Chapter 9
The contractor's name was Hal Brennan. He ran a delivery company out of a strip mall eleven miles off post, three box trucks, one refrigerated trailer, and a dispatch desk that consisted of one computer and one landline. He'd had a master delivery credential for Gate 3 and a secondary credential for the side gate, both issued by the installation access office. Both signed off by Staff Sergeant Corey Mullins.
Brennan was brought in three days after the Article 32. He was fifty-four, with a soft face and a habit of saying "yes, sir" before anyone asked him anything. He came in with a lawyer from the same firm the defense was using, which the government noticed.
The government's theory, as Nakamura laid it out to me, was simple. Brennan needed to move cargo onto the installation without waiting in the inbound lane. Waiting in the inbound lane meant opening every box for an inspection, and Brennan did not want every box opened. So he made an arrangement. He paid Mullins a monthly fee in cash — five hundred dollars, delivered in a prescription bag from Brennan's mother-in-law's pharmacy — and in exchange Mullins signed side-gate entry logbook entries for vehicles that had never been inspected, allowing Brennan's trucks to pass through a side gate that had no assigned guard at those hours.
The trucks were not checked. The cargo was not checked. The entry book made it look as though they had been.
Mullins wasn't the only one Brennan paid. He also paid the junior NCO who'd been transferred to battalion four months ago. She had signed seventy-one of the entries in the smaller, tighter script. The one who used to sign for my shift change every morning.
I sat through her interview. She cried for most of it. She was twenty-five and had been in service for four years and had a four-month-old at home and said she thought she was doing what Mullins had told her was a "shortcut" that everyone used. She said she never once saw cash change hands. She just signed what appeared on the side-gate log when Mullins asked her to help him out.
The government asked me to compare her signatures on the roster to the signatures on the side-gate entries. I did. They matched.
Fourteen months of the notebook in my pocket. Twenty-three months of traffic the notebook couldn't see.
When Nakamura told me the number, I sat in the shack for a while and didn't say anything. Twenty-three months of uninspected cargo on the installation. Twenty-three months of trucks that had been signed in and waved through without anyone opening a door.
The version of the story I'd been telling myself — that Mullins snapped, that the shove was personal, that I was the one he was trying to erase — that version was small too. Smaller than I'd thought. I'd been missing the shape of it the whole time.
Nakamura didn't say "I told you so." He just put my notebook in an evidence bag and gave me a receipt.
"You didn't do anything wrong," he said.
"I should have taken it to you sooner."
"You should have," he said. "But you took it to somebody. That's the part that matters."
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