I took the first tentative step toward finding out at one minute past seven the next morning, in Fort Bird's mortuary. I had slept for three hours and I hadn't eaten breakfast. There aren't many hard-and-fast rules involved in military crime investigation. Mostly we depend on instinct and improvisation. But one of the few rules that exist is: You don't eat before you walk into an army postmortem.
So I spent the breakfast hour with the crime scene report. It was a fairly thick file, but it had no useful information in it. It listed all the recovered uniform items and described them in minute detail. It described the corpse. It listed times and temperatures. All the thousands of words were backed by dozens of Polaroid photographs. But neither the words nor the pictures told me what I needed to know.
I put the file in my desk drawer and called the Provost Marshal's office for any AWOL or UA reports. The dead guy might have been missed already, and we might have been able to pick up on his identity that way. But there were no reports. Nothing out of the ordinary. The post was humming along with all its ducks in a row.
I walked out into the morning cold.
The mortuary had been custom-built during the Eisenhower administration and it was still fit for its purpose. We weren't looking for a high degree of sophistication. This wasn't the civilian world. We knew last night's victim hadn't slipped on a banana skin. I didn't much care which particular injury had been the fatal one. All I wanted to know was an approximate time of death, and who he was.
There was a tiled lobby inside the main doors with exits to the left, the center, and the right. If you went left, you found the offices. If you went right, you found cold storage. I went straight ahead, where knives cut and saws whined and water sluiced.
There were two dished metal tables set in the center of the room. They had bright lights above them and noisy drains below. They were surrounded by greengrocer scales hanging on chains ready to weigh excised organs, and by rolling steel carts with empty glass jars ready to receive them, and other carts with rows of knives and saws and shears and pliers lying ready for use on green canvas sheets. The whole place was glazed with white subway tiles and the air was cold and sweet with the smell of formaldehyde.
The right-hand table was clean and empty. The left-hand table was surrounded by people. There was a pathologist and an assistant and a clerk taking notes. Summer was there, standing back, observing. They were maybe halfway through the process. The tools were all in use. Some of the glass jars were filled. The drain was sucking loudly. I could see the corpse's legs through the crowd. They had been washed. They looked blue-white under the lamps above them. All the smeared dirt and blood was gone.
I stood next to Summer and took a look. The dead guy was on his back. They had taken the top of his skull off. They had cut around the center of his forehead and peeled the skin of his face down. It was lying there inside out, like a blanket pulled down on a bed. It reached to his chin. His cheekbones and his eyeballs were exposed. The pathologist was dissecting his brain, looking for something. He had used the saw on his skull and popped the top off like a lid.
"What's the story?" I asked him.
"We got fingerprints," he said.
"I faxed them in," Summer said. "We'll know today."
"Cause of death?"
"Blunt trauma," the doctor said. "To the back of the head. Three heavy blows, with something like a tire iron, I should think. All this dramatic stuff is postmortem. Pure window dressing."
"Any defensive injuries?"
"Not a thing," the doctor said. "This was a surprise attack. Out of the blue. There was no fight, no struggle."
"How many assailants?"
"I'm not a magician. The fatal blows were probably all delivered by the same individual. I can't tell if there were others standing around and watching."
"Best guess?"
"I'm a scientist, not a guesser."
"One assailant only," Summer said. "Just a feeling."
I nodded.
"Time of death?" I asked.
"Hard to be sure," the doctor said. "Nine or ten last night, probably. But don't take that to the bank."
I nodded again. Nine or ten would make sense. Well after dark, several hours before any reasonable expectation of discovery. Plenty of time for the bad guy to lure him out there, and then to be somewhere else when the alarms sounded.
"Was he killed at the scene?" I asked.
The pathologist nodded.
"Or very close to it," he said. "No medical signs to suggest otherwise."
"OK," I said. I glanced around. The broken tree limb was lying on a cart. Next to it was a jar with a penis and two testicles in it.
"In his mouth?" I said.
The pathologist nodded again. Said nothing.
"What kind of a knife?"
"Probably a K-bar," he said.
"Great," I said. K-bars had been manufactured by the tens of millions for the last fifty years. They were as common as medals.
"The knife was used by a right-handed person," the doctor said.
"And the tire iron?"
"Same."
"OK," I said.
"The fluid was yogurt," the doctor said.
"Strawberry or raspberry?"
"I didn't do a taste test."
Next to the jars of organs was a short stack of four Polaroid photographs. They were all of the fatal wound site. The first one was as-discovered. The guy's hair was relatively long and dirty and matted with blood and I couldn't make out much detail. The second was with the blood and dirt rinsed away. The third was with the hair cut back with scissors. The fourth was with the hair completely shaved away, with a razor.
"How about a crowbar?" I asked.
"Possible," the doctor said. "Maybe better than a tire iron. I took a plaster cast, anyway. You bring me the weapon, I'll tell you yes or no."
I stepped in a little and took a closer look. The corpse was very clean. It was gray and white and pink. It smelled faintly of soap, as well as blood and other rich organic odors. The groin was a mess. Like a butcher's shop. The knife cuts on the arms and the shoulders were deep and obvious. I could see muscle and bone. The edges of the wounds were blue and cold. The blade had gone right through a tattoo on his left upper arm. An eagle was holding a scroll with Mother written on it. Overall, the guy was not a pleasant sight. But he was in better shape than I had feared he would be.
"I thought there would be more swelling and bruising," I said.
The pathologist glanced at me.
"I told you," he said. "All the drama was after he was dead. No heartbeat, no blood pressure, no circulation, therefore no swelling and no contusions. Not much bleeding either. It was just leaking out by gravity. If he'd been alive when they cut him, it would have been running like a river."
He turned back to the table and finished up inside the guy's brain pan and put the lid of bone back where it belonged. He tapped it twice to get a good seal and wiped the leaky join with a sponge. Then he pulled the guy's face back into place. Poked and prodded and smoothed with his fingers and when he took his hands away I saw the Special Forces sergeant I had spoken to in the strip club, staring blindly upward into the bright lights above him.
I took a Humvee and drove past Andrea Norton's Psy-Ops school to the Delta Force station. It was pretty much self-contained in what had been a prison back before the army collected all its miscreants together at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The old wire and the walls suited its current purpose. There was a giant WW2-era airplane hangar next to it. It looked like it had been dragged in from some closed base and bolted back together to house their racks of stores and their trucks and their up-armored Humvees and maybe even a couple of fast-response helicopters.
The sentry on the inner gate let me in and I went straight to the adjutant's office. Seven-thirty in the morning, and it was already lit up and busy, which told me something. The adjutant was at his desk. He was a captain. In the upside-down world of Delta Force the sergeants are the stars, and the officers stay home and do the housework.
"You got anyone missing?" I asked him.
He looked away, which told me something more.
"I assume you know I do," he said. "Otherwise why would you be here?"
"You got a name for me?"
"A name? I assumed you had arrested him for something."
"This is not about an arrest," I said.
"So what's it about?"
"Does this guy get arrested a lot?"
"No. He's a fine soldier."
"What's his name?"
The captain didn't answer. Just leaned down and opened a drawer and pulled a file. Handed it to me. Like all the Delta files I had ever seen, it was heavily sanitized for public consumption. There were just two pages in it. The first was a name-rank-and-number ID sheet and a bare-bones career summary for a guy called Christopher Carbone. He was an unmarried sixteen-year veteran. He had served four years in an infantry division, four in an airborne division, four in a Ranger company, and four in Special Forces Detachment D. He was five years older than me. He was a sergeant first class. There were no theater details and no mention of awards or decorations.
