Hell Hole Read online

  On the computer screen I see a young boy, about six, with a baseball bat propped on his shoulder, his Cubs cap cocked sideways like only a Sears portrait photographer would do. I guess when your name is Casey your folks are required to have at least one photo with you at the bat.

  Diego pushes a few buttons, the hard drive grinds, and the screen goes blank.

  “I was killing time till you guys told me what we needed to do next.” She swipes her palms together, rubs away the Dorito crumbs. “What’s up?”

  “The crime-scene photographs provided by Saul Slominsky,” says Ceepak. “We need to take another look.”

  “No problem.” Diego punches a couple keys. “I scanned them all in earlier. Makes it easier to access and manipulate the imagery.”

  Now instead of a cute kid named Casey at the bat, we are presented with the gruesome image of the recently deceased Shareef Smith, dried blood streaming down in thick rivulets out of both nostrils, that grisly paintball splatter of gray-and-red just above and to the left of his wrenched-back head.

  “What about the floor?” says Ceepak.

  Diego moves her cursor across a row of thumbnails. Finds the close-up shot of the floor where it connects to the rear wall.

  “Here we go.”

  She clicks and we once again see the smear where somebody wiped off the drizzle from the bottommost row of tiles.

  Ceepak rubs his temples. He’s not seeing anything new. We already know this part of the story.

  “What about the picture Danny took with his cell phone?”

  “It’s not very good,” I remind him. “Low resolution. The camera phone only has about two pixels.”

  “I realize that,” says Ceepak. “Still, I’d like to reexamine it.”

  “Hang on.”

  A couple grinds and whirrs later, we’re viewing my online photo album. Diego moves her mouse and clicks.

  Great.

  It’s the stupid snapshot of Saul Slominsky standing like a smiling bozo in front of the sinks—posing for the keepsake portrait he thought I wanted when I first pulled out my cell phone and powered up the camera.

  “Uh, not that one,” I say. “The next shot shows the crime scene.”

  Ceepak raises a hand.

  “Just a second.”

  He leans in. Studies the screen.

  “Can you enlarge it, Officer Diego?”

  “The whole thing?”

  “No. I’m most interested in this area.” He taps the screen.

  “Behind him?”

  “Right. The mirror.”

  “Pretty big flash burst is all I see,” she says, “but you want it, you got it.”

  More keys click and clack.

  “How’s that?”

  “Can you sharpen it?”

  “Yeah. Hang on. Here we go.” Click.

  “Adjust contrast.”

  Click.

  “Good. Excellent. Who are they, Danny?”

  “Who?”

  “There. From the reflection in the mirror I see what appear to be two men hunched over in the stall immediately next to the one where Smith’s body was found.”

  Now it’s my turn to lean in and stare.

  “Oh, yeah. Two CSI guys. They were in there collecting the drug paraphernalia off the floor.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Yeah. It’s the handicapped stall so, you know, it’s bigger than the other ones.”

  Ceepak smiles.

  I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe he thinks it’s funny: two grown men on their hands and knees, scooting across the grungy floor of a public bathroom, bagging and tagging evidence off tiles smudged gray by shoe dirt mixed with urine. No. Wait. Ceepak wouldn’t find that funny. It’s what he’d do.

  The smile means something else.

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  “It’s the final piece of the puzzle, Danny. It’s how they did it.”

  The smile just grew wider.

  “They?” I say.

  Ceepak nods but doesn’t say anything because his big brain just figured out something else too. I can tell. It’s in his eyes.

  “Officer Diego?”

  “Sir?”

  “When you attend this wedding, how will you transport your musical slide show?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, do you transfer everything to a portable computer, then take that unit with you?”

  “I could, but the wedding’s in Chicago and I don’t like to fly with my laptop, so I’ll just burn a disk. The restaurant will hook me up with a computer and projector on the other end.”

  Ceepak nods. “Danny?”

  “Sir?”

  “Now would be a good time to retrieve Tonya Smith’s CD changer. More specifically, I’d like you to bring in the magazine holding its six music disks.”

