So he made a lateral jump and fired up his crime databases. Originally he planned to look for reports of other crimes that involved doors and crowbars. He thought that might narrow down a location. He didn’t find anything that matched his parameters. But instead, right there on his NCIC computer, he found a burglary at a small hardware store in Sperryville, Virginia. The store was a lonely place on a dead-end street. According to the owner the front window had been kicked in sometime in the early hours of New Year’s Day. Because it was a holiday, there had been no money left in the register. As far as the store owner could tell, the only thing that had been stolen was a single crowbar.
Summer stepped back to the map on the wall and put a pushpin through the center of Sperryville, Virginia. Sperryville was a small place and the plastic barrel of the pin obscured it completely. Then she put another pin through Green Valley. The two pins finished up about a quarter-inch apart. They were almost touching. They represented about ten miles of separation.
“Look at this,” Summer said.
I got up and stepped over. Looked at the map. Sperryville was on the elbow of a crooked road that ran southwest to Green Valley and beyond. In the other direction it didn’t really go anywhere at all except Washington D.C. So Summer put a pin in Washington D.C. She put the tip of her little finger on it. Put her middle finger on Sperryville and her index finger on Green Valley.
“Vassell and Coomer,” she said. “They left D.C., they stole the crowbar in Sperryville, they broke into Mrs. Kramer’s house in Green Valley.”
“Except they didn’t,” I said. “They were just in from the airport. They didn’t have a car. And they didn’t call for one. You checked the phone records yourself.”
She said nothing.
“Plus they’re lard-ass staff officers,” I said. “They wouldn’t know how to burgle a hardware store if their lives depended on it.”
She took her hand off the map. I stepped back to my desk and sat down again and butted the personnel lists into a neat pile.
“We need to concentrate on Carbone,” I said.
“Then we need a new plan,” she said. “Detective Clark is going to stop looking for crowbars now. He’s found the one he’s interested in.”
I nodded. “Back to traditional time-honored methods of investigation.”
“Which are?”
“I don’t really know. I went to West Point. I didn’t go to MP school.”
My phone rang. I picked it up. The same warm Southern voice I had heard before went through the same 10-33, 10-16 from Jackson routine I had heard before. I acknowledged and hit the speaker button and leaned all the way back in my chair and waited. The room filled with electronic hum. Then there was a click.
“Reacher?” Sanchez said.
“And Lieutenant Summer,” I said. “We’re on the speaker.”
“Anyone else in the room?”
“No,” I said.
“Door closed?”
“Yes. What’s up?”
“Columbia PD came through again, is what. They’re feeding me stuff bit by bit. And they’re having themselves a real good time doing it. They’re gloating like crazy.”
“Why?”
“Because Brubaker had heroin in his pocket, that’s why. Three dime bags of brown. And a big wad of cash money. They’re saying it was a drug deal that went bad.”
fifteen
I was born in 1960, which made me seven during the Summer of Love, and thirteen at the end of our effective involvement in Vietnam, and fifteen at the end of our official involvement there. Which meant I missed most of the American military’s collision with narcotics. The heavy-duty Purple Haze years passed me by. I had caught the later, stable phase. Like many soldiers I had smoked a little weed from time to time, maybe just enough to develop a preference among different strains and sources, but nowhere near enough to put me high on the list of U.S. users in terms of lifetime volume consumed. I was a part-timer. I was one of those guys who bought, not sold.
But as an MP, I had seen plenty sold. I had seen drug deals. I had seen them succeed, and I had seen them fail. I knew the drill. And one thing I knew for sure was that if a bad deal ends up with a dead guy on the floor, there’s nothing in the dead guy’s pocket. No cash, no product. No way. Why would there be? If the dead guy was the buyer, the seller runs away with his dope intact and the buyer’s cash. If the dead guy was the seller, then the buyer gets the whole stash for free. The deal money walks right back home with him. Either way someone takes a nice big profit in exchange for a couple of bullets and a little rummaging around.
