by Lee Child
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 spells 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.
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 in
terview 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 the 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?”