  38

  All six slots of the disk changer are filled.

  Drowning Pool’s Desensitized.

  An Echo Company home mix—the CD with Quiet Riot’s “Cum on Feel the Noize” burned into it. Most of the music on that particular playlist is heavy metal because, I guess, that’s what war sounds like. Steel ripping. Hot iron screeching. Rage thrashing through your brain.

  CD number three is a gospel collection. A dozen songs entreating the Almighty to have mercy on the singer’s soul and not let him be forsaken in the Valley of The Shadow of Death, which could be another name for Iraq.

  Smith also seemed to like rap. He has Big Boi and Dre Present OutKast featuring their hit “B.O.B” (Bombs Over Baghdad).

  And then there’s the one disc without any music.

  A data-only CD.

  Shareef Smith’s slide show, we presume.

  We also presume he wasn’t intending on taking it to a friend’s wedding in Chicago. He was coming to Sea Haven to share it with John Ceepak.

  That disk had been slipped into the fourth slot, so it would be camouflaged by the music-filled CDs on either side.

  Ceepak pulls on his evidence gloves and extracts the disk.

  “I suspect he sent a photo or two from this disk to Senator Worthington,” he says.

  “E-mail?” asks Diego.

  “Negative. I surmise he transferred the data to his cell phone.”

  “Sure,” says Diego. “You can do that.”

  “It would explain the data call on his phone bill,” I add, because I’m always the guy stating the obvious.

  Ceepak rotates the slim CD and it catches a flare from a halogen work lamp. On the less shiny side, Smith had written a crude label with a black Sharpie marker: AL HAHMUDIYAH—NOV. 19.

  “Who’s Al Hahmudiyah?” I ask.

  “It’s a place, Danny. A small village about fifteen kilometers southwest of Baghdad in an area often referred to as the triangle of death.”

  Geeze-o, man. This is going to be bad, I know it.

  “Can we look at this on your computer?” he asks Diego, who’s staring at the CD as if it’s toxic—which it probably is.

  “Yeah. Sure. Hang on.”

  She depresses the eject button and the computer’s disk tray slides out.

  “Just lay it down in there,” she says to Ceepak.

  He does.

  The door slides shut.

  “If they’re ‘jpg’ or ‘tiff’ pictures, I can open them with Adobe Photoshop.”

  Ceepak just nods.

  “Maybe I should make a backup of the whole file first,” Diego now suggests. “It’s my standard protocol.”

  “Is there some risk that Photoshop will irreparably damage the images?”

  “No,” Diego admits. “Not really.” She was just stalling. Hey, I don’t blame her. We’re about to see what kind of digital photographs can get a man killed.

  “Let’s view the photos first, make the backup later.” Ceepak’s voice is steady, his eyes riveted on the screen.

  Diego clicks on the icon for Adobe’s Photoshop program.

  It takes a moment to load and then its browser presents us with a
ll the readable files currently residing on Diego’s computer. She ignores the folder labeled C&M Wedding and clicks on the round icon for Smith’s CD.

  Now the two-dozen photos line up like a miniaturized Sunday-morning comic strip of half-inch boxes—six columns across, four rows deep. Staring over Diego’s shoulder, my first impression is a sea of brown: desert dust, adobe buildings, and chocolate-chip-camo battle fatigues.

  “Start at image one,” says Ceepak. “Enlarge it.”

  She does.

  It’s a full-framed shot of some sort of sign. Maybe a T-shirt stretched across a square of plywood. The shirt is desert-camo tan and sports a grinning skull and crossbones, sort of like a Jolly Roger, only the skull is wearing a helmet and the crossbones are automatic weapons, probably M16 assault rifles. Above the helmet, in a curving headline, is written ECHO COMPANY. On one side of the skull: MESS WITH THE BEST. On the other: DIE LIKE THE REST.

  “Next picture.”

  Diego clicks forward.

  It’s all of them. Dixon, Handy Andy, Rutledge, Worthington, Smith, and Hernandez. The six men scowl like angry rappers on an album cover and are wearing olive drab T-shirts with the left sleeves rolled up to expose something they’ve inked on their upper arms in the same spot where triathletes scrawl their numbers.