The second sheet contained ten inky fingerprints and a color photograph of the man I had spoken to in the bar and just left on the mortuary slab.
"Where is he?" the captain asked. "What happened?"
"Someone killed him," I said.
"What?"
"Homicide," I said.
"When?"
"Last night. Nine or ten o'clock."
"Where?"
"Edge of the woods."
"What woods?"
"Our woods. On-post."
"Jesus Christ. Why?"
I put the file back together and slipped it under my arm.
"I don't know why," I said. "Yet."
"Jesus Christ," he said again. "Who did it?"
"I don't know," I said. "Yet."
"Jesus Christ," the guy said, for the third time.
"Next of kin?" I asked.
The captain paused. Breathed out.
"I think he has a mother somewhere," he said. "I'll let you know."
"Don't," I said. "You'll be making the call."
He said nothing.
"Did Carbone have enemies here?" I asked.
"None that I knew about."
"Any points of friction?"
"Like what?"
"Any lifestyle issues?"
He stared at me. "What are you saying?"
"Was he gay?"
"What? Of course not."
I said nothing.
"You're saying Carbone was a fag?" the captain whispered.
I pictured Carbone in my mind, lounging six feet from the strip club runway, six feet from whoever was crawling around at the time on her elbows and knees with her ass up in the air and her nipples brushing the stage, a long-neck bottle in his hand and a big smile on his face. It seemed like a weird way for a gay man to spend his leisure time. But then I pictured the detachment in his eyes and his embarrassed gesture as he waved the brunette hooker away.
"I don't know what Carbone was," I said.
"Then keep your damn mouth shut," his captain said. "Sir."
I took Carbone's file with me back to the mortuary and collected Summer and took her to the O Club for breakfast. We sat on our own in a corner, far from everyone else. I ate eggs and bacon and toast. Summer ate oatmeal and fruit and glanced through the file. I drank coffee. Summer drank tea.
"The pathologist is calling it gay-bashing," she said. "He thinks it's obvious."
"He's wrong."
"Carbone's not married."
"Neither am I," I said. "Neither are you. Are you gay?"
"No."
"There you go."
"But misdirection has to be based on something real, right? I mean, if they knew he was a gambler, for instance, they might have crammed IOU slips in his mouth or thrown playing cards all around the place. Then we might have thought it was about gambling debts. You see what I mean? It just doesn't work if it's not based on anything. Something that can be disproved in five minutes looks stupid, not clever."
"Your best guess?"
"Carbone was gay, and someone knew it, but it wasn't the reason."
I nodded.
"It wasn't the reason," I said. "Let's say he was gay. He was in sixteen years. He survived most of the seventies and all of the eighties. So why would it happen now? Times are changing, getting better, he's getting better at hiding it, going out to strip joints with his buddies. No reason for it to happen now, all of a sudden. It would have happened before. Four years ago, or eight, or twelve, or sixteen. Whenever he joined a new unit and new people got to know him."
"So what was the reason?"
"No idea."
"Whatever, it could be embarrassing. Just like Kramer and his motel."
I nodded again. "Bird seems to be a very embarrassing place."
"You think this is why you're here? Carbone?"
"It's possible. Depends on what he represents."
I asked Summer to file and forward all the appropriate notifications and reports and I headed back to my office. Rumor was spreading fast. I found three Delta sergeants waiting for me, looking for information. They were typical Special Forces guys. Small, lean, whippy, slightly unkempt, hard as nails. Two of them were older than the third. The young one was wearing a beard. He was tan, like he was just back from somewhere hot. They were all pacing in my outer office. My sergeant with the baby son was there with them. I guessed she was pulling a swing shift. She was looking at them like they might have been alternating spells of pacing with spells of hitting on her. She looked very civilized, in comparison to them. Almost genteel. I ushered them all into my inner office and closed the door and sat down at my desk and left them standing in front of it.
"Is it true about Carbone?" one of them asked.
"He was killed," I said. "Don't know who, don't know why."
"When?"
"Last night, nine or ten o'clock."
"Where?"
"Here."
"This is a closed post."
I nodded. "The perp wasn't a member of the general public."
"We heard he was messed up good."
"Pretty good."
"When are you going to know who it was?"
"Soon, I hope."
"You got leads?"
"Nothing specific."
"When you know, are we going to know too?"
"You want to?"
"You bet your ass."
"Why?"
"You know why," the guy said.
I nodded. Gay or straight, Carbone was a member of the world's most fearsome gang. His buddies were going to stand up for him. I felt a little envious for a second. If I got offed in the woods late one night, I doubted if three tough guys would go straight to someone's office, eight in the morning, champing at the bit, ready for revenge. Then I looked at the three of them again and thought, This particular perp could be in a shitload of trouble. All I'd have to do is drop a name.
"I need to ask you some cop questions," I said. I asked them all the usual stuff. Did Carbone have any enemies? Had there been any disputes? Threats? Fights? The three guys all shook their heads and answered every question in the negative.
"Anything else?" I asked. "Anything that put him at risk?"
"Like what?"
"Like anything," I said. It was as far as I wanted to go.
"No," they all said.
"Got any theories?" I asked.
"Look at the Rangers," the young one said. "Find someone who failed Delta training, and thinks he still has a point to prove."
Then they left, and I sat there chewing on their final comment. A Ranger with a point to prove? I doubted it. Not plausible. Delta sergeants don't go out in the woods with people they don't know and get hit on the back of the head. They train long and hard to make such eventualities very unlikely, even impossible. If a Ranger had picked a fight with Carbone, it would have been the Ranger we found at the base of the tree. If two Rangers had gone out there with him, we'd have found two Rangers dead. Or at the very least we would have found defensive injuries on Carbone himself. He wouldn't have gone down easily.
So he went out there with someone he knew and trusted. I pictured him at ease, maybe chatting, maybe smiling like he had done in the bar in town. Maybe leading the way somewhere, his back to his attacker, suspecting nothing. Then I pictured a tire iron or a crowbar being fumbled out from under a coat, swinging, hitting with a crunching impact. Then again. And again. It had taken three hard blows to put him down. Three surprise blows. And a guy like Carbone doesn't get surprised very often.
My phone rang. I picked it up. It was Colonel Willard, the asshole in Garber's office, up in Rock Creek.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"In my office," I said. "How else would I be answering my phone?"
"Stay there," he said. "Don't go anywhere, don't do anything, don't call anyone. Those are my direct orders. Just sit there quietly and wait."
"For what?"
"I'm on my way down."
He clicked off. I put the phone back in its cradle.
I stayed there. I didn't go anywhere, I didn't do anything, I didn't call anyone. My sergeant brought me a cup of coffee. I accepted it. Willard hadn't told me to die of thirst.
After an hour I heard a voice in the outer office and then the young Delta sergeant came back in, alone. The one with the beard and the tan. I told him to take a seat and pondered my orders. Don't go anywhere, don't do anything, don't call anyone. I guessed talking with the guy would amount to doing something, which would contravene the don't do anything part of the command. But then, breathing was doing something, technically. So was metabolizing. My hair was growing, my beard was growing, all twenty of my nails were growing, I was losing weight. It was impossible not to do anything. So I decided that component of the order was purely rhetorical.
