So he went out there with someone he knew and trusted. I pictured him at ease, maybe chatting, maybe smiling like he had done in the bar in town. Maybe leading the way somewhere, his back to his attacker, suspecting nothing. Then I pictured a tire iron or a crowbar being fumbled out from under a coat, swinging, hitting with a crunching impact. Then again. And again. It had taken three hard blows to put him down. Three surprise blows. And a guy like Carbone doesn’t get surprised very often.
My phone rang. I picked it up. It was Colonel Willard, the asshole in Garber’s office, up in Rock Creek.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“In my office,” I said. “How else would I be answering my phone?”
“Stay there,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything, don’t call anyone. Those are my direct orders. Just sit there quietly and wait.”
“For what?”
“I’m on my way down.”
He clicked off. I put the phone back in its cradle.
I stayed there. I didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t do anything, I didn’t call anyone. My sergeant brought me a cup of coffee. I accepted it. Willard hadn’t told me to die of thirst.
After an hour I heard a voice in the outer office and then the young Delta sergeant came back in, alone. The one with the beard and the tan. I told him to take a seat and pondered my orders. Don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything, don’t call anyone. I guessed talking with the guy would amount to doing something, which would contravene the don’t do anything part of the command. But then, breathing was doing something, technically. So was metabolizing. My hair was growing, my beard was growing, all twenty of my nails were growing, I was losing weight. It was impossible not to do anything. So I decided that component of the order was purely rhetorical.
“Help you, Sergeant?” I said.
“I think Carbone was gay,” the sergeant said.
“You think he was?”
“OK, he was.”
“Who else knew?”
“All of us.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I thought you should know, is all.”
“You think it has a bearing?”
He shook his head. “We were comfortable with it. And whoever killed him wasn’t one of us. It wasn’t anyone in the unit. That’s not possible. We don’t do stuff like that. Outside the unit, nobody knew. Therefore it wasn’t a factor.”
“So why tell me?”
“Because you’re bound to find out. I wanted you to be ready for it. I didn’t want it to be a surprise.”
“Because?”
“Then maybe you can keep it quiet. Since it’s not a factor.”
I said nothing.
“It would trash his memory,” the sergeant said. “And that’s wrong. He was a nice guy and a good soldier. Being gay shouldn’t be a crime.”
“I agree,” I said.
“The army needs to change.”
“The army hates change.”
“They say it damages unit cohesion,” he said. “They should have come and seen our squadron working. With Carbone right there in it.”
“I can’t keep it quiet,” I said. “Maybe I would if I could. But the way the crime scene looked, everyone’s going to get the message.”
“What? It was like a sex crime? You didn’t say that before.”
“I was trying to keep it quiet,” I said.
“But nobody knew. Not outside the unit.”
“Someone must have. Or else the perp is in your unit.”
“That’s not possible. No way, no how.”
“One thing or the other has got to be possible,” I said. “Was he seeing anyone on the outside?”
“No, never.”
“So he was celibate for sixteen years?”
The guy paused a beat.
“I guess I don’t really know,” he said.
“Someone knew,” I said. “But I don’t think it was a factor. I think someone just tried to make it look like it was. Maybe we can make that clear, at least.”
The sergeant shook his head. “It’ll be the only thing anyone remembers about him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m not gay,” he said.
“I don’t really care either way.”
“I’ve got a wife and a kid.”
He left me with that information and I went back to obeying Willard’s orders.
I spent the time thinking. There had been no weapon recovered at the scene. No significant forensics. No threads of clothing snagged on a bush, no footprints in the earth, none of his attacker’s skin under Carbone’s fingernails. All of that was easily explicable. The weapon had been taken away by the attacker, who had probably been wearing BDUs, which the Department of the Army specifies very carefully just so that they won’t fall apart and leave threads all over the place. Textile mills across the nation have stringent quality targets to meet, in terms of wear-and-tear standards for military twill and poplin. The earth was frozen hard, so footprints were impossible. North Carolina probably had a reliable frost window of about a month, and we were smack in the middle of it. And it had been a surprise attack. Carbone had been given no time to turn around and claw and kick at his assailant.
So there was no material information. But we had some advantages. We had a fixed pool of possible suspects. It was a closed base, and the army is pretty good at recording who was where, at all times. We could start with yards of printout paper and go through each name, on a simple binary basis, possible or not possible. Then we could collate all the possibles and go to work with the holy trinity of detectives everywhere: means, motive, opportunity. Means and opportunity wouldn’t signify much. By definition nobody would be on the possibles list unless they had been proved to have opportunity. And everybody in the army was physically capable of swinging a tire iron or a crowbar against the back of an unsuspecting victim’s head. It was probably a rough equivalent of the most basic entry requirement.
So it would end up with motive, which is where it had started for me. What was the reason?
