The Enemy (31 page)

"That's a distinction they don't seem willing to make. People have been in and out of here looking for you."

"Were they armed?"

"They don't need to be armed. Not those guys. You should have them confined to quarters. You could do that. You're acting MP CO here."

I shook my head. "Anything else?"

"You need to call Colonel Willard before midnight, or he's going to write you up as AWOL. He said that's a promise."

I nodded. It was Willard's obvious next move. An AWOL charge wouldn't reflect badly on a CO. Wouldn't make him look like he had lost his grip. An AWOL charge was always on the man who ran, fair and square.

"Anything else?" I said again.

"Sanchez wants a ten-sixteen," she said. "Down at Fort Jackson. And your brother called again."

"Any message?" I said. "No message."

"OK," I said.

I went inside to my desk. Picked up my phone. Summer stepped over to the map. Traced her fingers across the pins, D.C. to Sperryville, Sperryville to Green Valley, Green Valley to Fort Bird. I dialled Joe's number. He answered, second ring. "I called Mom," he said. "She's still hanging in there."

"She said soon, Joe. Doesn't mean we have to mount a daily vigil."

"Bound to be sooner than we think. And than we want."

"How was she?"

"She sounded shaky."

"You OK?"

"Not bad," he said. "You?"

"Not a great year so far."

"You should call her next," he said.

"I will," I said. "In a few days."

"Do it tomorrow," he said.

He hung up and I sat for a minute. Then I dabbed the cradle to clear the line and asked my sergeant to get Sanchez for me. Down at Jackson. I held the phone by my ear and waited.

Summer was looking right at me.

"A daily vigil?" she said.

"She's waiting for the plaster to come off," I said: "She doesn't like it."

Summer looked at me a little more and then turned back to the map. I put the phone on speaker and laid the handset down on the desk. There was a click on the line and we heard Sanchez's voice.

"I've been hassling the Columbia PD about Brubaker's car," he said.

"Didn't they find it yet?" I said.

"No," he said. "And they weren't putting any effort into finding it. Which was inconceivable to me. So I kept on hassling them."

"And?"

"They dropped the other shoe."

"Which is?"

"Brubaker wasn't killed in Columbia," he said. "He was dumped there, is all."

SEVENTEEN

Sanchez told us the Columbia medical examiners had found confused lividity patterns on Brubaker's body that in their opinion meant he had been dead about three hours before being tossed in the alley. Lividity is what happens to a person's blood after death. The heart stops, blood pressure collapses, liquid blood drains and sinks and settles into the lowest parts of the body under the simple force of gravity. It rests there and over a period of time it stains the skin liverish purple. Somewhere between three and six hours later the colour fixes permanently, like a developed photograph. A guy who falls down dead on his back will have a pale chest and a purple back. Vice versa for a guy who falls down dead on his front. But Brubaker's lividity was all over the place. The Columbia medical examiners figured he had been killed, then kept on his back for about three hours, then dumped in the alley on his front. They were pretty confident about their estimate of the three-hour duration, because three hours was the point where the stains would first start to fix. They said he had signs of early fixed lividity on his back and major fixed lividity on his front. They also said he had a broad stripe across the middle of his back where the dead flesh had been partially cooked.

"He was in the trunk of a car," I said.

"Right over the muffler," Sanchez said. "Three-hour journey, plenty of temperature."

"This changes a lot of things."

"It explains why they never found his Chevy in Columbia."

"Or any witnesses," I said. "Or the shell cases or the bullets."

"So what are we looking at?"

"Three hours in a car?" I said. "At night, with empty roads?

"Anything up to a two-hundred-mile radius."

"That's a pretty big circle," Sanchez said.

"A hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles," I said.

"Approximately. Pi times the radius squared. What's the Columbia PD doing about it?"

"Dropping it like a hot potato. It's an FBI case now."

"What does the Bureau think about the dope thing?"

"They're a little sceptical. They figure heroin isn't our bag. They figure we're more into marijuana and amphetamines."

"I wish," I said. "I could use a little of both right now."

