“Generals are mortal,” I said. “Same as anyone else.”
No reply.
“There was nothing suspicious,” I said. “He croaked, is all. Heart attack. Probably had gout. I didn’t see a reason to get excited.”
“It’s a question of dignity,” Garber said. “We can’t leave a two-star lying around belly-up in public without reacting. We need a presence.”
“And that would be me?”
“I’d prefer someone else. But you’re probably the highest-ranking sober MP in the world tonight. So yes, it would be you.”
“It’ll take me an hour to get there.”
“He’s not going anywhere. He’s dead. And they haven’t found a sober medical examiner yet.”
“OK,” I said.
“Be respectful,” Garber said.
“OK,” I said again.
“And be polite. Off-post, we’re in their hands. It’s a civilian jurisdiction.”
“I’m familiar with civilians. I met one, once.”
“But control the situation,” he said. “You know, if it needs controlling.”
“He probably died in bed,” I said. “Like people do.”
“Call me,” he said. “If you need to.”
“Was it a good party?”
“Excellent. My daughter is visiting.”
He clicked off and I called the civilian dispatcher back and got the name and the address of the motel. Then I left my coffee on my desk and told my sergeant what was up and headed back to my quarters to change. I figured a presence required Class A greens, not woodland-pattern BDUs.
I took a Humvee from the MP motor pool and was logged out through the main gate. I found the motel inside fifty minutes. It was thirty miles due north of Fort Bird through dark undistinguished North Carolina countryside that was equal parts strip malls and scrubby forest and what I figured were dormant sweet potato fields. It was all new to me. I had never served there before. The roads were very quiet. Everyone was still inside, partying. I hoped I would be back at Bird before they all came out and started driving home. Although I really liked the Humvee’s chances, head-on against a civilian ride.
The motel was part of a knot of low commercial structures clustered in the darkness near a big highway interchange. There was a truck stop as a centerpiece. It had a greasy spoon that was open on the holidays and a gas station big enough to take eighteen-wheelers. There was a no-name cinder-block lounge bar with lots of neon and no windows. It had an Exotic Dancers sign lit up in pink and a parking lot the size of a football field. There were diesel spills and rainbow puddles all over it. I could hear loud music coming out of the bar. There were cars parked three-deep all around it. The whole area was glowing sulfurous yellow from the streetlights. The night air was cold and full of fog. The motel itself was directly across the street from the gas station. It was a run-down swaybacked affair about twenty rooms long. It had a lot of peeling paint. It looked empty. There was an office at the left-hand end with a token vehicle porch and a buzzing Coke machine.
First question: Why would a two-star general use a place like this? I was pretty sure there wouldn’t have been a DoD inquiry if he had checked into a Holiday Inn.
There were two town police cruisers parked at careless angles outside the motel’s last-but-one room. There was a small plain sedan sandwiched between them. It was cold and misted over. It was a base-model Ford, red, four cylinder. It had skinny tires and plastic hubcaps. A rental, for sure. I put the Humvee next to the right-hand police cruiser and slid out into the chill. I heard the music from across the street, louder. The last-but-one room’s lights were off and its door was open. I figured the cops were trying to keep the interior temperature low. Trying to stop the old guy from getting too ripe. I was anxious to take a look at him. I was pretty sure I had never seen a dead general before.
Three cops stayed in their cars and one got out to meet me. He was wearing tan uniform pants and a short leather jacket zipped to his chin. No hat. The jacket had badges pinned to it that told me his name was Stockton and his rank was deputy chief. He was gray, about fifty. He was medium height and a little soft and heavy but the way he was reading the badges on my coat told me he was probably a veteran, like a lot of cops are.
“Major,” he said, as a greeting.
I nodded. A veteran, for sure. A major gets a little gold-colored oak leaf on the epaulette, one inch across, one on each side. This guy was looking upward and sideways at mine, which wasn’t the clearest angle of view. But he knew what they were. So he was familiar with rank designations. And I recognized his voice. He was the guy who had called me, at five seconds past midnight.
