“Garber deserves it, no question,” I said. “Except it’s too early. It’s a one-star job. DoD has to bring it to the Senate. That process happens in the fall, not in January. This was a panic move, spur of the moment.”
“But that would be pointless chess,” Summer said. “Why bring you in and pull him out? The two moves neutralize each other.”
“So maybe there are two people playing. Like a tug-of-war. Good guy, bad guy. Win one, lose one.”
“But the bad guy could have won both, easily. He could have discharged you. Or sent you to prison. He’s got the civilian complaint to work with.”
I said nothing.
“It doesn’t add up,” Summer said. “Whoever’s playing on your side is willing to let Garber go but is powerful enough to keep you here, even with the civilian complaint on the table. Powerful enough that Willard knew he couldn’t proceed against you, even though he probably wanted to. You know what that means?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
She looked straight at me.
“It means you’re seen as more important than Garber,” she said. “Garber’s gone, and you’re still here.”
Then she looked away and went quiet.
“Permission to speak freely, Lieutenant,” I said.
She looked back at me.
“You’re not more important than Garber,” she said. “You can’t be.”
I yawned again.
“No argument from me,” I said. “Not on that particular subject. This is not about a choice between me and Garber.”
She paused. Then she nodded.
“No,” she said. “It isn’t. This is about a choice between Fort Bird and Rock Creek. Fort Bird is seen as more important. What’s happening here on the post is seen as more sensitive than what’s happening at special unit headquarters.”
“Agreed,” I said. “But what the hell is happening here?”
nine
I took the first tentative step toward finding out at one minute past seven the next morning, in Fort Bird’s mortuary. I had slept for three hours and I hadn’t eaten breakfast. There aren’t many hard-and-fast rules involved in military crime investigation. Mostly we depend on instinct and improvisation. But one of the few rules that exist is: You don’t eat before you walk into an army postmortem.
So I spent the breakfast hour with the crime scene report. It was a fairly thick file, but it had no useful information in it. It listed all the recovered uniform items and described them in minute detail. It described the corpse. It listed times and temperatures. All the thousands of words were backed by dozens of Polaroid photographs. But neither the words nor the pictures told me what I needed to know.
I put the file in my desk drawer and called the Provost Marshal’s office for any AWOL or UA reports. The dead guy might have been missed already, and we might have been able to pick up on his identity that way. But there were no reports. Nothing out of the ordinary. The post was humming along with all its ducks in a row.
I walked out into the morning cold.
The mortuary had been custom-built during the Eisenhower administration and it was still fit for its purpose. We weren’t looking for a high degree of sophistication. This wasn’t the civilian world. We knew last night’s victim hadn’t slipped on a banana skin. I didn’t much care which particular injury had been the fatal one. All I wanted to know was an approximate time of death, and who he was.
There was a tiled lobby inside the main doors with exits to the left, the center, and the right. If you went left, you found the offices. If you went right, you found cold storage. I went straight ahead, where knives cut and saws whined and water sluiced.
There were two dished metal tables set in the center of the room. They had bright lights above them and noisy drains below. They were surrounded by greengrocer scales hanging on chains ready to weigh excised organs, and by rolling steel carts with empty glass jars ready to receive them, and other carts with rows of knives and saws and shears and pliers lying ready for use on green canvas sheets. The whole place was glazed with white subway tiles and the air was cold and sweet with the smell of formaldehyde.
The right-hand table was clean and empty. The left-hand table was surrounded by people. There was a pathologist and an assistant and a clerk taking notes. Summer was there, standing back, observing. They were maybe halfway through the process. The tools were all in use. Some of the glass jars were filled. The drain was sucking loudly. I could see the corpse’s legs through the crowd. They had been washed. They looked blue-white under the lamps above them. All the smeared dirt and blood was gone.
I stood next to Summer and took a look. The dead guy was on his back. They had taken the top of his skull off. They had cut around the center of his forehead and peeled the skin of his face down. It was lying there inside out, like a blanket pulled down on a bed. It reached to his chin. His cheekbones and his eyeballs were exposed. The pathologist was dissecting his brain, looking for something. He had used the saw on his skull and popped the top off like a lid.
“What’s the story?” I asked him.
“We got fingerprints,” he said.
“I faxed them in,” Summer said. “We’ll know today.”
“Cause of death?”
“Blunt trauma,” the doctor said. “To the back of the head. Three heavy blows, with something like a tire iron, I should think. All this dramatic stuff is postmortem. Pure window dressing.”
“Any defensive injuries?”
“Not a thing,” the doctor said. “This was a surprise attack. Out of the blue. There was no fight, no struggle.”
“How many assailants?”
“I’m not a magician. The fatal blows were probably all delivered by the same individual. I can’t tell if there were others standing around and watching.”
“Best guess?”
“I’m a scientist, not a guesser.”
“One assailant only,” Summer said. “Just a feeling.”
I nodded.
“Time of death?” I asked.
“Hard to be sure,” the doctor said. “Nine or ten last night, probably. But don’t take that to the bank.”