"Help you, Sergeant?" I said.
"I think Carbone was gay," the sergeant said.
"You think he was?"
"OK, he was."
"Who else knew?"
"All of us."
"And?"
"And nothing. I thought you should know, is all."
"You think it has a bearing?"
He shook his head. "We were comfortable with it. And whoever killed him wasn't one of us. It wasn't anyone in the unit. That's not possible. We don't do stuff like that. Outside the unit, nobody knew. Therefore it wasn't a factor."
"So why tell me?"
"Because you're bound to find out. I wanted you to be ready for it. I didn't want it to be a surprise."
"Because?"
"Then maybe you can keep it quiet. Since it's not a factor."
I said nothing.
"It would trash his memory," the sergeant said. "And that's wrong. He was a nice guy and a good soldier. Being gay shouldn't be a crime."
"I agree," I said.
"The army needs to change."
"The army hates change."
"They say it damages unit cohesion," he said. "They should have come and seen our squadron working. With Carbone right there in it."
"I can't keep it quiet," I said. "Maybe I would if I could. But the way the crime scene looked, everyone's going to get the message."
"What? It was like a sex crime? You didn't say that before."
"I was trying to keep it quiet," I said.
"But nobody knew. Not outside the unit."
"Someone must have. Or else the perp is in your unit."
"That's not possible. No way, no how."
"One thing or the other has got to be possible," I said. "Was he seeing anyone on the outside?"
"No, never."
"So he was celibate for sixteen years?"
The guy paused a beat.
"I guess I don't really know," he said.
"Someone knew," I said. "But I don't think it was a factor. I think someone just tried to make it look like it was. Maybe we can make that clear, at least."
The sergeant shook his head. "It'll be the only thing anyone remembers about him."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I'm not gay," he said.
"I don't really care either way."
"I've got a wife and a kid."
He left me with that information and I went back to obeying Willard's orders.
I spent the time thinking. There had been no weapon recovered at the scene. No significant forensics. No threads of clothing snagged on a bush, no footprints in the earth, none of his attacker's skin under Carbone's fingernails. All of that was easily explicable. The weapon had been taken away by the attacker, who had probably been wearing BDUs, which the Department of the Army specifies very carefully just so that they won't fall apart and leave threads all over the place. Textile mills across the nation have stringent quality targets to meet, in terms of wear-and-tear standards for military twill and poplin. The earth was frozen hard, so footprints were impossible. North Carolina probably had a reliable frost window of about a month, and we were smack in the middle of it. And it had been a surprise attack. Carbone had been given no time to turn around and claw and kick at his assailant.
So there was no material information. But we had some advantages. We had a fixed pool of possible suspects. It was a closed base, and the army is pretty good at recording who was where, at all times. We could start with yards of printout paper and go through each name, on a simple binary basis, possible or not possible. Then we could collate all the possibles and go to work with the holy trinity of detectives everywhere: means, motive, opportunity. Means and opportunity wouldn't signify much. By definition nobody would be on the possibles list unless they had been proved to have opportunity. And everybody in the army was physically capable of swinging a tire iron or a crowbar against the back of an unsuspecting victim's head. It was probably a rough equivalent of the most basic entry requirement.
So it would end up with motive, which is where it had started for me. What was the reason?
I sat for another hour. Didn't go anywhere, didn't do anything, didn't call anyone. My sergeant brought me more coffee. I mentioned that she might call Lieutenant Summer for me and suggest she stop by.
Summer showed up within five minutes. I had a whole raft of things to tell her, but she had anticipated every one of them. She had ordered a list of all base personnel, plus a copy of the gate log so we could add and subtract names as appropriate. She had arranged for Carbone's quarters to be sealed, pending a search. She had arranged an interview with his CO to develop a better picture of his personal and professional life.
"Excellent," I said.
"What's this thing with Willard?" she asked.
"A pissing contest, probably," I said. "Important case like this, he wants to come down and direct things personally. To remind me I'm under a cloud."
But I was wrong.
Willard finally showed after a total of exactly four hours. I heard his voice in the outer office. I was pretty sure my sergeant wasn't offering him coffee. She had better instincts than that. My door opened and he came in. He didn't look at me. Just closed the door behind him and turned around and sat down in my visitor's chair. Immediately started up with the shuffling thing. He was going at it hard and plucking at the knees of his pants like they were burning his skin.
"Yesterday," he said. "I want a complete record of your movements. I want to hear it from your own lips."
"You're down here to ask me questions?"
"Yes," he said.
I shrugged.
"I was on a plane until two," I said. "I was with you until five."
"And then?"
"I got back here at eleven."
"Six hours? I did it in four."
"You drove, presumably. I took two buses and hitched a ride."
"After that?"
"I spoke to my brother on the phone," I said.
"I remember your brother," Willard said. "I worked with him."
I nodded. "He mentioned that."
"And then what?"
"I spoke to Lieutenant Summer," I said. "Socially."
"And then?"
"Carbone's body was discovered about midnight."
He nodded and twitched and shuffled and looked uncomfortable.
"Did you keep your bus tickets?" he said.
"I doubt it," I said.
He smiled. "Remember who gave you a ride to the post?"
"I doubt it. Why?"
"Because I might need to know. To prove I didn't make a mistake."
I said nothing.
"You made mistakes," Willard said.
"Did I?"
He nodded. "I can't decide whether you're an idiot or whether you're doing this on purpose."
"Doing what?"
"Are you trying to embarrass the army?"
"What?"
"What's the big picture here, Major?" he said.
"You tell me, Colonel."
"The Cold War is ending. Therefore there are big changes coming. The status quo will not be an option. Therefore we've got every part of the military trying to stand tall and make the cut. And you know what?"
"What?"
"The army is always at the bottom of the pile. The Air Force has got all those glamorous airplanes. The Navy has got submarines and carriers. The Marines are always untouchable. And we're stuck down there in the mud, literally. The bottom of the pile. The army is boring, Reacher. That's the view in Washington."
"So?"
"This Carbone guy was a shirtlifter. He was a damn fudgepacker, for Christ's sake. An elite unit has got perverts in it? You think the army needs for people to know that? At a time like this? You should have written him up as a training accident."
"That wouldn't have been true."
"Who cares?"
"He wasn't killed because of his orientation."
"Of course he was."
"I do this stuff for a living," I said. "And I say he wasn't."
He glared at me. Went quiet for a moment.
"OK," he said. "We'll come back to that. Who else but you saw the body?"
"My guys," I said. "Plus a Psy-Ops light colonel I wanted an opinion from. Plus the pathologist."
He nodded. "You deal with your guys. I'll tell Psy-Ops and the doctor."
"Tell them what?"
"That we're writing it up as a training accident. They'll understand. No harm, no foul. No investigation."
"You're kidding."
"You think the army wants this to get around? Now? That Delta had an illegal soldier for four years? Are you nuts?"
"The sergeants want an investigation."
"I'm pretty sure their CO won't. Believe me. You can take that as gospel."
"You'll have to give me a direct order," I said. "Words of one syllable."
"Watch my lips," Willard said. "Do not investigate the fag. Write a situation report indicating that he died in a training accident. A night maneuver, a run, an exercise, anything. He tripped and fell and hit his head. Case closed. That is a direct order."
"I'll need it in writing," I said.
"Grow up," he said.
