by Lee Child
“So where was Carbone’s new P7?” I said. “I didn’t find it in his quarters.”
“In their armory,” Summer said. “Cleaned, oiled, and loaded. They check their personal weapons in and out. They’ve got a cage inside their hangar. You should see that place. It’s like Santa’s grotto. Special armored Humvees wall to wall, trucks, explosives, grenade launchers, claymores, night vision stuff. They could equip a Central African dictatorship all by themselves.”
“That’s very reassuring,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Why did he file the complaint?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
I pictured Carbone in the strip club, New Year’s night. I had walked in and I had seen a group of four men I took to be sergeants. The swirl of the crowd had turned three of them away from me and one of them toward me in a completely random dynamic. I hadn’t known who was going to be there, they hadn’t known I was going to show up. I had never met any of them before. The encounter was as close to pure chance as it was possible to get. Yet Carbone had tagged me for the kind of tame mayhem he must have seen a thousand times before. The kind of tame mayhem he must have joined in with a hundred times before. Show me an enlisted man who claims never to have fought a civilian in a bar, and I’ll show you a liar.
“Are you Catholic?” I asked.
“No, why?” Summer said.
“I wondered if you knew any Latin.”
“It’s not just Catholics who know Latin. I went to school.”
“OK, cui bono?” I said.
“Who benefits? What, from the complaint?”
“It’s always a good guide to motive,” I said. “You can explain most things with it. History, politics, everything.”
“Like, follow the money?”
“Approximately,” I said. “Except I don’t think there’s money involved here. But there must have been some benefit for Carbone. Otherwise why would he do it?”
“Could have been a moral thing. Maybe he was driven to do it.”
“Not if it was his first complaint in sixteen years. He must have seen far worse. I only broke one leg and one nose. It was no kind of a big deal. This is the army, Summer. I assume he hadn’t been confusing it with a gardening club all these years.”
“I don’t know,” she said again.
I slid her the slip of paper with 973 written on it.
“That’s our suspect pool,” I said.
“He was in the bar until eight o’clock,” she said. “I checked that too. He left alone. Nobody saw him again after that.”
“Anyone say anything about his mood?”
“Delta guys don’t have moods. Too much danger of appearing human.”
“Had he been drinking?”
“One beer.”
“So he just walked out of the mess at eight, no nerves, no worries?”
“Apparently so.”
“He knew the guy he was meeting,” I said.
Summer said nothing.
“Sanchez called again while you were out,” I said. “Colonel Brubaker was shot in the back of the head. A double tap, close in, from behind.”
“So he knew the guy he was meeting too.”
“Very likely,” I said. “One twenty-three in the morning. Bullet caught his watch. Between three and a half and four and a half hours after Carbone.”
“That puts you in the clear with Delta. You were still here at one twenty-three.”
“Yes,” I said. “I was. With Norton.”
“I’ll spread the word.”
“They won’t believe you.”
“Do you think there’s a connection between Carbone and Brubaker?”
“Common sense says there has to be. But I don’t see how. And I don’t see why. I mean, sure, they were both Delta soldiers. But Carbone was here and Brubaker was there, and Brubaker was a high-profile mover and shaker, and Carbone was a nobody who kept himself to himself. Maybe because he thought he had to.”
“You think we’ll ever have gays in the military?”
“We’ve already got gays in the military. We always have had. World War Two, the Western Allies had fourteen million men in uniform. Any kind of reasonable probability says at least a million of them were gay. And we won that war, as I recall, last time I checked with the history books. We won it big time.”
“It’s a hell of a step,” she said.
“They took the same step when they let black soldiers in. And women. Everyone pissed and moaned about that too. Bad for morale, bad for unit cohesion. It was crap then and it’s crap now. Right? You’re here and you’re doing OK.”
“Are you a Catholic?”
I shook my head. “My mother taught us the Latin. She cared about our education. She taught us things, me and my brother, Joe.”
“You should call her.”
“Why?”
“To see how her leg is.”
“Maybe later,” I said.
I went back to the personnel lists and Summer went out and came back in with a map of the Eastern United States. She taped it flat to the wall below the clock and marked our location at Fort Bird with a red push-pin. Then she marked Columbia, South Carolina, where Brubaker had been found. Then she marked Raleigh, North Carolina, where he had been playing golf with his wife. I gave her a clear plastic ruler from my desk drawer and she checked the map’s scale and started calculating times and distances.
“Bear in mind most of us don’t drive as fast as you do,” I said.
“None of you drive as fast as I do,” she said.
She measured four and a half inches between Raleigh and Columbia and called it five to allow for the way U.S. 1 snaked slightly. She held the ruler against the scale in the legend box.
“Two hundred miles,” she said. “So if Brubaker left Raleigh after dinner, he could have been in Columbia by midnight, easily. An hour or so before he died.”
Then she checked the distance between Fort Bird and Columbia. She came up with a hundred and fifty miles, less than I had originally guessed.
“Three hours,” she said. “To be comfortable.”
Then she looked at me.
“It could have been the same guy,” she said. “If Carbone was killed at nine or ten, the same guy could have been in Columbia at midnight or one, ready for Brubaker.”
