“What now?” Summer said again.
We were unarmed. No weapons, on a formal visit in Class A uniform.
“Go cover the front,” I said. “In case anyone comes out.”
She moved away without a word and I gave her a minute to get in position. Then I pushed the door with my elbow and stepped inside the kitchen. Closed the door behind me and leaned on it to keep it shut. Then I stood still and listened.
There was no sound. No sound at all.
The kitchen smelled faintly of cooked vegetables and stewed coffee. It was big. It was halfway between tidy and untidy. A well-used space. There was a door on the other side of the room. On my right. It was open. I could see a small triangle of polished oak floor. A hallway. I moved very slowly. Crept forward and to the right to line up my view. The door banged again behind me. I saw more of the hallway. I figured it ran straight to the front entrance. Off of it to the left was a closed door. Probably a dining room. Off of it to the right was a den or a study. Its door was open. I could see a desk and a chair and dark wood bookcases. I took a cautious step. Moved a little more.
I saw a dead woman on the hallway floor.
three
The dead woman had long gray hair. She was wearing an elaborate white flannel nightgown. She was on her side. Her feet were near the study door. Her arms and legs had sprawled in a way that made it look like she was running. There was a shotgun half underneath her. One side of her head was caved in. I could see blood and brains matted in her hair. More blood had pooled on the oak. It looked dark and sticky.
I stepped into the hallway and stopped an arm’s length from her. I squatted down and reached for her wrist. Her skin was very cold. There was no pulse.
I stayed down. Listened. Heard nothing. I leaned over and looked at her head. She had been hit with something hard and heavy. Just a single blow, but a serious one. The wound was in the shape of a trench. Nearly an inch wide, maybe four inches long. It had come from the left side, and above. She had been facing the back of the house. Facing the kitchen. I glanced around and dropped her wrist and stood up and stepped into the den. A Persian carpet covered most of the floor. I stood on it and imagined I was hearing quiet tense footsteps coming down the hallway, toward me. Imagined I was still holding the wrecking bar I had used to force the lock. Imagined swinging it when my target stepped into view, on her way past the open doorway.
I looked down. There was a stripe of blood and hair on the carpet. The wrecking bar had been wiped on it.
Nothing else in the room was disturbed. It was an impersonal space. It looked like it was there because they had heard a family house should have a study. Not because they actually needed one. The desk was not set up for working. There were photographs in silver frames all over it. But fewer than I would have expected, from a long marriage. There was one that showed the dead man from the motel and the dead woman from the hallway standing together with the Mount Rushmore faces blurry in the background. General and Mrs. Kramer, on vacation. He was much taller than she was. He looked strong and vigorous. She looked petite in comparison.
There was another framed photograph showing Kramer himself in uniform. The picture was a few years old. He was standing at the top of the steps, about to climb into a C-130 transport plane. It was a color photograph. His uniform was green, the airplane was brown. He was smiling and waving. Off to assume his one-star command, I guessed. There was a second picture, almost identical, a little newer. Kramer, at the top of a set of airplane steps, turning back, smiling and waving. Off to assume his two-star command, probably. In both pictures he was waving with his right hand. In both pictures his left held the same canvas suit carrier I had seen in the motel room closet. And above it, in both pictures, tucked up under his arm, was a matching canvas briefcase.
I stepped out to the hallway again. Listened hard. Heard nothing. I could have searched the house, but I didn’t need to. I was pretty sure there was nobody in it and I knew there was nothing I needed to find. So I took a last look at the Kramer widow. I could see the soles of her feet. She hadn’t been a widow for long. Maybe an hour, maybe three. I figured the blood on the floor was about twelve hours old. But it was impossible to be precise. That would have to wait until the doctors arrived.
I retreated through the kitchen and went back outside and walked around to find Summer. Sent her inside to take a look. It was quicker than a verbal explanation. She came out again four minutes later, looking calm and composed. Score one for Summer, I thought.
“You like coincidences?” she said.
I said nothing.
“We have to go to D.C.,” she said. “To Walter Reed. We have to make them double-check Kramer’s autopsy.”
I said nothing.
“This makes his death automatically suspicious. I mean, what are the chances? It’s one in forty or fifty thousand that an individual soldier will die on any given day, but to have his wife die on the same day? For her to be a homicide victim on the same day?”
“Wasn’t the same day,” I said. “Wasn’t even the same year.”
She nodded. “OK, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day. But that just makes my point. It’s inconceivable that Walter Reed had a pathologist scheduled to work last night. So they had to drag one in, specially. And from where? From a party, probably.”
I smiled, briefly. “So you want us to go up there and say, hey, are you sure your doc could see straight last night? Sure he wasn’t too juiced up to spot the difference between a heart attack and a homicide?”
“We have to check,” she said. “I don’t like coincidences.”
“What do you think happened in there?”
“Intruder,” she said. “Mrs. Kramer was woken up by the noise at the door, got out of bed, grabbed a shotgun she kept near at hand, came downstairs, headed for the kitchen. She was a brave lady.”
I nodded. Generals’ wives, tough as they come.
