The review was set for nine o’clock the next morning, in the briefing room on the second floor of headquarters.
I wore my own uniform for the first time in eleven months.
The sleeves were a little loose now, and the knee under the trousers had a brace on it that I hadn’t worn in the yard.
I stood in the hallway outside the door for a full minute with my hand on the cold brass handle.
Rook was beside me, on a plain leash that I held loosely.
He didn’t pull. He leaned against my leg, and I took more strength from that than I’d have admitted.
Inside, the long table was set for six.
Colonel Haskell sat at the head. Sergeant First Class Marlowe, back from the regional meeting a day early, sat at his right, with a face like a locked door.
Captain Anand had her folder open.
Corporal Hatch sat at the far end with both hands under the table.
Brandt stood in the middle of the room at parade rest, in a pressed uniform, with the bare place on his chest where the camera had been.
“Sit, Major,” Haskell said.
I sat.
Rook lay down at my feet without being asked.
Marlowe went first.
He was a stocky, grey-templed man with a flat voice and no patience for anything he couldn’t count.
He slid a printout down the table.
“The camera dock logs every file that goes in and every one that comes out, Colonel. “Over the last eleven weeks, there are twenty-two five a.m. sessions on the kennel log. Handler of record, Staff Sergeant Brandt. Footage on the dock for those sessions, none.” “None?” “Deleted by user. Same login. Every time.” Marlowe tapped the page. “The file is there for four seconds, and then it isn’t.” I watched Brandt’s jaw tighten. I watched a vein stand up at his temple and go down again. “Today’s card was in the camera on your chest, Staff Sergeant,” Haskell said. “That one you didn’t get to.” He nodded at the screen on the wall. Anand lifted a small black rectangle from a clear evidence bag, and she slotted it into a reader. The screen woke up grey and then blue, and then a corridor appeared. It was the kennel corridor at four minutes past five. The light was the cheap fluorescent kind, flickering on the steel doors. The camera swung, and a run door opened, and a fawn-colored head came into the frame and stopped. “Out,” Brandt’s voice said on the recording. The sound filled the room. It was clear and close, and you could hear him breathing. The leash went on. Rook’s collar went up behind his ears. Then the camera followed the dog down the length of the corridor, and the leash cracked taut, and cracked again, and nobody on screen said anything at all. “You think she’s coming back?” Brandt’s voice said, low, from behind the lens. “She’s gone, you stupid animal. Nobody’s coming for you. Quinn’s not coming back.” The leash snapped. The dog on the screen did not bark and did not fight. He went flat and rigid, every muscle locked, and turned his face away from the camera. I did not look at the screen. I looked at the table, and I counted the grain in the wood. Beside me, Rook lifted his head, and he looked at the wall. He’d heard his own name in a voice he knew. I put my hand on his back, and I felt him tremble once, and settle. The recording jumped to the yard. The same camera, the same man, the morning light. The rope pulled out of a pocket. The toy sailing over the fence. Staff don’t touch my dog’s gear. The leash paying out through a fist. Show the kennel girl who’s in charge. When it ended, nobody spoke. Somewhere down the hallway a phone rang four times and quit. “Sir,” Brandt said. It came out dry. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Sir, that dog is dangerous. That animal has a history. And the reason nobody else can control him is that she built him that way. One handler. One voice. That’s not a working dog, that’s a pet.” He turned his head toward me for the first time. “That’s her fault.” I opened my mouth, and Haskell lifted one hand. “Corporal Hatch,” he said. “You haven’t spoken.” Hatch’s chair scraped. He stood up, and for a second I thought his knees would not hold him. He pulled something out of the pocket of his uniform, a small spiral notebook, soft and curved from being sat on. “Sir. I kept dates.” He put it on the table. Haskell opened it. The pages were dense with pencil, small neat columns of dates and times and one or two words each. Jun 4, 0505. Corridor. Heard leash. Jun 11, 0500. Rook out alone. Back 0540. Shaking. “Since June, sir.” Hatch’s hands were shaking, and he put them flat on the table to stop them. “I should have said something sooner. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Major.” “Why didn’t you?” Haskell asked, and he asked it gently. “He writes my evaluations, sir.” Hatch swallowed. “And I figured nobody would take a corporal’s word over the man who could hold the dog.” Haskell closed the notebook. He laid his palm on its cover, the way you’d rest a hand on a sleeping child. “Staff Sergeant Brandt.” “Sir.” “Is there anything in that room that you’d like to say was a lie?” Brandt looked at the screen, and at the dock log, and at the notebook, and at Anand’s folder with his own slashed B at the bottom of every page. His mouth moved. “No, sir,” he said. “Then hear this.
“As of five p.m. yesterday, you are relieved of all duties with working dogs. “Your instructor packet is withdrawn, with my non-concurrence.
“I am referring you to a board of inquiry for cruelty to a military working animal, and for the deliberate destruction of recorded sessions. Sergeant Marlowe.”
“Colonel.”
“His handler’s card.”
Brandt reached into his breast pocket.
He took out a small laminated card with a photograph on it, and he stood there for a moment looking at the face on it, as if it belonged to someone he used to know.
Then he laid it down on the table in front of Marlowe.
It made a very small sound.
I had imagined that moment a dozen times in three weeks.
I had thought there’d be a rush, a sweetness, something like the opposite of fear.
There was only the clock on the wall, ticking, and my dog’s heartbeat under my palm.
Brandt’s shoulders went down a quarter-inch, and he stood a little less straight.
“That’ll be all,” Haskell said.
Brandt turned and walked out.
He closed the door very gently behind him, like a man leaving a hospital room.