We sat quiet for a moment or two, just glaring at each other across the desk. I sat still, and Willard rocked and plucked. I clenched my fist, out of his sight. I imagined smashing a straight right to the center of his chest. I figured I could stop his lousy heart with a single blow. I could write it up as a training accident. I could say he had been practicing getting in and out of his chair, and he had slipped and caught his sternum on the corner of the desk.
"What was the time of death?" he asked.
"Nine or ten last night," I said.
"And you were off-post until eleven?"
"Asked and answered," I said.
"Can you prove that?"
I thought of the gate guards in their booth. They had logged me in.
"Do I have to?" I said.
He went quiet again. Leaned to his left in the chair.
"Next item," he said. "You claim the butt-bandit wasn't killed because he was a butt-bandit. What's your evidence?"
"The crime scene was overdone," I said.
"To obscure the real motive?"
I nodded. "That's my judgment."
"What was the real motive?"
"I don't know. That would have required an investigation."
"Let's speculate," Willard said. "Let's assume the hypothetical perpetrator would have benefited from the homicide. Tell me how."
"The usual way," I said. "By preventing some future action on Sergeant Carbone's part. Or to cover up a crime that Sergeant Carbone was a party to or had knowledge of."
"To silence him, in other words."
"To dead-end something," I said. "That would be my guess."
"And you do this stuff for a living."
"Yes," I said. "I do."
"How would you have located this person?"
"By conducting an investigation."
Willard nodded. "And when you found this person, hypothetically, assuming you were able to, what would you have done?"
"I would have taken him into custody," I said. Protective custody, I thought. I pictured Carbone's squadron buddies in my mind, pacing anxiously, ready to lock and load.
"And your suspect pool would have been whoever was on-post at the time?"
I nodded. Lieutenant Summer was probably struggling with reams of printout paper even as we spoke.
"Verified via strength lists and gate logs," I said.
"Facts," Willard said. "I would have thought that facts would be extremely important to someone who does this stuff for a living. This post covers nearly a hundred thousand acres. It was last strung with perimeter wire in 1943. Those are facts. I discovered them with very little trouble, and you should have too. Doesn't it occur to you that not everyone on the post has to come through the main gate? Doesn't it occur to you that someone recorded as not being here could have slipped in through the wire?"
"Unlikely," I said. "It would have given him a walk of well over two miles, in pitch dark, and we run random motor patrols all night."
"The patrols might have missed a trained man."
"Unlikely," I said again. "And how would he have rendezvoused with Sergeant Carbone?"
"Prearranged location."
"It wasn't a location," I said. "It was just a spot near the track."
"Map reference, then."
"Unlikely," I said, for the third time.
"But possible?"
"Anything's possible."
"So a man could have met with the shirtlifter, then killed him, then gotten back out through the wire, and then walked around to the main gate, and then signed in?"
"Anything's possible," I said again.
"What kind of timescale are we looking at? Between killing him and signing in?"
"I don't know. I would have to work out the distance he walked."
"Maybe he ran."
"Maybe he did."
"In which case he would have been out of breath when he passed the gate."
I said nothing.
"Best guess," Willard said. "How much time?"
"An hour or two."
He nodded. "So if the fairy was offed at nine or ten, the killer could have been logging in at eleven?"
"Possible," I said.
"And the motive would have been to dead-end something."
I nodded. Said nothing.
"And you took six hours to complete a four-hour journey, thereby leaving a potential two-hour gap, which you explain with the vague claim that you took a slow route."
I said nothing.
"And you just agreed that a two-hour window is generous in terms of getting the deed done. In particular the two hours between nine and eleven, which by chance are the same two hours that you can't account for."
I said nothing. Willard smiled.
"And you arrived at the gate out of breath," he said. "I checked."
I didn't reply.
"But what would have been your motive?" he said. "I assume you didn't know Carbone well. I assume you don't move in the same social circles that he did. At least I sincerely hope you don't."
"You're wasting your time," I said. "And you're making a big mistake. Because you really don't want to make an enemy out of me."
"Don't I?"
"No," I said. "You really don't."
"What do you need dead-ended?" he asked me.
I said nothing.
"Here's an interesting fact," Willard said. "Sergeant First Class Christopher Carbone was the soldier who lodged the complaint against you."
He proved it to me by unfolding a copy of the complaint from his pocket. He smoothed it out and passed it across my desk. There was a reference number at the top and then a date and a place and a time. The date was January second, the place was Fort Bird's Provost Marshal's office, and the time was 0845. Then came two paragraphs of sworn affidavit. I glanced through some of the stiff, formal sentences. I personally observed a serving Military Police Major named Reacher strike the first civilian with a kicking action against the right knee. Immediately subsequent to that Major Reacher struck the second civilian in the face with his forehead. To the best of my knowledge both attacks were unprovoked. I saw no element of self-defense. Then came a signature with Carbone's name and number typed below it. I recognized the number from Carbone's file. I looked up at the slow silent clock on the wall and pictured Carbone in my mind, slipping out of the bar door into the parking lot, looking at me for a second, and then merging with the knot of men leaning on cars and drinking beer from bottles. Then I looked down again and opened a drawer and slipped the sheet of paper inside.
"Delta Force looks after its own," Willard said. "We all know that. I guess it's part of their mystique. So what are they going to do now? One of their own is beaten to death after lodging a complaint against a smart-ass MP major, and the smart-ass MP major in question needs to save his career, and he can't exactly account for his time on the night it went down?"
I said nothing.
"The Delta CO's office gets its own copy," Willard said. "Standard procedure with disciplinary complaints. Multiple copies all over the place. So the news will leak very soon. Then they'll be asking questions. So what shall I tell them? I could tell them you're definitely not a suspect. Or I could suggest you definitely are a suspect, but there's some type of technicality in the way that means I can't touch you. I could see how their sense of right and wrong deals with that kind of injustice."
I said nothing.
"It's the only complaint Carbone ever made," he said. "In a sixteen-year career. I checked that too. And it stands to reason. A guy like that has to keep his head down. But Delta as a whole will see some significance in it. Carbone comes up over the parapet for the first time in his life, they're going to think you boys had some previous history. They'll think it was a grudge match. Won't make them like you any better."
I said nothing.
"So what should I do?" Willard said. "Should I go over there and drop some hints about awkward legal technicalities? Or shall we trade? I keep Delta off your back, and you start toeing the line?"
I said nothing.
"I don't really think you killed him," he said. "Not even you would go that far. But I wouldn't have minded if you had. Fags in the army deserve to be killed. They're here under false pretenses. You would have chosen the wrong reason, is all."
"It's an empty threat," I said. "You never told me he lodged the complaint. You didn't show it to me yesterday. You never gave me a name."
"Their sergeants' mess won't buy that for a second. You're a special unit investigator. You do this stuff for a living. Easy enough for you to weasel a name out of all the paperwork they think we do."
I said nothing.
"Wake up, Major," Willard said. "Get with the program. Garber's gone. We're going to do things my way now."
"You're making a mistake," I said. "Making an enemy out of me."
He shook his head. "I don't agree. I'm not making a mistake. And I'm not making an enemy out of you. I'm bringing this unit into line, is all. You'll thank me later. All of you. The world is changing. I can see the big picture."
I said nothing.
"Help the army," he said. "And help yourself at the same time."
I said nothing.
"Do we have a deal?" he said.
I didn't reply. He winked at me.
"I think we have a deal," he said. "You're not that dumb."