I nodded again. Nine or ten would make sense. Well after dark, several hours before any reasonable expectation of discovery. Plenty of time for the bad guy to lure him out there, and then to be somewhere else when the alarms sounded.
“Was he killed at the scene?” I asked.
The pathologist nodded.
“Or very close to it,” he said. “No medical signs to suggest otherwise.”
“OK,” I said. I glanced around. The broken tree limb was lying on a cart. Next to it was a jar with a penis and two testicles in it.
“In his mouth?” I said.
The pathologist nodded again. Said nothing.
“What kind of a knife?”
“Probably a K-bar,” he said.
“Great,” I said. K-bars had been manufactured by the tens of millions for the last fifty years. They were as common as medals.
“The knife was used by a right-handed person,” the doctor said.
“And the tire iron?”
“Same.”
“OK,” I said.
“The fluid was yogurt,” the doctor said.
“Strawberry or raspberry?”
“I didn’t do a taste test.”
Next to the jars of organs was a short stack of four Polaroid photographs. They were all of the fatal wound site. The first one was as-discovered. The guy’s hair was relatively long and dirty and matted with blood and I couldn’t make out much detail. The second was with the blood and dirt rinsed away. The third was with the hair cut back with scissors. The fourth was with the hair completely shaved away, with a razor.
“How about a crowbar?” I asked.
“Possible,” the doctor said. “Maybe better than a tire iron. I took a plaster cast, anyway. You bring me the weapon, I’ll tell you yes or no.”
I stepped in a little and took a closer look. The
corpse was very clean. It was gray and white and pink. It smelled faintly of soap, as well as blood and other rich organic odors. The groin was a mess. Like a butcher’s shop. The knife cuts on the arms and the shoulders were deep and obvious. I could see muscle and bone. The edges of the wounds were blue and cold. The blade had gone right through a tattoo on his left upper arm. An eagle was holding a scroll with Mother written on it. Overall, the guy was not a pleasant sight. But he was in better shape than I had feared he would be.
“I thought there would be more swelling and bruising,” I said.
The pathologist glanced at me.
“I told you,” he said. “All the drama was after he was dead. No heartbeat, no blood pressure, no circulation, therefore no swelling and no contusions. Not much bleeding either. It was just leaking out by gravity. If he’d been alive when they cut him, it would have been running like a river.”
He turned back to the table and finished up inside the guy’s brain pan and put the lid of bone back where it belonged. He tapped it twice to get a good seal and wiped the leaky join with a sponge. Then he pulled the guy’s face back into place. Poked and prodded and smoothed with his fingers and when he took his hands away I saw the Special Forces sergeant I had spoken to in the strip club, staring blindly upward into the bright lights above him.
I took a Humvee and drove past Andrea Norton’s Psy-Ops school to the Delta Force station. It was pretty much self-contained in what had been a prison back before the army collected all its miscreants together at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The old wire and the walls suited its current purpose. There was a giant WW2-era airplane hangar next to it. It looked like it had been dragged in from some closed base and bolted back together to house their racks of stores and their trucks and their up-armored Humvees and maybe even a couple of fast-response helicopters.
The sentry on the inner gate let me in and I went straight to the adjutant’s office. Seven-thirty in the morning, and it was already lit up and busy, which told me something. The adjutant was at his desk. He was a captain. In the upside-down world of Delta Force the sergeants are the stars, and the officers stay home and do the housework.
“You got anyone missing?” I asked him.
He looked away, which told me something more.
“I assume you know I do,” he said. “Otherwise why would you be here?”
“You got a name for me?”
“A name? I assumed you had arrested him for something.”
“This is not about an arrest,” I said.
“So what’s it about?”
“Does this guy get arrested a lot?”
“No. He’s a fine soldier.”
“What’s his name?”
The captain didn’t answer. Just leaned down and opened a drawer and pulled a file. Handed it to me. Like all the Delta files I had ever seen, it was heavily sanitized for public consumption. There were just two pages in it. The first was a name-rank-and-number ID sheet and a bare-bones career summary for a guy called Christopher Carbone. He was an unmarried sixteen-year veteran. He had served four years in an infantry division, four in an airborne division, four in a Ranger company, and four in Special Forces Detachment D. He was five years older than me. He was a sergeant first class. There were no theater details and no mention of awards or decorations.
The second sheet contained ten inky fingerprints and a color photograph of the man I had spoken to in the bar and just left on the mortuary slab.
“Where is he?” the captain asked. “What happened?”
“Someone killed him,” I said.
“What?”
“Homicide,” I said.
“When?”
“Last night. Nine or ten o’clock.”
“Where?”
“Edge of the woods.”
“What woods?”
“Our woods. On-post.”
“Jesus Christ. Why?”
I put the file back together and slipped it under my arm.
“I don’t know why,” I said. “Yet.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said again. “Who did it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Yet.”
“Jesus Christ,” the guy said, for the third time.
“Next of kin?” I asked.
The captain paused. Breathed out.
“I think he has a mother somewhere,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”
“Don’t,” I said. “You’ll be making the call.”
He said nothing.
