“It was her first deployment, right?” I ask.
He nods, still looking past me like I’m not really there. “I don’t know why she was so eager to go over there. It was all she ever wanted. Remember that, Vera?”
Vera nods. She is not looking at him; she stares into her cup. “It was all she ever talked about. That was why she enlisted.”
“She was an interpreter, right?” I ask.
Sammy nods heavily. His shoulders sag. “She studied Arabic and, naturally, that is very useful over there. She really believed she could make a difference, that she could be useful.”
“So, why didn’t she like it there?” I ask, praying I’m not going too far. But I do feel like they want to tell me this. They want to talk about their daughter. “You said she was disappointed at life at the camp. What was different? How was it different than what she expected it to be?”
Sammy shakes his head. He looks defeated. It’s no surprise to me that he is a broken man; I can’t imagine losing a daughter, but there’s something else. There is spite in his voice and defiance in his brown eyes that tell me he hasn’t gotten the closure he needs. There’s a wistfulness to his voice that I don’t think he’s aware of. It’s like he’s missing these important pieces, and he’s trying so hard to finish the puzzle without them, but it just won’t fit.
“She wouldn’t say exactly what it was, but she did tell us on her last call that she had seen stuff in her role as interpreter that she found troublesome.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know much. Methods that were very different from what she was used to from her training.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Torture?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he says, “but that’s the only thing that makes any sense.”
“She did tell me about witnessing prisoners being burned with cigarettes at another time,” Vera says. “Or stripped down and then taunted about their manhood. I got the feeling she only told me a little about what she had seen. She told me she wanted to talk to her supervisor about it because she didn’t want to be a part of it. It was unethical, she said.”
“Did she ever talk to her superior about it?” I ask.
Vera shrugs. “We don’t know. There was a notebook that she wrote these things in, but it was never found.”
“Really?” I ask. “And then she told you that if anything happened to her, she wanted you to investigate?”
Sammy nods. He doesn’t look at me when he says the next part. He looks down at his fingers. He reminds me of my youngest when he is in trouble.
“Yes. I think she said it mostly as a joke. She said it with a laugh at the end, you know? Like she didn’t really mean it. That’s what it sounded like to me.”
The way he talks about it makes it sound like he doesn’t really believe it was a joke. He has only convinced himself to think it was. I wonder why. Is it to make it easier to accept that she committed suicide? Because he doesn’t know what to do about it if it wasn’t? Because the Air Force has told him to think that way? Because his wife wants him to think that way, so he won’t get worked up with his high blood pressure?
Because it’s easier?
I lean back in my chair, pensively. It doesn’t sound like a joke to me. Nothing about this seems like a joke. But what do I know, right? I wasn’t there. I didn’t know her very well and didn’t know if she’d joke about something like this. Would anyone joke about something like this?
“But that’s not the worst part,” Hattie says as she comes back from the kitchen. She has been standing there for a little while like she was deciding whether to come sit with us or go back. She places the cookies on the table in front of us, then sits down, looking at her husband.
“Tell her, Sammy. There’s no use in keeping it a secret. Tell her what you discovered.”
Chapter 13
“We were told it was a suicide,” Sammy says, folding his hands in front of him on the table while he speaks. “And immediately, we both knew it couldn’t be true. We just knew.”
“Not our daughter,” Hattie says. “Not Clarice. Not my baby. She wouldn’t do that to herself.”
“None of us would believe it, so I took it upon myself to start digging a little,” Sammy says, grabbing his wife’s hand in his. They exchange a brief look before he returns to his story. “The first thing that rubbed me the wrong way was how she supposedly killed herself. We were told she shot herself in the mouth with a military-issued service weapon. Now, I am a military vet myself, and I knew that Clarice’s service weapon was a forty-inch M-16. My daughter is only five feet tall and weighs maybe ninety pounds. She was a tiny little thing. She would have had great difficulty maneuvering an M-16 into her mouth and firing it. “
“But that isn’t all,” his wife says.
“No,” Sammy says. “We were also told that she was upset because a boyfriend had broken up with her via an email. That was their explanation. They said that she received the email, then slung her M-16 over her shoulder and went to the military store to buy a six-pack of soda and a pack of Hershey’s chocolate. They said, at this point, she was with an unnamed male friend and that she returned to her barracks with him, but then she left alone. She then went to a tent belonging to a military contractor, where they say she found a can of aerosol and set the tent on fire, then put the M-16 to her mouth and fired. The Air Force’s investigation showed that she killed herself. The Armed Service Committee in the Senate then signed off on her death, and the case was closed.”
I stare at the both of them, my pulse quickening. “But…” I say, then look briefly at Vera. “Wasn’t Clarice gay? I thought you told me that once.”
Vera nods. “Yes, that’s the problem. Only her closest friends knew this about her. She wasn’t exactly open about it to the Air Force, but some of them knew.”
“So, the boyfriend is made up,” I say. “Someone made up that part?”
Sammy nods. “Yes. Someone who didn’t know her well enough not to make such a mistake. And that makes one think. How much of the rest is made up as well?”
“We received her in a casket draped with the American flag, and they refused to let us see her,” Hattie says. Her voice cracks as she talks, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “They said it was for our own good. But my son…”
“Frank,” I say and think about the chat I had with Vera’s brother just a few days earlier when I called him about Sandra’s autopsy report. He’s a lot younger than Vera and Clarice, like ten years apart from them. I knew him before I met Vera, back when I worked as a journalist before we had Isabella. I used him as an expert for a series of articles I did on forensic work when they found a mass grave in the backyard of an old orphanage in Florida. He helped me get several articles to come to life. Since then, he has been my go-to guy when it came to forensic stuff I needed to have explained.
“You know how he works at the Medical Examiner’s facility on base,” Sammy says. He is leaning forward now, getting engaged in our conversation. I can tell he’s getting agitated while talking. He’s moving his hands more aggressively, and his nostrils are flaring. He is breathing in small huffs. “So, you also know that he has access that no one else does. We told him to look at her files, and he found out that they had actually performed an autopsy when she died, but it was just not made public. In it, he could see that Clarice had a busted lip, several broken teeth, and she had a lot of scratch marks on her neck. She also had a broken nose. He also noticed that the bullet wound in Clarice’s head was too small to be from an M-16 and that it was on the left side of her face, even though Clarice was right-handed. Frank confronted the investigators about it, and they explained that the bruises and scratches were from before the suicide, days earlier, and she could have gotten them from a fall and that they believed it was definitely an exit wound from an M-16. Frank then went to two ballistic experts, and they said the wound was more consistent with a bullet wound from a nine mm pistol.”