He got up and walked out of the office and closed the door behind him. I sat there and watched the stiff vinyl cushion on my visitor's chair regain its shape. It happened slowly, with quiet hissing sounds as air leaked back into it.
So I spent the breakfast hour with the crime scene report. It was a fairly thick file, but it had no useful information in it. It listed all the recovered uniform items and described them in minute detail. It described the corpse. It listed times and temperatures. All the thousands of words were backed by dozens of Polaroid photographs. But neither the words nor the pictures told me what I needed to know.
I put the file in my desk drawer and called the Provost Marshal's office for any AWOL or UA reports. The dead guy might have been missed already, and we might have been able to pick up on his identity that way. But there were no reports. Nothing out of the ordinary. The post was humming along with all its ducks in a row.
I walked out into the morning cold.
The mortuary had been custom-built during the Eisenhower administration and it was still fit for its purpose. We weren't looking for a high degree of sophistication. This wasn't the civilian world. We knew last night's victim hadn't slipped on a banana skin. I didn't much care which particular injury had been the fatal one. All I wanted to know was an approximate time of death, and who he was.
There was a tiled lobby inside the main doors with exits to the left, the center, and the right. If you went left, you found the offices. If you went right, you found cold storage. I went straight ahead, where knives cut and saws whined and water sluiced.
There were two dished metal tables set in the center of the room. They had bright lights above them and noisy drains below. They were surrounded by greengrocer scales hanging on chains ready to weigh excised organs, and by rolling steel carts with empty glass jars ready to receive them, and other carts with rows of knives and saws and shears and pliers lying ready for use on green canvas sheets. The whole place was glazed with white subway tiles and the air was cold and sweet with the smell of formaldehyde.
The right-hand table was clean and empty. The left-hand table was surrounded by people. There was a pathologist and an assistant and a clerk taking notes. Summer was there, standing back, observing. They were maybe halfway through the process. The tools were all in use. Some of the glass jars were filled. The drain was sucking loudly. I could see the corpse's legs through the crowd. They had been washed. They looked blue-white under the lamps above them. All the smeared dirt and blood was gone.
I stood next to Summer and took a look. The dead guy was on his back. They had taken the top of his skull off. They had cut around the center of his forehead and peeled the skin of his face down. It was lying there inside out, like a blanket pulled down on a bed. It reached to his chin. His cheekbones and his eyeballs were exposed. The pathologist was dissecting his brain, looking for something. He had used the saw on his skull and popped the top off like a lid.
"What's the story?" I asked him.
"We got fingerprints," he said.
"I faxed them in," Summer said. "We'll know today."
"Cause of death?"
"Blunt trauma," the doctor said. "To the back of the head. Three heavy blows, with something like a tire iron, I should think. All this dramatic stuff is postmortem. Pure window dressing."
"Any defensive injuries?"
"Not a thing," the doctor said. "This was a surprise attack. Out of the blue. There was no fight, no struggle."
"How many assailants?"
"I'm not a magician. The fatal blows were probably all delivered by the same individual. I can't tell if there were others standing around and watching."
"Best guess?"
"I'm a scientist, not a guesser."
"One assailant only," Summer said. "Just a feeling."
I nodded.
"Time of death?" I asked.
"Hard to be sure," the doctor said. "Nine or ten last night, probably. But don't take that to the bank."
I nodded again. Nine or ten would make sense. Well after dark, several hours before any reasonable expectation of discovery. Plenty of time for the bad guy to lure him out there, and then to be somewhere else when the alarms sounded.
"Was he killed at the scene?" I asked.
The pathologist nodded.
"Or very close to it," he said. "No medical signs to suggest otherwise."
"OK," I said. I glanced around. The broken tree limb was lying on a cart. Next to it was a jar with a penis and two testicles in it.
"In his mouth?" I said.
The pathologist nodded again. Said nothing.
"What kind of a knife?"
"Probably a K-bar," he said.
"Great," I said. K-bars had been manufactured by the tens of millions for the last fifty years. They were as common as medals.
"The knife was used by a right-handed person," the doctor said.
"And the tire iron?"
"Same."
"OK," I said.
"The fluid was yogurt," the doctor said.
"Strawberry or raspberry?"
"I didn't do a taste test."
Next to the jars of organs was a short stack of four Polaroid photographs. They were all of the fatal wound site. The first one was as-discovered. The guy's hair was relatively long and dirty and matted with blood and I couldn't make out much detail. The second was with the blood and dirt rinsed away. The third was with the hair cut back with scissors. The fourth was with the hair completely shaved away, with a razor.
"How about a crowbar?" I asked.
"Possible," the doctor said. "Maybe better than a tire iron. I took a plaster cast, anyway. You bring me the weapon, I'll tell you yes or no."
I stepped in a little and took a closer look. The corpse was very clean. It was gray and white and pink. It smelled faintly of soap, as well as blood and other rich organic odors. The groin was a mess. Like a butcher's shop. The knife cuts on the arms and the shoulders were deep and obvious. I could see muscle and bone. The edges of the wounds were blue and cold. The blade had gone right through a tattoo on his left upper arm. An eagle was holding a scroll with Mother written on it. Overall, the guy was not a pleasant sight. But he was in better shape than I had feared he would be.
"I thought there would be more swelling and bruising," I said.
The pathologist glanced at me.
"I told you," he said. "All the drama was after he was dead. No heartbeat, no blood pressure, no circulation, therefore no swelling and no contusions. Not much bleeding either. It was just leaking out by gravity. If he'd been alive when they cut him, it would have been running like a river."
He turned back to the table and finished up inside the guy's brain pan and put the lid of bone back where it belonged. He tapped it twice to get a good seal and wiped the leaky join with a sponge. Then he pulled the guy's face back into place. Poked and prodded and smoothed with his fingers and when he took his hands away I saw the Special Forces sergeant I had spoken to in the strip club, staring blindly upward into the bright lights above him.
I took a Humvee and drove past Andrea Norton's Psy-Ops school to the Delta Force station. It was pretty much self-contained in what had been a prison back before the army collected all its miscreants together at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The old wire and the walls suited its current purpose. There was a giant WW2-era airplane hangar next to it. It looked like it had been dragged in from some closed base and bolted back together to house their racks of stores and their trucks and their up-armored Humvees and maybe even a couple of fast-response helicopters.
The sentry on the inner gate let me in and I went straight to the adjutant's office. Seven-thirty in the morning, and it was already lit up and busy, which told me something. The adjutant was at his desk. He was a captain. In the upside-down world of Delta Force the sergeants are the stars, and the officers stay home and do the housework.
"You got anyone missing?" I asked him.
He looked away, which told me something more.
"I assume you know I do," he said. "Otherwise why would you be here?"
"You got a name for me?"
"A name? I assumed you had arrested him for something."
"This is not about an arrest," I said.
"So what's it about?"
"Does this guy get arrested a lot?"
"No. He's a fine soldier."
"What's his name?"
The captain didn't answer. Just leaned down and opened a drawer and pulled a file. Handed it to me. Like all the Delta files I had ever seen, it was heavily sanitized for public consumption. There were just two pages in it. The first was a name-rank-and-number ID sheet and a bare-bones career summary for a guy called Christopher Carbone. He was an unmarried sixteen-year veteran. He had served four years in an infantry division, four in an airborne division, four in a Ranger company, and four in Special Forces Detachment D. He was five years older than me. He was a sergeant first class. There were no theater details and no mention of awards or decorations.