“I’m Rick Stockton,” he said. “Deputy Chief.”
He was calm. He had seen heart attacks before.
“I’m Jack Reacher. MP duty officer tonight.”
He recognized my voice in turn. Smiled.
“You decided to come out,” he said. “After all.”
“You didn’t tell me the DOA was a two-star.”
“Well, he is.”
“I’ve never seen a dead general,” I said.
“Not many people have,” he said, and the way he said it made me think he had been an enlisted man.
“Army?” I asked.
“Marine Corps,” he said. “First sergeant.”
“My old man was a Marine,” I said. I always make that point, talking to Marines. It gives me some kind of genetic legitimacy. Stops them from thinking of me as a pure army dogface. But I keep it vague. I don’t tell them my old man had made captain. Enlisted men and officers don’t automatically see eye to eye.
“Humvee,” Stockton said.
He was looking at my ride.
“You like it?” he asked.
I nodded. Humvee was everyone’s best attempt at saying HMMWV, which stands for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, which about says it all. Like the army generally, what you’re told is what you get.
“It works as advertised,” I said.
“Kind of wide,” he said. “I wouldn’t like to drive it in a city.”
“You’d have tanks in front of you,” I said. “They’d be clearing the way. I think that would be the basic plan.”
The music from the bar thudded on. Stockton said nothing.
“Let’s look at the dead guy,” I said to him.
He led the way inside. Flicked a switch that lit up the interior hallway. Then another that lit up the whole room. I saw a standard motel layout. A yard-wide lobby with a closet on the left and a bathroom on the right. Then a twelve-by-twenty rectangle with a built-in counter the same depth as the closet, and a queen bed the same depth as the bathroom. Low ceiling. A wide window at the far end, draped, with an integrated heater-cooler unit built through the wall underneath it. Most of the things in the room were tired and shabby and colored brown. The whole place looked dim and damp and miserable.
There was a dead man on the bed.
He was naked, facedown. He was white, maybe pushing sixty, quite tall. He was built like a fading pro athlete. Like a coach. He still had decent muscle, but he was growing love handles the way old guys do, however fit they are. He had pale hairless legs. He had old scars. He had wiry gray hair buzzed close to his scalp and cracked weathered skin on the back of his neck. He was a type. Any hundred people could have looked at him and all hundred would have said army officer, for sure.
“He was found like this?” I asked.
“Yes,” Stockton said.
Second question: How? A guy takes a room for the night, he expects privacy until the maid comes in the next morning, at the very least.
“How?” I said.
“How what?”
“How was he found? Did he call 911?”
“No.”
“So how?”
“You’ll see.”
I paused. I didn’t see anything yet.
“Did you roll him over?” I said.
“Yes. Then we rolled him back.”
; “Mind if I take a look?”
“Be my guest.”
I stepped to the bed and slipped my left hand under the dead guy’s armpit and rolled him over. He was cold and a little stiff. Rigor was just setting in. I got him settled flat on his back and saw four things. First, his skin had a distinctive gray pallor. Second, shock and pain were frozen on his face. Third, he had grabbed his left arm with his right hand, up near the bicep. And fourth, he was wearing a condom. His blood pressure had collapsed long ago and his erection had disappeared and the condom was hanging off, mostly empty, like a translucent flap of pale skin. He had died before reaching orgasm. That was clear.
“Heart attack,” Stockton said, behind me.
I nodded. The gray skin was a good indicator. So was the evidence of shock and surprise and sudden pain in his upper left arm.
“Massive,” I said.
“But before or after penetration?” Stockton said, with a smile in his voice.
I looked at the pillow area. The bed was still completely made. The dead guy was on top of the counterpane and the counterpane was still tight over the pillows. But there was a head-shaped dent, and there were rucks where elbows and heels had scrabbled and pushed lower down.
“She was underneath him when it happened,” I said. “That’s for sure. She had to wrestle her way out.”