“It’s bullshit, Sanchez,” I said. “It’s faked.”
“Of course it is. I know that.”
“Did you make that point?”
“Did I need to? They’re civilians, but they ain’t stupid.”
“So why are they gloating?”
“Because it gives them a free pass. If they can’t close the case, they can just write it off. Brubaker ends up looking bad, not them.”
“They found any witnesses yet?”
“Not a one.”
“Shots were fired,” I said. “Someone must have heard something.”
“Not according to the cops.”
“Willard is going to freak,” I said.
“That’s the least of our problems.”
“Are you alibied?”
“Me? Do I need to be?”
“Willard’s going to be looking for leverage. He’s going to use anything he can invent to get you to toe the line.”
Sanchez didn’t answer right away. Some kind of electronic circuitry in the phone line brought the background hiss up loud to cover the silence. Then he spoke over it.
“I think I’m fireproof here,” he said. “It’s the Columbia PD making the accusations, not me.”
“Just take care,” I said.
“Bet on it,” he said.
I clicked the phone off. Summer was thinking. Her face was tense and her lower lids were moving.
“What?” I said.
“You sure it was faked?” she said.
“Had to be,” I said.
“OK,” she said. “Good.” She was still standing next to the map. She put her hand back on it. Little finger on the Fort Bird pin, index finger on the Columbia pin. “We agree that it was faked. We’re sure of it. So there’s a pattern now. The drugs and the money in Brubaker’s pocket are the exact same thing as the branch up Carbone’s ass and the yogurt on his back. Elaborate misdirection. Concealment of the true motive. It’s a definite MO. It’s not just a guess anymore. The same guy did both. He killed Carbone here and then jumped in his car and drove down to Columbia and killed Brubaker there. It’s a clear sequence. Everything fits. Times, distances, the way the guy thinks.”
I looked at her standing there. Her small brown hand was stretched like a starfish. She had clear polish on her nails. Her eyes were bright.
“Why would he ditch the crowbar?” I said. “After Carbone but before Brubaker?”
“Because he preferred a handgun,” she said. “Like anyone normal would. But he knew he couldn’t use one here. Too noisy. A mile from the main post, late in the evening, we’d have all come running. But in a bad part of a big city, nobody was going to think twice. Which is how it turned out, apparently.”
“Could he have been sure of that?”
“No,” she said. “Not entirely sure. He set up the rendezvous, so he knew where he was going. But he couldn’t be exactly certain about what he would find when he got there. So I guess he would have liked to keep a backup weapon. But the crowbar was all covered with Carbone’s blood and hair by then. There was no opportunity to clean it. He was in a hurry. The ground was frozen. No patch of soft grass to wipe it on. So he couldn’t see having it in the car with him. Maybe he was worried about a traffic stop on the way south. So he ditched it.”
I nodded. Ultimately, the crowbar was disposable. A handgun was a more reliable weapon against a fit and wary opponent. Especia
lly in the tight confines of a city alley, as opposed to the kind of dark and wide-open spaces where he had taken Carbone down. I yawned. Closed my eyes. From the wide-open spaces where he had taken Carbone down. I opened my eyes again.
“He killed Carbone here,” I repeated. “And then he jumped in his car and drove to Columbia and killed Brubaker there.”
“Yes,” Summer said.
“But you figured he was already in a car,” I said.
“Yes,” she said again. “I did.”
“You figured he drove out on the track with Carbone, hit him in the head, arranged the scene, and then drove back here to the post. Your reasoning was pretty good. And where we found the crowbar kind of confirmed it.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“And then we figured he parked his car and went about his business.”
“Correct,” she said.
“But he can’t have parked his car and gone about his business. Because now we’re saying he drove straight to Columbia, South Carolina, instead. To meet with Brubaker. Three-hour drive. He was in a hurry. Not much time to waste.”
“Correct,” she said again.
