Then I counted the remaining check marks, and wrote the number 973 on a slip of paper. That was our suspect pool. I stared into space. My phone rang. I picked it up. It was Sanchez again, down at Fort Jackson.
“Columbia PD just called me,” he said. “They’re sharing their initial findings.”
“And?”
“Their medical examiner doesn’t entirely agree with me. Time of death wasn’t three or four in the morning. It was one twenty-three A.M., the night before last.”
“That’s very precise.”
“Bullet caught his wristwatch.”
“A broken watch? Can’t necessarily rely on that.”
“No, it’s firm enough. They did a lot of other tests. Wrong season for measurable insect activity, which would have helped, but the stomach contents were exactly right for five or six hours after he ate a heavy dinner.”
“What does his wife say?”
“He disappeared at eight that night, after a heavy dinner. Got up from the table and never came back.”
“What did she do about it?”
“Nothing,” Sanchez said. “He was Special Forces. Their whole marriage, he’ll have been disappearing with no warning, the middle of dinner, the middle of the night, days or weeks at a time, never able to say where or why afterward. She was used to it.”
“Did he get a phone call or something?”
“She assumes he did, at some point. She’s not really sure. She was in the spa before dinner. They’d just played twenty-seven holes.”
“Can you call her yourself? She’ll talk to you faster than civilian cops.”
“I could try, I suppose.”
“Anything else?” I said.
“The GSWs were nine-millimeter,” he said. “Two rounds fired, both of them through and through, neat entry wounds, bad exit wounds.”
“Full metal jackets,” I said.
“Contact shots. There were powder burns. And soot.”
I paused. I couldn’t picture it. Two rounds fired? Contact shots? So one of the bullets goes in, comes out, loops all the way around, comes back, and drops down and smashes his wristwatch?
“Did he have his hands on his head?”
“He was shot from behind, Reacher. A double tap, to the back of the skull. Bang bang, thank you and good night. The second round must have gone through his head and caught his watch. Downward trajectory. Tall shooter.”
I said nothing.
“Right,” Sanchez said. “How likely is all that? Did you know him?”
“Never met him,” I said.
“He was way above average. He was a real pro. And he was a thinker. Any angle, any advantage, any wrinkle, he knew it and he was ready to use it.”
“But he got himself shot in the back of the head?”
“He knew the shooter, definitely. Had to. Why else would he turn his back, in the middle of the night, in an alley?”
“You looking at people from Jackson?”
“That’s a lot of people.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Did he have enemies at Bird?”
“Not that I’ve heard,” I said. “He had enemies up the chain of command.”
“Those pussies don’t meet people in alleys in the middle of the night.”
“Where was the alley?”
“Not in a quiet part of town.”
“So did anyone hear anything?”
“Nobody,” Sanchez said. “Columbia PD ran a canvass and came up empty.”
“That’s weird.”
“They’re civilians. What else would they be?”
He went quiet.
“You met Willard yet?” I asked him.
“He’s on his way here right now. Seems to be a real hands-on type of asshole.”
“What was the alley like?”
“Whores and crack dealers. Nothing that the Columbia city fathers are likely to put in their tourism brochures.”
“Willard hates embarrassment,” I said. “He’s going to be nervous about image.”
“Columbia’s image? What does he care?”
“The army’s image,” I said. “Willard won’t want Brubaker put next to whores and crack dealers. Not an elite colonel. He figures this Soviet stuff is going to shake things up. He figures we need good PR right now. He figures he can see the big picture.”
“The big picture is I can’t get near this case anyway. So what kind of pull does he have with the Columbia PD and the FBI? Because that’s what it’s going to take.”
“Just be ready for trouble,” I said.
“Are we in for seven lean years?”
“Not that long.”
“Why not?”
“Just a feeling,” I said.
“You happy with me handling liaison down here? Or should I get them to call you direct? Brubaker is your dead guy, technically.”
“You do it,” I said. “I’ve got other things to do.”
We hung up and I went back to Summer’s lists. Nine hundred seventy-three. Nine hundred seventy-two innocent, one guilty. But which one?
Summer came back inside another hour. She walked in and gave me a sheet of paper. It was a photocopy of a weapons requisition that Sergeant First Class Christopher Carbone had made four months ago. It was for a Heckler & Koch P7 handgun. Maybe he had liked the H&K submachine guns Delta was using, and therefore he wanted the P7 for his personal sidearm. He had asked for it to be chambered for the standard nine-millimeter Parabellum cartridge. He had asked for the thirteen-round magazine, and three spares. It was a perfectly standard requisition form, and a perfectly reasonable request. I was sure it had been granted. There would have been no political sensitivities. H&K was a German outfit and Germany was a NATO country, last time I checked. There would have been no compatibility issues either. Nine-millimeter Parabellums were standard NATO loads. The U.S. Army had no shortage of them. We had warehouses crammed full of them. We could have filled thirteen-round magazines with them a million times over, every day for the rest of history.
“So?” I said.
