There was a big guy in a black T-shirt behind a register inside the door. His face was in deep shadow. The edge of a dim spotlight beam showed me he had a chest the size of an oil drum. The music was deafening and the crowd was packed shoulder to shoulder and wall to wall. I backed out and let the door swing shut. Stood still for a moment in the cold air and then walked away and crossed the street and headed for the motel office.
It was a dismal place. It was lit with fluorescent tubes that gave the air a greenish cast and it was noisy from the Coke machine parked at its door. It had a pay phone on the wall and worn linoleum on the floor and a waist-high counter boxed in with the sort of fake wood paneling people use in their basements. The clerk sat on a high stool behind it. He was a white guy of about twenty with long unwashed hair and a weak chin.
“Happy New Year,” I said.
He didn’t reply.
“You take anything out of the dead guy’s room?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No.”
“Tell me again.”
“I didn’t take anything.”
I nodded. I believed him.
“OK,” I said. “When did he check in?”
“I don’t know. I came on at ten. He was already here.”
I nodded again. Kramer was in the rental lot at Dulles at one thirty-two and he hadn’t driven enough miles to do much of anything except come straight here, in which case he was checking in around seven-thirty. Maybe eight-thirty, if he stopped for dinner somewhere. Maybe nine, if he was an exceptionally cautious driver.
“Did he use the pay phone at all?”
“It’s busted.”
“So how did he get hold of the hooker?”
“What hooker?”
“The hooker he was poking when he died.”
“No hookers here.”
“Did he go over and get her from the lounge bar?”
“He was way the hell down the row. I didn’t see what he did.”
“You got a driver’s license?”
The guy paused. “Why?”
“Simple question,” I said. “Either you do or you don’t.”
“I got a license,” he said.
“Show me,” I said.
I was bigger than his Coke machine and all covered in badges and ribbons and he did what he was told, like most skinny twenty-year-olds do when I use that tone. He eased his butt up off the stool and reached back and came out with a wallet from his hip pocket. Flipped it open. His DL was behind a milky plastic window. It had his photograph on it, and his name, and his address.
“OK,” I said. “Now I know where you live. I’ll be back later with some questions. If I don’t find you here I’ll come and find you at home.”
He said nothing to me. I turned away and pushed out through the door and went back to my Humvee to wait.
Forty minutes later a military meat wagon and another Humvee showed up. I told my guys to grab everything including the rental car but didn’t wait around to watch them do it. I headed back to base instead. I logged in and got back to my borrowed office and told my sergeant to get me Garber on the phone. I waited at my desk for the call to come through. It took less than two minutes.
“What’s the story?” he asked.
“His name was Kramer,” I said.
“I know that,” Garber said. “I spoke to the police dispatcher after I spoke to you. What happened to him?”
“Heart attack,” I said. “During consensual sex with a prostitute. In the kind of motel a fastidious cockroach would take pains to avoid.”
There was a long silence.
“Shit,” Garber said. “He was married.”
“Yes, I saw his wedding band. And his West Point ring.”
“Class of Fifty-two,” Garber said. “I checked.”
The phone went quiet.
“Shit,” he said again. “Why do smart people pull stupid stunts like this?”
I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know.
“We’ll need to be discreet,” Garber said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The cover-up is already started. The locals let me send him to Walter Reed.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s good.” Then he paused. “From the beginning, OK?”
“He was wearing XII Corps patches,” I said. “Means he was based in Germany. He flew into Dulles yesterday. From Frankfurt, probably. Civilian flight, for sure, because he was wearing Class As, hoping for an upgrade. He would have worn BDUs on a military flight. He rented a cheap car and drove two hundred ninety-eight miles and checked into a fifteen-dollar motel room and picked up a twenty-dollar hooker.”
“I know about the flight,” Garber said. “I called XII Corps and spoke with his staff. I told them he was dead.”
“When?”
“After I got off the phone with the dispatcher.”
“You tell them how or where he was dead?”
“I said a probable heart attack, nothing more, no details, no location, which is starting to look like a very good decision now.”
“What about the flight?” I said.
“American Airlines, yesterday, Frankfurt to Dulles, arrived thirteen hundred hours, with an onward connection nine hundred hours today, Washington National to LAX. He was going to an Armored Branch conference at Fort Irwin. He was an Armored commander in Europe. An important one. Outside chance of making Vice-Chief of Staff in a couple of years. It’s Armored’s turn next, for Vice-Chief. Current guy is infantry, and they like to rotate. So he stood a chance. But it ain’t going to happen for him now, is it?”
“Probably not,” I said. “Being dead and all.”
Garber didn’t answer that.
“How long was he over here for?” I said.
“He was due back in Germany inside a week.”
“What’s his full name?”
“Kenneth Robert Kramer.”
“I bet you know his date of birth,” I said. “And where he was born.”
“So?”
“And his flight numbers and his seat assignments. And what the government paid for the tickets. And whether or not he requested a vegetarian meal. And what exact room Irwin VOQ was planning on putting him in.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is, why don’t I know all that stuff too?”