"On the other hand they know Delta guys go all over. Pakistan, South America. Which is where heroin comes from. So they'll keep it in their back pocket, in case they don't get anywhere, just like the Columbia PD was going to."

"They're wasting their time. Heroin? A guy like Brubaker would die first."

"They're thinking, maybe he did."

His end of the line clicked off. I killed the speaker and put the handset back.

"It happened to the north, probably," Summer said. "Brubaker started out in Raleigh. We should be looking for his car somewhere up there."

"Not our case," I said.

"OK, the FBI should be looking."

"I'm sure they already are."

There was a knock at the door. It opened up and an MP corporal came in with sheets of paper under his arm. He saluted smartly and stepped a pace forward and placed the sheets of paper on my desk. Stepped the same pace back and saluted again.

"Copies of the gate log, sir," he said. "First through fourth of this month, times as requested."

He turned around and walked back out of the room. Closed the door. I looked at the pile of paper. There were about seven sheets in it. Not too bad.

"Let's go to work," I said.

Operation Just Cause helped us again. The raised DefCon level meant a lot of leave had been cancelled. No real reason, because the Panama thing was no kind of a big deal, but that was how the military worked. No point in having DefCon levels if they couldn't be raised up and dropped down, no point in moving them at all if there weren't any associated consequences. No point in staging little foreign dramas unless the whole establishment felt a remote and vicarious thrill.

No point in cancelling leave without giving people something to fill their time, either. So there were extra training sessions and daily readiness exercises. Most of them were arduous and started early. Therefore the big bonus for us was that almost everyone who had gone out to celebrate New Year's Eve was back on post and in the rack relatively early. They must have straggled back around three or four or five in the morning, because there was very little gate activity recorded after six.

Incoming personnel during the eighteen hours we were looking at on New Year's Day totalled nineteen. Summer and I were two of them, returning from Green Valley and D.C. after the widow trip and the visit to Walter Reed. We crossed ourselves off the list.

Incoming personnel other than ourselves on January 2nd totalled sixteen. Twelve, on January 3rd. Seventeen, before 2000 hours on January 4th. Sixty-two names in total, during the eighty-six-hour window. Nine of them were civilian delivery drivers. We crossed them off. Eleven of them were repeats. They had come in, gone out, come in again. Like commuters. My night-duty sergeant was one of them. We crossed her off, because she was a woman. And short. Elsewhere we deleted the second and any subsequent entries in each case.

We ended up with forty-one individuals, listed by name, rank and initial. No way of telling which were men and which were women. No way of telling which of the men were tall and strong and right-handed.

"I'll work on the genders," Summer said. "I've still got the basic strength lists. They have full names on them."

I nodded. Left her to it. Got on the phone and scared up the pathologist and asked him to meet me in the mortuary, right away. I drove our Chevy between my office and his because I didn't want to be seen walking around with a crowbar. I parked outside the mortuary entrance and waited. The guy showed up inside five minutes, walking, from the direction of the O Club. I probably interrupted his dessert. Or maybe even his main course. I slid out to meet him and leaned back in and took the crowbar out of the back seat. He glanced at it. Led me inside. He seemed to understand what I wanted to do. He unlocked his office and hit the lights and unlocked his drawer. Opened it and lifted out the crowbar that had killed Carbone. Laid it on his desk. I laid the borrowed specimen next to it. Pulled the tissue paper off it. Lined it up at the same angle. It was exactly identical.

"Are there wide variations?" the pathologist asked. "With crow bars?"

"More than you would think," I said. "I just had a big crowbar lesson."

"These two look the same."

"They are the same. They're peas in a pod. Count on it. They're custom made. They're unique in all the world."

"Did you ever meet Carbone?"

"Very briefly," I said.

"What was his posture like?"

"In what way?"

"Did he stoop?"

I thought back to the dim interior of the lounge bar. To the hard light in the parking lot. Shook my head.

"He wasn't tall enough to stoop," I said. "He was a wiry guy, solid, stood up pretty straight. Kind of on the balls of his feet. He looked athletic."

"OK."

"Why?"