I sat for another hour. Didn’t go anywhere, didn’t do anything, didn’t call anyone. My sergeant brought me more coffee. I mentioned that she might call Lieutenant Summer for me and suggest she stop by.
Summer showed up within five minutes. I had a whole raft of things to tell her, but she had anticipated every one of them. She had ordered a list of all base personnel, plus a copy of the gate log so we could add and subtract names as appropriate. She had arranged for Carbone’s quarters to be sealed, pending a search. She had arranged an interview with his CO to develop a better picture of his personal and professional life.
“Excellent,” I said.
“What’s this thing with Willard?” she asked.
“A pissing contest, probably,” I said. “Important case like this, he wants to come down and direct things personally. To remind me I’m under a cloud.”
But I was wrong.
Willard finally showed after a total of exactly four hours. I heard his voice in the outer office. I was pretty sure my sergeant wasn’t offering him coffee. She had better instincts than that. My door opened and he came in. He didn’t look at me. Just closed the door behind him and turned around and sat down in my visitor’s chair. Immediately started up with the shuffling thing. He was going at it hard and plucking at the knees of his pants like they were burning his skin.
“Yesterday,” he said. “I want a complete record of your movements. I want to hear it from your own lips.”
“You’re down here to ask me questions?”
“Yes,” he said.
I shrugged.
“I was on a plane until two,” I said. “I was with you until five.”
“And then?”
“I got back here at eleven.”
“Six hours? I did it in four.”
“You drove, presumably. I took two buses and hitched a ride.”
“After that?”
“I spoke to my brother on t
he phone,” I said.
“I remember your brother,” Willard said. “I worked with him.”
I nodded. “He mentioned that.”
“And then what?”
“I spoke to Lieutenant Summer,” I said. “Socially.”
“And then?”
“Carbone’s body was discovered about midnight.”
He nodded and twitched and shuffled and looked uncomfortable.
“Did you keep your bus tickets?” he said.
“I doubt it,” I said.
He smiled. “Remember who gave you a ride to the post?”
“I doubt it. Why?”
“Because I might need to know. To prove I didn’t make a mistake.”
I said nothing.
“You made mistakes,” Willard said.
“Did I?”
He nodded. “I can’t decide whether you’re an idiot or whether you’re doing this on purpose.”
“Doing what?”
“Are you trying to embarrass the army?”
“What?”
“What’s the big picture here, Major?” he said.
“You tell me, Colonel.”
“The Cold War is ending. Therefore there are big changes coming. The status quo will not be an option. Therefore we’ve got every part of the military trying to stand tall and make the cut. And you know what?”
“What?”
“The army is always at the bottom of the pile. The Air Force has got all those glamorous airplanes. The Navy has got submarines and carriers. The Marines are always untouchable. And we’re stuck down there in the mud, literally. The bottom of the pile. The army is boring, Reacher. That’s the view in Washington.”
“So?”
“This Carbone guy was a shirtlifter. He was a damn fudgepacker, for Christ’s sake. An elite unit has got perverts in it? You think the army needs for people to know that? At a time like this? You should have written him up as a training accident.”
“That wouldn’t have been true.”
“Who cares?”
“He wasn’t killed because of his orientation.”
“Of course he was.”
“I do this stuff for a living,” I said. “And I say he wasn’t.”
He glared at me. Went quiet for a moment.
“OK,” he said. “We’ll come back to that. Who else but you saw the body?”
“My guys,” I said. “Plus a Psy-Ops light colonel I wanted an opinion from. Plus the pathologist.”
He nodded. “You deal with your guys. I’ll tell Psy-Ops and the doctor.”
“Tell them what?”
“That we’re writing it up as a training accident. They’ll understand. No harm, no foul. No investigation.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You think the army wants this to get around? Now? That Delta had an illegal soldier for four years? Are you nuts?”
“The sergeants want an investigation.”
“I’m pretty sure their CO won’t. Believe me. You can take that as gospel.”
“You’ll have to give me a direct order,” I said. “Words of one syllable.”
“Watch my lips,” Willard said. “Do not investigate the fag. Write a situation report indicating that he died in a training accident. A night maneuver, a run, an exercise, anything. He tripped and fell and hit his head. Case closed. That is a direct order.”
“I’ll need it in writing,” I said.
“Grow up,” he said.
We sat quiet for a moment or two, just glaring at each other across the desk. I sat still, and Willard rocked and plucked. I clenched my fist, out of his sight. I imagined smashing a straight right to the center of his chest. I figured I could stop his lousy heart with a single blow. I could write it up as a training accident. I could say he had been practicing getting in and out of his chair, and he had slipped and caught his sternum on the corner of the desk.
“What was the time of death?” he asked.
“Nine or ten last night,” I said.
“And you were off-post until eleven?”
“Asked and answered,” I said.
“Can you prove that?”
