by Lee Child
She said nothing.
“Do that U-turn thing again,” I said. “Across the median. Then go back north a little. I want to look at the rest area.”
The rest area was the same as on most American interstates I had seen. The northbound highway and the southbound highway eased apart to put a long fat bulge into the median. The buildings were shared by both sets of travelers. Therefore they had two fronts and no backs. They were built of brick and had dormant flower beds and leafless trees all around them. There were gas pumps. There were angled parking slots. Right then the place seemed to be halfway between quiet and busy. It was the end of the holidays. Families were struggling home, ready for school, ready for work. The parking slots were maybe one-third filled with cars. Their distribution was interesting. People had grabbed the first parking spot they saw rather than chancing something farther on, even though that might have put them ultimately a little closer to the food and the bathrooms. Maybe it was human nature. Some kind of insecurity.
There was a small semicircular plaza at the facility’s main entrance. I could see bright neon signs inside at the food stations. Outside, there were six trash cans all fairly close to the doors. There were plenty of people around, looking in, looking out.
“Too public,” Summer said. “This is going nowhere.”
I nodded again. “I’d forget it in a heartbeat if it wasn’t for Mrs. Kramer.”
“Carbone is more important. We should prioritize.”
“That feels like we’re giving up.”
We went north out of the rest area and Summer did her off-roading thing across the median again and turned south. I got as comfortable as it was possible to get in a military vehicle and settled in for the ride back. Darkness unspooled on my left. There was a vague sunset in the West, to my right. The road looked damp. Summer didn’t seem very worried about the possibility of ice.
I did nothing for the first twenty minutes. Then I switched the dome light on and searched Kramer’s briefcase, thoroughly. I didn’t expect to find anything, and I wasn’t proved wrong. His passport was a standard item, seven years old. He looked a little better in the picture than he had dead in the motel, but not much. He had plenty of stamps in and out of Germany and Belgium. The future battlefield and NATO HQ, respectively. He hadn’t been anywhere else. He was a true specialist. For at least seven years he had concentrated exclusively on the world’s last great tank arena and its command structure.
The plane tickets were exactly what Garber had said they should be. Frankfurt to Dulles, and Washington National to Los Angeles, both round-trip. They were all coach class and government rate, booked three days before the first departure date.
The itinerary matched the details on the plane tickets exactly. There were seat assignments. It seemed like Kramer preferred the aisle. Maybe his age was affecting his bladder. There was a reservation for a single room in Fort Irwin’s Visiting Officers’ Quarters, which he had never reached.
His wallet contained thirty-seven American dollars and sixty-seven German marks, all in mixed small bills. The Amex card was the basic green item, due to expire in a year and a half. He had carried one since 1964, according to the Member Since rubric. I figured that was pretty early for an army officer. Back then most got by with cash and military scrip. Kramer must have been a sophisticated guy, financially.
There was a Virginia driver’s license. He had been using Green Valley as his permanent address, even though he avoided spending time there. There was a standard military ID card. There was a photograph of Mrs. Kramer, behind a plastic window. It showed a much younger version of the woman I had seen dead on her hallway floor. It was at least twenty years old. She had been pretty back then. She had long auburn hair that showed up a little orange from the way the photograph had faded with age.
There was nothing else in the wallet. No receipts, no restaurant checks, no Amex carbons, no phone numbers, no scraps of paper. I wasn’t surprised. Generals are often neat, organized people. They need fighting talent, but they need bureaucratic talent too. I guessed Kramer’s office and desk and quarters would be the same as his wallet. They would contain everything he needed and nothing he didn’t.
The hardcover book was an academic monograph from a Midwestern university about the Battle of Kursk. Kursk happened in July of 1943. It was Nazi Germany’s last grand offensive of World War Two and its first major defeat on an open battlefield. It turned into the greatest tank battle the world has ever seen, and ever will see, unless people like Kramer himself are eventually turned loose. I wasn’t surprised by his choice of reading material. Some small part of him must have feared the closest he would ever get to truly cataclysmic action was reading about the hundreds of Tigers and Panthers and T-34s whirling and roaring through the choking summer dust all those years ago.
There was nothing else in the briefcase. Just a few furred paper shreds trapped in the seams. It looked like Kramer was the sort of guy who emptied his case and turned it upside down and shook it every time he packed for a trip. I put everything back inside and buckled the little straps and laid the case on the floor by my feet.
“Speak to the dining room guy,” I said. “When we get back. Find out who was at the table with Vassell and Coomer.”
“OK,” Summer said. She drove on.
We got back to Bird in time for dinner. We ate in the O Club bar with a bunch of fellow MPs. If Willard had spies among them, they would have seen nothing except a couple of tired people doing not very much of anything. But Summer slipped away between courses and came back with news in her eyes. I ate my dessert and drank my coffee slowly enough that nobody could think I had urgent business anywhere. Then I stood up and wandered out. Waited in the cold on the sidewalk. Summer came out five minutes later. I smiled. It felt like we were conducting a clandestine affair.