“Hell of a way for a man to go.”
“I can think of worse ways.”
Stockton just smiled at me.
“What?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“No sign of the woman?” I said.
“Hide nor hair,” he said. “She ran for it.”
“The desk guy see her?”
Stockton just smiled again.
I looked at him. Then I understood. A low-rent dive near a highway interchange with a truck stop and a strip bar, thirty miles north of a military base.
“She was a hooker,” I said. “That’s how he was found. The desk guy knew her. Saw her running out way too soon. Got curious as to why and came in here to check.”
Stockton nodded. “He called us right away. The lady in question was long gone by then, of course. And he’s denying she was ever here in the first place. He’s pretending this isn’t that kind of an establishment.”
“Your department had business here before?”
“Time to time,” he said. “It is that kind of an establishment, believe me.”
Control the situation, Garber had said.
“Heart attack, right?” I said. “Nothing more.”
“Probably,” Stockton said. “But we’ll need an autopsy to know for sure.”
The room was quiet. I could hear nothing except radio traffic from the cop cars outside, and music from the bar across the street. I turned back to the bed. Looked at the dead guy’s face. I didn’t know him. I looked at his hands. He had a West Point ring on his right and a wedding band on his left, wide, old, probably nine carat. His dog tags were hidden under his right arm, where he had reached across to grab his left bicep. I lifted the arm with difficulty and pulled the tags out. He had rubber silencers on them. I raised them until the chain went tight against his neck. His name was Kramer and he was a Catholic and his blood group was O.
“We could do the autopsy for you,” I said. “Up at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.”
“Out of state?”
“He’s a general.”
“You want to hush it up.”
I nodded. “Sure I do. Wouldn’t you?”
“Probably,” he said.
I let go of the dog tags and moved away from the bed and checked the nightstands and the built-in counter. Nothing there. There was no phone in the room. A place like this, I figured there would be a pay phone in the office. I moved past Stockton and checked the bathroom. There was a privately purchased black leather Dopp kit next to the sink, zipped closed. It had the initials KRK embossed on it. I opened it up and found a toothbrush and a razor and travel-sized tubes of toothpaste and shaving soap. Nothing else. No medications. No heart prescription. No pack of condoms.
I checked the closet. There was a Class A uniform in there, neatly squared away on three separate hangers, with the pants folded on the bar of the first and the coat next to it on the second and the shirt on a third. The tie was still inside the shirt collar. Centered above the hangers on the shelf was a field grade officer’s service cap. Gold braid all over it. On one side of the cap was a folded white undershirt and on the other side was a pair of folded white boxers.
There were two shoes side by side on the closet floor next to a faded green canvas suit carrier which was propped neatly against the back wall. The shoes were gleaming black and had socks rolled tight inside them. The suit carrier was a privately purchased item and had battered leather reinforcements at the stress points. It wasn’t very full.
“You’d get the results,” I said. “Our pathologist would give you a copy of the report with nothing added and nothing deleted. You see anything you’re not happy about, we could put the ball right back in your court, no questions asked.”
Stockton said nothing, but I wasn’t feeling any hostility coming off him. Some town cops are OK. A big base like Bird puts a lot of ripples into the surrounding civilian world. Therefore MPs spend a lot of time with their civilian counterparts, and sometimes it’s a pain in the ass, and sometimes it isn’t. I had a feeling Stockton wasn’t going to be a huge problem. He was relaxed. Bottom line, he seemed a little lazy to me, and lazy people are always happy to pass their burdens on to someone else.
“How much?” I said.
“How much what?”
“How much would a whore cost here?”
“Twenty bucks would do it,” he said. “There’s nothing very exotic available in this neck of the woods.”
“And the room?”
“Fifteen, probably.”
I rolled the corpse back onto its front. Wasn’t easy. It weighed two hundred pounds, at least.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“About what?”
“About Walter Reed doing the autopsy.”
There was silence for a moment. Stockton looked at the wall.
“That might be acceptable,” he said.
