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By Root 474 0

of who his father was, and partly because of his own personality. But he wasn’t liked. The conversations as recorded were loyal to a fault, but it was institutional loyalty, not personal loyalty, all of it filtered through any soldier’s traditional hatred for the military police. No one had a bad thing to say about the guy, but no one had a good thing to say either. By reading between the lines of what was and wasn’t said I saw that Riley was a grandstander and a show pony, and that he was impatient, reckless, careless, and full of entitlement. No big deal in a low-temperature environment like Kosovo, but he would have been accidentally shot in the back or blown up with a faulty grenade on his first day if he had been a generation older in Vietnam. That was for damn sure. Better men than Riley had suffered that fate.

Before Chapman it was clear he had dated Shawna Lindsay. They had been seen together many times. And before Lindsay he had dated Rosemary McClatchy. They too had been seen together many times, in the bars, in the diner, riding around in the blue ’57 Chevy. There was a faint twice-removed reek of testosterone in Munro’s notes, as one young man after another had chortled about the big dog mowing them down in sequence, all the best looking women in town, just like that, wham bam, thank you ma’am.

And according to Bravo Company, that prestigious sequence had begun with Elizabeth Deveraux. She was well known at Kelham, because of an early courtesy visit at the start of the mission. Back then training had been intense, and there had been no leave or down time, but the big dog had snuck out at night and nailed the prize. That triumph had been revealed one evening during Bravo Company’s first tour to Kosovo, over drinks around a fire. Again, I could almost hear the voices first-hand, full of chuckling delight at the way the rest of the regular 75th training grunts thought Deveraux was a lesbian, and at the way the boys of Bravo Company secretly knew better, because of their big dog, their alpha male, and his irresistible ways. They didn’t like the guy, but they admired him. Personality, and charisma. And hormones too, I guessed.

There was nothing else of interest in the notebook. I spent some time looking at Riley’s picture again, and then I squared the whole thing away in my own top pocket, and I went back to waiting.

* * *

The rest of the afternoon was long and fruitless. The hours passed, and no one called, and no one came, and the town stayed quiet. At one point I heard some faint live-firing noise from the east, and I guessed the hoopla at Kelham was going swimmingly. From time to time I drank a cup of coffee and ate a slice of pie, but mostly I just rested in a semi-vegetative state, eyes open but half-asleep, breathing low, saving energy, like hibernation. Local people came and went in ones and twos, and at six o’clock Jonathan and Hunter Brannan came in for an early dinner, to fuel up ahead of their busy evening, which I thought was wise, and two or three others I took to be bar owners did the same thing, and some of what I took to be their cleaners stopped by before heading home, and at seven o’clock Main Street went dark outside the window, and at seven-thirty the old couple from the hotel came in for their meal, she with her book, he with his paper.

Then a minute later Stan Lowrey called on the phone, and the evening began to unravel.

Chapter

81

Lowrey started out by apologizing for the extreme lateness of his warning, and then he said he had just heard from an MP friend at Fort Benning in Georgia, where the 75th Ranger Regiment was based. Apparently a lieutenant colonel from their remote detachment at Kelham had phoned home and told his bosses there were still two CID majors on the scene locally, one on the post itself and one in town, the latter a prize pain in the ass, and because his bosses were determined that Senator Riley be shown nothing but a good time, they had dispatched a babysitting squad to muzzle the said CID majors for the remaining duration of the senator’s visit. Just in