Chapter04

 

“I can’t believe my brother’s dead,” Sara Billman, breathing with such irregularity she might have just run up the stairs from the lobby.

She looked more agitated than she had in the elevator and hall earlier, glancing around the room, cringing at the parade of police personnel, who dusted and took pictures.

She had much darker skin than her brother, almost the blue black that many tribes of central Africa had, as if the blood line ran purer through her than through many others that had been altered by generations of slavery and abuse.

To Miller, she looked like an African princess who should have had an entourage around her of dignitaries. She overdress, or wear any of the traditional garb many African-Americans adopted as a tie to their own cultures, but wore her simple white blouse and brown slacks with such dignity, she seemed even more eloquent. She did, however, wear her hair in tight braids, symbolic of the route through the Caribbean many of American-bound slaves had to endure before arriving on plantations in the south.

She had wide, wondering eyes, the darkness of which reflected the room better than any camera lens, and when they turned back on Miller, these deep pools showed the depth of her agony and overflowed with questions he could not answer.

 

 

“My momma made me promise I would take care of him,” she said, glancing around the room again with a look of desperation. “and now he’s dead.”

The sobs came from deep in her chest and sounded a little like coughing.

“But it’s not my fault,” she said in a voice so low, Miller had to lean towards her to hear, and doing so, caught the scent of her perfume, Lily of the Valley, which stirred up memories of his own. “My brother was also so secretive.”

“Secretive, how?” Miller asked.

“About his life, about everything,” Sara said with a huff of breath. “He would never talk about things like a normal person. I would call him up and we’d started to talk and just when he started to open up a little, he’d stop. Everything was top secret with him. If he didn’t get clearance from somebody, he’d seal up like a clam. He couldn’t even talk about it with me – and I’m the closest person to him. It was so frustrating. I started to wonder what kind of people could do this to him. He was never like this when he was a kid. So I started to press him about things – especially when he clammed up. I would keep on asking. Then, he stopped talking my calls. So I went down to the place where he said he was stationed. Nobody there knew anything about him. It was like he didn’t exist.”

“Then what did you do?” Miller asked.

 

 

 

“I made a big stink,” she said. “I kept calling his office and demanding to see his commanding officer, and when I couldn’t get any where like that, I showed up at the place where the commanding officer had an office. But I was told he wasn’t going to see me, and that I shouldn’t make such a fuss.”

“Who told you this?”

“Some other officer, I never got his name.

“What exactly did he tell you?”

“He said I was putting my brother’s life at risk, as well as my own.”

“did you ask him how? Or why?”

“Sure, I did.”

“And what did he say?”

“He told me to go home.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, but I didn’t stop asking about him. I wrote my Congressman and others, demanding to know what was going on.”

“Did you get help there?”

“At first people seemed eager to help, but then as if a switch got turned off, they told me they couldn’t help. I thought he might even be dead until I got this in the mail from him.”

She held up a tiny silver key. Miller peered at it for a moment, then looked back at the woman.

“It looks like a key to a brief case,” he said.

“It is,” she said. “But there was no explanation. Just the key, and a note with some strange letters and numbers, and for me to hold onto it.”

She held up the note, and Miller peered at that, too, and then went to take it, but she snatched it back.

“Oh, no you don’t,” she said.

“Those things may be evidence,” Miller said. “Those letters and numbers look like some kind of code word.”

“If it is, then I’m keeping it. My brother would have wanted me to.”

Miller’s hand dropped slowly.

“All right,” he said softly. “Keep the key and the note for now. But I may have to take them later.”

“We’ll see,” she said, then looked around again, more sadly and less scared.

Miller shivered, his hand shaking a little, which was a bad sign, since it meant he needed a drink.

“Say,” he said suddenly. “If you didn’t know where he was, how come you’re here?”

 

 

“My brother called me last night,” Sara said.

“Out of the blue?”

“Yes?”

“And?”

“He told me to meet him here.”

“Did he say why?”

“No, he said he couldn’t talk about it over the phone but would explain everything when we met. He sounded scared.”

“And when you got here?”

“He was already gone. I heard about the shooting, of  course. But I didn’t connect it with him until they found him dead.”

“And you have no clue as to what he intended to tell you?”

“He said he wanted to show me something and that it was top secret.”

“Did that sound odd to you?”

“I told you. Everything with him was top secret. I was only surprised that he wanted to tell me about it. But he did say something I thought was strange.”

“What was that?”

“He told me to turn off my cell phone and stay off the internet.”