  “Can you zoom in on one of those arms?” Ceepak asks.

  “Yes, sir.”

  She does it and we’re tight on a pixilated pair of letters: J.S.

  “What does it means?” Ceepak asks the room, which is stone-cold silent except for the fan motor buzzing inside Diego’s computer.

  “J.S. could be John Sullivan,” I say. “He was a soldier with Echo Company who was killed by an improvised explosive device. Dixon told Starky and me about it on the drive down to the rest area.”

  I figure the J.S. temporarily tattooed on their shoulders is some sort of memorial for a fallen brother. I glance at Smith in the group photograph. He looks like I’ve never seen him before. Angry and fully alert. He doesn’t appear to be on any kind of drug other than raw hate.

  “I wonder who took the picture?” asks Diego.

  “They could’ve done it with the camera’s auto-timer,” I suggest.

  “Inconsequential,” says Ceepak. “So far they’re simply soldiers posing for a group portrait. Let’s view the next image, please.”

  Diego clicks forward.

  The nightmare begins.

  Shareef Smith is no longer in the shot. He’s behind the camera. Recording the horror for posterity.

  It’s Sergeant Dixon in full battle gear. Helmet strapped on tight. Goggles down. His assault rifle is aimed at an old man in a wheelchair. The old man has his hands up. He’s surrendering. He’s begging for his life. Dixon is smirking.

  “Next photo.”

  Dixon blew the old man’s head off. His white robes and what’s left of his white beard are now black with blood. His wheelchair is lying on its side, like somebody kicked it over. Dixon mugs for the camera, a cigar clamped between his teeth. In the background, I can see three elderly women in black burkas. They’re kneeling on the ground, screaming, pleading with two other soldiers. Handy Andy and Rutledge, I think.

  “Next.”

  The camera is tighter on the other two now. Rutledge is brandishing his weapon over the wailing women. Handy Andy is rigging up wires to the oldest one’s hands, wrapping bare copper around her wrists, making her look like Jesus praying in the garden. I see a car battery sitting in the rocky sand near his left boot.

  “Next.”

  The two soldiers pose triumphant over the three dead bodies. They both have their rifles resting against their hips, their fists raised high like they just brought the noize.

  “Next.”

  Handy Andy dumped the car battery’s acid on one elderly woman’s face. You can see the burn marks where it scorched the fabric around the eye slit on her headpiece.

  “Next.” Ceepak is barely audible.

  Lieutenant Worthington. He’s shoving a young girl, a teenager, down to the dirt floor inside a small hovel. I see other girls, their clothing ripped off, their faces bruised and battered, trying to cover their breasts.

  Ceepak doesn’t say anything. Diego clicks on.

  Worthington rapes the teenager. Beside him, maybe waiting his turn, is Miguel Hemandez—his M16 aimed at the young girl’s head.

  Click.

  A group shot. The soldiers posed near naked bodies stacked like cordwood in the middle of the same room.

  Jesus. This is worse than Abu Ghraib. Worse than Haditha. Worse than anything I ever thought human beings could do to each other.

  Diego is clicking faster. The photos stream by, a string of unrelenting savagery. Dixon and his men look like they’re enjoying themselves immensely. Smith too. Occasionally, he steps out from behind the camera to join in on the fun.

  We see Hernandez and Rutledge, taking turns kicking another old man, this one clutching a Koran. In the distance, you can make out the dome and minarets of a mosque. Maybe the man was a mullah.

  The six-member strike team moves through Al Hahmudiyah like a well-oiled killing machine. Each man appears to have his individual assignment. Handy Andy, Hernandez, and Rutledge round up a group of targets. Dixon, Worthington, and Smith gun them down.

  Maybe Echo Company wiped out the whole village that November 19. Maybe they burned it down because in one picture, Handy Andy empties a can of kerosene on top of a pile of dead bodies while Rutledge stands by, ready to ignite it with the glowing stub of his cigar.