“Look at the signature on it,” Summer said. She took my copy of Carbone’s complaint out of her inside pocket and handed it over. I spread it out on my desk, side by side with the requisition form. Looked from one to the other.
The two signatures were identical.
“We’re not handwriting experts,” I said.
“We don’t need to be. They’re the same, Reacher. Believe it.”
I nodded. Both signatures read C. Carbone, and the four capital letter Cs were very distinctive. They were fast, elongated, curling flourishes. The lower-case e on the end of each sample was distinctive too. It made a small round shape, and then the tail of the letter whipped way out to the right of the page, well beyond the name itself, horizontally, and exuberantly. The a-r-b-o-n in the middle was fast and fluid and linear. As a whole it was a bold, proud, legible, self-confident signature, developed no doubt by long years of signing checks and bar bills and leases and car papers. No signature was impossible to forge, of course, but I figured this one would have been a real challenge. A challenge that I guessed would have been impossible to meet between midnight and 0845 on a North Carolina army post.
“OK,” I said. “The complaint is genuine.”
I left it on the desk. Summer reversed it and read it through, although she must have read it plenty of times already.
“It’s cold,” she said. “It’s like a knife in the back.”
“It’s weird,” I said. “That’s what it is. I never met this guy before. I’m absolutely sure of that. And he was Delta. Not too many gentle pacifist souls over there. Why would he be offended? It wasn’t his leg I broke.”
“Maybe it was personal. Maybe the fat guy was his friend.”
I shook my head. “He’d have stepped in. He’d have stopped the fight.”
“It’s the only complaint he ever made in a sixteen-year career.”
“You been talking to people?”
“All
kinds of people. Right here, and by phone far and wide.”
“Were you careful?”
“Very. And it’s the only complaint you ever had made against you.”
“You checked that too?”
She nodded. “All the way back to when God’s dog was a puppy.”
“You wanted to know what kind of a guy you’re dealing with here?”
“No, I wanted to be able to show the Delta guys you don’t have a history. With Carbone or with anyone else.”
“You’re protecting me now?”
“Someone’s going to have to. I was just over there, and they’re plenty mad.”
I nodded. Brubaker.
“I’m sure they are,” I said. I pictured Delta’s lonely prison barracks, first designed to keep people in, then used to keep strangers out, now serving to keep their unity boiling like a pressure cooker. I pictured Brubaker’s office, wherever it was, quiet and deserted. I pictured Carbone’s cell, standing empty.
“So where was Carbone’s new P7?” I said. “I didn’t find it in his quarters.”
“In their armory,” Summer said. “Cleaned, oiled, and loaded. They check their personal weapons in and out. They’ve got a cage inside their hangar. You should see that place. It’s like Santa’s grotto. Special armored Humvees wall to wall, trucks, explosives, grenade launchers, claymores, night vision stuff. They could equip a Central African dictatorship all by themselves.”
“That’s very reassuring,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Why did he file the complaint?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
I pictured Carbone in the strip club, New Year’s night. I had walked in and I had seen a group of four men I took to be sergeants. The swirl of the crowd had turned three of them away from me and one of them toward me in a completely random dynamic. I hadn’t known who was going to be there, they hadn’t known I was going to show up. I had never met any of them before. The encounter was as close to pure chance as it was possible to get. Yet Carbone had tagged me for the kind of tame mayhem he must have seen a thousand times before. The kind of tame mayhem he must have joined in with a hundred times before. Show me an enlisted man who claims never to have fought a civilian in a bar, and I’ll show you a liar.
“Are you Catholic?” I asked.
“No, why?” Summer said.
“I wondered if you knew any Latin.”
“It’s not just Catholics who know Latin. I went to school.”
“OK, cui bono?” I said.
“Who benefits? What, from the complaint?”
“It’s always a good guide to motive,” I said. “You can explain most things with it. History, politics, everything.”
“Like, follow the money?”
“Approximately,” I said. “Except I don’t think there’s money involved here. But there must have been some benefit for Carbone. Otherwise why would he do it?”
“Could have been a moral thing. Maybe he was driven to do it.”
“Not if it was his first complaint in sixteen years. He must have seen far worse. I only broke one leg and one nose. It was no kind of a big deal. This is the army, Summer. I assume he hadn’t been confusing it with a gardening club all these years.”
“I don’t know,” she said again.
I slid her the slip of paper with 973 written on it.
“That’s our suspect pool,” I said.
“He was in the bar until eight o’clock,” she said. “I checked that too. He left alone. Nobody saw him again after that.”
“Anyone say anything about his mood?”
“Delta guys don’t have moods. Too much danger of appearing human.”
“Had he been drinking?”
“One beer.”
“So he just walked out of the mess at eight, no nerves, no worries?”
“Apparently so.”
“He knew the guy he was meeting,” I said.
Summer said nothing.
“Sanchez called again while you were out,” I said. “Colonel Brubaker was shot in the back of the head. A double tap, close in, from behind.”
