seventeen

Sanchez told us the Columbia medical examiners had found confused lividity patterns on Brubaker’s body that in their opinion meant he had been dead about three hours before being tossed in the alley. Lividity is what happens to a person’s blood after death. The heart stops, blood pressure collapses, liquid blood drains and sinks and settles into the lowest parts of the body under the simple force of gravity. It rests there and over a period of time it stains the skin liverish purple. Somewhere between three and six hours later the color fixes permanently, like a developed photograph. A guy who falls down dead on his back will have a pale chest and a purple back. Vice versa for a guy who falls down dead on his front. But Brubaker’s lividity was all over the place. The Columbia medical examiners figured he had been killed, then kept on his back for about three hours, then dumped in the alley on his front. They were pretty confident about their estimate of the three-hour duration, because three hours was the point where the stains would first start to fix. They said he had signs of early fixed lividity on his back and major fixed lividity on his front. They also said he had a broad stripe across the middle of his back where the dead flesh had been partially cooked.

“He was in the trunk of a car,” I said.

“Right over the muffler,” Sanchez said. “Three-hour journey, plenty of temperature.”

“This changes a lot of things.”

“It explains why they never found his Chevy in Columbia.”

“Or any witnesses,” I said. “Or the shell cases or the bullets.”

“So what are we looking at?”

“Three hours in a car?” I said. “At night, with empty roads? Anything up to a two-hundred-mile radius.”

“That’s a pretty big circle,” Sanchez said.

“A hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles,” I said. “Approximately. Pi times the radius squared. What’s the Columbia PD doing about it?”

“Dropping it like a hot potato. It’s an FBI case now.”

“What does the Bureau think about the dope thing?”

“They’re a little skeptical. They figure heroin isn’t our bag. They figure we’re more into marijuana and amphetamines.”

“I wish,” I said. “I could use a little of both right now.”

“On the other hand they know Delta guys go all over. Pakistan, South America. Which is where heroin comes from. So they’ll keep it in their back pocket, in case they don’t get anywhere, just like the Columbia PD was going to.”

“They’re wasting their time. Heroin? A guy like Brubaker would die first.”

“They’re thinking maybe he did.”

His end of the line clicked off. I killed the speaker and put the handset back.

“It happened to the north, probably,” Summer said. “Brubaker started out in Raleigh. We should be looking for his car somewhere up there.”

“Not our case,” I said.

“OK, the FBI should be looking.”

“I’m sure they already are.”

There was a knock at the door. It opened up and an MP corporal came in with sheets of paper under his arm. He saluted smartly and stepped a pace forward and placed the sheets of paper on my desk. Stepped the same pace back and saluted again.

“Copies of the gate log, sir,” he said. “First through fourth of this month, times as requested.”

He turned around and walked back out of the room. Closed the door. I looked at the pile of paper. There were about seven sheets in it. Not too bad.

“Let’s go to work,” I said.

 

Operation Just Cause helped us again. The raised DefCon level meant a lot of leave had been canceled. No real reason, because the Panama thing was no kind of a big deal, but that was how the military worked. No point in having DefCon levels if they couldn’t be raised up and dropped down, no point in moving them at all if there weren’t any associated consequences. No point in staging little foreign dramas unless the whole establishment felt a remote and vicarious thrill.

No point in canceling leave without giving people something to fill their time either. So there were extra training sessions and daily readiness exercises. Most of them were arduous and started early. Therefore the big bonus for us was that almost everyone who had gone out to celebrate New Year’s Eve was back on-post and in the rack relatively early. They must have straggled back around three or four or five in the morning, because there was very little gate activity recorded after six.

Incoming personnel during the eighteen hours we were looking at on New Year’s Day totaled nineteen. Summer and I were two of them, returning from Green Valley and D.C. after the widow trip and the visit to Walter Reed. We crossed ourselves off the list.

Incoming personnel other than ourselves on January second totaled sixteen. Twelve, on January third. Seventeen, before 2000 hours on January fourth. Sixty-two names in total, during the eighty-six-hour window. Nine of them were civilian delivery drivers. We crossed them off. Eleven of them were repeats. They had come in, gone out, come in again. Like commuters. My night-duty sergeant was one of them. We crossed her off, because she was a woman. And short. Elsewhere we deleted the second and any subsequent entries in each case.

We ended up with forty-one individuals, listed by name, rank, and initial. No way of telling which were men and which were women. No way of telling which of the men were tall and strong and right-handed.

“I’ll work on the genders,” Summer said. “I’ve still got the basic strength lists. They have full names on them.”

I nodded. Left her to it. Got on the phone and scared up the pathologist and asked him to meet me in the mortuary, right away.

 

I drove our Chevy between my office and his because I didn’t want to be seen walking around with a crowbar. I parked outside the mortuary entrance and waited. The guy showed up inside five minutes, walking, from the direction of the O Club. I probably interrupted his dessert. Or maybe even his main course. I slid out to meet him and leaned back in and took the crowbar out of the backseat. He glanced at it. Led me inside. He seemed to understand what I wanted to do. He unlocked his office and hit the lights and unlocked his drawer. Opened it and lifted out the crowbar that had killed Carbone. Laid it on his desk. I laid the borrowed specimen next to it. Pulled the tissue paper off it. Lined it up at the same angle. It was exactly identical.

