"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."
Chapter 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."