She put her little finger on the Fort Bird pin.
“Carbone,” she said.
Then she spanned her hand and put her index finger on the Columbia pin.
“Brubaker,” she said. “It’s a definite sequence.”
“It’s a definite guess,” I said.
She didn’t reply.
“Do we know that Brubaker drove down from Raleigh?” I said.
“We can assume he did.”
“We should check with Sanchez,” I said. “See if they found his car anywhere. See if his wife says he took it with him in the first place.”
“OK,” she said. She went out to my sergeant’s desk to make the call. Left me with the interminable personnel lists. She came back in ten minutes later.
“He took his car,” she said. “His wife told Sanchez they had two cars up at the hotel. His and hers. They always did it that way because he was always rushing off somewhere and she was always concerned about getting stuck.”
“What kind of car?” I said. I figured she would have asked.
“Chevy Impala SS.”
“Nice car.”
“He left after dinner and his wife’s assumption was that he was driving back here to Bird. That would have been normal. But the car hasn’t turned up anyplace yet. At least, not according to the Columbia PD and the FBI.”
“OK,” I said.
“Sanchez thinks they’re holding out on him, like they know something we don’t.”
“That would be normal too.”
“He’s pressing them. But it’s difficult.”
“It always is.”
“He’ll call us,” she said. “As soon as he ge
ts anywhere.”
We got a call thirty minutes later. But not from Sanchez. Not about Brubaker or Carbone. The call was from Detective Clark, in Green Valley, Virginia. It was about Mrs. Kramer’s case.
“Got something,” he said.
He sounded very pleased with himself. He launched into a blow-by-blow account of the moves he had made. They sounded reasonably intelligent. He had used a map to figure out all the likely approaches to Green Valley from as much as three hundred miles away. Then he had used phone books to compile a list of hardware sources that lay along those approaches. He had started his guys calling them all, one by one, beginning right in the center of the spiderweb. He had figured that crowbar sales would be slow in winter. Major remodeling happens from springtime onward. Nobody wants their walls torn down for kitchen extensions when the weather is cold. So he had expected to get very few positive reports. After three hours he had gotten none at all. People had spent the post-Christmas period buying power drills and electric screwdrivers. Some had bought chainsaws, to keep their wood-burning stoves going. Those with pioneer fantasies had bought axes. But nobody had been interested in inert and prosaic things like crowbars.
So he made a lateral jump and fired up his crime databases. Originally he planned to look for reports of other crimes that involved doors and crowbars. He thought that might narrow down a location. He didn’t find anything that matched his parameters. But instead, right there on his NCIC computer, he found a burglary at a small hardware store in Sperryville, Virginia. The store was a lonely place on a dead-end street. According to the owner the front window had been kicked in sometime in the early hours of New Year’s Day. Because it was a holiday, there had been no money left in the register. As far as the store owner could tell, the only thing that had been stolen was a single crowbar.
Summer stepped back to the map on the wall and put a pushpin through the center of Sperryville, Virginia. Sperryville was a small place and the plastic barrel of the pin obscured it completely. Then she put another pin through Green Valley. The two pins finished up about a quarter-inch apart. They were almost touching. They represented about ten miles of separation.
“Look at this,” Summer said.
I got up and stepped over. Looked at the map. Sperryville was on the elbow of a crooked road that ran southwest to Green Valley and beyond. In the other direction it didn’t really go anywhere at all except Washington D.C. So Summer put a pin in Washington D.C. She put the tip of her little finger on it. Put her middle finger on Sperryville and her index finger on Green Valley.
“Vassell and Coomer,” she said. “They left D.C., they stole the crowbar in Sperryville, they broke into Mrs. Kramer’s house in Green Valley.”
“Except they didn’t,” I said. “They were just in from the airport. They didn’t have a car. And they didn’t call for one. You checked the phone records yourself.”
She said nothing.
“Plus they’re lard-ass staff officers,” I said. “They wouldn’t know how to burgle a hardware store if their lives depended on it.”
She took her hand off the map. I stepped back to my desk and sat down again and butted the personnel lists into a neat pile.
“We need to concentrate on Carbone,” I said.
“Then we need a new plan,” she said. “Detective Clark is going to stop looking for crowbars now. He’s found the one he’s interested in.”
I nodded. “Back to traditional time-honored methods of investigation.”
“Which are?”
“I don’t really know. I went to West Point. I didn’t go to MP school.”
My phone rang. I picked it up. The same warm Southern voice I had heard before went through the same 10-33, 10-16 from Jackson routine I had heard before. I acknowledged and hit the speaker button and leaned all the way back in my chair and waited. The room filled with electronic hum. Then there was a click.
“Reacher?” Sanchez said.
“And Lieutenant Summer,” I said. “We’re on the speaker.”
“Anyone else in the room?”
“No,” I said.
“Door closed?”
“Yes. What’s up?”
“Columbia PD came through again, is what. They’re feeding me stuff bit by bit. And they’re having themselves a real good time doing it. They’re gloating like crazy.”
