by Lee Child
I said nothing.
“Meanwhile, watch your step,” Joe said. “I wouldn’t want Willard for a boss.”
“I’ll be OK,” I said.
“We should have stayed in Paris,” he said, and hung up.
I found Summer in the O Club bar. She had a beer on the go and was leaning on the wall with a couple of W2s. She moved away from them when she saw me.
“Garber’s gone to Korea,” I said. “We got a new guy.”
“Who?”
“A colonel called Willard. From Intelligence.”
“So how is he qualified?”
“He isn’t qualified. He’s an asshole.”
“Doesn’t that piss you off?”
I shrugged. “He’s telling us to stay away from the Kramer thing.”
“Are we going to?”
“He’s telling me to stop talking to you. He says he’s going to turn down your application.”
She went very quiet. Looked away.
“Shit,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you wanted it.”
She looked back at me.
“Is he serious about the Kramer thing?” she asked.
I nodded. “He’s serious about everything. He had me arrested at the airport, to make all his various points.”
“Arrested?”
I nodded again. “Someone ratted me out for those guys in the parking lot.”
“Who?”
“One of the grunts in the audience.”
“One of ours? Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s cold.”
I nodded. “Never happened to me before.”
She went quiet again.
“How was your mom?” she said.
“She broke her leg,” I said. “No big deal.”
“They can get pneumonia.”
I nodded again. “She had the X ray. No pneumonia.”
Her lower eyelids moved upward.
“Can I ask the obvious question?” she said.
“Is there one?”
“Aggravated battery against civilians is a big deal. And apparently there’s a report and an eyewitness, good enough to get you arrested.”
“So?”
“So why are you still walking around?”
“Willard’s sitting on it.”
“But why would he, if he’s an asshole?”
“Out of respect for my record. That’s what he said.”
“Did you believe him?”
I shook my head.
“There must be something wrong with the complaint,” I said. “An asshole like Willard would use it if he could, that’s for sure. He doesn’t care about my record.”
“Can’t be something wrong with the complaint. A military witness is the best kind they can get. He’ll testify to whatever they tell him to. It’s like Willard would be writing the complaint himself.”
I said nothing.
“And why are you here at all?” she asked.
I heard Joe say: You should find out who wanted you at Bird badly enough to pull you out of Panama and replace you with an asshole.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” I said. “I don’t know anything. Tell me about Lieutenant Colonel Norton.”
“We’re off the case.”
“So just tell me for interest’s sake.”
“It isn’t her. She’s got an alibi. She was at a party in a bar off-post. All night long. About a hundred people were there with her.”
“Who is she?”
“Psy-Ops instructor. She’s a psychosexual Ph.D. who specializes in attacking an enemy’s internal emotional security concerning his feelings of masculinity.”
“She sounds like a fun lady.”
“She was invited to a party in a bar. Someone thinks she’s a fun lady.”
“Did you check who drove Vassell and Coomer down here?”
Summer nodded. “Our gate guys list him as a Major Marshall. I looked him up, and he’s a XII Corps staffer on temporary detached duty at the Pentagon. Some kind of a blue-eyed boy. He’s been over here since November.”
“Did you check phone calls out of the D.C. hotel?”
She nodded again.
“There weren’t any,” she said. “Vassell’s room took one incoming call at twelve twenty-eight in the morning. I’m assuming that was XII Corps calling from Germany. Neither of them made any outgoing calls.”
“None at all?”
“Not a one.”
“Are you sure?”
“Totally. It’s an electronic switchboard. Dial nine for an outside line, and the computer records it automatically. It has to, for the bill.”
Dead end.
“OK,” I said. “Forget the whole thing.”
“Really?”
“Orders are orders,” I said. “The alternative is anarchy and chaos.”
I went back to my office and called Rock Creek. I figured Willard would be long gone. He was the type of guy who keeps bankers’ hours his whole life. I got hold of a company clerk and asked him to find a copy of the original order moving me from Panama to Bird. It was five minutes before he came back on the line. I spent them reading Summer’s lists. They were full of names that meant nothing to me.
“I’ve got the order here now, sir,” the guy on the phone said.
“Who signed it?” I asked him.
“Colonel Garber, sir.”
“Thank you,” I said, and put the phone down. Then I sat for ten minutes wondering why people were lying to me. Then I forgot all about that question, because my phone rang again and a young MP private on routine base patrol told me we had a homicide victim in the woods. It sounded like a real bad one. My guy had to pause twice to throw up before he got to the end of his report.
eight
Most rural army posts are pretty big. Even if the built infrastructure is compact, there is often a huge acreage of spare land reserved around it. This was my first tour at Fort Bird, but I guessed it would be no exception. It would be like a small neat town surrounded by a county-sized horseshoe-shaped government-owned tract of poor sandy earth with low hills and shallow valleys and a thin covering of trees and scrub. Over the post’s long life the trees would have imitated the gray ashes of the Ardennes and the mighty firs of Central Europe and the swaying palms of the Middle East. Whole generations of infantry training theory would have come and gone there. There would be old trenches and foxholes and firing pits. There would be bermed rifle ranges and barbed-wire obstacles and isolated huts where psychiatrists would challenge masculine emotional security. There would be concrete bunkers and exact replicas of government offices where Special Forces would train to rescue hostages. There would be cross-country running routes where out-of-shape boot camp inductees would tire and stagger and where some of them would collapse and die. The whole thing would be ringed by miles of ancient rusty wire and claimed for the DoD forever by warning notices fixed to every third fence post.
