The Essential Jack Reacher 12-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

  I nodded.

  “Likewise the nudity and the missing dog tags,” she said. “Removing the army from the deviant is the same thing as removing the deviant from the army.”

  I nodded.

  “The foreign object insertion speaks for itself,” she said. “In the anus.”

  I nodded.

  “And then there’s the fluid on his back,” she said.

  “Yogurt,” I said.

  “Probably strawberry,” she said. “Or maybe raspberry. It’s the old joke. How does a gay man fake an orgasm?”

  “He groans a bit,” I said. “And then he throws yogurt on his lover’s back.”

  “Yes,” she said. She didn’t smile. And she watched me, to see if I would.

  “What about the cuts and the beating?” I said.

  “Hate,” she said.

  “And the belt around the neck?”

  She shrugged. “It’s suggestive of an autoerotic technique. Partial asphyxiation creates heightened pleasure during orgasm.”

  I nodded.

  “OK,” I said.

  “OK what?”

  “Those were your first impressions. Do you have an opinion based on them?”

  “Do you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You first.”

  “I think it’s bogus.”

  “Why?”

  “Too much going on,” I said. “There were six things there. The nudity, the missing tags, the genitals, the tree branch, the yogurt, and the belt. Any two would have done it. Maybe three. It’s like they were trying to make a point, instead of just going ahead and making one. Maybe trying too hard.”

  Norton said nothing.

  “Too much,” I said again. “Like shooting someone, then strangling him, then stabbing him, then drowning him, then suffocating him, then beating him to death. It’s like they were decorating a damn Christmas tree with clues.”

  She stayed quiet. She was watching me, deep inside her pool of light. Maybe assessing me.

  “I have my doubts about the belt,” she said. “Autoeroticism isn’t exclusively homosexual. All men have the same orgasms physiologically, gay or not.”

  “The whole thing was faked,” I said.

  She nodded, finally.

  “I agree with you,” she said. “You’re a smart guy.”

  “For a cop?”

  She didn’t smile. “But we know as officers that to permit homosexuals to serve is illegal. So we better be sure we’re not letting a defense of the army cloud our judgment.”

  “It’s my job to protect the army,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Norton said.

  I shrugged. “But I’m not taking a position. I’m not saying this guy definitely wasn’t gay. Maybe he was. I really don’t care. And maybe his attackers knew, maybe they didn’t. I’m saying either way, that’s not why they killed him. They wanted it to look like the reason. But they weren’t really feeling it. They were feeling something else. So they larded on the clues, in a rather self-conscious way.”

  Then I paused.

  “In a rather academic way,” I said.

  She stiffened.

  “An academic way?” she said.

  “Do you guys teach anything about this kind of stuff in class?”

  “We don’t teach people how to kill,” she said.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  She nodded. “We talk about it. We have to. Cutting off your enemy’s dick is as basic as it gets. It’s happened all through history. Happened all through Vietnam. Afghan women have been doing it to captured Soviet soldiers for the last ten years. We talk about what it symbolizes, what it communicates, and the fear it creates. There are whole books about the fear of grotesque wounds. It’s always a message to the target population. We talk about violation with foreign objects. We talk about the deliberate display of violated bodies. The trail of abandoned clothing is a classic touch.”

  “Do you talk about yogurt?”

  She shook her head. “But that’s a very old joke.”

  “And the asphyxiation thing?”

  “Not on the Psy-Ops courses. But most of the people here can read magazines. Or they can watch porn on videotape.”

  “Do you talk about questioning an enemy’s sexuality?”

  “Of course we do. Impugning an enemy’s sexuality is the whole point of our course. His sexual orientation, his virility, his capability, his capacity. It’s a core tactic. It always has been, everywhere, throughout history. It’s designed to work both ways. It diminishes him, and it builds us up by comparison.”

  I said nothing.

  She looked right at me. “Are you asking me if I recognized the fruits of our lessons, out there in the woods?”

  “I guess I am,” I said.

  “You didn’t really want my opinion, did you?” she asked. “That was all preamble. You already knew what you were seeing.”

  I nodded. “I’m a smart guy, for a cop.”

  “The answer is no,” she said. “I did not recognize the fruits of our lessons, out there in the woods. Not specifically.”

  “But possibly?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “Did you meet General Kramer when you were at Fort Irwin?” I asked.

  “Once or twice,” she said. “Why?”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Not recently?”

  “No. Not recently. Why?”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “Professionally,” she said.

  “You teach your stuff to Armored Branch?”

  “Irwin isn’t exclusively Armored Branch. It’s the National Training Center too, don’t forget. People used to come to us there. Now we go to them.”

  I said nothing.

  “Does it surprise you we taught Armored people?”

  I shrugged again. “A little, I guess. If I was riding around in a seventy-ton tank, I don’t suppose I’d feel a need for any more of a psychological edge.”

  She still didn’t smile. “We taught them. As I recall General Kramer didn’t like it if the infantry was getting things his people weren’t. It was an intense rivalry.”

  “Who do you teach now?”

  “Delta Force,” she said. “Exclusively.”

  “Thank you for your help,” I said.

  “I didn’t recognize anything tonight that we would take responsibility for.”

  “Not specifically.”

  “It was psychologically generic,” she said.

  “OK,” I said.

  “And I resent being asked.”

  “OK,” I said again. “Good night, ma’am.”

  I got up out of the chair and headed for the door.

  “What was the real reason?” she asked. “If the display we saw was bogus?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not that smart.”

  I stopped in my outer office and the sergeant with the baby son gave me coffee. Then I went into my inner office and found Summer waiting for me there. She had come to collect her lists, because the Kramer case was closed.

  “Did you check the other women?” I asked her. “Apart from Norton?”

  She nodded. “They all have alibis. It’s the best night of the year for alibis. Nobody spends New Year’s Eve alone.”

  “I did,” I said.

  She said nothing back. I butted the papers into a neat stack and put them back inside their folder and unclipped the note off the front. Hope your mom was OK. I dropped the note in my drawer and handed the file to her.

  “What did Norton tell you?” she asked.

  “She agreed with me that it was homicide dressed up to look like gay-bashing. I asked her if any of the symbols came from Psy-Ops classes and she didn’t really say yes or no. She said they were psychologically generic. She resented being asked.”

  “So what now?”

  I yawned. I was tired. “We’ll work it like we work any of them. We don�
��t even know who the victim is yet. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow. On deck at seven, OK?”

  “OK,” she said, and headed for my door, carrying her file.

  “I called Rock Creek,” I said. “Asked a clerk to find their copy of the order bringing me here from Panama.”

  “And?”

  “He said it’s got Garber’s signature on it.”

  “But?”

  “That’s not possible. Garber got me on the phone on New Year’s Eve and was surprised I was here.”

  “Why would a clerk lie?”

  “I don’t think a clerk would. I think the signature is a forgery.”

  “Is that conceivable?”

  “It’s the only explanation. Garber couldn’t have forgotten he’d transferred me here forty-eight hours previously.”

  “So what’s this all about?”

  “I have no idea. Someone somewhere is playing chess. My brother told me I should find out who wants me here bad enough to pull me out of Panama and replace me with an asshole. So I tried to find out. And now I’m thinking maybe we should be asking the same question about Garber. Who wants him out of Rock Creek bad enough to replace him with an asshole?”

  “But Korea has to be a genuine merit promotion, doesn’t it?”

  “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.