“Only one woman ate with Vassell and Coomer,” she said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Lieutenant Colonel Andrea Norton.”
“The Psy-Ops person?”
“The very same.”
“She was at a party on New Year’s Eve?”
Summer made a face. “You know what those parties are like. A bar in town, hundreds of people, in and out all the time, noise, confusion, drinks, people disappearing two by two. She could have slipped away.”
“Where was the bar?”
“Thirty minutes from the motel.”
“Then she would have been gone an hour, absolute minimum.”
“That’s possible.”
“Was she in the bar at midnight? Holding hands and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’? Whoever was standing next to her should be able to say for sure.”
“People say she was there. But she could have made it back by then anyway. The kid said the Humvee left at eleven twenty-five. She’d have been back with five minutes to spare. It could have looked natural. You know, everybody comes out of the woodwork, ready for the ball to drop. The party kind of starts over.”
I said nothing.
“She would have taken the case to sanitize it. Maybe her phone number was in there, or her name or her picture. Or a diary. She didn’t want the scandal. But once she was through with it, she didn’t need the rest of the stuff anymore. She’d have been happy to hand it back when asked.”
“How would Vassell and Coomer know who to ask?”
“Hard to hide a long-standing affair in this fishbowl.”
“Not logical,” I said. “If people knew about Kramer and Norton, why would someone go to the house in Virginia?”
“OK, maybe they didn’t know. Maybe it was just there on the list of possibilities. Maybe way down the list. Maybe it was something that people thought was over.”
I nodded. “What can we get from her?”
“We can get confirmation that Vassell and Coomer arranged to take possession of the briefcase last night. That would prove they were looking for it, which puts them in the frame for Mrs. Kramer.”
“They made no calls from the hotel
, and they didn’t have time to get down there themselves. So I don’t see how we can put them in the frame. What else can we get?”
“We can be certain about what happened to the agenda. We can know that Vassell and Coomer got it back. Then at least the army can relax because we’ll know for sure it isn’t going to wind up on some public trash pile for a journalist to find.”
I nodded. Said nothing.
“And maybe Norton saw it,” Summer said. “Maybe she read it. Maybe she could tell us what all this fuss is about.”
“That’s tempting.”
“It sure is.”
“Can we just walk in and ask her?”
“You’re from the 110th. You can ask anyone anything.”
“I have to stay under Willard’s radar.”
“She doesn’t know he warned you off.”
“She does. He spoke to her after the Carbone thing.”
“I think we have to talk to her.”
“Difficult kind of a talk to have,” I said. “She’s likely to get offended.”
“Only if we do it wrong.”
“What are the chances of doing it right?”
“We might be able to manipulate the situation. There’ll be an embarrassment factor. She won’t want it broadcast.”
“We can’t push her to the point where she calls Willard.”
“You scared of him?”
“I’m scared of what he can do to us bureaucratically. Doesn’t help anyone if we both get transferred to Alaska.”
“Your call.”
I was quiet for a long moment. Thought back to Kramer’s hardcover book. This was like July thirteenth, 1943, the pivotal day of the Battle of Kursk. We were like Alexander Vasilevsky, the Soviet general. If we attacked now, this minute, we had to keep on and on attacking until the enemy was run off his feet and the war was won. If we bogged down or paused for breath even for a second, we would be overrun again.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
We found Andrea Norton in the O Club lounge and I asked her if she would spare us a minute in her office. I could see she was puzzled as to why. I told her it was a confidential matter. She stayed puzzled. Willard had told her that Carbone was a closed case, and she couldn’t see what else we would have to talk to her about. But she agreed. She told us she would meet us there in thirty minutes.
Summer and I spent the thirty minutes in my office with her list of who was on-post and who wasn’t at Carbone’s time of death. She had yards of computer paper neatly folded into a large concertina about an inch thick. There was a name, rank, and number printed on each line with pale dot-matrix ink. Almost every name had a check mark next to it.
“What are the marks?” I asked her. “Here or not here?”
“Here,” she said.
I nodded. I was afraid of that. I riffed through the concertina with my thumb.
“How many?” I asked.
“Nearly twelve hundred.”
I nodded again. There was nothing intrinsically difficult about boiling down twelve hundred names and finding one sole perpetrator. Police files everywhere are full of larger suspect pools. There had been cases in Korea where the entire U.S. military strength had been the suspect pool. But cases like that require unlimited manpower, big staffs, and endless resources. And they require everybody’s total cooperation. They can’t be handled behind a CO’s back, in secret, by two people acting alone.
“Impossible,” I said.
“Nothing’s impossible,” Summer said.
“We have to go at it a different way.”
“How?”
“What did he take to the scene?”
“Nothing.”
“Wrong,” I said. “He took himself.”
Summer shrugged. Dragged her fingers up the folded edges of her paper. The stack thickened and then thinned back down as the air sighed out from between the pages.
“Pick a name,” she said.
“He took a K-bar,” I said.
“Twelve hundred names, twelve hundred K-bars.”
