In the Name of Honor - Hardcover

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PART I

The Killing

June 2005

One

The phone call awakened Paul Terry from the dream of his father.

Disoriented, he sat up in bed, staring at the wall of the hotel room. In the dream, he was thirteen, the age at which the image had first come to him. His father had just died; reappearing in Paul's sleep, Frank Terry assured his son that he was fine, just living in a different place. Relieved, Paul would awaken, and then feel more abandoned and alone. Even now, at thirty- one, the dream left tears in Terry's eyes.

His cell phone rasped again. Beside him, Jenny stirred. Groping, he found the phone on a nightstand and flipped it open.

"Captain Terry," he said in a sleep- stunned voice.

"Paul. It's Colonel Dawes."

"Morning, sir." Glancing at the drawn curtains, he detected no light. "Is it morning?"

"Six a.m. Where are you?"

"D.C. I'm spending the weekend here."

"Not anymore, I'm afraid." Dawes's southern- tinged voice was soft. "I guess you haven't seen the papers. There's been a shooting on the post. A captain's dead."

Terry tried to process this. "Are they preferring charges?"

"Not yet." The Colonel's voice lowered. "The shooter is Lieutenant Brian McCarran."

Terry was instantly alert. "The general's son?"

"Yes. He's in need of a lawyer, Paul. Hopefully not for long."

At once Terry understood his superior's undertone of caution and regret. "I'll be there in an hour and a half," he promised.

When he turned the phone off, Jenny was awake, blond hair falling across her forehead. "I'm sorry, Jen. There's been a shooting at Fort Bolton— one officer killed another. I have to go."

Jenny switched on the bedside lamp. The disappointment he read in her pretty, intelligent face was mingled with resistance. "Don't they have other attorneys? Why you, Paul?"

"The Colonel didn't explain himself. Just sounded worried."

She shook her head. "I thought you were leaving the ser vice. I mean, isn't a Wall Street firm about to pay you a ton of money?"

Terry paused to assess her mood. Six years after a law school romance had revealed them to be unsuited as life partners, they had become lovers of convenience, who connected only at the end of her sporadic business trips to Washington. For the odd forty- eight hours, they would always rediscover their shared sense of fun, their enjoyment of verbal combat, the luxury of sex without anxiety or inhibition. It was too bad, Terry often thought, that their differences prevented more. Now Terry grasped that their scattered weekends meant more to Jenny Haskell than she let on.

"They are," he told her. "But for another month I can't debate an order." He gave her a lingering kiss, then added gently, "However much I'd like to."

He sensed her regret becoming withdrawal. "I think I'll stay here for a while," she said in a subdued tone. "Order room ser vice, read the paper. Maybe I'll call friends in Bethesda."

Terry felt his own regret, both at leaving and, as with other women, that leaving did not matter more. He kissed her again, this time on the forehead, then reluctantly headed for the shower.

Shortly before seven- thirty, dressed in the uniform of a JAG Corps captain, Paul Terry passed through the main gate at Fort Bolton, headquarters of the Seventh Infantry and, for one more month, Terry's home.

Over twenty miles square, Fort Bolton was sequestered amid a wooded area of northern Virginia, an enclave sufficient to itself: shopping centers, athletic facilities, offices, a hospital, apartments, town houses, and, for senior officers, commodious colonial- style houses dating back to the fort's establishment eighty years before. Turning down its principal thoroughfare, McCarran Drive, Terry was reminded of the three generations that preceded Brian McCarran. That Brian had killed a fellow officer, what ever the circumstances, would reverberate all the way to the Pentagon, where the family's most revered member, Anthony McCarran, served as the chief of staff of the army. Parking at the headquarters of the regional defense counsel, Terry felt edgy.

The aftershock of the dream still muddied his thoughts. But by this time, at least, he resembled the officer Lieutenant Colonel Dawes expected to brief. He had taken a large black coffee for the road, and the mild hangover he had earned through a bibulous dinner with Jen was fading. Fortunately for Terry, his life circumstances had lent him an air of near- perpetual alertness, accenting the swift intelligence reflected in his penetrant blue eyes. Jen sometimes teased him that he looked like an officer whether he meant to or not: tall and fit, he had jet black hair and strong but regular features accented by a ridged nose, which, broken during a high school basketball career based largely on determination, added a hint of ruggedness. That Terry had never fired a shot in anger did not detract from the success he'd had in the courtroom.

Taking a last swallow of lukewarm coffee, Terry went to meet Harry Dawes.

Colonel Dawes sat behind a desk so orderly that, Terry often thought, even the piles of papers appeared to be standing in formation. For Terry, this thought was a fond one: a soft- spoken Virginian, the Colonel treated Terry with an avuncular regard enhanced by the military courtesy that governed their relationship. As Terry entered, a brief smile crossed Dawes's ruddy face. "Sit down, Paul. Sorry to get you out of what ever bed you happened to be in."

The remark was delivered with quiet humor; a committed Christian and devoted husband of twenty- five years, Dawes never concealed his belief that Terry's rotating cast of female friends suggested an attenuated adolescence that could only be cured by marriage. "A warm one," Terry responded. "But even in my sleep, I grasped that this case is special."

Without asking if Terry wanted coffee, Dawes poured him a cup and handed a Washington Redskins mug across the desk. "It is that," Dawes concurred soberly. "In the last twenty- four hours, the media's been all over this. You must have been living in a cave."

"When I take time off, sir, I commit myself. Please catch me up."

Pensive, Dawes ran a hand through his dwindling gray- brown hair. "To say the least, the relationships surrounding this shooting are complicated. For one thing, the victim, Captain Joe D'Abruzzo, was married to General McCarran's goddaughter, Kate Gallagher—"

"Hang on, sir," Terry interjected. "The general's son killed his goddaughter's husband?"

"Yes," Dawes answered unhappily. "It seems that her father was General McCarran's classmate at the Point. After he died in Vietnam, the families remained close. So Kate's relationship with Brian McCarran predated her marriage to D'Abruzzo by many years. To top it off, D'Abruzzo was Brian's company commander in Iraq. What ever their relationship, this tragedy leaves two kids— an eight- year- old boy and six- year- old girl— without a father."

Terry found himself squinting; the summer sunlight, brightening, hit his face through Dawes's window. For a painful moment he imagined the children's shock at learning their father was dead. "Tell me about the shooting, sir."

Even in difficult circumstances, Dawes was the most considerate of men; noting Terry's squint, he stood to lower the blinds. "It happened in McCarran's apartment," he began, "between seven and eight on Friday evening. Sometime before eight, Lieutenant McCarran called the MPs and calmly advised them that he'd shot Captain D'Abruzzo. The MPs and paramedics found D'Abruzzo on the floor of the lieutenant's apartment. There were four wounds, including one in the dead man's back. Despite this, when two men from the Criminal Investigation Division questioned him,...