“Why would you?” Garber said. “I’ve been working the phones and you’ve been poking around in a motel.”
“You know what?” I said. “Every time I go anywhere I’ve got a wad of airplane tickets and travel warrants and reservations and if I’m flying in from overseas I’ve got a passport. And if I’m going to a conference I’ve got a briefcase full of all kinds of other crap to carry them in.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying there were things missing from the motel room. Tickets, reservations, passport, itinerary. Collectively, the kind of things a person would carry in a briefcase.”
Garber didn’t respond.
“He had a suit carrier,” I said. “Green canvas, brown leather bindings. A buck gets ten he had a briefcase to match. His wife probably chose them both. Probably got them mail-order from L.L.Bean. Maybe for Christmas, ten years ago.”
“And the briefcase wasn’t there?”
“He probably kept his wallet in it too, when he was wearing Class As. As many medal ribbons as this guy had, it makes the inside pocket tight.”
“So?”
“I think the hooker saw where he put his wallet after he paid her. Then they got down to business, and he croaked, and she saw a little extra profit for herself. I think she stole his briefcase.”
Garber was quiet for a moment.
“Is this going to be a problem?” he asked.
“Depends what else was in the briefcase,” I said.
two
I put the phone down and saw a note my sergeant had left me: Your brother called. No message. I folded the note once and dropped it in the trash. Then I headed back to my quarters and got thre
e hours’ sleep. Got up again fifty minutes before first light. I was back at the motel just as dawn was breaking. Morning didn’t make the neighborhood look any better. It was depressed and abandoned for miles around. And quiet. Nothing was stirring. Dawn on New Year’s Day is as close as any inhabited place gets to absolute stillness. The highway was deserted. There was no traffic. None at all.
The diner at the truck stop was open but empty. The motel office was empty. I walked down the row to the last-but-one room. Kramer’s room. The door was locked. I stood with my back to it and pretended I was a hooker whose client had just died. I had pushed his weight off me and dressed fast and grabbed his briefcase and I was running away with it. What would I do? I wasn’t interested in the briefcase itself. I wanted the cash in the wallet, and maybe the American Express card. So I would rifle through and grab the cash and the card and ditch the bag itself. But where would I do that?
Inside the room would have been best. But I hadn’t done it there, for some reason. Maybe I was panicking. Maybe I was shocked and spooked and just wanted to get the hell out, fast. So where else? I looked straight ahead at the lounge bar. That was probably where I was going. That was probably where I was based. But I wouldn’t carry the briefcase in there. My co-workers would notice, because I was already carrying a big purse. Hookers always carry big purses. They’ve got a lot of stuff to haul around. Condoms, massage oils, maybe a gun or a knife, maybe a credit card machine. That’s the easiest way to spot a hooker. Look for someone dressed like she’s going to a ball, carrying a bag like she’s going on vacation.
I looked to my left. Maybe I walked around behind the motel. It would be quiet back there. All the windows faced that way, but it was night and I could count on the drapes being closed. I turned left and left again and came out behind the bedrooms on a rectangle of scrubby weeds that ran the length of the building and was about twenty feet deep. I imagined walking fast and then stopping in deep shadow and going through the bag by feel. I imagined finding what I wanted and heaving the bag away into the darkness. I might have thrown it thirty feet.
I stood where she might have stood and scoped out a quarter circle. It gave me about a hundred and fifty square feet to check. The ground was stony and nearly frozen by overnight frost. I found plenty of stuff. I found trash and used needles and foil crack pipes and a Buick hubcap and a skateboard wheel. But I didn’t find a briefcase.
There was a wooden fence at the rear of the lot. It was about six feet tall. I jacked myself up on it and looked over. Saw another rectangle of weeds and stones. No briefcase. I got down off the fence and walked onward and came up on the motel office from the back. There was a window made of dirty pebbled glass that I guessed let into the staff bathroom. Underneath it were a dozen trashed air conditioners all stacked in a low pile. They were rusty. They hadn’t been moved in years. I walked on and came around the corner and turned left into a weedy gravel patch with a Dumpster on it. I opened the lid. It was three-quarters full of garbage. No briefcase.
I crossed the street and walked through the empty lot and looked at the lounge bar. It was silent and closed up tight. Its neon signs were all switched off and the little bent tubes looked cold and dead. It had its own Dumpster, close by in the lot, just sitting there like a parked vehicle. There was no briefcase in it.
I ducked inside the greasy spoon. It was still empty. I checked the floor around the tables and the banquettes in the booths. I looked on the floor behind the register. There was a cardboard box back there with a couple of forlorn umbrellas in it. But no briefcase. I checked the women’s bathroom. No women in it. No briefcase in it either.
