by Lee Child
Nobody spoke.
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” she said. “I’m seriously conflicted. That’s a completely absurd accusation. I’m astonished you made it.”
Nobody spoke for a long time. Norton smiled, like the main component of her reaction was amusement. Not anger. She closed her eyes and opened them a moment later, like she was erasing the conversation from her memory.
“Is there something missing from the briefcase?” she asked me.
I didn’t answer.
“Help me out here,” she said. “Please. I’m trying to see the point of this extraordinary visit. Is there something missing from Kramer’s briefcase?”
“Vassell and Coomer say not.”
“But?”
“I don’t believe them.”
“You probably should. They’re senior officers.”
I said nothing.
“What does your new CO say?”
“He doesn’t want it pursued. He’s worried about embarrassment.”
“You should be guided by him.”
“I’m an investigator. I have to ask questions.”
“The army is a family,” she said. “We’re all on the same side.”
“Did Vassell or Coomer leave with this briefcase last night?” I said.
Norton closed her eyes again. At first I thought she was just exasperated, but then I realized she was picturing last night’s scene, at the O Club coat check.
“No,” she said. “Neither one of them left with that briefcase.”
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“I’m totally certain.”
“What was their mood during dinner?”
She opened her eyes.
“They were relaxed,” she said. “Like they were passing an empty evening.”
“Did they say why they were at Bird again?”
“General Kramer’s funeral was yesterday, at noon.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I believe Walter Reed released the body and the Pentagon handled the details.”
“Where was the funeral?”
“Arlington Cemetery,” she said. “Where else?”
“That’s three hundred miles away.”
“Approximately. As the crow flies.”
“So why did they come down here for dinner?”
“They didn’t tell me,” she said.
I said nothing.
“Anything else?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“A motel?” she said. “Do I look like the kind of woman who would agree to meet a man in a motel?”
I didn’t answer.
“Dismissed,” she said.
I stood up. Summer did the same. I took Kramer’s briefcase from the center chair and walked out of the room. Summer followed behind me.
“Did you believe her?” Summer asked me.
We were sitting in the Humvee outside the Psy-Ops building. The engine was idling and the heater was blowing hot stale air that smelled of diesel.
“Totally,” I said. “As soon as she didn’t look at the briefcase. She’d have gotten very flustered if she’d ever seen it before. And I certainly believed her about the motel. It would cost you a suite at the Ritz to get in her pants.”
“So what did we learn?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”
“No, we learned that Bird is a very attractive place, apparently. Vassell and Coomer keep coming all the way down here, for no very obvious reason.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“And that Norton thinks we’re a family.”
“Officers,” I said. “What do you expect?”
“You’re an officer. I’m an officer.”
I nodded.
“I was at West Point for four years,” I said. “I should know better. I should have changed my name and come back in as a private. Three promotions, I’d be an E-4 specialist by now. Maybe even an E-5 sergeant. I wish I was.”
“What now?”
I checked my watch. It was close to ten o’clock.
“Sleep,” I said. “First light, we go out looking for a yogurt container.”
thirteen
I had never eaten yogurt myself but I had seen some and my impression was that individual portions came in small pots about two inches wide, which meant you could fit about three hundred of them in a square yard. Which meant you could fit nearly a million and a half of them in an acre. Which meant you could hide a hundred-fifty billion of them inside Fort Bird’s perimeter wire. Which meant that looking for one would be like looking for a single anthrax spore in Yankee Stadium. I did the calculation while I showered and dressed in the predawn darkness.
Then I sat on my bed and waited for some light in the sky. No point in going out there and missing the 1-in-150-billion chance because it was too dark to see properly. But as I sat I started to figure we could narrow the odds by being intelligent about where exactly we looked. The guy with the yogurt obviously made it back from A to B. We knew where A was. A was where Carbone had been killed. And there was a limited choice of places for B. B was either a random hole in the perimeter wire or somewhere among the main post buildings. So if we were smart, we could cut the billions to millions, and find the thing in a hundred years instead of a thousand.
Unless it was already licked clean inside some starving raccoon’s den.
I met Summer in the MP motor pool. She was bright and full of energy but we didn’t talk. There was nothing to say, except that the task we had set for ourselves was impossible. And I guessed neither of us wanted to confirm that out loud. So we didn’t speak. We just picked a Humvee at random and headed out. I drove, for a change, the same three-minute journey I had driven thirty-some hours before.
According to the Humvee’s trip meter we traveled exactly a mile and a half and according to its compass we traveled south and west, and then we arrived at the crime scene. There were still tatters of MP tape on some of the trees. We parked ten yards off the track and got out. I climbed up on the hood and sat on the roof above the windshield. Gazed west and north, and then turned around and gazed east and south. The air was cold. There was a breeze. The landscape was brown and dead and immense. The dawn sun was weak and pale.
“Which way did he go?” I called.
“North and east,” Summer called back.
She sounded pretty sure about it.
“Why?” I called.
She climbed up on the hood and sat next to me.
“He had a vehicle,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because we didn’t find one left out here, and I doubt if they walked.”
“Why?”
“Because if they’d walked, it would have happened closer to where they started. This is at least a thirty-minute walk from anywhere. I don’t see the bad guy concealing a tire iron or a crowbar for thirty solid minutes, not walking side by side. Under a coat, it would make him move like a robot. Carbone would have twigged. So they drove. In the bad guy’s vehicle. He had the weapon under a jacket or something on the backseat. Maybe the knife and the yogurt too.”
“Where did they start?”
“Doesn’t matter. Only thing that matters to us now is where the bad guy went afterward. And if he was in a vehicle, he didn’t drive outward toward the wire. We can assume there are no vehicle-sized holes in it. Man-sized maybe, or deer-sized, but nothing big enough to drive a truck or a car through.”
“OK,” I said.
“So he headed back to the post. He can’t have gone anywhere else. Can’t just drive a vehicle into the middle of nowhere. He drove back along the track and parked his vehicle and went about his business.”
I nodded. Looked at the western horizon ahead of me. Turned and looked north and east, back along the track. Back toward the post. A mile and a half of track. I pictured the aerodynamics of an empty yogurt container. Lightweight plastic, cup-shaped, a torn foil closure flapping like an air brake. I pictured throwing one
, hard. It would sail and stall in the air. It would travel ten feet, tops. A mile and a half of track, ten feet of shoulder, on the left, on the driver’s side. I felt millions shrink to thousands. Then I felt them expand all the way back up to billions.
“Good news and bad news,” I said. “I think you’re right, so you’ve cut the search area down by about ninety-nine percent. Maybe more. Which is good.”
“But?”
“If he was in a vehicle, did he throw it out at all?”
Summer was silent.
“He could have just dropped it on the floor,” I said. “Or chucked it in the back.”
“Not if it was a pool vehicle.”
“So maybe he put it in a sidewalk trash can later, after he parked. Or maybe he took it home with him.”
“Maybe. It’s a fifty-fifty situation.”
“Seventy-thirty at best,” I said.
“We should look anyway.”
I nodded. Braced the palms of my hands on the windshield’s header rail and vaulted down to the ground.
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.