“Are there wide variations?” the pathologist asked. “With crowbars?”

“More than you would think,” I said. “I just had a big crowbar lesson.”

“These two look the same.”

“They are the same. They’re peas in a pod. Count on it. They’re custom-made. They’re unique in all the world.”

“Did you ever meet Carbone?”

“Very briefly,” I said.

“What was his posture like?”

“In what way?”

“Did he stoop?”

I thought back to the dim interior of the lounge bar. To the hard light in the parking lot. Shook my head.

“He wasn’t tall enough to stoop,” I said. “He was a wiry guy, solid, stood up pretty straight. Kind of on the balls of his feet. He looked athletic.”

“OK.”

“Why?”

“It was a downward blow. Not a downward chop, but a horizontal swing that dipped as it hit. Maybe it was just below horizontal. Carbone was seventy inches tall. The wound was sixty-five inches off the ground, assuming he wasn’t stooping. But it was delivered from above. So his attacker was tall.”

“You told us that already,” I said.

“No, I mean tall,” he said. “I’ve been working on it. Mapping it out. The guy had to be six-four or six-five.”

“Like me,” I said.

“And as heavy as you too. Not easy to break a skull as badly as that.”

I thought back to the crime scene. It had been pocked with small hummocks of dead grass and there were wrist-thick branches here and there on the ground, but it was basically a flat area. No way one guy could have been standing higher than the other. No way of assuming a relative height difference when there really wasn’t one.

“Six-four or six-five,” I said. “Are you prepared to go to bat on that?”

“In court?”

“It was a training accident,” I said. “We’re not going to court. This is just between you and me. Am I wasting my time looking at people less than six feet four inches tall?”

The doctor breathed in, breathed out.

“Six-three,” he said. “To be on the safe side. To allow a margin for experimental error. I’d go to bat on six-three. Count on it.”

“OK,” I said.

He shooed me out the door and hit the lights and locked up again.

 

Summer was sitting behind my desk when I got back, doing nothing. She was through with the gender analysis. It hadn’t taken her long. The strength lists were comprehensive and accurate and alphabetical, like most army paperwork.

“Thirty-three men,” she told me. “Twenty-three enlisted, ten officers.”

“Who are they?”

“A little bit of everything. Delta and Ranger leave was completely canceled, but they had evening passes. Carbone himself was in and out on the first, obviously.”

“We can cross him off.”

“OK, thirty-two men,” she said. “The pathologist is one of them.”

“We can take him out too.”

“Thirty-one, then,” she said. “And Vassell and Coomer are still in there. In and out on the first and in again on the fourth at seven o’clock.”

“Take them out,” I said. “They were eating dinner. Fish, and steak.”

“Twenty-nine,” she said. “Twenty-two enlisted, seven officers.”

“OK,” I said. “Now go to Post HQ and pull their medical records.”

“Why?”

“To find out how tall they are.”

“Can’t do that for the driver Vassell and Coomer had on New Year’s Day. Major Marshall. He was a visitor. His records won’t be here.”

“He wasn’t here the night Carbone died,” I said. “So you can take him out, too.”

“Twenty-eight.”

“So go pull twenty-eight sets of records,” I said.

She slid me a slip of white paper. I picked it up. It was the one I had written 973 on. Our original suspect pool.

“We’re making progress,” she said.

I nodded. She smiled and stood up. Walked out the door. I took her place behind the desk. The chair was warm from her body. I savored the feeling, until it went away. Then I picked up the phone. Asked my sergeant to get the post quartermaster on the line. It took her a few minutes to find him. I figured she had to drag him out of the mess hall. I figured I had just ruined his dinner too, as well as the pathologist’s. But then, I hadn’t eaten anything yet myself.

“Yes, sir?” the guy said. He sounded a little annoyed.

“I’ve got a question, Chief,” I said. “Something only you will know.”

“Like what?”

“Average height and weight for a male U.S. Army soldier.”

The guy said nothing, but I felt his annoyance fade away. The Quartermaster Corps buys millions of uniforms a year, and twice as many boots, all on a budget, so you can bet it knows the tale of the tape to the nearest half-inch and the nearest half-ounce. It can’t afford not to, literally. And it loves to show off its specialized knowledge.

“No problem,” the guy said. “Male adult population aged twenty to fifty as a whole in America goes five-nine and a half, and one seventy-eight. We’re overrepresented with Hispanics by comparison with the nation as a whole, which brings our median height down one whole inch to five-eight and a half. We train pretty hard, which brings our median weight up three pounds to one eighty-one, muscle being generally heavier than fat.”

“Those are this year’s figures?”

“Last year’s,” he said. “This year is only a few days old.”

“What’s the spread in height?”

“What are you looking for?”

“How many guys have we got six-three or better?”