“So he didn’t park his car,” I said. “He didn’t even touch the brake. He drove straight out the main gate instead. There’s no other way off the post. He drove straight out the main gate, Summer, immediately after he killed Carbone, somewhere around nine or ten o’clock.”
“Check the gate log,” she said. “There’s a copy right there on the desk.”
We checked the gate log together. Operation Just Cause in Panama had moved all domestic installations up one level on the DefCon scale and therefore all closed posts were recording entrances and exits in detail in bound ledgers that had preprinted page numbers in the top right-hand corner. We had a good clear Xerox of the page for January fourth. I was confident it was genuine. I was confident it was complete. And I was confident it was accurate. The Military Police have numerous failings, but snafus with basic paperwork aren’t any of them.
Summer took the page from me and taped it to the wall next to the map. We stood side by side and looked at it. It was ruled into six columns. There were spaces for date, time in, time out, plate number, occupants, and reason.
“Traffic was light,” Summer said.
I said nothing. I was in no position to know whether nineteen entries represented light traffic or not. I wasn’t used to Bird and it had been a long time since I had pulled gate duty anywhere else. But certainly it seemed quiet compared to the multiple pages I had seen for New Year’s Eve.
“Mostly people reporting back for duty,” Summer said.
I nodded. Fourteen lines had entries in the Time In column but no corresponding entries in the Time Out column. That meant fourteen people had come in and stayed in. Back to work, after time away from the post for the holidays. Or after time away from the post for other reasons. I was right there among them: 1-4-90. 2302, Reacher, J., Mjr, RTB. January fourth, 1990, two minutes past eleven in the evening, Major J. Reacher, returning to base. From Paris, via Garber’s old office in Rock Creek. My vehicle plate number was listed as: Pedestrian. My sergeant was there, coming in from her off-post address to work the night shift. She had arrived at nine-thirty, driving something with North Carolina plates.
Fourteen in, to stay in.
Only five exits.
Three of them were routine food deliveries. Big trucks, probably. An army post gets through a lot of food. Lots of hungry mouths to feed. Three trucks in a day seemed about right to me. Each of them was timed inward at some point during the early afternoon and then timed outward again a plausible hour or so later. The last time out was just before three o’clock.
Then there was a seven-hour gap.
The last-but-one recorded exit was Vassell and Coomer themselves, on their way out after their O Club dinner. They had passed through the gate at 2201. They had previously been timed in at 1845. At that point their Department of Defense plate number had been written down and their names and ranks had been entered. Their reason had been stated as: Courtesy visit.
Five exits. Four down.
One to go.
The only other person to have left Fort Bird on the fourth of January was logged as: 1-4-90, 2211, Trifonov, S., Sgt. There was a North Carolina passenger vehicle plate number written in the relevant space. There was no time in recorded. There was nothing in the reason column. Therefore a sergeant called Trifonov had been on-post all day or all week and then he had left at eleven minutes past ten in the evening. No reason had been recorded because there was no directive to inquire as to why a soldier was leaving. The assumption was that he was going out for a drink or a meal or for some other form of entertainment. Reason was a question the gate guards asked of people trying to get in, not trying to get out.
We checked again, just to be absolutely sure. We came up with the same result. Apart from General Vassell and Colonel Coomer in their self-driven Mercury Grand Marquis, and then a sergeant called Trifonov in some other kind of car, nobody had passed through the gate in an outward direction in a vehicle or on foot at any time on the fourth of January, apart from three food trucks in the early part of the afternoon.
“OK,” Summer said. “Sergeant Trifonov. Whoever he is. He’s the one.”
“Has to be,” I said.
I called the main gate. Got the same guy I had spoken to before, when I was checking on Vassell and Coomer earlier. I recognized his voice. I asked him to search forward through his log, starting from the page number immediately following the one we were looking at. Asked him to check exactly when a sergeant named Trifonov had returned to Bird. Told him it could be anytime after about four-thirty in the morning on January fifth. There was a moment’s delay. I could hear the guy turning the stiff parchment pages in the ledger. He was doing it slowly, paying close attention.
