LITMIR.BIZ

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      Nelson whipped his head back and forth. “Oh, no. Just this temper. Things that remind him of that time seem to set him off. I just think he’s...”

      “Unstable?”

      “Not usually. I mean, we all have our buttons, eh? His is Croatia.”

      Vaillancourt had leaned forward on his elbows, his hands folded and his forehead creased in uneasy thought. Now he shook his head slowly. “But he did ask to job shadow the Rosscase, right off the bat when he first got involved in the search of the scene.”

      Nelson scowled. “But at that point there was no known connection to the military or to Yugoslavia. Patricia Ross looked like just another luckless hooker.”

      Unless Weiss already knew the connection, Green thought. And the players. He glanced at his watch, pretended to be surprised, and shoved back his chair. “Gotta run. Thanks for this. Can you do one more thing? Find out exactly when and where he was in Croatia, and anything you can about the nature of the assignment. ASAP. Off the record and just between us, of course. I don’t want the rumour mill to ruin a good officer’s career.”

      Or get anyone else killed, he added silently, as he tossed some money on the table.

      EIGHTEEN

      Back at the office, Green pulled out the chart that Captain Ulrich had sent him of the military chain of command. If the military functioned like the police, loyalty was built from the ground up, starting with your partner and your squad. The section was the basic unit in the army. There were eight other members in the section, all of whom lived together more closely than any family did, packed like sardines into armoured personnel carriers and spending long hours together on patrol. If a breach of military law had been committed, this is probably where it would have occurred, and these are the boys who would have seen it. But who else might have known?

      Sections worked closely together as a platoon, under the day to day direction of the platoon commander. Richard Hamm. There were other NCO s attached to the platoon, but all of these appeared to be more closely allied to platoon headquarters under Hamm than to the sections. There were ranking officers higher than Hamm, of course, but these would be even more removed from the frontline actions and daily lives of the individual soldiers. Hamm was the only ranking officer likely to know of their wrongdoing and capable of suppressing that knowledge.

      And Hamm had been surprisingly unsupportive of Ian MacDonald’s recommendation for a medal.

      But if a war crime had been committed or covered up, Green was not going to get at it by going head to head with Hamm. Hamm would never admit a thing unless his back was truly to the wall. To accomplish that, Green needed ammunition. He needed to find a lowly section member who wouldn’t see the harm in revealing the truth ten years after the fact, or who might be relieved at the chance to be rid of the guilt.

      He yanked open his office door and caught sight of Gibbs, who was back from the hospital and deep in conversation on the phone. Green paced as he listened to Gibbs’s end of the conversation.

      “Thanks for trying, Karl. I appreciate your position,” Gibbs said, hanging up with a sigh.

      “Karl? As in Captain Karl Ulrich?”

      A ghost of a smile flitted across Gibbs’s weary face. “We’re old friends by now. He gave me some deep background on Colonel Hamm.” Gibbs glanced down at his notes. “He’s fourth generation military. His father was a decorated Korean war hero, and his grandfather was an infantry platoon commander who died at the Somme and was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his solo stand against the enemy. It saved most of his platoon. Quite an impressive family, sir.”

      Green nodded thoughtfully. No wonder Hamm had not been supportive of MacDonald’s medal; he was used to heroism on a far grander scale. But the information added new clarity to the picture that was beginning to emerge. Hamm would have grown up with these family tales of heroism and sacrifice. How powerful would be his commitment to the military he loved, and how far would he be willing to go to protect it? Far enough for a cover-up? Far enough for murder?

      “Sir?”

      Green pulled himself from his racing thoughts.

      “I’m running into brick walls on John Blakeley,” Gibbs was saying. “His file is shut tight as a clam, except what they give out to the media.”

      Green nodded grimly, not surprised that the military’s open access had slammed shut when it reached one of its gilded sons. “I guess nobody in the military wants to give the media or the opposition any ammunition to use against him.”

      “Even the details about his wife and his children are confidential, sir. All I could find out is he has three grown children and a wife named Leanne.”

      “Wouldn’t want the truth interfering with a good spin. He probably had a really ugly divorce, and the children hate him.” Green sighed. He wasn’t sure how Blakeley fit into his conspiracy theory anyway. Although he had served on peacekeeping missions, his name wasn’t listed anywhere on the chain of command from MacDonald’s section to the whole battalion.

      “Okay, we’ll keep chipping away,” he said. “But I’ve got something else for you to do right now. I’d like you to track down that corporal from Oliver’s section who’s studying at Queens. I want him brought up here for questioning first thing in the morning.” He turned to go, then belatedly he remembered Gibbs’s visit to the hospital. Judging from his long face, the news wasn’t good.

      “How is Sue?” he asked gently.

      “Alive. They did another brain scan, and there’s some recovery. I suppose that’s good news. I just want...I just want her to open her eyes and tell us who did this, so it will all be over.” Green thought of Peters lying so still and helpless in the bed. She would hate this and would be the first person wanting to nail the bastard to the wall. If only she could. But with any luck, by the time she did open her eyes, they would have some justice for her. At the very least, they would know what had happened between the soldiers in Croatia, which would be one small step in unravelling the mystery.

      In the meantime, he had to stop Sullivan from questioning Hamm until they had some concrete facts to back up Green’s theory. If Hamm was the mastermind of a war crimes coverup and the killer of Oliver and Ross, Green wanted all the ammunition he could muster before going after him. As he punched in Sullivan’s cellphone number, he hoped he wasn’t already too late. Hamm was one of the key witnesses Sullivan had gone to see, and he was probably in the middle of the interview right now, armed with fewer than half the facts he needed to make the colonel sweat.

      Sullivan’s cheerful voice came through after the third ring. “No problem,” he said when Green told him to forget Hamm for now. “He’s not even here. Got called down to Ottawa this morning for some meeting. He’s slumming it at the Chateau Laurier, so we can catch him tomorrow. Anything else you want us to do before we head back home?”

      “You could drop by the OPP to check on the progress of the Peters investigation.”

      Sullivan chuckled. “Already done that. They haven’t made much headway, but they did uncover a couple of interesting things. You want to hear them?”

      Green rolled his eyes. Sullivan had always been a tease, particularly when he knew Green was hot on the scent. Never had the teasing felt so good. “You want to direct traffic, putz?”

      Sullivan laughed. “First, the OPP turned up an old ex-army sergeant who says he was talking to Peters in the King’s Arms bar when she received the mysterious phone call. He claims he told her Patricia Ross had been asking questions in the same bar the week before.”

      “He seems to be keeping a bar stool warm at the King’s Arms. Questions about what?”

      “About the campaign, the people behind it, that sort of thing. He was a bit fuzzy. He apparently told Patricia Ross he didn’t know much except that Blakeley was some military hotshot who believed in a new approach to peacekeeping. Which the sergeant apparently agreed

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