Page 105 of A Deeper Darkness
“Yeah. Doc was torn up. Ripped. He shut down harder than I’ve ever seen, wouldn’t talk to anyone. They sent him to Germany, got him talked to. He came back, but he’d changed. He wanted out as soon as possible. When our rotation was up, he made it clear he wasn’t going to stick around. Without him, none of us really wanted to stay, either.
“But the sequence from that night, it didn’t feel right to me. I couldn’t get it out of my head. So a few weeks ago, I went to Orange and requested the video. I wanted to see for myself, see how we messed up. He told me to let it go. Doc was the shooter, it wasn’t my fault, or my responsibility. But that’s not how we work. We were a team. A good one. We didn’t fuck up. And getting King killed, that was as big a fuckup as can happen.”
Sam was sitting forward now, completely caught up in Xander’s story.
“But you thought that wasn’t the case?”
He shook his head.
“I started digging around the files, the briefings, to see what I could see. I still have friends in the Pentagon. What I found was damning, at best. The video they’d shown us wasn’t our video. It was date and time stamped on the disc, like they all are, but it had been altered. It was from the year before. Some other friendly fire incident.
“I went straight to Doc. We sat down and had a long talk. Mapped everything out, I’m talking down to the fraction of an inch. As best we could figure, the shots that killed King came twenty degrees from my left. Doc was on my right. So someone else was up there, either trying to engage the Tallies, or…”
“Trying to kill King.”
“Yeah. I was convinced Doc didn’t do this, and it wasn’t right for him to have to carry that burden. I went to Taranto, started some quiet inquiries. And then everything went to hell. Doc, Jackal and Shakes were dead. Maggie showed up here and finally told me the whole truth about what happened back when we left Kaf. She’d given me most of the story, but not all.”
Xander got quiet again. Sam waited him out. A frog started up, singing in the rushes down toward the river. Finally, Xander cleared his throat and told her the rest of it.
“The night it all started, back at the Kaf, Maggie and King were supposed to hook up, their usual spot, but he didn’t show. He’d gotten sent out on patrol, didn’t have time to warn her. She didn’t know that, though. She was really upset. But someone else made an appearance. Turns out the five of us weren’t the only ones who knew about their affair. This guy told her he’d get her tossed out if she didn’t have sex with him. She turned him down flat, so he raped her.”
Sam sucked in a breath.Oh, my God.
“Rape isn’t the most uncommon thing in the military, unfortunately. You look at the studies, four out of every ten women in the service say they’ve been raped or assaulted. Forty percent. It’s one of the reasons we fight against having them side by side on a combat mission—there’s serious naked aggression that goes into what we do. We have to temper ourselves, or else we tip over the edge, and that’s when massacres occur. Some men get a release from forcing women, even though we’re over there telling them it’s not right to rape their own women….
“Anyway, she wouldn’t tell me who raped her. Didn’t tell me who it was until she showed up three days ago. But she did tell King. They had a huge fight about it, and she broke it off with him. Said she couldn’t face being with an honorable man after what had happened. He blamed himself, of course. If he hadn’t been sent off to the line, if he’d made their date…”
“Please tell me it wasn’t—?”
“It was Orange,” he said bitterly. “We fucking trusted him, and this is what kind of man he was all along. He assigned King that tour. He wanted to get at Maggie himself.”
“Xander, who is Orange?”
It hit her then.Orange. She suddenly knew exactly who it was. He was so named because there was a city near Orange, Virginia, called…
“Culpepper.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
Savage River
Detective Darren Fletcher
The darkness cut across the sky like a heavy blanket. Fletcher regretted his choice to ride in one of the four-wheel-drive Jeeps the forest rangers used. He regretted insisting they set off in the dark. He regretted not waiting until morning and letting a helicopter fly him up the mountain, instead of this jolting, thumping canter up the tiny switchback roads. Each bump felt like a hot poker was being shoved into his arm, over and over and over, and his head was aching in time. Sweat had broken out on his forehead, and he felt a bit like vomiting.
But he wasn’t about to admit he was wrong, so he gritted his teeth and sucked it up.
They’d been on the road for an hour. Before they decided which camp to take, Fletcher had practically knocked the teeth out of the forest ranger, making him give his best guess as to where Sam would be. He had the distinct impression the kid knew, and he threatened and cajoled until the boy chose the site they were headed to.
He could only hope his instincts were right. Whitfield had to have friends in these hills, people who would do him a favor or two, like distract a tactical team trying to find his place. Someone young and idealistic, maybe. Someone like a young forest ranger.
Fletcher’s phone rang, and he fished it out of his pocket, thankful he’d remembered to charge it back at the lodge, and that he had a signal. It was Roosevelt. “Tell me you have good news.”
“I do. We found Susan Donovan. Poor thing’s pretty beat up, but she’s alive. Guess where we found her?”
“I have no idea,” Fletcher said.
“Tied to a chair in Allan Culpepper’s living room. He wanted the journal pages. Smart girl, she told them they’d been stolen, that no one knew where they were, and he believed her. But she had them in her back pocket and didn’t give them up.”