“Did Carbone have enemies here?” I asked.
“None that I knew about.”
“Any points of friction?”
“Like what?”
“Any lifestyle issues?”
He stared at me. “What are you saying?”
“Was he gay?”
“What? Of course not.”
I said nothing.
“You’re saying Carbone was a fag?” the captain whispered.
I pictured Carbone in my mind, lounging six feet from the strip club runway, six feet from whoever was crawling around at the time on her elbows and knees with her ass up in the air and her nipples brushing the stage, a long-neck bottle in his hand and a big smile on his face. It seemed like a weird way for a gay man to spend his leisure time. But then I pictured the detachment in his eyes and his embarrassed gesture as he waved the brunette hooker away.
“I don’t know what Carbone was,” I said.
“Then keep your damn mouth shut,” his captain said. “Sir.”
I took Carbone’s file with me back to the mortuary and collected Summer and took her to the O Club for breakfast. We sat on our own in a corner, far from everyone else. I ate eggs and bacon and toast. Summer ate oatmeal and fruit and glanced through the file. I drank coffee. Summer drank tea.
“The pathologist is calling it gay-bashing,” she said. “He thinks it’s obvious.”
“He’s wrong.”
“Carbone’s not married.”
“Neither am I,” I said. “Neither are you. Are you gay?”
“No.”
“There you go.”
“But misdirection has to be based on something real, right? I mean, if they knew he was a gambler, for instance, they might have crammed IOU slips in his mouth or thrown playing cards all around the place. Then we might have thought it was about gambling debts. You see what I mean? It just doesn’t work if it’s not based on anything. Something that can be disproved in five minutes looks stupid, not clever.”
“Your best guess?”
“Carbone was gay, and someone knew it, but it wasn’t the reason.”
I nodded.
“It wasn’t the reason,” I said. “Let’s say he was gay. He was in sixteen years. He survived most of the seventies and all of the eighties. So why would it happen now? Times are changing, getting better, he’s getting better at hiding it, going out to strip joints with his buddies. No reason for it to happen now, all of a sudden. It would have happened before. Four years ago, or eight, or twelve, or sixteen. Whenever he joined a new unit and new people got to know him.”
“So what was the reason?”
“No idea.”
“Whatever, it could be embarrassing. Just like Kramer and his motel.”
I nodded again. “Bird seems to be a very embarrassing place.”
“You think this is why you’re here? Carbone?”
“It’s possible. Depends on what he represents.”
I asked Summer to file and forward all the appropriate notifications and reports and I headed back to my office. Rumor was spreading fast. I found three Delta sergeants waiting for me, looking for information. They were typical Special Forces guys. Small, lean, whippy, slightly unkempt, hard as nails. Two of them were older than the third. The young one was wearing a beard. He was tan, like he was just back from somewhere hot. They were all pacing in my outer office. My sergeant with the baby son was there with them. I guessed she was pulling a swing shift. She was looking at them like they might have been alternating s
pells of pacing with spells of hitting on her. She looked very civilized, in comparison to them. Almost genteel. I ushered them all into my inner office and closed the door and sat down at my desk and left them standing in front of it.
“Is it true about Carbone?” one of them asked.
“He was killed,” I said. “Don’t know who, don’t know why.”
“When?”
“Last night, nine or ten o’clock.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“This is a closed post.”
I nodded. “The perp wasn’t a member of the general public.”
“We heard he was messed up good.”
“Pretty good.”
“When are you going to know who it was?”
“Soon, I hope.”
“You got leads?”
“Nothing specific.”
“When you know, are we going to know too?”
“You want to?”
“You bet your ass.”
“Why?”
“You know why,” the guy said.
I nodded. Gay or straight, Carbone was a member of the world’s most fearsome gang. His buddies were going to stand up for him. I felt a little envious for a second. If I got offed in the woods late one night, I doubted if three tough guys would go straight to someone’s office, eight in the morning, champing at the bit, ready for revenge. Then I looked at the three of them again and thought, This particular perp could be in a shitload of trouble. All I’d have to do is drop a name.
“I need to ask you some cop questions,” I said. I asked them all the usual stuff. Did Carbone have any enemies? Had there been any disputes? Threats? Fights? The three guys all shook their heads and answered every question in the negative.
“Anything else?” I asked. “Anything that put him at risk?”
“Like what?”
“Like anything,” I said. It was as far as I wanted to go.
“No,” they all said.
“Got any theories?” I asked.
“Look at the Rangers,” the young one said. “Find someone who failed Delta training, and thinks he still has a point to prove.”
Then they left, and I sat there chewing on their final comment. A Ranger with a point to prove? I doubted it. Not plausible. Delta sergeants don’t go out in the woods with people they don’t know and get hit on the back of the head. They train long and hard to make such eventualities very unlikely, even impossible. If a Ranger had picked a fight with Carbone, it would have been the Ranger we found at the base of the tree. If two Rangers had gone out there with him, we’d have found two Rangers dead. Or at the very least we would have found defensive injuries on Carbone himself. He wouldn’t have gone down easily.
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