Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]
Page 317
It was January, and the conditions were pretty good. February would have been better. In a temperate northern hemisphere climate, vegetation dies right back in February. It gets as thin and sparse as it ever will. But January was OK. The undergrowth was low and the ground was flat and brown. It was the color of dead bracken and leaf litter. There was no snow. The landscape was even and neutral and organic. It was a good background. I figured a container for a dairy product would be bright white. Or cream. Or maybe pink, for a strawberry or a raspberry flavor. Whatever, it would be a helpful color. It wouldn’t be black, for instance. Nobody puts a dairy product in a black container. So if it was there and we came close to it, we would find it.
We checked a ten-foot belt all around the perimeter of the crime scene. Found nothing. So we went back to the track and set off north and east along it. Summer walked five feet from the track’s left-hand edge. I walked five feet to her left. If we both scanned both ways we would cover a fifteen-foot strip, with two pairs of eyes on the crucial five-foot lane between us, which is exactly where the container should have landed, according to my aerodynamic theory.
We walked slow, maybe half-speed. I used short paces and settled into a rhythm of moving my head from one side to the other with every step. I felt pretty stupid doing it. I must have looked like a penguin. But it was an efficient method. I lapsed into a kind of autopilot mode and the ground blurred beneath me. I wasn’t seeing individual leaves and twigs and blades of grass. I was tuning out what should be there. I felt like something that shouldn’t be there would leap right out at me.
We walked for ten minutes and found nothing.
“Swap?” Summer said.
We changed places and moved on. We saw a million tons of forest debris, and nothing else. Army posts are kept scrupulously clean. The weekly litter patrol is a religion. Outside the wire we would have been tripping over all kinds of stuff. Inside, there was nothing. Nothing at all. We did another ten minutes, another three hundred yards, and then we paused and swapped positions again. Moving slow in the cold air was chilling me. I stared at the earth like a maniac. I felt we were close to our best chance. A mile and a half is 2,640 yards. I figured the first few hundred and the last few hundred were poor hunting grounds. At first the guy would have been feeling the pure urge to escape. Then close to the post buildings he knew he had to be ready and done and composed. So the middle stretch was where he would have sanitized. Anyone with any sense would have coasted to a stop, breathed in, breathed out, and thought things through. He would have buzzed his window down and felt the night air on his face. I slowed down and looked harder, left and right, left and right. Saw nothing.
“Did he have blood on him?” I said.
“A little, maybe,” Summer said, on my right.
I didn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on the ground.
“On his gloves,” she said. “Maybe on his shoes.”
“Less than he might have expected,” I said. “Unless he was a doctor he would have expected some pretty bad bleeding.”
“So?”
“So he didn’t use a pool car. He expected blood and didn’t want to risk leaving it all over a vehicle that someone else was going to drive the next day.”
“So like you said, with his own car, he’ll have thrown it in the back. So we aren’t going to find anything out here.”
I nodded. Said nothing. Walked on.
We covered the whole of the middle section and found nothing. Two thousand yards of dormant organic material and not one single man-made item. Not a cigarette butt, not a scrap of paper, no rusted cans, no empty bottles. It was a real tribute to the post commander’s enthusiasm. But it was disappointing. We stopped with the main post buildings clearly visible, three hundred yards in front of us.
“I want to backtrack,” I said. “I want to do the middle part again.”
“OK,” she said. “About-face.”
She turned and we switched positions. We decided we would cover each three-hundred-yard section the opposite way around from the first pass. Where I had walked inboard, I would walk outboard, and vice versa. No real reason, except our perspectives were different and we felt we should alternate. I was more than a foot taller than she was, and therefore simple trigonometry meant I could see more than a foot farther in either direction. She was closer to the ground and she claimed her eyes were good for detail.
We walked back, slow and steady.
Nothing in the first section. We swapped positions. I took up station ten feet from the track. Scanned left and right. The wind was in our faces, and my eyes started watering from the cold. I put my hands in my pockets.
Nothing in the second section. We changed positions again. I walked five feet from the track, parallel to its edge. Nothing in the third section. We changed yet again. I did math in my head as we walked. So far we had swept a fifteen-foot swath along a 2,340-yard length. That made 11,700 square yards, which was a hair better than two-point-four acres. Nearly two and a half acres, out of a hundred thousand. Odds of forty thousand to one, approximately. Better than driving to town and spending a dollar on a lottery ticket. But not much better.
We walked on. The wind got stronger and we got colder. We saw nothing.
Then I saw something.
It was far to my right. Maybe twenty feet from me. Not a yogurt container. Something else. I almost ignored it because it was well outside the zone of possibility. No lightweight plastic unaerodynamic item could have gone that far after being thrown from a car on the track. So my eyes spotted it and my brain processed it and rejected it instantly, on a purely preprogrammed basis.
And then it hung up on it. Out of pure animal instinct.
