"It doesn't add up," Summer said. "Whoever's playing on your side is willing to let Garber go but is powerful enough to keep you here, even with the civilian complaint on the table. Powerful enough that Willard knew he couldn't proceed against you, even though he probably wanted to. You know what that means?"
"Yes," I said. "I do."
She looked straight at me.
"It means you're seen as more important than Garber," she said. "Garber's gone, and you're still here."
Then she looked away and went quiet.
"Permission to speak freely, Lieutenant," I said.
She looked back at me.
"You're not more important than Garber," she said. "You can't be."
I yawned again.
"No argument from me," I said. "Not on that particular subject. This is not about a choice between me and Garber."
She paused. Then she nodded.
"No," she said. "It isn't. This is about a choice between Fort Bird and Rock Creek. Fort Bird is seen as more important. What's happening here on the post is seen as more sensitive than what's happening at special unit headquarters."
"Agreed," I said. "But what the hell is happening here?"
Chapter Nine
I took the first tentative step toward finding out at one minute past seven the next morning, in Fort Bird's mortuary. I had slept for three hours and I hadn't eaten breakfast. There aren't many hard-and-fast rules involved in military crime investigation. Mostly we depend on instinct and improvisation. But one of the few rules that exist is: You don't eat before you walk into an army postmortem.
So I spent the breakfast hour with the crime scene report. It was a fairly thick file, but it had no useful information in it. It listed all the recovered uniform items and described them in minute detail. It described the corpse. It listed times and temperatures. All the thousands of words were backed by dozens of Polaroid photographs. But neither the words nor the pictures told me what I needed to know.
I put the file in my desk drawer and called the Provost Marshal's office for any AWOL or UA reports. The dead guy might have been missed already, and we might have been able to pick up on his identity that way. But there were no reports. Nothing out of the ordinary. The post was humming along with all its ducks in a row.
I walked out into the morning cold.
The mortuary had been custom-built during the Eisenhower administration and it was still fit for its purpose. We weren't looking for a high degree of sophistication. This wasn't the civilian world. We knew last night's victim hadn't slipped on a banana skin. I didn't much care which particular injury had been the fatal one. All I wanted to know was an approximate time of death, and who he was.
There was a tiled lobby inside the main doors with exits to the left, the center, and the right. If you went left, you found the offices. If you went right, you found cold storage. I went straight ahead, where knives cut and saws whined and water sluiced.
There were two dished metal tables set in the center of the room. They had bright lights above them and noisy drains below. They were surrounded by greengrocer scales hanging on chains ready to weigh excised organs, and by rolling steel carts with empty glass jars ready to receive them, and other carts with rows of knives and saws and shears and pliers lying ready for use on green canvas sheets. The whole place was glazed with white subway tiles and the air was cold and sweet with the smell of formaldehyde.
The right-hand table was clean and empty. The left-hand table was surrounded by people. There was a pathologist and an assistant and a clerk taking notes. Summer was there, standing back, observing. They were maybe halfway through the process. The tools were all in use. Some of the glass jars were filled. The drain was sucking loudly. I could see the corpse's legs through the crowd. They had been washed. They looked blue-white under the lamps above them. All the smeared dirt and blood was gone.
I stood next to Summer and took a look. The dead guy was on his back. They had taken the top of his skull off. They had cut around the center of his forehead and peeled the skin of his face down. It was lying there inside out, like a blanket pulled down on a bed. It reached to his chin. His cheekbones and his eyeballs were exposed. The pathologist was dissecting his brain, looking for something. He had used the saw on his skull and popped the top off like a lid.
"What's the story?" I asked him.
"We got fingerprints," he said.
"I faxed them in," Summer said. "We'll know today."
"Cause of death?"
"Blunt trauma," the doctor said. "To the back of the head. Three heavy blows, with something like a tire iron, I should think. All this dramatic stuff is postmortem. Pure window dressing."
"Any defensive injuries?"
"Not a thing," the doctor said. "This was a surprise attack. Out of the blue. There was no fight, no struggle."
"How many assailants?"
"I'm not a magician. The fatal blows were probably all delivered by the same individual. I can't tell if there were others standing around and watching."
"Best guess?"
"I'm a scientist, not a guesser."
"One assailant only," Summer said. "Just a feeling."
I nodded.
"Time of death?" I asked.
"Hard to be sure," the doctor said. "Nine or ten last night, probably. But don't take that to the bank."
I nodded again. Nine or ten would make sense. Well after dark, several hours before any reasonable expectation of discovery. Plenty of time for the bad guy to lure him out there, and then to be somewhere else when the alarms sounded.
"Was he killed at the scene?" I asked.
The pathologist nodded.
"Or very close to it," he said. "No medical signs to suggest otherwise."
"OK," I said. I glanced around. The broken tree limb was lying on a cart. Next to it was a jar with a penis and two testicles in it.
"In his mouth?" I said.
The pathologist nodded again. Said nothing.
"What kind of a knife?"
"Probably a K-bar," he said.
"Great," I said. K-bars had been manufactured by the tens of millions for the last fifty years. They were as common as medals.
"The knife was used by a right-handed person," the doctor said.
"And the tire iron?"
"Same."
"OK," I said.
"The fluid was yogurt," the doctor said.
"Strawberry or raspberry?"
"I didn't do a taste test."
Next to the jars of organs was a short stack of four Polaroid photographs. They were all of the fatal wound site. The first one was as-discovered. The guy's hair was relatively long and dirty and matted with blood and I couldn't make out much detail. The second was with the blood and dirt rinsed away. The third was with the hair cut back with scissors. The fourth was with the hair completely shaved away, with a razor.
"How about a crowbar?" I asked.
"Possible," the doctor said. "Maybe better than a tire iron. I took a plaster cast, anyway. You bring me the weapon, I'll tell you yes or no."
I stepped in a little and took a closer look. The corpse was very clean. It was gray and white and pink. It smelled faintly of soap, as well as blood and other rich organic odors. The groin was a mess. Like a butcher's shop. The knife cuts on the arms and the shoulders were deep and obvious. I could see muscle and bone. The edges of the wounds were blue and cold. The blade had gone right through a tattoo on his left upper arm. An eagle was holding a scroll with Mother written on it. Overall, the guy was not a pleasant sight. But he was in better shape than I had feared he would be.