives in the area. Not that far from here.”

“Didn’t know that.”

“How about Elizabeth Van Beuren? That’s her married name. Her maiden name was-”

“Elizabeth Claire. I know.”

“It was unusual having a woman in the ranks back then, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Things are different now, of course. But I always thought the combat exclusion rule for women was crap. They can fight just as good as men. And in a unit they really let their strengths shine. Guys are more macho. Women build a team perspective. And I gotta tell you, even though women were deployed in combat support positions, but technically weren’t supposed to shoot back, they sure as hell did. At least in Gulf One. And Lizzie was one of the best. She was a better soldier than I was, I can tell you that.”

“But she’s no longer in the Army,” said Robie.

“Well, there’s a good reason for that,” replied Siegel.

“You’ve been in touch with her?”

“I have.”

“So what’s the reason she’s no longer in the Army?”

“Cancer. Started in her breasts and then it spread. It’s in her brain, lungs, liver now. She’s terminal, of course. Once that stuff metastasizes, it’s over. They don’t have any magic bullets for that. She’s at a hospice center in Gainesville.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“Went regularly until about a month ago. She was in and out of it. Mostly out. Morphine. I’m not even sure if she’s still alive. I should have kept up, but I guess it was just too hard to see her like that.”

“What’s the name of the place?”

“Central Hospice Care. It’s off of Route 29.”

“Okay.”

Siegel exclaimed, “I’m telling you, it’s all the crap we breathed in over there. Depleted uranium, toxic cocktails from all the artillery blasts. Fires burning all over the damn place, painting the sky black, burning crap we didn’t know what the hell it was. And there we all were, just sucking it in. That could just as easily be me in that bed waiting for the end.”

Robie handed Siegel a card. “Anything else occurs to you, give me a call.”

“What is this really all about? How can somebody from my old squad be involved in all this stuff?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.” Robie paused. “Did your wife give you a heads-up we were coming?”

“She did,” admitted Siegel.

“She worried about something?”

“She’s worried I might lose my job.”

Robie thought back to Julie’s theory of money laundering for terrorists. “Why? Problems here?”