  I’m thinking after November 19 is when Shareef Smith started fighting “the pain” with heroin. He had journeyed into the valley of the shadow of death and discovered that he was the one casting the shadow.

  “Enough,” says Ceepak.“Enough.”

  Diego nods. She can’t speak. Neither can I.

  “Please print a copy of the thumbnails. We need to take that with us.”

  Diego swivels in her chair, puts photo paper in the printer. The mechanical motions give her something to do besides remember what we’ve just seen.

  “Then go ahead and make that backup copy of the disk. Put it in the safe. I’ll ask Sergeant Pender to station an armed guard outside the evidence room.”

  “Okay,” says Diego.

  “We have our motive,” I mumble. “We know why they killed Smith.”

  Ceepak nods. “We also know how they did it.”

  “We do?”

  He nods again. “The same way, Danny. They brought Al Hahmudiyah home with them.”

  39

  I need a shower. Mouthwash. A time machine. Something to make it all go away.

  Instead, we press on.

  Ceepak and I head up the hall toward the front desk. Starky is there, juggling a couple cans of Sprite and chip bags from the vending machine.

  “The sisters got thirsty,” she says. “And hungry.”

  Ceepak nods. She sees his grim face.

  “Everything okay, sir?”

  Ceepak’s eyelids look about as heavy as mine. For the first time in a long while, he doesn’t paste on his jaunty smile and tell the world, “It’s all good.”

  “We found Smith’s photographs.”

  He need say no more. Starky can tell: it’s all bad.

  “You guys heading back out?”

  Ceepak nods. “I need to make a phone call first … .”

  “Rita?”

  “No. Cyrus Parker.”

  “Wait a sec …” Starky unclips the cell phone from her belt. “I’m going to be here all night with the Smith sisters. If I need a phone, I can use one of the landlines so you guys can take this since, you know, yours don’t work anymore.”

  Starky’s cell is wrapped up inside a pink leatherette holder that looks like my mother’s old cigarette case, but Ceepak takes it anyway.

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem, sir.”

  Starky bops up the hall with her snack food items.

  Ceepak flips op
en the clamshell. Finds a scrap of paper in his top pocket: Parker’s mobile number.

  “Cyrus? John Ceepak. I wanted you to know—we found Smith’s photographs.” His eyes narrow. “Worse. Right. How are things at your end? Appreciate it. Roger that.” He closes up the phone, clips it to his belt.

  “You still trust Parker?” I ask.

  “I do. And soon, we’ll discover whether that trust is warranted.”

  “I don’t know—those guys in the pictures. They’re all soldiers too.”

  “Which makes what they did even worse. Let’s roll.”

  “Where to?”

  “The house on Kipper Street. It’s time for the men of Echo Company to answer for at least one of their crimes.”

  When we come down the front steps of police headquarters, Parker’s partner Graves is standing on the sidewalk waiting for us.

  He’s with one of the senator’s other bodyguards—a white guy almost as big around as Parker. It’s nearly 8:30, the sun has slipped down over the bay, but these two still have on their sunglasses and, judging by the bulges beneath the breast flaps of their suit coats, I’d say they’re also wearing their weapons. I notice the big guy checking out Ceepak’s belt. Guess he saw the pink princess phone. Hope he saw the Glock too.

  “Officers?” says Graves, as he gives us the palm of his hand.

  “Yes?” says Ceepak.

  “Did you locate Smith’s photographs?”

  Ceepak pauses for just an instant. Hey, us finding Smith’s photographs is none of his damn business unless, of course, all this major-league cooperation from Parker and the rest of Senator Worthington’s crew was only given in order that we would find what they couldn’t.

  I knew Parker was a bad guy. But Ceepak trusted him. Trusted the Code. Which, by the way, also means my partner will now feel compelled to tell this other thug the truth.

  “Did you find the photographs?”

  Ceepak nods.

  “Excellent. The senator will be happy to hear it. This way.” He gestures toward the SUV illegally parked at the curb—another black GMC, a Yukon, I think.

  “We have our own vehicle.” Ceepak takes a step up the sidewalk. Graves moves to block him.