There was a knock at the open door. One of the cops from the cars.
“Medical examiner just called in,” he said. “He can’t get here for another two hours at least. It’s New Year’s Eve.”
I smiled. Acceptable was about to change to highly desirable. Two hours from now Stockton would need to be somewhere else. A whole bunch of parties would be breaking up and the roads would be mayhem. Two hours from now he would be begging me to haul the old guy away. I said nothing and the cop went back to wait in his car and Stockton moved all the way into the room and stood facing the draped window with his back to the corpse. I took the hanger with the uniform coat on it and lifted it out of the closet and hung it on the bathroom door frame where the hallway light fell on it.
Looking at a Class A coat is like reading a book or sitting next to a guy in a bar and hearing his whole life story. This one was the right size for the body on the bed and it had Kramer on the nameplate, which matched the dog tags. It had a Purple Heart ribbon with two bronze oak leaf clusters to denote a second and third award of the medal, which matched the scars. It had two silver stars on the epaulettes, which confirmed he was a major general. The branch insignia on the lapels denoted Armor and the shoulder patch was from XII Corps. Apart from that there were a bunch of unit awards and a whole salad bowl of medal ribbons dating way back through Vietnam and Korea, some of which he had probably earned the hard way, and some of which he probably hadn’t. Some of them were foreign awards, whose display was authorized but not compulsory. It was a very full coat, relatively old, well cared for, standard-issue, not privately tailored. Taken as a whole it told me he was professionally vain, but not personally vain.
I went through the pockets. They were all empty, except for a key to the rental car. It
was attached to a keyring in the shape of a figure 1, which was made out of clear plastic and contained a slip of paper with Hertz printed in yellow at the top and a license-plate number written by hand in black ballpoint underneath.
There was no wallet. No loose change.
I put the coat back in the closet and checked the pants. Nothing in the pockets. I checked the shoes. Nothing in them except the socks. I checked the hat. Nothing hidden underneath it. I lifted the suit carrier out and opened it on the floor. It contained a battledress uniform and an M43 field cap. A change of socks and underwear and a pair of shined combat boots, plain black leather. There was an empty compartment that I figured was for the Dopp kit. Nothing else. Nothing at all. I closed it up and put it back. Squatted down and looked under the bed. Saw nothing.
“Anything we should worry about?” Stockton asked.
I stood up. Shook my head.
“No,” I lied.
“Then you can have him,” he said. “But I get a copy of the report.”
“Agreed,” I said.
“Happy New Year,” he said.
He walked out to his car and I headed for my Humvee. I called in a 10-5 ambulance requested and told my sergeant to have it accompanied by a squad of two who could list and pack all Kramer’s personal property and bring it back to my office. Then I sat there in the driver’s seat and waited until Stockton’s guys were all gone. I watched them accelerate away into the fog and then I went back inside the room and took the rental key from Kramer’s jacket. Came back out and used it to unlock the Ford.
There was nothing in it except the stink of upholstery cleaner and carbonless copies of the rental agreement. Kramer had picked the car up at one thirty-two that afternoon at Dulles Airport near Washington D.C. He had used a private American Express card and received a discount rate. The start-of-rental mileage was 13,215. Now the odometer was showing 13,513, which according to my arithmetic meant he had driven 298 miles, which was about right for a straight-line trip between there and here.
I put the paper in my pocket and relocked the car. Checked the trunk. It was completely empty.
I put the key in my pocket with the rental paper and headed across the street to the bar. The music got louder with every step I took. Ten yards away I could smell beer fumes and cigarette smoke from the ventilators. I threaded through parked vehicles and found the door. It was a stout wooden item and it was closed against the cold. I pulled it open and was hit in the face by a wall of sound and a blast of hot thick air. The place was heaving. I could see five hundred people and black-painted walls and purple spotlights and mirrorballs. I could see a pole dancer on a stage in back. She was on all fours and naked except for a white cowboy hat. She was crawling around, picking up dollar bills.
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