"It was a downward blow. Not a downward chop, but a horizontal swing that dipped as it hit. Maybe it was just below horizontal. Carbone was seventy inches tall. The wound was sixty-five inches off the ground, assuming he wasn't stooping.

"But it was delivered from above. So his attacker was tall."

"You told us that already," I said.

"No, I mean tall," he said. "I've been working on it. Mapping it out. The guy had to be six-four or six-five."

"Like me," I said.

"And as heavy as you, too. Not easy to break a skull as badly as that."

I thought back to the crime scene. It had been pocked with small hummocks of dead grass and there were wrist-thick branches here and there on the ground, but it was basically a flat area. No way one guy could have been standing higher than the other. No way of assuming a relative height difference when there really wasn't one.

"Six-four or six-five," I said. "Are you prepared to go to bat on that?"

"In court?"

"It was a training accident," I said. "We're not going to court. This is just between you and me. Am I wasting my time looking at people less than six feet four inches tall?"

The doctor breathed in, breathed out.

"Six-three," he said. "To be on the safe side. To allow a margin for experimental error. I'd go to bat on six-three. Count on it."

"OK," I said.

He shooed me out the door and hit the lights and locked up again.

Summer was sitting behind my desk when I got back, doing nothing. She was through with the gender analysis. It hadn't taken her long. The strength lists were comprehensive and accurate and alphabetical, like most army paperwork.

"Thirty-three men," she said. "Twenty-three enlisted, ten officers."

"Who are they?"

"A little bit of everything. Delta and Ranger leave was completely cancelled, but they had evening passes. Carbone himself was in and out on the first, obviously."

"We can cross him off."

"OK, thirty-two men," she said. "The pathologist is one of them."

"We can take him out, too."

"Thirty-one, then," she said. "And Vassell and Coomer are still in there. In and out on the first and in again on the fourth at seven o'clock."

"Take them out," I said. "They were eating dinner. Fish, and steak."

"Twenty-nine," she said. "Twenty-two enlisted, seven officers."

"OK," I said. "Now go to Post HQ and pull their medical records."

"Why?"

"To find out how tall they are."

"Can't do that for the driver Vassell and Coomer had on New Year's Day. Major Marshall. He was a visitor. His records won't be here."

"He wasn't here the night Carbone died," I said. "So you can take him out too."

"Twenty-eight," she said.

"So go pull twenty-eight sets of records," I said.

She slid me a slip of white paper. I picked it up. It was the one

I had written 973 on. Our original suspect pool.

"We're making progress," she said.

I nodded. She smiled and stood up. Walked out the door. I took her place behind the desk. The chair was warm from her body. I savoured the feeling, until it went away. Then I picked up the phone. Asked my sergeant to get the post quartermaster on the line. It took her a few minutes to find him. I figured she had to drag him out of the mess hall. I figured I had just ruined his dinner, too, as well as the pathologist's. But then, I hadn't eaten anything yet myself.

"Yes, sir?" the guy said. He sounded a little annoyed.

"I've got a question, chief," I said. "Something only you will know."

"Like what?"

"Average height and weight for a male U.S. Army soldier."

The guy said nothing, but I felt his annoyance fade away. The Quartermaster Corps buys millions of uniforms a year, and twice as many boots, all on a budget, so you can bet it knows the tale of the tape to the nearest half-inch and the nearest half-ounce. It can't afford not to, literally. And it loves to show off its specialized knowledge.

"No problem," the guy said. "Male adult population aged twenty to fifty as a whole in America goes five-nine and a half, and one-seventy-eight. We're over-represented with Hispanics by comparison with the nation as a whole which brings our median height down one whole inch to five-eight and a half. We train pretty hard which brings our median weight up three pounds to one-eighty-one, muscle being generally heavier than fat."

"Those are this year's figures?"

"Last year's," he said. "This year is only a few days old."

"What's the spread in height?"

"What are you looking for?"

"How many guys have we got six-three or better?"

"One in ten," he said. "In the army as a whole, maybe ninety thousand. Call it a Superbowl crowd. On a post this size, maybe a hundred and twenty. Call it a half-empty airplane."