“That’s right.”

“Where’d you cut him?”

“What do you mean, where’d I cut him?” I asked, becoming exasperated by his ghoulish curiosity.

“Did you slice his throat open? Did you plunge the blade into his stomach? Into his heart? Into his back?”

“I put it in the lower part of his stomach. Okay?”

“And then you yanked it up?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why’d you choose that particular killing thrust?”

“It’s quick. It’s foolproof.”

“How so?”

“Because the stomach’s soft tissue, Ed. Because there’s no bones or ribs in the way. Because a strong upward thrust rips up a lot of vital organs, and tears open at least two major arteries.”

“Was that a deliberate choice on your part?”

I said, “Ed, I’m getting tired of this.”

“Was it?” he persisted.

“All right, yes. Why?”

“What were you thinking while he was dying?”

“I don’t know,” I lied, very irritated.

“Yes, you do know. What were you thinking?”

Now sounding grouchy myself, I said, “Look, Ed, I just want to know what would make Whitehall kill a guy. Drop the game.”

He said, “You’re standing just outside the facility. You’ve got one hand over his mouth, and with your other arm you’re holding him erect. Your bodies are so close you can feel his heart racing. You can smell the gases escaping from his bowels. Your two heads are so near you can hear his last dying breaths, his muffled groans of pain. It’s a very intimate moment. What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking the same thing I’m thinking about you. I just wished the stubborn bastard would get it over with. I needed to get my team into the facility, so he just needed to hurry up and die.”

“Then you’re a cold killer,” Gilderstone said. “A paid assassin. I wasn’t like that, Drummond. That’s not the way it happened with me. I snapped. I exploded into a rage. I just ran into a bunch of underbrush and started killing indiscriminately, brazenly, wantonly. I still don’t know what triggered it. I started killing everything in sight.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “What’s it got to do with Whitehall?”

“Know what I did afterward?” he asked, doggedly oblivious to my protests and proddings.

“Okay, Ed. What did you do afterward?”

“I looked around at all the people I killed. There were maybe a dozen corpses, I have to tell you. I threw up. Then I shot myself in the foot. Right then and there, I simply pointed my rifle at my shoe and fired three shots.”

Being cute, I said, “That must’ve hurt like hell, Ed.”

“Want to hear the funny part?”

“I didn’t know there was a funny part,” I said. I thoroughly disliked this man.

“I got a Distinguished Service Cross for my valorous actions. And I got a Purple Heart, and a trip home for the wounded foot.”

I don’t often go speechless, but I did. I was dumbfounded.

A Distinguished Service Cross is only a tiny sliver below the Medal of Honor. Edward Gilderstone was a war hero. A thoroughly flawed, conflicted, self-loathing one, but a genuine hero nonetheless. But hero or not, he was the kind of guy who was so puffed up on his own sanitized sense of self-worth that the realization he could be as ordinary, as feral, as murderous as the next guy drove him to self-mutilation. That’s pretty nasty stuff, in my book.

More perplexing than that, though, here was a guy who’d earned his country’s second highest decoration for valor, and he was too chickenshit to help an old student stay out of the electric chair. Some hero.

Thinking I was being sarcastic, I finally said, “Gee, Ed, that must’ve been some rage you flew into.”

Still ignoring me, he replied in a very dry tone, “Thomas Whitehall’s not like you, Drummond. He’s like me. He could snap and kill somebody, but afterward he’d show horrific effects from it. His conscience would eviscerate his whole being. So how does he appear to you? Like a man who’s still coping with himself? Or a man who wants to shoot himself in the foot?”

This was the moment when I decided I’d had enough of Edwin Gilderstone and his bitter, sanctimonious words. I abruptly thanked him and hung up. I poured another cup of coffee and stood looking out the window, trying to piece all this together.

Neither Whitehall’s college roommate nor his college mentor had hesitated or equivocated a bit – yes, Thomas Whitehall could easily kill somebody. That obviously wasn’t what I’d hoped to hear. On the other hand, how good was their judgment?

Ernie Walters had the New Yorker’s gift of gab, which always entails a degree of exaggeration. He wasn’t lying, he was taking forty-five seconds and making it sound like a minute. But he’d lived with Whitehall two years, been his close personal friend for twelve, described him as virtually a brother, yet had never suspected his homosexuality. That’s a fairly gaping miscalculation. A man’s sexual character is an integral part of his larger character, of his earthly essence. Ernie Walters never had a clue.

Gilderstone had known about the homosexuality, but his misjudgments, if anything, went closer to the bone than Walters’s. What I figured was that like lots of older men, Gilderstone saw Whitehall as a younger figure he wanted to transform into a burnished, tidier image of himself. That’s what lay behind all that gibberish about untapped talents and Rhodes Scholarships. He wanted Whitehall to be his shadow, to follow in his footsteps. Maybe because he was gay and would have no children, he wished to sculpt one. He wanted Whitehall to be something more than a typical soldier, fighting and garrisoning his life away. Only Whitehall said no.

One thing I was learning about the world inhabited by military gays was that it could make for some fairly confused bedfellows. I mean, here was Ernie Walters, a thoroughly decent but straight guy who was getting his balls clipped every day because he’d once roomed with a gay. Still, he’d volunteered to step up and trade his career to help Whitehall. Then here was Ed Gilderstone, a gay man himself, who maybe loved Whitehall, who should’ve been sympathetic as hell, a fifty-three-year-old major whose military career was already a shambling wreck, who wasn’t willing to make any effort to help his old student.

Maybe Gilderstone was the scarred product of the old days and the old system. He’d been a teenager in the fifties and served in the Army of the sixties; back in the days when “gay” still meant joyful, and “homosexual” meant ridicule, disgrace, and ostracism. When a man is forced to hide in a closet that long, I guess it can get pretty dark and lonely.

It’s what writers term an appalling irony. I call it frustrating as hell.

But the most surprising thing I’d learned was that Whitehall was actually a pretty good guy. Actually, unless Ernie Walters was a complete fool, Whitehall was a great guy. And if Gilderstone was right, then Whitehall should be showing terrific emotional effects from the murder. I’d seen no signs of that.

Too bad I’d also learned my client was a boxer with concrete fists driven by powerful pistons, and with a psychic trigger that could drive him over the edge. He had the kind of power to shatter jaws and noses – certainly enough to cause the hideous bruising I’d seen on Lee’s body.