Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [107]
Classes were already in session, and his first order of business was to attend a luncheon meeting with full-time and visiting faculty in the executive dining room. He reviewed the list of assigned instructors. Edward Ramsey, of the FBI Law Enforcement Communication Unit, was scheduled to teach an afternoon class next week on public speaking and media relations.
Kerney wondered if he was the same Ed Ramsey who’d once headed up the Santa Barbara PD. The instructor résumés inside the three-ringed binder of student course materials confirmed he was. That meant it should be easy to approach Ramsey and engage him in conversation. He’d be interested to learn if Ramsey knew about his meetings with Captain Chase. He hoped so.
He put the binder aside, took out the lecture notes he’d prepared before leaving Santa Fe, and started adding to them.
After a lengthy morning meeting, Sara returned to her cubicle at the Pentagon to find George Spalding’s military service jacket on her desk. Known as a 201 file, it contained, among other things, information on Spalding’s military training and occupational specialty, performance ratings and promotions, awards and decorations, medical/dental records, pay and allowances, permanent duty assignments, and disciplinary actions.
The file confirmed Spalding had been a graves registration specialist and not a military policeman. According to his performance ratings, he’d been a marginal soldier at best; so much so that, had he survived his tour of duty in Vietnam, he would have been denied a Good Conduct Medal. However, he was awarded the National Defense and the Vietnam Service medals.
While Spalding was in Nam, his promotion from private first class to specialist fourth class had been delayed due to a CID investigation into missing personal effects of soldiers killed in action. He’d been cleared of any wrongdoing, but a sergeant in his unit had been tried and convicted for theft under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Sara made copies of Spalding’s dental charts and the CID report for Kerney, put them in her briefcase, and reviewed her notes from her latest meeting with the brass, which had been a rehash of her original marching orders.
Her immediate boss, a brigadier general, had made it clear that none of the closed sexual assault cases would be reopened. Everything in the report to Congress was to be forward-looking and proactive. He wanted loopholes closed, coordination improved, policies defined, protocols recommended, training proposed, staffing patterns detailed, and nothing more.
Post commanders could be interviewed only to gain feedback about how the system could be improved. No case studies of actual investigations were to be included; only a statistical model of the investigations, with graphs and charts, would be incorporated in the report.
She’d griped to Kerney about the decision by the brass to sanitize the shoddy sexual assault investigations, and her dissatisfaction with the assignment was deepening. The agenda was pure face-saving, buck-passing, Teflon-coated gamesmanship.
Sara had come to her Pentagon post as a realist, knowing full well that not everyone in command operated ethically or honestly. But she was saddled with a petty, childish tyrant of a boss, who was more interested in making rank than doing the right thing.
Two choices faced her: She could play the marionette, get her ticket punched, and move up a rung on the ladder. Or she could exercise initiative and risk short-circuiting her career.
Her gut told her that she really didn’t have a choice. No woman willing to serve her country, who’d been viciously assaulted and violated while performing her duty, deserved anything less than justice. The shackles put on her by the higher-ups were unacceptable. She would have to find a way to push the envelope and try