“But she was slow,” Summer said. “The intruder was already all the way into the study and was able to get her from the side. With the crowbar he had used on the door. As she walked past. He was taller than she was, maybe by a foot, probably right-handed.”
I said nothing.
“So are we going to Walter Reed?”
“I think we have to,” I said. “We’ll go as soon as we’ve finished here.”
We called the Green Valley cops from a wall phone we found in the kitchen. Then we called Garber and gave him the news. He said he would meet us at the hospital. Then we waited. Summer watched the front of the house, and I watched the back. Nothing happened. The cops came within seven minutes. They made a tight little convoy, two marked cruisers, a detective’s car, an ambulance. They had lights and sirens going. We heard them a mile away. They howled into the driveway and then shut down. Summer and I stepped back in the sudden silence and they all swarmed past us. We had no role. A general’s wife is a civilian, and the house was inside a civilian jurisdiction. Normally I wouldn’t let such fine distinctions get in my way, but the place had already told me what I needed to know. So I was prepared to stand back and earn some Brownie points by doing it by the book. Brownie points might come in useful later.
A patrolman watched us for twenty long minutes while the other cops poked around inside. Then a detective in a suit came out to take our statements. We told him about Kramer’s heart attack, the widow trip, the banging door. His name was Clark and he had no problem with anything we had to say. His problem was the same as Summer’s. Both Kramers had died miles apart on the same night, which was a coincidence, and he didn’t like coincidences any better than Summer did. I started to feel sorry for Rick Stockton, the deputy chief down in North Carolina. His decision to let me haul Kramer’s body away was going to look bad, in this new light. It put half the puzzle in the military’s hands. It was going to set up a conflict.
We gave Clark a phone number where he could reach us at Bird, and then we got back in the car. I figured D.C. was another seventy miles. Another hour and ten
. Maybe less, the way Summer drove. She took off and found the highway again and put her foot down until the Chevy was vibrating fit to bust.
“I saw the briefcase in the photographs,” she said. “Did you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Does it upset you to see dead people?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. You?”
“It upsets me a little.”
I said nothing.
“You think it was a coincidence?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“So you think the postmortem missed something?”
“No,” I said again. “I think the postmortem was probably accurate.”
“So why are we driving all the way to D.C.?”
“Because I need to apologize to the pathologist. I dropped him in it by sending him Kramer’s body. Now he’s going to have wall-to-wall civilians bugging him for a month. That will piss him off big time.”
But the pathologist was a her, not a him, and she had such a sunny disposition that I doubted anything could piss her off for long. We met with her in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s reception area, four o’clock in the afternoon, New Year’s Day. It looked like any other hospital lobby. There were holiday decorations hanging from the ceilings. They already looked a little tired. Garber was already there. He was sitting on a plastic chair. He was a small man and didn’t seem uncomfortable. But he was quiet. He didn’t introduce himself to Summer. She stood next to him. I leaned on the wall. The doctor faced us with a sheaf of notes in her hand, like she was lecturing a small group of keen students. Her name badge read Sam McGowan, and she was young and dark, and brisk, and open.
“General Kramer died of natural causes,” she said. “Heart attack, last night, after eleven, before midnight. There’s no possibility of doubt. I’m happy to be audited if you want, but it would be a complete waste of time. His toxicology was absolutely clear. The evidence of ventricular fibrillation is indisputable and his arterial plaque was monumental. So forensically, your only tentative question might be whether by coincidence someone electrically stimulated fibrillation in a man almost certain to suffer it anyway within minutes or hours or days or weeks.”
“How would it be done?” Summer asked.
McGowan shrugged. “The skin would have to be wet over a large area. The guy would have to be in a bathtub, basically. Then, if you applied wall current to the water, you’d probably get fibrillation without burn marks. But the guy wasn’t in a bathtub, and there’s no evidence he ever had been.”
“What if his skin wasn’t wet?”
“Then I’d have seen burn injuries. And I didn’t, and I went over every inch of him with a magnifying glass. No burns, no hypodermic marks, no nothing.”
“What about shock, or surprise, or fear?”
The doctor shrugged again. “Possible, but we know what he was doing, don’t we? That kind of sudden sexual excitement is a classic trigger.”
Nobody spoke.
“Natural causes, folks,” McGowan said. “Just a big old heart attack. Every pathologist in the world could take a look at him and there would be one hundred percent agreement. I absolutely guarantee it.”
“OK,” Garber said. “Thanks, Doc.”
“I apologize,” I said. “You’re going to have to repeat all that to about two dozen civilian cops, every day for a couple of weeks.”
She smiled. “I’ll print up an official statement.”
Then she looked at each of us in turn in case we had more questions. We didn’t, so she smiled once more and swept away through a door. It sucked shut behind her and the ceiling decorations rustled and stilled and the reception area went quiet.
We didn’t speak for a moment.
“OK,” Garber said. “That’s it. No controversy with Kramer himself, and his wife is a civilian crime. It’s out of our hands.”
“Did you know Kramer?” I asked him.
Garber shook his head. “Only by reputation.”
“Which was?”
“Arrogant. He was Armored Branch. The Abrams tank is the best toy in the army. Those guys rule the world, and they know it.”