“Sir, five o’clock in the morning precisely,” the guy said. “January fifth, 0500, Sergeant Trifonov, returning to base.” I heard another page turn. “He left at 2211 the previous evening.”
“Remember anything about him?”
“He left about ten minutes after those Armored staffers you were asking me about before. He was in a hurry, as I recall. Didn’t wait for the barrier to go all the way up. He squeezed right underneath it.”
“What kind of car?”
“Corvette, I think. Not a new one. But it looked pretty good.”
“Were you still on duty when he got back?”
“Yes, sir, I was.”
“Remember anything about that?”
“Nothing that stands out. I spoke to him, obviously. He has a foreign accent.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Civilian stuff. A leather jacket, I think. I assumed he had been off duty.”
“Is he on the post now?”
I heard pages turning again. I imagined a finger, tracing slowly down all the lines written after 0500 on the morning of the fifth.
“We haven’t logged him out again, sir,” the guy said. “Not as of right now. So he must be on-post somewhere.”
“OK,” I said. “Thanks, soldier.”
I hung up. Summer looked at me.
“He got back at 0500,” I said. “Three and a half hours after Brubaker’s watch stopped.”
“Three-hour drive,” she said.
“And he’s here now.”
“Who is he?”
I called post headquarters. Asked the question. They told me who he was. I put the phone down and looked straight at Summer.
“He’s Delta,” I said. “He was a defector from Bulgaria. They brought him in as an instructor. He knows stuff our guys don’t.”
I got up from my desk and stepped over to the map on the wall. Put my own fingers on the pushpins. Little finger on Fort Bird, index finger on Columbia. It was like I was validating a theory by touch alone. A hundred and fifty miles. Three hours and twelve minutes to get there, three hours and thirty-seven minutes to get back. I did the math in my head.
An average speed of forty-seven miles an hour going, and forty-one coming back. At night, on empty roads, in a Chevrolet Corvette. He could have done it with the parking brake on.
“Should we have him picked up?” Summer said.
“No,” I said. “I’ll do it myself. I’ll go over there.”
“Is that smart?”
“Probably not. But I don’t want those guys to think they got to me.”
“I’ll come with you,” she said.
“OK,” I said.
It was five o’clock in the afternoon, exactly thirty-six hours to the minute since Trifonov arrived back on-post. The weather was dull and cold. We took sidearms and handcuffs and evidence bags. We walked to the MP motor pool and found a Humvee that had a cage partition bolted behind the front seats and no inside handles on the back doors. Summer drove. She parked at Delta’s prison gate. The sentry let us through on foot. We walked around the outside of the main block until I found the entrance to their NCO Club. I stopped, and Summer stopped beside me.
“You going in there?” she said.
“Just for a minute.”
“Alone?”
I nodded. “Then we’re going to their armory.”
“Not smart,” she said. “I should come in with you.”
“Why?”
She hesitated. “As a witness, I guess.”
“To what?”
“To whatever they do to you.”
I smiled, briefly.
“Terrific,” I said.
I pushed in through the door. The place was pretty crowded. The light was dim and the air was full of smoke. There was a lot of noise. Then people saw me and went quiet. I moved onward. People stood where they were. Stock-still. Then they turned to face me. I pushed past them, one by one. Through the crowd. Nobody moved out of my way. They bumped me with their shoulders, left and right. I bumped back, in the silence. I stand six feet five inches tall and I weigh two hundred thirty pounds. I can hold my own in a shoving competition.
I made it through the lobby and moved into the bar. Same thing happened. The noise died fast. People turned toward me. Stared at me. I pushed and shoved and bumped my way through the room. There was nothing to hear except tense breathing and the scrape of feet on the floor and the soft thump of shoulder on shoulder. I kept my eyes on the far wall. The young guy with the beard and the tan stepped out into my path. He had a glass of beer in his hand. I kept going straight and he leaned to his right and we collided and his glass slopped half its contents on the linoleum tile.
Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16] Page 320