The second sheet contained ten inky fingerprints and a color photograph of the man I had spoken to in the bar and just left on the mortuary slab.
"Where is he?" the captain asked. "What happened?"
"Someone killed him," I said.
"What?"
"Homicide," I said.
"When?"
"Last night. Nine or ten o'clock."
"Where?"
"Edge of the woods."
"What woods?"
"Our woods. On-post."
"Jesus Christ. Why?"
I put the file back together and slipped it under my arm.
"I don't know why," I said. "Yet."
"Jesus Christ," he said again. "Who did it?"
"I don't know," I said. "Yet."
"Jesus Christ," the guy said, for the third time.
"Next of kin?" I asked.
The captain paused. Breathed out.
"I think he has a mother somewhere," he said. "I'll let you know."
"Don't," I said. "You'll be making the call."
He said nothing.
"Did Carbone have enemies here?" I asked.
"None that I knew about."
"Any points of friction?"
"Like what?"
"Any lifestyle issues?"
He stared at me. "What are you saying?"
"Was he gay?"
"What? Of course not."
I said nothing.
"You're saying Carbone was a fag?" the captain whispered.
I pictured Carbone in my mind, lounging six feet from the strip club runway, six feet from whoever was crawling around at the time on her elbows and knees with her ass up in the air and her nipples brushing the stage, a long-neck bottle in his hand and a big smile on his face. It seemed like a weird way for a gay man to spend his leisure time. But then I pictured the detachment in his eyes and his embarrassed gesture as he waved the brunette hooker away.
"I don't know what Carbone was," I said.
"Then keep your damn mouth shut," his captain said. "Sir."
I took Carbone's file with me back to the mortuary and collected Summer and took her to the O Club for breakfast. We sat on our own in a corner, far from everyone else. I ate eggs and bacon and toast. Summer ate oatmeal and fruit and glanced through the file. I drank coffee. Summer drank tea.
"The pathologist is calling it gay-bashing," she said. "He thinks it's obvious."
"He's wrong."
"Carbone's not married."
"Neither am I," I said. "Neither are you. Are you gay?"
"No."
"There you go."
"But misdirection has to be based on something real, right? I mean, if they knew he was a gambler, for instance, they might have crammed IOU slips in his mouth or thrown playing cards all around the place. Then we might have thought it was about gambling debts. You see what I mean? It just doesn't work if it's not based on anything. Something that can be disproved in five minutes looks stupid, not clever."
"Your best guess?"
"Carbone was gay, and someone knew it, but it wasn't the reason."
I nodded.
"It wasn't the reason," I said. "Let's say he was gay. He was in sixteen years. He survived most of the seventies and all of the eighties. So why would it happen now? Times are changing, getting better, he's getting better at hiding it, going out to strip joints with his buddies. No reason for it to happen now, all of a sudden. It would have happened before. Four years ago, or eight, or twelve, or sixteen. Whenever he joined a new unit and new people got to know him."
"So what was the reason?"
"No idea."
"Whatever, it could be embarrassing. Just like Kramer and his motel."
I nodded again. "Bird seems to be a very embarrassing place."
"You think this is why you're here? Carbone?"
"It's possible. Depends on what he represents."
I asked Summer to file and forward all the appropriate notifications and reports and I headed back to my office. Rumor was spreading fast. I found three Delta sergeants waiting for me, looking for information. They were typical Special Forces guys. Small, lean, whippy, slightly unkempt, hard as nails. Two of them were older than the third. The young one was wearing a beard. He was tan, like he was just back from somewhere hot. They were all pacing in my outer office. My sergeant with the baby son was there with them. I guessed she was pulling a swing shift. She was looking at them like they might have been alternating spells of pacing with spells of hitting on her. She looked very civilized, in comparison to them. Almost genteel. I ushered them all into my inner office and closed the door and sat down at my desk and left them standing in front of it.
"Is it true about Carbone?" one of them asked.
"He was killed," I said. "Don't know who, don't know why."
"When?"
"Last night, nine or ten o'clock."
"Where?"
"Here."
"This is a closed post."
I nodded. "The perp wasn't a member of the general public."
"We heard he was messed up good."
"Pretty good."
"When are you going to know who it was?"
"Soon, I hope."
"You got leads?"
"Nothing specific."
"When you know, are we going to know too?"
"You want to?"
"You bet your ass."
"Why?"
"You know why," the guy said.
I nodded. Gay or straight, Carbone was a member of the world's most fearsome gang. His buddies were going to stand up for him. I felt a little envious for a second. If I got offed in the woods late one night, I doubted if three tough guys would go straight to someone's office, eight in the morning, champing at the bit, ready for revenge. Then I looked at the three of them again and thought, This particular perp could be in a shitload of trouble. All I'd have to do is drop a name.
"I need to ask you some cop questions," I said. I asked them all the usual stuff. Did Carbone have any enemies? Had there been any disputes? Threats? Fights? The three guys all shook their heads and answered every question in the negative.
"Anything else?" I asked. "Anything that put him at risk?"
"Like what?"
"Like anything," I said. It was as far as I wanted to go.
"No," they all said.
"Got any theories?" I asked.
"Look at the Rangers," the young one said. "Find someone who failed Delta training, and thinks he still has a point to prove."
Then they left, and I sat there chewing on their final comment. A Ranger with a point to prove? I doubted it. Not plausible. Delta sergeants don't go out in the woods with people they don't know and get hit on the back of the head. They train long and hard to make such eventualities very unlikely, even impossible. If a Ranger had picked a fight with Carbone, it would have been the Ranger we found at the base of the tree. If two Rangers had gone out there with him, we'd have found two Rangers dead. Or at the very least we would have found defensive injuries on Carbone himself. He wouldn't have gone down easily.
So he went out there with someone he knew and trusted. I pictured him at ease, maybe chatting, maybe smiling like he had done in the bar in town. Maybe leading the way somewhere, his back to his attacker, suspecting nothing. Then I pictured a tire iron or a crowbar being fumbled out from under a coat, swinging, hitting with a crunching impact. Then again. And again. It had taken three hard blows to put him down. Three surprise blows. And a guy like Carbone doesn't get surprised very often.
My phone rang. I picked it up. It was Colonel Willard, the asshole in Garber's office, up in Rock Creek.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"In my office," I said. "How else would I be answering my phone?"
"Stay there," he said. "Don't go anywhere, don't do anything, don't call anyone. Those are my direct orders. Just sit there quietly and wait."
"For what?"
"I'm on my way down."
He clicked off. I put the phone back in its cradle.
I stayed there. I didn't go anywhere, I didn't do anything, I didn't call anyone. My sergeant brought me a cup of coffee. I accepted it. Willard hadn't told me to die of thirst.
After an hour I heard a voice in the outer office and then the young Delta sergeant came back in, alone. The one with the beard and the tan. I told him to take a seat and pondered my orders. Don't go anywhere, don't do anything, don't call anyone. I guessed talking with the guy would amount to doing something, which would contravene the don't do anything part of the command. But then, breathing was doing something, technically. So was metabolizing. My hair was growing, my beard was growing, all twenty of my nails were growing, I was losing weight. It was impossible not to do anything. So I decided that component of the order was purely rhetorical.
"Help you, Sergeant?" I said.
"I think Carbone was gay," the sergeant said.
"You think he was?"
"OK, he was."
"Who else knew?"
"All of us."