“So he knew the guy he was meeting too.”
“Very likely,” I said. “One twenty-three in the morning. Bullet caught his watch. Between three and a half and four and a half hours after Carbone.”
“That puts you in the clear with Delta. You were still here at one twenty-three.”
“Yes,” I said. “I was. With Norton.”
“I’ll spread the word.”
“They won’t believe you.”
“Do you think there’s a connection between Carbone and Brubaker?”
“Common sense says there has to be. But I don’t see how. And I don’t see why. I mean, sure, they were both Delta soldiers. But Carbone was here and Brubaker was there, and Brubaker was a high-profile mover and shaker, and Carbone was a nobody who kept himself to himself. Maybe because he thought he had to.”
“You think we’ll ever have gays in the military?”
“We’ve already got gays in the military. We always have had. World War Two, the Western Allies had fourteen million men in uniform. Any kind of reasonable probability says at least a million of them were gay. And we won that war, as I recall, last time I checked with the history books. We won it big time.”
“It’s a hell of a step,” she said.
“They took the same step when they let black soldiers in. And women. Everyone pissed and moaned about that too. Bad for morale, bad for unit cohesion. It was crap then and it’s crap now. Right? You’re here and you’re doing OK.”
“Are you a Catholic?”
I shook my head. “My mother taught us the Latin. She cared about our education. She taught us things, me and my brother, Joe.”
“You should call her.”
“Why?”
“To see how her leg is.”
“Maybe later,” I said.
I went back to the personnel lists and Summer went out and came back in with a map of the Eastern United States. She taped it flat to the wall below the clock and marked our location at Fort Bird with a red push-pin. Then she marked Columbia, South Carolina, where Brubaker had been found. Then she marked Raleigh, North Carolina, where he had been playing golf with his wife. I gave her a clear plastic ruler from my desk drawer and she checked the map’s scale and started calculating times and distances.
“Bear in mind most of us don’t drive as fast as you do,” I said.
“None of you drive as fast as I do,” she said.
She measured four and a half inches between Raleigh and Columbia and called it five to allow for the way U.S. 1 snaked slightly. She held the ruler against the scale in the legend box.
“Two hundred miles,” she said. “So if Brubaker left Raleigh after dinner, he could have been in Columbia by midnight, easily. An hour or so before he died.”
Then she checked the distance between Fort Bird and Columbia. She came up with a hundred and fifty miles, less than I had originally guessed.
“Three hours,” she said. “To be comfortable.”
Then she looked at me.
“It could have been the same guy,” she said. “If Carbone was killed at nine or ten, the same guy could have been in Columbia at midnight or one, ready for Brubaker.”
She put her little finger on the Fort Bird pin.
“Carbone,” she said.
Then she spanned her hand and put her index finger on the Columbia pin.
“Brubaker,” she said. “It’s a definite sequence.”
“It’s a definite guess,” I said.
She didn’t reply.
“Do we know that Brubaker drove down from Raleigh?” I said.
“We can assume he did.”
“We should check with Sanchez,” I said. “See if they found his car anywhere. See if his wife says he took it with him in the first place.”
“OK,” she said. She went out to my sergeant’s desk to make the call. Left me with the interm
inable personnel lists. She came back in ten minutes later.
“He took his car,” she said. “His wife told Sanchez they had two cars up at the hotel. His and hers. They always did it that way because he was always rushing off somewhere and she was always concerned about getting stuck.”
“What kind of car?” I said. I figured she would have asked.
“Chevy Impala SS.”
“Nice car.”
“He left after dinner and his wife’s assumption was that he was driving back here to Bird. That would have been normal. But the car hasn’t turned up anyplace yet. At least, not according to the Columbia PD and the FBI.”
“OK,” I said.
“Sanchez thinks they’re holding out on him, like they know something we don’t.”
“That would be normal too.”
“He’s pressing them. But it’s difficult.”
“It always is.”
“He’ll call us,” she said. “As soon as he gets anywhere.”
We got a call thirty minutes later. But not from Sanchez. Not about Brubaker or Carbone. The call was from Detective Clark, in Green Valley, Virginia. It was about Mrs. Kramer’s case.
“Got something,” he said.
He sounded very pleased with himself. He launched into a blow-by-blow account of the moves he had made. They sounded reasonably intelligent. He had used a map to figure out all the likely approaches to Green Valley from as much as three hundred miles away. Then he had used phone books to compile a list of hardware sources that lay along those approaches. He had started his guys calling them all, one by one, beginning right in the center of the spiderweb. He had figured that crowbar sales would be slow in winter. Major remodeling happens from springtime onward. Nobody wants their walls torn down for kitchen extensions when the weather is cold. So he had expected to get very few positive reports. After three hours he had gotten none at all. People had spent the post-Christmas period buying power drills and electric screwdrivers. Some had bought chainsaws, to keep their wood-burning stoves going. Those with pioneer fantasies had bought axes. But nobody had been interested in inert and prosaic things like crowbars.
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