Because it looked like a snake. The lizard part of my brain whispered snake and I got that little primeval jolt of fright that had kept my ancestors alive and well way back in evolution. It was all over in a split second. It was smothered immediately. The modern educated part of my mind stepped in and said, No snakes here in January, bud. Way too cold. I breathed out and moved on a step and then paused to look back, purely out of curiosity.
There was a curved black shape in the dead grass. Belt? Garden hose? But it was settled deeper down among the stiff brown stalks than something made of leather or fabric or rubber could have fallen. It was right down there among the roots. Therefore it was heavy. And it had to be heavy to have traveled so far from the track. Therefore it was metal. Solid, not tubular. Therefore it was unfamiliar. Very little military equipment is curved.
I walked over. Got close. Knelt down.
It was a crowbar.
A black-painted crowbar, all matted on one end with blood and hair.
I stayed with it and sent Summer to get the truck. She must have jogged all the way back for it because she returned sooner than I expected and out of breath.
“Do we have an evidence bag?” I asked.
“It’s not evidence,” she said. “Training accidents don’t need evidence.”
“I’m not planning on taking it to court,” I said. “I just don’t want to touch it, is all. Don’t want my prints on it. That might give Willard ideas.”
She checked the back of the truck.
“No evidence bags,” she said.
I paused. Normally you take exquisite care not to contaminate evidence with foreign prints and hairs and fibers, so as not to confuse the investigation. If you screw up, you can get your ass chewed by the prosecutors. But this time the motivation had to be different, with Willard in the mix. If I screwed up, I could get my ass sent to jail. Means, motive, opportunity, my prints on the weapon. Too good to be true. If the training accident story came back to bite him, he would jump all over anything he could get.
“We could bring a specialist out here,” Summer said. She was standing right behind me. I could sense her there.
“Can’t involve anyone else,” I said. “I didn’t even want to involve you.”
She came around beside me and crouched low. Smoothed stalks of grass
out of the way with her hands, for a closer look.
“Don’t touch it,” I said.
“Wasn’t planning to,” she said.
We looked at it together, close up. It was a handheld wrecking bar forged from octagonal-section steel. It looked like a high-quality tool. It looked brand new. It was painted gloss black with the kind of paint people use on boats or cars. It was shaped a little like an alto saxophone. The main shaft was about three feet long, slightly S-shaped, and it had a shallow curve on one end and a full curve on the other, the shape of a capital letter J. Both tips were flattened and notched into claws, ready for levering nails out of planks of wood. Its design was streamlined and evolved, and simple, and brutal.
“Hardly used,” Summer said.
“Never used,” I said. “Not for construction, anyway.”
I stood up.
“We don’t need to print it,” I said. “We can assume the guy was wearing gloves when he swung it.”
Summer stood up next to me.
“We don’t need to type the blood either,” she said. “We can assume it’s Carbone’s.”
I said nothing.
“We could just leave it here,” Summer said.
“No,” I said. “We can’t do that.”
I bent down and untied my right boot. Pulled the lace all the way out and used a reef knot to tie the ends together. That gave me a closed loop about fifteen inches in diameter. I draped it over my right palm and dragged the free end across the dead stubble until I snagged it under the crowbar’s tip. Then I closed my fist and lifted the heavy steel weight carefully out of the grass. I held it up, like a proud angler with a fish.
“Let’s go,” I said.
I limped around to the front passenger seat with the crowbar swinging gently in midair and my boot half off. I sat close to the transmission tunnel and steadied the crowbar against the floor just enough to stop it touching my legs as the vehicle moved.
“Where to?” Summer asked.
“The mortuary,” I said.
I was hoping the pathologist and his staff would be out eating breakfast, but they weren’t. They were all in the building, working. The pathologist himself caught us in the lobby. He was on his way somewhere with a file in his hand. He looked at us and then he looked at the trophy dangling from my boot lace. Took him half of a second to understand what it was, and the other half to realize it put us all in a very awkward situation.
“We could come back later,” I said. When you’re not here.
“No,” he said. “We’ll go to my office.”
He led the way. I watched him walk. He was a small dark man with short legs, brisk, competent, a little older than me. He seemed nice enough. And I guessed he wasn’t stupid. Very few medics are. They have all kinds of complicated stuff to learn, before they get to be where they want to be. And I guessed he wasn’t unethical. Very few medics were that either, in my experience. They’re scientists at heart, and scientists generally retain a good-faith interest in facts and the truth. Or at least they retain some kind of innate curiosity. All of which was good, because this guy’s attitude was going to be crucial. He could stay out of our way, or he could sell us out with a single phone call.
His office was a plain square room full of original-issue gray steel desks and file cabinets. It was crowded. There were framed diplomas on the walls. There were shelves full of books and manuals. No specimen jars. No weird stuff pickled in formaldehyde. It could have been an army lawyer’s office, except the diplomas were from medical schools, not law schools.
He sat down in his rolling chair. Placed his file on his desk. Summer closed his door and leant on it. I stood in the middle of the floor, with the crowbar hanging in space. We all looked at each other. Waited to see who would make the opening bid.
