The Summer House(16)

Allen smiles, but John sees how his fellow investigator is nearly gritting his teeth. “So where is he? Can you call him?”

The young man looks surprised, like both he and Allen should know what’s going on. “Fellas, it’s deer-hunting season for muzzle-loaders. The chief is out by Sweeney’s Tract by now…and there ain’t no cell phone coverage out there.”

Allen’s smile is getting icier, and John says, “Sir, if I may…We’re not here to cause any trouble. We’re here to help those four men. Now, we know they’ve been charged with horrible crimes. We understand that. But the captain here is an Army lawyer, and I’m an Army doctor, and we’ve been ordered to see the men, to talk to them, to send a report back to Washington.”

John knows what he’s said is 50 percent true, 50 percent bullshit, but he hopes the magic words of Army, ordered, and Washington just might work.

The jail attendant says, “You’re here to help, then?”

Allen says, “Sir, absolutely.”

John has a guilty thought that this is probably one of the few times this pudgy young man has ever been called sir.

He says, “You stay here. I’ll be right back.” With coffee cup still in hand, he steps back in, locks the door, and then disappears from sight.

Allen says, “Looks like it worked.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me again, how do you do it?” Allen asks. “Me, I’ve got law books and online records to help me puzzle out legal crap, years of precedents, and judges out there to kick me in the nuts if I stray too far. But you?” Allen taps the side of his head. “All between your ears, Doc, trying to figure out what’s going on with some other guy’s brain. Don’t know how you do it.”

“There are degrees and learning on our end, too,” John says, feeling uncomfortable in the heat.

“Yeah, but I know enough about psychiatry to know that every ten or so years there’s a big upheaval that turns everything upside down. Lawyers? Man, we’re still working off a document that King John signed more than a thousand years back. How do you do it?”

Like a PowerPoint presentation, faces of past patients he talked to after joining the Army come to him, men and women, young and old, privates to colonels, all sizes and shapes and colors, but one thing is the same for each of them: their eyes. Each has the same dull, blank look of someone who has gone into the abyss and is trying so desperately to climb out.

And he, Dr. John Huang of Stanford and the US Army Medical Corps, is lying along the lip of a precipice, reaching a hand out, anxious to rescue his patient down there in the darkness, and also desperately hoping that, listening to the bloody horrors they took part in and witnessed, he won’t also be pulled down.

John says, “I don’t know. It’s a gift, I guess.”

The shadow reappears, the door is unlocked, and this time it’s opened only a foot or so.

The jail attendant stands in the gap, nervous, face pale, no longer holding the kitschy coffee cup.

“Sorry, fellas, none of them wants to see you,” he says. “You need to leave. Now.”





Chapter 13



I WAIT FOR Sheriff Williams to take a breath and I step forward, keeping my voice soft and low. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Sheriff, and with all due respect, I’m not here to play games.”

“You got one funny goddamn way of showing it,” she says, nearly spitting out the words.

I say, “Sheriff, you have to admit you placed us in a box. You told me we couldn’t get access to the crime scene. I respect that. If I didn’t, then I would have had Special Agent Sanchez”—I gesture to him, standing about three meters away—“knock that door down and let us in. I didn’t do that.”

The sheriff folds her arms. “A goddamn good thing you didn’t or you and yours would be getting processed right now in my county jail.”

I smile, nod, trying to maintain a reassuring look. “I respect that, and appreciate that, Sheriff. Now, if I may, we’re all here. It’s still early on a Sunday morning. You’ve been active-duty, you’ve been exposed to enemy fire and danger in Iraq. Not many people can say that, now, can they? And you know that out in the field you have to bend sometimes to get your job done.”

Sheriff Williams lifts an eyebrow. “Like me bending to let you into the crime scene?”

“Sheriff, my detachment and I are here on official business. We need to get into that house. And I’m just asking you—from one Army vet to another—to allow us in.”

I wait, then a slight smile appears on her previously hard face, and she lets her arms fall free. “You’re a slippery and smart one, I’ll give you that. All right, we go in, but no photos, nothing taken from the house, you follow my lead.”

“Absolutely.”

She nods to me. “And don’t forget, Major, I’m a slippery and smart one, too.”



I follow her to the wide wooden steps leading to the door of the old home, and she removes the yellow-and-black police tape and gently drapes it on a railing. Up at the door she turns and says, “Years and years ago this was a famous place in our little town. It belonged to a rich fella named Callaghan, owned a shipping company over in Savannah. There’s a little lake nearby, and he and his family and rich friends loved coming here during the summer, ’fore air-conditioning came here.” She shakes her head. “Yeah, a nice little historical place. Poets, writers, politicians—they all made their way here. Including FDR, like I said earlier. And then the Callaghan family got hit hard during the Great Depression, had to give it up and other properties, and from generation to generation, it came to this. Being rented to a bunch of losers by some property management company. Okay, let me give you a bit of a timeline before we go in.”