I thought of the gate guards in their booth. They had logged me in.
“Do I have to?” I said.
He went quiet again. Leaned to his left in the chair.
“Next item,” he said. “You claim the butt-bandit wasn’t killed because he was a butt-bandit. What’s your evidence?”
“The crime scene was overdone,” I said.
“To obscure the real motive?”
I nodded. “That’s my judgment.”
“What was the real motive?”
“I don’t know. That would have required an investigation.”
“Let’s speculate,” Willard said. “Let’s assume the hypothetical perpetrator would have benefited from the homicide. Tell me how.”
“The usual way,” I said. “By preventing some future action on Sergeant Carbone’s part. Or to cover up a crime that Sergeant Carbone was a party to or had knowledge of.”
“To silence him, in other words.”
“To dead-end something,” I said. “That would be my guess.”
“And you do this stuff for a living.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“How would you have located this person?”
“By conducting an investigation.”
Willard nodded. “And when you found this person, hypothetically, assuming you were able to, what would you have done?”
“I would have taken him into custody,” I said. Protective custody, I thought. I pictured Carbone’s squadron buddies in my mind, pacing anxiously, ready to lock and load.
“And your suspect pool would have been whoever was on-post at the time?”
I nodded. Lieutenant Summer was probably struggling with reams of printout paper even as we spoke.
“Verified via strength lists and gate logs,” I said.
“Facts,” Willard said. “I would have thought that facts would be extremely important to someone who does this stuff for a living. This post covers nearly a hundred thousand acres. It was last strung with perimeter wire in 1943. Those are facts. I discovered them with very little trouble, and you should have too. Doesn’t it occur to you that not everyone on the post has to come through the main gate? Doesn’t it occur to you that someone recorded as not being here could have slipped in through the wire?”
“Unlikely,” I said. “It would have given him a walk of well over two miles, in pitch dark, and we run random motor patrols all night.”
“The patrols might have missed a trained man.”
“Unlikely,” I said again. “And how would he have rendezvoused with Sergeant Carbone?”
“Prearranged location.”
“It wasn’t a location,” I said. “It was just a spot near the track.”
“Map reference, then.”
“Unlikely,” I said, for the third time.
“But possible?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“So a man could have met with the shirtlifter, then killed him, then gotten back out through the wire, and then walked around to the main gate, and then signed in?”
“Anything’s possible,” I said again.
“What kind of timescale are we looking at? Between killing him and signing in?”
“I don’t know. I would have to work out the distance he walked.”
“Maybe he ran.”
“Maybe he did.”
“In which case he would have been out of breath when he passed the gate.”
I said nothing.
“Best guess,” Willard said. “How much time?”
“An hour or two.”
He nodded. “So if the fairy was offed at nine or ten, the killer could have been logging in at eleven?”
“Possible,” I said.
“And the motive would have been to dead-end something.”
I nodded. Said nothing.
“And you took s
ix hours to complete a four-hour journey, thereby leaving a potential two-hour gap, which you explain with the vague claim that you took a slow route.”
I said nothing.
“And you just agreed that a two-hour window is generous in terms of getting the deed done. In particular the two hours between nine and eleven, which by chance are the same two hours that you can’t account for.”
I said nothing. Willard smiled.
“And you arrived at the gate out of breath,” he said. “I checked.”
I didn’t reply.
“But what would have been your motive?” he said. “I assume you didn’t know Carbone well. I assume you don’t move in the same social circles that he did. At least I sincerely hope you don’t.”
“You’re wasting your time,” I said. “And you’re making a big mistake. Because you really don’t want to make an enemy out of me.”
“Don’t I?”
“No,” I said. “You really don’t.”
“What do you need dead-ended?” he asked me.
I said nothing.
“Here’s an interesting fact,” Willard said. “Sergeant First Class Christopher Carbone was the soldier who lodged the complaint against you.”
He proved it to me by unfolding a copy of the complaint from his pocket. He smoothed it out and passed it across my desk. There was a reference number at the top and then a date and a place and a time. The date was January second, the place was Fort Bird’s Provost Marshal’s office, and the time was 0845. Then came two paragraphs of sworn affidavit. I glanced through some of the stiff, formal sentences. I personally observed a serving Military Police Major named Reacher strike the first civilian with a kicking action against the right knee. Immediately subsequent to that Major Reacher struck the second civilian in the face with his forehead. To the best of my knowledge both attacks were unprovoked. I saw no element of self-defense. Then came a signature with Carbone’s name and number typed below it. I recognized the number from Carbone’s file. I looked up at the slow silent clock on the wall and pictured Carbone in my mind, slipping out of the bar door into the parking lot, looking at me for a second, and then merging with the knot of men leaning on cars and drinking beer from bottles. Then I looked down again and opened a drawer and slipped the sheet of paper inside.
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