"So did you get anywhere?"
"Not really," he said. "But I can prove an incoming secure fax from Germany late on December thirtieth, and I can prove significant Xeroxing activity on the thirty-first, in the afternoon. And then there was some shredding and burning on New Year's Day, after the Kramer news broke. I spoke to the incinerator guy. One burn bag, full of paper shreds, maybe enough for about sixty sheets."
"How secure is their secure fax line?"
"How secure do you want it to be?"
"Extremely secure. Because the only way I can make sense out of this is if the agenda was really secret. I mean, really secret. And if it was really secret, would they have put it on paper in the first place?"
"They're XII Corps, Reacher. They've been living on the front line for forty years. All they've got is secrets."
"How many people were scheduled to attend the conference?"
"I spoke to the mess. There were fifteen bag lunches booked."
"Sixty pages, fifteen people, that's a four-page agenda, then."
"Looks that way. But they went up in smoke."
"Not the original that was faxed from Germany," I said.
"They'll have burned that one over there."
"No, my guess is Kramer was hand-carrying it when he died."
"So where is it now?"
"Nobody knows. It got away."
"Is it worth chasing?"
"Nobody knows," I said again. "Except the guy who wrote it, and he's dead. And Vassell and Coomer. They must have seen it. They probably helped with it."
"Vassell and Coomer went back to Germany. This morning. First flight out of Dulles. The staffers here were talking about it."
"You ever met this new guy Willard?" I asked him.
"No."
"Try not to. He's an asshole."
"Thanks for the warning. What did we do to deserve him?"
"I have no idea," I said. We hung up and I dialed the Virginia number and asked for Detective Clark. I got put on hold. Then I heard a click and a second's worth of squad room sounds and a voice came on the line.
"Clark," it said.
"Reacher," I said. "U.S. Army, down at Fort Bird. Did you want me?"
"You wanted me, as I recall," Clark said. "You wanted a progress report on Mrs. Kramer. But there isn't any progress. We're looking at a brick wall here. We're looking for help, actually."
"Nothing I can do. It's your case."
"I wish it wasn't," he said.
"What have you got?"
"Lots of nothing. The perp was in and out without maybe touching a thing. Gloves, obviously. There was a light frost on the ground. We've got some residual grit from the driveway and the path, but we're not even close to a footprint."
"Neighbors see anything?"
"Most of them were out, or drunk. It was New Year's Eve. I've had people up and down the street canvassing, but nothing's jumping out at me. There were some cars around, but there would be anyway, on New Year's Eve, with folks heading back and forth to parties."
"Any tire tracks on the driveway?"
"None that mean anything."
I said nothing.
"The victim was killed with a crowbar," Clark said. "Probably the same tool as was used on the door."
"I figured that," I said.
"After the attack the perp wiped it on the rug and then washed it clean in the kitchen sink. We found stuff in the pipe. No prints on the faucet. Gloves, again."
I said nothing.
"Something else we haven't got," Clark said. "There's nothing much to say your general ever really lived there."
"Why?"
"We gave it the full-court press, forensically. We printed the whole place, we took hair and fiber from everywhere including the sink and shower traps, like I said. Everything belonged to the victim except a couple of stray prints. Bingo, we thought, but the database brought them back as the husband's. And the ratio of hers to his suggests he was hardly there over the last five years or so. Is that usual?"
"He'll have stayed on-post a lot," I said. "But he should have been home for the holidays every year. The story here is that the marriage wasn't so great."
"People like that should just go ahead and get divorced," Clark said. "I mean, that's not a deal-breaker even for a general, right?"
"Not that I've heard," I said. "Not anymore."
Then he went quiet for a minute. He was thinking.
"How bad was the marriage?" he asked. "Bad enough that we should be looking at the husband for the doer?"
"The timing doesn't work," I said. "He was dead when it happened."
"Was there money involved?"
"Nice house," I said. "Probably hers."
"So what about a paid hit, maybe set up way ahead of time?"
Now he was really clutching at straws.
"He'd have arranged it for when he was away in Germany."
Clark said nothing to that.
"Who called you for this progress report?" I asked him.
"You did," he said. "An hour ago."
"I don't recall doing that."
"Not you personally," he said. "Your people. It was the little black chick I met at the scene. Your lieutenant. I was too busy to talk. She gave me a number, but I left it somewhere. So I called back on the number you gave me originally. Did I do wrong?"
"No," I said. "You did fine. Sorry we can't help you."
We hung up. I sat quiet for a moment and then I buzzed my corporal.
"Ask Lieutenant Summer to come see me," I said.
Summer showed up inside ten minutes. She was in BDUs and between her face and her body language I could see she was feeling a little nervous of me and a little contemptuous of me all at the same time. I let her sit down and then I launched right into it.
"Detective Clark called back," I said.
She said nothing.
"You disobeyed my direct order," I said.
She said nothing.
"Why?" I asked.
"Why did you give me the order?"
"Why do you think?"
"Because you're toeing Willard's line."
"He's the CO," I said. "It's a good line to toe."
"I don't agree."
"You're in the army now, Summer. You don't obey orders just because you agree with them."
"We don't cover things up just because we're told to either."
"We do," I said. "We do that all the time. We always have."
"Well, we shouldn't."
"Who made you Chief of Staff?"
"It's unfair to Carbone and Mrs. Kramer," she said. "They're innocent victims."
I paused. "Why did you start with Mrs. Kramer? You see her as more important than Carbone?"
Summer shook her head. "I didn't start with Mrs. Kramer. I got to her second. I had already started on Carbone. I went through the personnel lists and the gate log and marked who was here at the time and who wasn't."
"You gave me that paperwork."
"I copied it first."
"You're an idiot," I said.
"Why? Because I'm not chicken?"
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-five."
"OK," I said. "So next year you'll be twenty-six. You'll be a twenty-six-year-old black woman with a dishonorable discharge from the only career you've ever had. Meanwhile the civilian job market will be flooded because of force reduction and you'll be competing with people with chests full of medals and pockets full of testimonials. So what are you going to do? Starve? Go work up at the strip club with Sin?"