“Carbone was a training accident,” the doctor said, like he was moving his first pawn two squares forward.
I nodded.
“No question,” I said, like I was moving my own pawn.
“I’m glad we’ve got that straight,” he said.
But he said it in a voice that meant: Can you believe this shit?
I heard Summer breathe out, because we had an ally. But we had an ally who wanted distance. We had an ally who wanted to hide behind an elaborate charade. And I didn’t altogether blame him. He owed years of service in exchange for his medical school tuition. Therefore he was cautious. Therefore he was an ally whose wishes we had to respect.
“Carbone fell and hit his head,” I said. “It’s a closed case. Pure accident, very unfortunate for all concerned.”
“But?”
I held the crowbar a little higher.
“I think this is what he hit his head on,” I said.
“Three times?”
“Maybe he bounced. Maybe there were dead twigs under the leaves, made the ground a little springy, like a trampoline.”
The doctor nodded. “Terrain can be like that, this time of year.”
“Lethal,” I said.
I lowered the crowbar again. Waited.
“Why did you bring it here?” the doctor asked.
“There might be an issue of contributory negligence,” I said. “Whoever left it lying around for Carbone to fall on might need a reprimand.”
The doctor nodded again. “Littering is a grave offense.”
“In this man’s army,” I said.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing,” I said. “We’re here to help you out, is all. With it being a closed case, we figured you wouldn’t want to clutter your place up with those plaster casts you made. Of the wound site. We figured we could haul them to the trash for you.”
The doctor nodded for a third time.
“You could do that,” he said. “It would save me a trip.”
He paused for a long moment. Then he cleared the file away from in front of him and opened some drawers and laid sheets of clean white paper on the desktop and arranged half-a-dozen glass microscope slides on the paper.
“That thing looks heavy,” he said to me.
“It is,” I said.
“Maybe you should put it down. Take the weight off your shoulder.”
“Is that medical advice?”
“You don’t want ligament damage.”
“Where should I put it down?”
“Any flat surface you can find.”
I stepped forward and laid the crowbar gently on his desk, on top of the paper and the glass slides. Unhooked my boot lace and picked the knot out of it. Squatted down and threaded it back through all the eyelets. Tightened it up and tied it off. I looked up in time to see the doctor move a microscope slide. He picked it up and scraped it against the end of the crowbar where it was matted with blood and hair.
“Damn,” he said. “I got this slide all dirty. Very careless of me.”
He made the exact same error with five more slides.
“Are we interested in fingerprints?” he said.
I shook my head. “We’re assuming gloves.”
“We should check, I think. Contributory negligence is a serious matter.”
He opened another drawer and peeled a latex glove out of a box and snapped it on his hand. It made a tiny cloud of talcum dust. Then he picked the crowbar up and carried it out of the room.
He came back less than ten minutes later. He still had his glove on. The crowbar was washed clean. The black paint gleamed. It looked indistinguishable from new.
“No prints,” he said.
He put the crowbar down on his chair and pulled a file drawer and came out with a plain brown cardboard box. Opened it up and took out two chalk-white plaster casts. Both were about six inches long and both had Carbone handwritten in black ink on the underside. One was a positive, formed by pressing wet plaster into the wound. The other was a negative, formed by molding more plaster over the positive. The negative showed the shape of the wound the weapon had made, and therefore the positive showed the shape of the weapon itself.
Then the doctor put the negative on the desk. It was a little bigger than the positive, and a little messier. It was an exact replica of the back of Carbone’s shattered skull. The doctor picked up the crowbar. Hefted it in his hand. Lined it up, speculatively. Brought it down, very slowly, one, for the first blow, then two for the second. Then three for the last. He touched it to the plaster. The third and final wound was the best defined. It was a clear three-quarter-inch trench in the plaster, and the crowbar fitted it perfectly.
“I’ll check the blood and the hair,” the doctor said. “Not that we don’t already know what the results will be.”
He lifted the crowbar out of the plaster and tried it again. It went in again, precisely, and deep. He lifted it out and balanced it across his open palms, like he was weighing it. Then he grasped it by the straighter end and swung it, like a batter going after a high fastball. He swung it again, harder, a compact, violent stroke. It looked big in his hands. Big, and a little heavy for him. A little out of control.
“Very strong man,” he said. “Vicious swing. Big tall guy, right-handed, physically very fit. But that describes a lot of people on this post, I guess.”
“There was no guy,” I said. “Carbone fell and hit his head.”
The doctor smiled briefly and balanced the bar across his palms again.
“It’s handsome, in its way,” he said. “Does that sound strange?”
I knew what he meant. It was a nice piece of steel, and it was everything it needed to be and nothing it didn’t. Like a Colt Detective Special, or a K-bar, or a cockroach. He slid it inside a long steel drawer. The metals scraped one on the other and then boomed faintly when he let it go and dropped it the final inch.
“I’ll keep it here,” he said. “If you like. Safer that way.”
“OK,” I said.