"And?"
"And nothing. I thought you should know, is all."
"You think it has a bearing?"
He shook his head. "We were comfortable with it. And whoever killed him wasn't one of us. It wasn't anyone in the unit. That's not possible. We don't do stuff like that. Outside the unit, nobody knew. Therefore it wasn't a factor."
"So why tell me?"
"Because you're bound to find out. I wanted you to be ready for it. I didn't want it to be a surprise."
"Because?"
"Then maybe you can keep it quiet. Since it's not a factor."
I said nothing.
"It would trash his memory," the sergeant said. "And that's wrong. He was a nice guy and a good soldier. Being gay shouldn't be a crime."
"I agree," I said.
"The army needs to change."
"The army hates change."
"They say it damages unit cohesion," he said. "They should have come and seen our squadron working. With Carbone right there in it."
"I can't keep it quiet," I said. "Maybe I would if I could. But the way the crime scene looked, everyone's going to get the message."
"What? It was like a sex crime? You didn't say that before."
"I was trying to keep it quiet," I said.
"But nobody knew. Not outside the unit."
"Someone must have. Or else the perp is in your unit."
"That's not possible. No way, no how."
"One thing or the other has got to be possible," I said. "Was he seeing anyone on the outside?"
"No, never."
"So he was celibate for sixteen years?"
The guy paused a beat.
"I guess I don't really know," he said.
"Someone knew," I said. "But I don't think it was a factor. I think someone just tried to make it look like it was. Maybe we can make that clear, at least."
The sergeant shook his head. "It'll be the only thing anyone remembers about him."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I'm not gay," he said.
"I don't really care either way."
"I've got a wife and a kid."
He left me with that information and I went back to obeying Willard's orders.
I spent the time thinking. There had been no weapon recovered at the scene. No significant forensics. No threads of clothing snagged on a bush, no footprints in the earth, none of his attacker's skin under Carbone's fingernails. All of that was easily explicable. The weapon had been taken away by the attacker, who had probably been wearing BDUs, which the Department of the Army specifies very carefully just so that they won't fall apart and leave threads all over the place. Textile mills across the nation have stringent quality targets to meet, in terms of wear-and-tear standards for military twill and poplin. The earth was frozen hard, so footprints were impossible. North Carolina probably had a reliable frost window of about a month, and we were smack in the middle of it. And it had been a surprise attack. Carbone had been given no time to turn around and claw and kick at his assailant.
So there was no material information. But we had some advantages. We had a fixed pool of possible suspects. It was a closed base, and the army is pretty good at recording who was where, at all times. We could start with yards of printout paper and go through each name, on a simple binary basis, possible or not possible. Then we could collate all the possibles and go to work with the holy trinity of detectives everywhere: means, motive, opportunity. Means and opportunity wouldn't signify much. By definition nobody would be on the possibles list unless they had been proved to have opportunity. And everybody in the army was physically capable of swinging a tire iron or a crowbar against the back of an unsuspecting victim's head. It was probably a rough equivalent of the most basic entry requirement.
So it would end up with motive, which is where it had started for me. What was the reason?
I sat for another hour. Didn't go anywhere, didn't do anything, didn't call anyone. My sergeant brought me more coffee. I mentioned that she might call Lieutenant Summer for me and suggest she stop by.
Summer showed up within five minutes. I had a whole raft of things to tell her, but she had anticipated every one of them. She had ordered a list of all base personnel, plus a copy of the gate log so we could add and subtract names as appropriate. She had arranged for Carbone's quarters to be sealed, pending a search. She had arranged an interview with his CO to develop a better picture of his personal and professional life.
"Excellent," I said.
"What's this thing with Willard?" she asked.
"A pissing contest, probably," I said. "Important case like this, he wants to come down and direct things personally. To remind me I'm under a cloud."
But I was wrong.
Willard finally showed after a total of exactly four hours. I heard his voice in the outer office. I was pretty sure my sergeant wasn't offering him coffee. She had better instincts than that. My door opened and he came in. He didn't look at me. Just closed the door behind him and turned around and sat down in my visitor's chair. Immediately started up with the shuffling thing. He was going at it hard and plucking at the knees of his pants like they were burning his skin.
"Yesterday," he said. "I want a complete record of your movements. I want to hear it from your own lips."
"You're down here to ask me questions?"
"Yes," he said.
I shrugged.
"I was on a plane until two," I said. "I was with you until five."
"And then?"
"I got back here at eleven."
"Six hours? I did it in four."
"You drove, presumably. I took two buses and hitched a ride."
"After that?"
"I spoke to my brother on the phone," I said.
"I remember your brother," Willard said. "I worked with him."
I nodded. "He mentioned that."
"And then what?"
"I spoke to Lieutenant Summer," I said. "Socially."
"And then?"
"Carbone's body was discovered about midnight."
He nodded and twitched and shuffled and looked uncomfortable.
"Did you keep your bus tickets?" he said.
"I doubt it," I said.
He smiled. "Remember who gave you a ride to the post?"
"I doubt it. Why?"
"Because I might need to know. To prove I didn't make a mistake."
I said nothing.
"You made mistakes," Willard said.
"Did I?"
He nodded. "I can't decide whether you're an idiot or whether you're doing this on purpose."
"Doing what?"
"Are you trying to embarrass the army?"
"What?"
"What's the big picture here, Major?" he said.
"You tell me, Colonel."
"The Cold War is ending. Therefore there are big changes coming. The status quo will not be an option. Therefore we've got every part of the military trying to stand tall and make the cut. And you know what?"
"What?"
"The army is always at the bottom of the pile. The Air Force has got all those glamorous airplanes. The Navy has got submarines and carriers. The Marines are always untouchable. And we're stuck down there in the mud, literally. The bottom of the pile. The army is boring, Reacher. That's the view in Washington."
"So?"
"This Carbone guy was a shirtlifter. He was a damn fudgepacker, for Christ's sake. An elite unit has got perverts in it? You think the army needs for people to know that? At a time like this? You should have written him up as a training accident."
"That wouldn't have been true."
"Who cares?"
"He wasn't killed because of his orientation."
"Of course he was."
"I do this stuff for a living," I said. "And I say he wasn't."
He glared at me. Went quiet for a moment.
"OK," he said. "We'll come back to that. Who else but you saw the body?"
"My guys," I said. "Plus a Psy-Ops light colonel I wanted an opinion from. Plus the pathologist."
He nodded. "You deal with your guys. I'll tell Psy-Ops and the doctor."
"Tell them what?"
"That we're writing it up as a training accident. They'll understand. No harm, no foul. No investigation."
"You're kidding."
"You think the army wants this to get around? Now? That Delta had an illegal soldier for four years? Are you nuts?"
"The sergeants want an investigation."
"I'm pretty sure their CO won't. Believe me. You can take that as gospel."
"You'll have to give me a direct order," I said. "Words of one syllable."
"Watch my lips," Willard said. "Do not investigate the fag. Write a situation report indicating that he died in a training accident. A night maneuver, a run, an exercise, anything. He tripped and fell and hit his head. Case closed. That is a direct order."
"I'll need it in writing," I said.
"Grow up," he said.
We sat quiet for a moment or two, just glaring at each other across the desk. I sat still, and Willard rocked and plucked. I clenched my fist, out of his sight. I imagined smashing a straight right to the center of his chest. I figured I could stop his lousy heart with a single blow. I could write it up as a training accident. I could say he had been practicing getting in and out of his chair, and he had slipped and caught his sternum on the corner of the desk.