“One in ten,” he said. “In the army as a whole, maybe ninety thousand. Call it a Super Bowl crowd. On a post this size, maybe a hundred and twenty. Call it a half-empty airplane.”

“OK, Chief,” I said. “Thanks.”

I hung up. One in ten. Summer was going to come back with twenty-eight medical charts. Nine out of ten of them were going to be for guys too small to worry about. So out of twenty-eight, if we were lucky, only two of them would need looking at. Three, if we were unlucky. Two or three, down from nine hundred seventy-three. Making progress. I looked at the clock. Eight-thirty. I smiled to myself. Shit happens, Willard, I thought.

 

Shit happened, for sure, but it happened to us, not Willard. Averages and medians played their little arithmetic tricks and Summer came back with twenty-eight charts and all twenty-eight of them were for short guys. Tallest among them was a marginal six-foot-one, and he was a reed-thin one hundred sixty pounds, and he was a padre.

Once when I was a kid we lived for a month in an off-post bungalow somewhere. It had no dining table. My mother called people and had one delivered. It came packed flat in a carton. I tried to help her put it together. All the parts were there. There was a laminated tabletop, and four chrome legs, and four big steel bolts. We laid them out on the floor in the dining nook. The top, four legs, four bolts. But there was no way to fit them together. No way at all. It was some kind of an inexplicable design. Nothing would join up. We knelt side by side and worked on it. We sat cross-legged on the floor, with the dust bunnies and the cockroaches. The smooth chrome was cold in my hands. The edges were rough, where the laminate was shaped on the corners. We couldn’t put it together. Joe came in, and tried, and failed. My dad tried, and failed. We ate in the kitchen for a month. We were still trying to put that table together when we moved out. Now I felt like I was wrestling with it all over again. Nothing went together. Everything looked good at first, and then everything stalled and died.

“The crowbar didn’t walk in by itself,” Summer said. “One of those twenty-eight names brought it in. Obviously. It can’t have gotten here any other way.”

I said nothing.

“Want dinner?” she said.

“I think better when I’m hungry,” I said.

“We’ve run out of things to think about.”

I nodded. Gathered the twenty-eight medical charts together and piled them neatly. Put Summer’s original list of thirty-three names on top. Thirty-three, minus Carbone, because he didn’t bring the crowbar in himself and commit suicide with it. Minus the pathologist, because he wasn’t a convincing suspect, and because he was short, and because his practice swings with the crowbar had been weak. Minus Vassell and Coomer and their driver, Marshall, because their alibis were too good. Vassell and Coomer had been stuffing their faces, and Marshall hadn’t even come at all.

“Why wasn’t Marshall here?” I said.

Summer nodded. “That’s always bothered me. It’s like Vassell and Coomer had something to hide from him.”

“All they did was eat dinner.”

“But Marshall must have been right there at Kramer’s funeral with them. So they must have specifically told him not to drive them here. Like a positive order to get out of the car and stay home.”

I nodded. Pictured the long line of black government sedans at Arlington National Cemetery, under a leaden January sky. Pictured the ceremony, the folding of the flag, the salute from the riflemen. The shuffling procession back to the cars, bareheaded men with their chins ducked into their collars against the cold, maybe snow in the air. I pictured Marshall holding the Mercury’s rear doors, for Vassell first, then for Coomer. He must have driven them back to the Pentagon lot and then gotten out and watched Coomer move up into the driver’s seat.

“We should talk to him,” I said. “Find out exactly what they told him. What kind of reason they gave him. It must have been a slightly awkward moment. A blue-eyed boy like that must have felt a little excluded.”

I picked up the phone and spoke to my sergeant. Asked her to get a number for Major Marshall. Told her he was a XII Corps staffer based at the Pentagon. She said she would get back to me. Summer and I sat quiet and waited. I gazed at the map on the wall. I figured we should take the pin out of Columbia. It distorted the picture. Brubaker hadn’t been killed there. He had been killed somewhere else. North, south, east, or west.

“Are you going to call Willard?” Summer asked me.

“Probably,” I said. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

“Not before midnight?”

“I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.”

“That’s a risk.”

“I’m protected,” I said.

“Might not last forever.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll have Delta Force coming after me soon. That’ll make everything else seem kind of academic.”

“Call Willard tonight,” she said. “That would be my advice.”

I looked at her.

“As a friend,” she said. “AWOL is a big deal. No point making things worse.”

“OK,” I said.

“Do it now,” she said. “Why not?”

“OK,” I said again. I reached out for the phone but before I could get my hand on it my sergeant put her head in the door. She told us Major Marshall was no longer based in the United States. His temporary detached duty had been prematurely terminated. He had been recalled to Germany. He had been flown out of Andrews Air Force Base late in the morning of the fifth of January.

“Whose orders?” I asked her.

“General Vassell’s,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

She closed the door.

“The fifth of January,” Summer said.

“The morning after Carbone and Brubaker died,” I said.

“He knows something.”

“He wasn’t even here.”

“Why else would they hide him away afterward?”

“It’s a coincidence.”

“You don’t like coincidences.”

I nodded.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s go to Germany.”