“Know anything about the wife?”
He made a face. “She spent way too much time at home in Virginia, is what I hear. She was rich, from an old Virginia family. I mean, she did her duty. She spent time on-post in Germany, only when you add it up, it really wasn’t a hell of a lot of time. Like now, XII Corps told me she was home for the holidays, which sounds OK, but actually she came home for Thanksgiving and wasn’t expected back until the spring. So the Kramers weren’t real close, by all accounts. No kids, no shared interests.”
“Which might explain the hooker,” I said. “If they lived separate lives.”
“I guess,” Garber said. “I get the feeling it was a marriage, you know, but it was more window dressing than anything real.”
“What was her name?” Summer asked.
Garber turned to look at her.
“Mrs. Kramer,” he said. “That’s all the name we need to know.”
Summer looked away.
“Who was Kramer traveling to Irwin with?” I asked.
“Two of his guys,” Garber said. “A one-star general and a colonel, Vassell and Coomer. They were a real triumvirate. Kramer, Vassell, and Coomer. The corporate face of Armor.”
He stood up and stretched.
“Start at midnight,” I said to him. “Tell me everything you did.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t like coincidences. And neither do you.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Everybody did something,” I said. “Except Kramer.”
Garber looked straight at me.
“I watched the ball drop,” he said. “Then I had another drink. I kissed my daughter. I kissed a whole bunch of people, as I recall. Then I sang ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”
“And then?”
“My office got me on the phone. Told me they’d found out by circuitous means that we had a dead two-star down in North Carolina. Told me the Fort Bird MP duty officer had palmed it off. So I called there, and I got you.”
“And then?”
“You set out to do your thing and I called the town cops and got Kramer’s name. Looked him up and found he was a XII Corps guy. So I called Germany and reported the death, but I kept the details to myself. I told you this already.”
“And then?”
“Then nothing. I waited for your report.”
“OK,” I said.
“OK what?”
“OK, sir?”
“Bullshit,” he said. “What are you thinking?”
“The briefcase,” I said. “I still want to find it.”
“So keep looking for it,” he said. “Until I find Vassell and Coomer. They can tell us whether there was anything in it worth worrying about.”
“You can’t find them?”
He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “They checked out of their hotel, but they didn’t fly to California. Nobody seems to know where the hell they are.”
Garber left to drive himself back to town and Summer and I climbed into the car and headed south again. It was cold, and it was getting dark. I offered to take the wheel, but Summer wouldn’t let me. Driving seemed to be her main hobby.
“Colonel Garber seemed tense,” she said. She sounded disappointed, like an actress who had failed an audition.
“He was feeling guilty,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because he killed Mrs. Kramer.”
She just stared at me. She was doing about ninety, looking at me, sideways.
“In a manner of speaking,” I said.
“How?”
“This was no coincidence.”
“That’s not what the doctor told us.”
“Kramer died of natural causes. That’s what the doctor told us. But something
about that event led directly to Mrs. Kramer becoming a homicide victim. And Garber set all that in motion. By notifying XII Corps. He put the word out, and within about two hours the widow was dead too.”
“So what’s going on?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” I said.
“And what about Vassell and Coomer?” she said. “They were a threesome. Kramer’s dead, his wife is dead, and the other two are missing.”
“You heard the man. It’s out of our hands.”
“You’re not going to do anything?”
“I’m going to look for a hooker.”
We set off on the most direct route we could find, straight back to the motel and the lounge bar. There was no real choice. First the Beltway, and then I-95. Traffic was light. It was still New Year’s Day. The world outside our windows looked dark and quiet, cold and sleepy. Lights were coming on everywhere. Summer drove as fast as she dared, which was plenty fast. What might have taken Kramer six hours was going to take us less than five. We stopped for gas early, and we bought stale sandwiches that had been made in the previous calendar year. We forced them down as we hustled south. Then I spent twenty minutes watching Summer. She had small neat hands. She had them resting lightly on the wheel. She didn’t blink much. Her lips were slightly parted and every minute or so she would run her tongue across her teeth.
“Talk to me,” I said.
“About what?”
“About anything,” I said. “Tell me the story of your life.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m tired,” I said. “To keep me awake.”
“Not very interesting.”
“Try me,” I said.
So she shrugged and started at the beginning, which was outside of Birmingham, Alabama, in the middle of the sixties. She had nothing bad to say about it, but she gave me the impression that she knew even then there were better ways to grow up than poor and black in Alabama at that time. She had brothers and sisters. She had always been small, but she was nimble, and she parlayed a talent for gymnastics and dancing and jumping rope into a way of getting noticed at school. She was good at the book work too, and had assembled a patchwork of minor scholarships and moved out of state to a college in Georgia. She had joined the ROTC and in her junior year the scholarships ran out and the military picked up the tab in exchange for five years’ future service. She was now halfway through it. She had aced MP school. She sounded comfortable. The military had been integrated for forty years and she said she found it to be the most color-blind place in America. But she was also a little frustrated about her own individual progress. I got the impression her application to the 110th was make-or-break for her. If she got it, she was in for life, like me. If she didn’t, she was out after five.
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