"What was the time of death?" he asked.
"Nine or ten last night," I said.
"And you were off-post until eleven?"
"Asked and answered," I said.
"Can you prove that?"
I thought of the gate guards in their booth. They had logged me in.
"Do I have to?" I said.
He went quiet again. Leaned to his left in the chair.
"Next item," he said. "You claim the butt-bandit wasn't killed because he was a butt-bandit. What's your evidence?"
"The crime scene was overdone," I said.
"To obscure the real motive?"
I nodded. "That's my judgment."
"What was the real motive?"
"I don't know. That would have required an investigation."
"Let's speculate," Willard said. "Let's assume the hypothetical perpetrator would have benefited from the homicide. Tell me how."
"The usual way," I said. "By preventing some future action on Sergeant Carbone's part. Or to cover up a crime that Sergeant Carbone was a party to or had knowledge of."
"To silence him, in other words."
"To dead-end something," I said. "That would be my guess."
"And you do this stuff for a living."
"Yes," I said. "I do."
"How would you have located this person?"
"By conducting an investigation."
Willard nodded. "And when you found this person, hypothetically, assuming you were able to, what would you have done?"
"I would have taken him into custody," I said. Protective custody, I thought. I pictured Carbone's squadron buddies in my mind, pacing anxiously, ready to lock and load.
"And your suspect pool would have been whoever was on-post at the time?"
I nodded. Lieutenant Summer was probably struggling with reams of printout paper even as we spoke.
"Verified via strength lists and gate logs," I said.
"Facts," Willard said. "I would have thought that facts would be extremely important to someone who does this stuff for a living. This post covers nearly a hundred thousand acres. It was last strung with perimeter wire in 1943. Those are facts. I discovered them with very little trouble, and you should have too. Doesn't it occur to you that not everyone on the post has to come through the main gate? Doesn't it occur to you that someone recorded as not being here could have slipped in through the wire?"
"Unlikely," I said. "It would have given him a walk of well over two miles, in pitch dark, and we run random motor patrols all night."
"The patrols might have missed a trained man."
"Unlikely," I said again. "And how would he have rendezvoused with Sergeant Carbone?"
"Prearranged location."
"It wasn't a location," I said. "It was just a spot near the track."
"Map reference, then."
"Unlikely," I said, for the third time.
"But possible?"
"Anything's possible."
"So a man could have met with the shirtlifter, then killed him, then gotten back out through the wire, and then walked around to the main gate, and then signed in?"
"Anything's possible," I said again.
"What kind of timescale are we looking at? Between killing him and signing in?"
"I don't know. I would have to work out the distance he walked."
"Maybe he ran."
"Maybe he did."
"In which case he would have been out of breath when he passed the gate."
I said nothing.
"Best guess," Willard said. "How much time?"
"An hour or two."
He nodded. "So if the fairy was offed at nine or ten, the killer could have been logging in at eleven?"
"Possible," I said.
"And the motive would have been to dead-end something."
I nodded. Said nothing.
"And you took six hours to complete a four-hour journey, thereby leaving a potential two-hour gap, which you explain with the vague claim that you took a slow route."
I said nothing.
"And you just agreed that a two-hour window is generous in terms of getting the deed done. In particular the two hours between nine and eleven, which by chance are the same two hours that you can't account for."
I said nothing. Willard smiled.
"And you arrived at the gate out of breath," he said. "I checked."
I didn't reply.
"But what would have been your motive?" he said. "I assume you didn't know Carbone well. I assume you don't move in the same social circles that he did. At least I sincerely hope you don't."
"You're wasting your time," I said. "And you're making a big mistake. Because you really don't want to make an enemy out of me."
"Don't I?"
"No," I said. "You really don't."
"What do you need dead-ended?" he asked me.
I said nothing.
"Here's an interesting fact," Willard said. "Sergeant First Class Christopher Carbone was the soldier who lodged the complaint against you."
He proved it to me by unfolding a copy of the complaint from his pocket. He smoothed it out and passed it across my desk. There was a reference number at the top and then a date and a place and a time. The date was January second, the place was Fort Bird's Provost Marshal's office, and the time was 0845. Then came two paragraphs of sworn affidavit. I glanced through some of the stiff, formal sentences. I personally observed a serving Military Police Major named Reacher strike the first civilian with a kicking action against the right knee. Immediately subsequent to that Major Reacher struck the second civilian in the face with his forehead. To the best of my knowledge both attacks were unprovoked. I saw no element of self-defense. Then came a signature with Carbone's name and number typed below it. I recognized the number from Carbone's file. I looked up at the slow silent clock on the wall and pictured Carbone in my mind, slipping out of the bar door into the parking lot, looking at me for a second, and then merging with the knot of men leaning on cars and drinking beer from bottles. Then I looked down again and opened a drawer and slipped the sheet of paper inside.
"Delta Force looks after its own," Willard said. "We all know that. I guess it's part of their mystique. So what are they going to do now? One of their own is beaten to death after lodging a complaint against a smart-ass MP major, and the smart-ass MP major in question needs to save his career, and he can't exactly account for his time on the night it went down?"
I said nothing.
"The Delta CO's office gets its own copy," Willard said. "Standard procedure with disciplinary complaints. Multiple copies all over the place. So the news will leak very soon. Then they'll be asking questions. So what shall I tell them? I could tell them you're definitely not a suspect. Or I could suggest you definitely are a suspect, but there's some type of technicality in the way that means I can't touch you. I could see how their sense of right and wrong deals with that kind of injustice."
I said nothing.
"It's the only complaint Carbone ever made," he said. "In a sixteen-year career. I checked that too. And it stands to reason. A guy like that has to keep his head down. But Delta as a whole will see some significance in it. Carbone comes up over the parapet for the first time in his life, they're going to think you boys had some previous history. They'll think it was a grudge match. Won't make them like you any better."
I said nothing.
"So what should I do?" Willard said. "Should I go over there and drop some hints about awkward legal technicalities? Or shall we trade? I keep Delta off your back, and you start toeing the line?"
I said nothing.
"I don't really think you killed him," he said. "Not even you would go that far. But I wouldn't have minded if you had. Fags in the army deserve to be killed. They're here under false pretenses. You would have chosen the wrong reason, is all."
"It's an empty threat," I said. "You never told me he lodged the complaint. You didn't show it to me yesterday. You never gave me a name."
"Their sergeants' mess won't buy that for a second. You're a special unit investigator. You do this stuff for a living. Easy enough for you to weasel a name out of all the paperwork they think we do."
I said nothing.
"Wake up, Major," Willard said. "Get with the program. Garber's gone. We're going to do things my way now."
"You're making a mistake," I said. "Making an enemy out of me."
He shook his head. "I don't agree. I'm not making a mistake. And I'm not making an enemy out of you. I'm bringing this unit into line, is all. You'll thank me later. All of you. The world is changing. I can see the big picture."
I said nothing.
"Help the army," he said. "And help yourself at the same time."
I said nothing.
"Do we have a deal?" he said.
I didn't reply. He winked at me.
"I think we have a deal," he said. "You're not that dumb."
He got up and walked out of the office and closed the door behind him. I sat there and watched the stiff vinyl cushion on my visitor's chair regain its shape. It happened slowly, with quiet hissing sounds as air leaked back into it.
