THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 4:38 A.M.
SOUTHEASTERN OHIO
He parks the Sierra up the ridge at the end of the road and hikes the rest of the way down to the water’s edge. He knew the lake as a boy, fished here and hunted, near Bannock, where his grandfather had owned land.
He would sit and dream, his eyes open, imagining himself grown. He felt something special was headed for him.
Now he wonders if he is in the wrong spot. The aspens are leafless in winter. The lake looks smaller.
Play by the rules and you still lose. Like that bank that opened accounts and stole people’s money and ruined their credit, all because the more accounts the bank opened the higher the stock price went.
Is that what we were fighting for over there? American values?
Once, when it was just the six of them, they had talked with the general about why the jihadists could recruit Americans. He asked Roderick if he thought America had become a less moral, less righteous country. You could talk that way with Roderick.
“I don’t think any of the six of us here is immoral. Do you?”
Maybe Roderick was wrong about people. About America.
He doesn’t know what to think.
He looks at the lake through the steam of his own breath. In battle, you learn that if you don’t breathe, you lock up, your muscles tighten, and you begin to panic. People who don’t know how to breathe get killed.
* * *
Around midmorning, an Ohio state trooper spots the white Sierra parked at the ridgeline. When they contact O’Dowd’s home in Elyria, his mother says she hasn’t seen him for three days.
It is late afternoon, just before dark, when they find O’Dowd’s body below the surface of the lake, weighted down with rocks stuffed in the pockets of his jacket. The case is listed as a suspicious death, a likely suicide, awaiting results of an autopsy.
The autopsy is authorized with priority status, given that O’Dowd is a public figure, someone, in a certain way and for the moment, famous. Or at least a person whose death, the sheriff’s communications office anticipated, will get media attention.
“Soldiers commit suicide all the time,” the assistant coroner says as they begin the examination of the body.
“This one was a hero, though,” the county’s chief medical examiner says.
“So what?”
The autopsy, however, is inconclusive. O’Dowd was alive when he went into the water and apparently struggled afterward, but the depth of the lake, the cold, and the fact that his jacket was zipped closed meant he had little time or chance to escape or get to shore.
“A guy committing suicide who began to have second thoughts?” the medical examiner asks his assistant.
“Probably. Who would want to kill a hero?”
Peter Rena will wonder the same thing, though Hallie Jobe said the man she had met certainly might have taken his own life.
Brooks asks only one thing: that Rena not head off to Ohio to solve whatever lingering mystery there was behind O’Dowd’s drowning until after they are finished with Morat.