I looked at my watch and walked back to the bar. I would need to ask some face-to-face questions there. But it wouldn’t be open for business for another eight hours at least. I turned around and looked across the street at the motel. There was still nobody in the office. So I headed back to my Humvee and got there in time to hear a 10-17 come in on the radio. Return to base. So I acknowledged and fired up the big diesel and drove all the way back to Bird. There was no traffic and I made it inside forty minutes. I saw Kramer’s rental parked in the motor pool lot. There was a new person at the desk outside my borrowed office. A corporal. The day shift. He was a small dark guy who looked like he was from Louisiana. French blood in there, certainly. I know French blood when I see it.
“Your brother called again,” the corporal said.
“Why?”
“No message.”
“What was the ten-seventeen for?”
“Colonel Garber requests a ten-nineteen.”
I smiled. You could live your whole life saying nothing but 10-this and 10-that. Sometimes I felt like I already had. A 10-19 was a contact by phone or radio. Less serious than a 10-16, which was a contact by secure landline. Colonel Garber requests a 10-19 meant Garber wants you to call him, was all. Some MP units get in the habit of speaking English, but clearly this one hadn’t yet.
I stepped into my office and saw Kramer’s suit carrier propped against the wall and a carton containing his shoes and underwear and hat sitting next to it. His uniform was still on three hangers. They were hung one in front of the other on my coatrack. I walked past them to my borrowed desk and dialed Garber’s number. Listened to the purr of the ring tone and wondered what my brother wanted. Wondered how he had tracked me down. I had been in Panama sixty hours ago. Before that I had been all over the place. So he had made a big effort to find me. So maybe it was important. I picked up a pencil and wrote Joe on a slip of paper. Then I underlined it, twice.
“Yes?” Leon Garber said in my ear.
“Reacher here,” I said. The clock on the wall showed a little after nine in the morning. Kramer’s onward connection to LAX was already in the air.
“It was a heart attack,” Garber said. “No question.”
“Walter Reed worked fast.”
“He was a general.”
“But a general with a bad heart.”
“Bad arteries, actually. Severe arteriosclerosis leading to fatal ventricular fibrillation. That’s what they’re telling us. And I believe them too. Probably kicked in around the time the whore took her bra off.”
“He wasn’t carrying any pills.”
“It was probably undiagnosed. It’s one of those things. You feel fine, then you feel dead. No way it could be faked, anyway. You could simulate fibrillation with an electric shock, I guess, but you can’t simulate forty years’ worth of crap in the arteries.”
“Were we worried about it being faked?”
“There could have been KGB interest,” Garber said. “Kramer and his tanks are the biggest single tactical problem the Red Army is facing.”
“Right now the Red Army is facing the other way.”
“Kind of early to say whether that’s permanent or not.”
I didn’t reply. The phone went quiet.
“I can’t let anyone else touch this with a stick,” Garber said. “Not just yet. Because of the circumstances. You understand that, right?”
“So?”
“So you’re going to have to do the widow thing,” Garber said.
“Me? Isn’t she in Germany?”
“She’s in Virginia. She’s home for the holidays. They have a house there.”
He gave me the address and I wrote it on the slip of paper, directly underneath where I had underlined Joe.
“Anyone with her?” I asked.
“They don’t have kids. So she’s probably alone.”
“OK,” I said.
“She doesn’t know yet,” Garber said. “Took me a while to track her down.”
“Want me to take a priest?”
“It isn’t a combat death. You could take a female partner, I guess. Mrs. Kramer might be a hugger.”
“OK.”
“Spare her the details, obviously. He was en route to Irwin, is all. Croaked in a layover hotel. We need to make that the official line. Nobody except you and me knows any different yet, and that’s the
way we’re going to keep it. Except you can tell whoever you partner with, I guess. Mrs. Kramer might ask questions, and you’ll need to be on the same page. What about the local cops? Are they going to leak?”
“The guy I saw was an ex-Marine. He knows the score.”
“Semper Fi,” Garber said.
“I didn’t find the briefcase yet,” I said.
The phone went quiet again.
“Do the widow thing first,” Garber said. “Then keep on looking for it.”
I told the day-shift corporal to move Kramer’s effects to my quarters. I wanted to keep them safe and sound. The widow would ask for them, eventually. And things can disappear, on a big base like Bird, which can be embarrassing. Then I walked over to the O Club and looked for MPs eating late breakfasts or early lunches. They usually cluster well away from everybody else, because everybody else hates them. I found a group of four, two men and two women. They were all in woodland-pattern BDUs, standard on-post dress. One of the women was a captain. She had her right arm in a sling. She was having trouble eating. She would have trouble driving too. The other woman had a lieutenant’s bar on each lapel and Summer on her nametape. She looked to be about twenty-five years old and she was short and slender. She had skin the same color as the mahogany table she was eating off.
“Lieutenant Summer,” I said.
“Sir?”
“Happy New Year,” I said.
“Sir, you too.”
“You busy today?”
“Sir, general duties.”
“OK, out front in thirty minutes, Class As. I need you to hug a widow.”
I put my own Class As on again and called the motor pool for a sedan. I didn’t want to ride all the way to Virginia in a Humvee. Too noisy, too uncomfortable. A private brought me a new olive-green Chevrolet. I signed for it and drove it around to post headquarters and waited.
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