“He took a tire iron or a crowbar.”
She nodded.
“And he took yogurt,” I said.
She said nothing.
“Four things,” I said. “Himself, a K-bar, a blunt instrument, and yogurt. Where did the yogurt come from?”
“His refrigerator in his quarters,” Summer said. “Or one of the mess kitchens, or one of the mess buffets, or the commissary, or a supermarket or a deli or a grocery store somewhere off-post.”
I pictured a man breathing hard, walking fast, maybe sweating, a bloodstained knife and a crowbar clutched together in his right hand, an empty yogurt pot in his left, stumbling in the dark, nearing a destination, looking down, seeing the pot, hurling it into the undergrowth, putting the knife in his pocket, slipping the crowbar under his coat.
“We should look for the container,” I said.
Summer said nothing.
“He’ll have ditched it,” I said. “Not close to the scene, but not far from it either.”
“Will it help us?”
“It’ll have some kind of a product code on it. Maybe a best before date. Stuff like that. It might lead us to where it was bought.”
Then I paused.
“And it might have prints on it,” I said.
“He’ll have worn gloves.”
I shook my head. “I’ve seen people opening yogurt containers. But I’ve never seen anyone do it with gloves on. There’s a foil closure. With a tiny little tab to pull.”
“We’re on a hundred thousand acres here.”
I nodded. Square one. Normally a couple of phone calls would get me all the grunts on the post lined up a yard apart on their knees, crawling slowly across the terrain like a giant human comb, staring down at the ground and parting every blade of grass by hand. And then doing it again the next day, and the next, until one of them found what we were looking for. With manpower like the army has, you can find a needle in a haystack. You can find both halves of a broken needle. You can find the tiny chip of chrome that flaked off the break.
Summer looked at the clock on the wall.
“Our thirty minutes are up,” she said.
We used the Humvee to get over to Psy-Ops and parked in a slot that was probably reserved for someone else. It was nine o’clock. Summer killed the motor and we opened the doors and slipped out into the cold.
I took Kramer’s briefcase with me.
We walked through the old tiled corridors and came to Norton’s door. Her light was on. I knocked and we went in. Norton was behind her desk. All her textbooks were back on her shelves. There were no legal pads on view. No pens or pencils. Her desktop was clear. The pool of light from her lamp was a perfect circle on the empty wood.
She had three visitor’s chairs. She waved us toward them. Summer sat on the right. I sat on the left. I propped Kramer’s briefcase on the center chair, facing Norton, like a ghost at the feast. She didn’t look at it.
“How can I help you?” she said.
I made a point of adjusting the briefcase’s position so that it was completely upright on the chair.
“Tell us about the dinner party last night,” I said.
“What dinner party?”
“You ate with some Armored staffers who were visiting.”
She nodded.
“Vassell and Coomer,” she said. “So?”
“They worked for General Kramer.”
She nodded again. “So I believe.”
“Tell us about the meal.”
“The food?”
“The atmosphere,” I said. “The conversation. The mood.”
“It was just dinner in the O Club,” she said.
“Someone gave Vassell and Coomer a briefcase.”
“Did they? What, like a present?”
I said nothing.
“I don’t remember that,” Norton said. “When?”
“During dinner,” I said. “Or as they were leaving.”
“A briefcase?” Norton said.
“Was it you?” Summer asked.
Norton looked at her, blankly. She was either genuinely puzzled, or she was a superb actress. “Was it me what?”
“Who gave them the briefcase.”
“Why would I give them a briefcase? I hardly knew them.”
“How well did you know them?”
“I met them once or twice, years ago.”
“At Irwin?”
“I believe so.”
“Why did you eat with them?”
“I was in the bar. They asked me. It would have been rude to decline.”
“Did you know they were coming?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I had no idea. I was surprised they weren’t in Germany.”
“So you knew them well enough to know where they’re based.”
“Kramer was an Armored Branch commander in Europe. They were his staffers. I wouldn’t expect to find them based in Hawaii.”
Nobody spoke. I watched Norton’s eyes. She hadn’t looked at Kramer’s briefcase longer than about half a second. Just long enough to figure I was some guy who carried a briefcase, and then to forget all about it.
“What’s going on here?” she said.
I didn’t answer.
“Tell me.”
I pointed to the briefcase. “This is General Kramer’s. He lost it on New Year’s Eve and it showed up again today. We’re trying to figure out where it’s been.”
“Where did he lose it?”
Summer moved in her chair.
“In a motel,” she said. “During a sexual assignation with a woman from this post. The woman was driving a Humvee. Therefore we’re looking for women who knew Kramer, and who have permanent access to Humvees, and who were off-post on New Year’s Eve, and who were at dinner last night.”
“I was the only woman at dinner last night.”
Silence.
Summer nodded. “We know that. And we promise we can keep the whole thing quiet, but first we need you to confirm who you gave the briefcase to.”
The room stayed quiet. Norton looked at Summer like she had told a joke with a punch line she didn’t quite understand.