“Why?”
“Because Brubaker had heroin in his pocket, that’s why. Three dime bags of brown. And a big wad of cash money. They’re saying it was a drug deal that went bad.”
fifteen
I was born in 1960, which made me seven during the Summer of Love, and thirteen at the end of our effective involvement in Vietnam, and fifteen at the end of our official involvement there. Which meant I missed most of the American military’s collision with narcotics. The heavy-duty Purple Haze years passed me by. I had caught the later, stable phase. Like many soldiers I had smoked a little weed from time to time, maybe just enough to develop a preference among different strains and sources, but nowhere near enough to put me high on the list of U.S. users in terms of lifetime volume consumed. I was a part-timer. I was one of those guys who bought, not sold.
But as an MP, I had seen plenty sold. I had seen drug deals. I had seen them succeed, and I had seen them fail. I knew the drill. And one thing I knew for sure was that if a bad deal ends up with a dead guy on the floor, there’s nothing in the dead guy’s pocket. No cash, no product. No way. Why would there be? If the dead guy was the buyer, the seller runs away with his dope intact and the buyer’s cash. If the dead guy was the seller, then the buyer gets the whole stash for free. The deal money walks right back home with him. Either way someone takes a nice big profit in exchange for a couple of bullets and a little rummaging around.
“It’s bullshit, Sanchez,” I said. “It’s faked.”
“Of course it is. I know that.”
“Did you make that point?”
“Did I need to? They’re civilians, but they ain’t stupid.”
“So why are they gloating?”
“Because it gives them a free pass. If they can’t close the case, they can just write it off. Brubaker ends up looking bad, not them.”
“They found any witnesses yet?”
“Not a one.”
“Shots were fired,” I said. “Someone must have heard something.”
“Not according to the cops.”
“Willard is going to freak,” I said.
“That’s the least of our problems.”
“Are you alibied?”
“Me? Do I need to be?”
“Willard’s going to be looking for leverage. He’s going to use anything he can invent to get you to toe the line.”
Sanchez didn’t answer right away. Some kind of electronic circuitry in the phone line brought the background hiss up loud to cover the silence. Then he spoke over it.
“I think I’m fireproof here,” he said. “It’s the Columbia PD making the accusations, not me.”
“Just take care,” I said.
“Bet on it,” he said.
I clicked the phone off. Summer was thinking. Her face was tense and her lower lids were moving.
“What?” I said.
“You sure it was faked?” she said.
“Had to be,” I said.
“OK,” she said. “Good.” She was still standing next to the map. She put her hand back on it. Little finger on the Fort Bird pin, index finger on the Columbia pin. “We agree that it was faked. We’re sure of it. So there’s a pattern now. The drugs and the money in Brubaker’s pocket are the exact same thing as the branch up Carbone’s ass and the yogurt on his back. Elaborate misdirection. Concealment of the true motive. It’s a definite MO. It’s not just a guess anymore. The same guy did both. He killed Carbone here and then jumped in his car and drove down to Columbia and killed Brubaker there. It’s a clear sequence. Everything fits. Times, distances, the way the guy thinks.”
I looked at her standing there. Her small brown h
and was stretched like a starfish. She had clear polish on her nails. Her eyes were bright.
“Why would he ditch the crowbar?” I said. “After Carbone but before Brubaker?”
“Because he preferred a handgun,” she said. “Like anyone normal would. But he knew he couldn’t use one here. Too noisy. A mile from the main post, late in the evening, we’d have all come running. But in a bad part of a big city, nobody was going to think twice. Which is how it turned out, apparently.”
“Could he have been sure of that?”
“No,” she said. “Not entirely sure. He set up the rendezvous, so he knew where he was going. But he couldn’t be exactly certain about what he would find when he got there. So I guess he would have liked to keep a backup weapon. But the crowbar was all covered with Carbone’s blood and hair by then. There was no opportunity to clean it. He was in a hurry. The ground was frozen. No patch of soft grass to wipe it on. So he couldn’t see having it in the car with him. Maybe he was worried about a traffic stop on the way south. So he ditched it.”
I nodded. Ultimately, the crowbar was disposable. A handgun was a more reliable weapon against a fit and wary opponent. Especially in the tight confines of a city alley, as opposed to the kind of dark and wide-open spaces where he had taken Carbone down. I yawned. Closed my eyes. From the wide-open spaces where he had taken Carbone down. I opened my eyes again.
“He killed Carbone here,” I repeated. “And then he jumped in his car and drove to Columbia and killed Brubaker there.”
“Yes,” Summer said.
“But you figured he was already in a car,” I said.
“Yes,” she said again. “I did.”
“You figured he drove out on the track with Carbone, hit him in the head, arranged the scene, and then drove back here to the post. Your reasoning was pretty good. And where we found the crowbar kind of confirmed it.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“And then we figured he parked his car and went about his business.”
“Correct,” she said.
“But he can’t have parked his car and gone about his business. Because now we’re saying he drove straight to Columbia, South Carolina, instead. To meet with Brubaker. Three-hour drive. He was in a hurry. Not much time to waste.”