I called a bunch of specialists and went out to the motor pool and found a Humvee that had a working flashlight in the clip on the dash. Then I fired it up and followed the private’s directions south and west of the inhabited areas until I was on a rough sandy track leading straight out into the hinterland. The darkness was absolute. I drove more than a mile and then I saw another Humvee’s headlights in the distance. The private’s vehicle was parked at a sharp angle about twenty feet off the road and its high beams were shining into the trees and casting long evil shadows deep into the woods. The private himself was leaning up against its hood. His head was bowed and he was looking down at the ground.
First question: How does a guy on motor patrol in the dark spot a corpse hidden way the hell out here, deep in the trees?
I parked next to him and took the flashlight out of the clip and slid out into the cold and immediately understood how. There was a trail of clothing starting in the center of the track. Right on the crown of the camber was a single boot. It was a standard-issue black
leather combat boot, old, worn, not very well shined. West of it was a sock, a yard away. Then another boot, another sock, a BDU jacket, an olive drab undershirt. The clothes were all spaced out in a line, like a grotesque parody of the domestic fantasy where you get home and find abandoned lingerie items leading you up the stairs to the bedroom. Except that the jacket and the undershirt were stained dark with blood.
I checked the condition of the ground at the edge of the track. It was rock hard and frosted over. I wasn’t going to compromise the scene. I wasn’t going to blur any footprints, because there weren’t going to be any footprints. So I took a deep breath and followed the trail of clothes to its conclusion. When I got there I understood why my guy had thrown up twice. At his age I might have thrown up three times.
The corpse was facedown in the frozen leaf litter at the base of a tree. Naked. Medium height, compact. It was a white guy, but he was mostly covered in blood. There were bone-deep knife cuts all over his arms and shoulders. From behind I could see that his face looked beaten and swollen. His cheeks were protruding. His dog tags were missing. There was a slim leather belt cinched tight around his neck. It had a brass buckle and the long tail looped away from his head. There was some kind of thick pink-white liquid pooled on his back. He had a broken tree limb rammed up his ass. Below it the ground was black with blood. I guessed when we rolled him over we would find that his genitals had been removed.
I backtracked along the trail of clothes and made it to the road. Stepped over next to the MP private. He was still staring down at the ground.
“Where are we exactly?” I asked him.
“Sir?”
“No question we’re still on the base?”
He nodded. “We’re a mile inside the fence line. In every direction.”
“OK,” I said. Jurisdiction was clear. Army guy, army property. “We’ll wait here. Nobody gets access in there until I say so. Clear?”
“Sir,” he said.
“You’re doing a good job,” I said.
“You think?”
“You’re still on your feet,” I said.
I went back to my Humvee and radioed my sergeant. Told her what was up and where and asked her to find Lieutenant Summer and have her call me on the emergency channel. Then I waited. An ambulance arrived two minutes later. Then two Humvees showed up with the crime scene specialists I had called before leaving my office. Guys spilled out. I told them to stand by. There was no burning urgency.
Summer got on the radio within five minutes.
“Dead guy in the woods,” I told her. “I want you to find that Psy-Ops woman you were telling me about.”
“Lieutenant Colonel Norton?”
“I want you to bring her out here.”
“Willard said you can’t work with me.”
“He said I can’t involve you in special unit stuff. This is regular police business.”
“Why do you want Norton there?”
“I want to meet her.”
She clicked off and I got out of my truck. Joined the medics and the forensics people. We all stood around in the cold. We kept our engines running to keep the batteries charged and the heaters working. Clouds of diesel smoke drifted and pooled and formed horizontal strata, like smog. I told the crime scene people to start listing the clothing on the road. I told them not to touch it and not to leave the track.
We waited. There was no moon. No stars. No light and no sound beyond our headlights and our idling diesels. I thought about Leon Garber. Korea was one of the biggest branch offices the U.S. Army has to offer. Not the most glamorous, but probably the most active and certainly the most difficult. MP command out there was a feather in anyone’s cap. It meant he would probably retire with two stars, which was way more than he could have ever hoped for. If my brother was right and axes were getting ready to fall, then Leon had already come out on the right side of the cut. I was happy for him. For about ten minutes. Then I started looking at his situation from a different perspective. I worried at it for another ten minutes and got nowhere with it.
Summer showed up before I was finished thinking. She was driving a Humvee and she had a bareheaded blonde woman in BDUs about four feet away from her in the front passenger seat. She stopped the truck in the center of the track with her headlights full on us. She stayed in the vehicle and the blonde got out and scanned the crowd and stepped into the matrix of headlight beams and made straight for me. I saluted her out of courtesy and checked her nametape. It said: Norton. She had a light colonel’s oak leaves sewn on her lapels. She was a little older than me, but not much. She was tall and thin and had the kind of face that should have made her an actress or a model.
“How can I help you, Major?” she said. She sounded like she was from Boston and not very pleased about being dragged outside in the middle of the night.
“Something I need you to see,” I said.
“Why?”
“Maybe you’ll have a professional opinion.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re here in North Carolina. It would take me hours to get someone from somewhere else.”
“What kind of someone do you need?”
“Someone in your line of work.”
“I’m aware that I work in a classroom,” she said. “I don’t need constant reminders.”
“What?”
“It seems to be a popular sport here, reminding Andrea Norton that she’s just a bookish academic, while everybody else is out there busy with the real thing.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. I’m new here. I just want first impressions from someone in your line of work, is all.”
“You’re not trying to make a point?”
“I’m trying to get some help.”
She made a face. “OK.”
I offered her my flashlight. “Follow the trail of clothes to the end. Please don’t touch anything. Just fix your first impressions in your mind. Then I’d like to talk to you about them.”
She said nothing. Just took my flashlight from me and set off. She was brightly backlit for the first twenty feet by the MP private’s headlights. His Humvee was still facing the woods. Her shadow danced ahead of her. Then she stepped beyond the range of the headlights’ illumination and I saw her flashlight beam move onward, bobbing and spearing through the darkness. Then I lost sight of it. All that was visible was a faint reflection from the underside of leafless branches, far in the distance, high in the air.
She was gone about ten minutes. Then I saw the flashlight beam sweeping back toward us. She came out of the woods, retracing her steps. She walked right up to me. She looked pale. She clicked the flashlight off and handed it back.
“My office,” she said. “In one hour.”
She got back in Summer’s Humvee and Summer backed up and turned and accelerated away into the dark.
“OK, guys, go to work,” I said. I sat in my truck and watched drifting smoke and flashlight beams quartering the ground and bright blue camera flashes freezing the motion all around me. I radioed my sergeant again and told her to get the base mortuary opened up. Told her to have a pathologist standing by, first thing in the morning. After thirty minutes the ambulance backed up onto the shoulder and my guys loaded a sheet-draped shape into it. They closed the doors and slapped on them and the truck took off. Clear plastic evidence bags were filled and labeled. Crime scene tape was wound between tree trunks. It was tied off in a rough rectangle maybe forty yards by fifty.
I left them to finish up by themselves and drove back through the dark to the main post buildings. Checked with a sentry and got directions to the Psy-Ops facility. It was a low brick structure with green doors and windows that might have housed the quartermaster offices way back when it was built. It was set at a distance from post headquarters, maybe halfway to where Special Forces bunked. There was darkness and silence all around it but there was a light burning in the central hallway and in one of the office windows. I parked my truck and went inside. Made it through gl
oomy tiled corridors and came to a door with a pebble-glass window set in its upper half. The glass had light behind it and Lt/Col. A. Norton stenciled on it. I knocked and went in. I saw a small neat office. It was clean and it smelled feminine. I didn’t salute again. I figured we were past that point.
Norton was behind a big oak army-issue desk and she had it covered with open textbooks. She had so many on the go that she had taken her telephone off the desk and put it down on the floor. She had a yellow legal pad in front of her with handwritten notes on it. The pad was in a pool of light from her desk lamp and its color was reflected upward into her hair.
“Hello,” she said.
I sat down in her visitor’s chair.
“Who was he?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think we’ll get a visual ID. He was too badly beaten. We’ll have to use fingerprints. Or teeth. If he’s got any left in there.”
“Why did you want me to look at him?”
“I told you why. I wanted your opinion.”
“Why did you think I would have an opinion?”
“Seemed to me there were elements in there that you would understand.”
“I’m not a criminal profiler.”
“I don’t want you to be. I just want some input, fast. I want to know if I’m starting out in the right direction.”
She nodded. Swept her hair back off her face.
“The obvious conclusion is that he was a homosexual,” she said. “Possibly killed because of it. Or if not, then with full awareness of it on the part of his attackers.”
I nodded.
“There was genital amputation,” she said.
“You checked?”
“I moved him a little,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know you asked me not to.”
I looked at her. She hadn’t been wearing gloves. She was a tough lady. Maybe her classroom-bound reputation was undeserved.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“My guess is you’ll find his testicles and his penis in his mouth. I doubt if his cheeks would have swelled that much simply from a beating. It’s an obvious symbolic statement, from the point of view of a homophobic attacker. Removing the deviant organs, simulating oral sex.”
