"Got something," he said.
He sounded very pleased with himself. He launched into a blow-by-blow account of the moves he had made. They sounded reasonably intelligent. He had used a map to figure out all the likely approaches to Green Valley from as much as three hundred miles away. Then he had used phone books to compile a list of hardware sources that lay along those approaches. He had started his guys calling them all, one by one, beginning right in the center of the spiderweb. He had figured that crowbar sales would be slow in winter. Major remodeling happens from springtime onward. Nobody wants their walls torn down for kitchen extensions when the weather is cold. So he had expected to get very few positive reports. After three hours he had gotten none at all. People had spent the post-Christmas period buying power drills and electric screwdrivers. Some had bought chainsaws, to keep their wood-burning stoves going. Those with pioneer fantasies had bought axes. But nobody had been interested in inert and prosaic things like crowbars.
So he made a lateral jump and fired up his crime databases. Originally he planned to look for reports of other crimes that involved doors and crowbars. He thought that might narrow down a location. He didn't find anything that matched his parameters. But instead, right there on his NCIC computer, he found a burglary at a small hardware store in Sperryville, Virginia. The store was a lonely place on a dead-end street. According to the owner the front window had been kicked in sometime in the early hours of New Year's Day. Because it was a holiday, there had been no money left in the register. As far as the store owner could tell, the only thing that had been stolen was a single crowbar.
Summer stepped back to the map on the wall and put a pushpin through the center of Sperryville, Virginia. Sperryville was a small place and the plastic barrel of the pin obscured it completely. Then she put another pin through Green Valley. The two pins finished up about a quarter-inch apart. They were almost touching. They represented about ten miles of separation.
"Look at this," Summer said.
I got up and stepped over. Looked at the map. Sperryville was on the elbow of a crooked road that ran southwest to Green Valley and beyond. In the other direction it didn't really go anywhere at all except Washington D.C. So Summer put a pin in Washington D.C. She put the tip of her little finger on it. Put her middle finger on Sperryville and her index finger on Green Valley.
"Vassell and Coomer," she said. "They left D.C., they stole the crowbar in Sperryville, they broke into Mrs. Kramer's house in Green Valley."
"Except they didn't," I said. "They were just in from the airport. They didn't have a car. And they didn't call for one. You checked the phone records yourself."
She said nothing.
"Plus they're lard-ass staff officers," I said. "They wouldn't know how to burgle a hardware store if their lives depended on it."
She took her hand off the map. I stepped back to my desk and sat down again and butted the personnel lists into a neat pile.
"We need to concentrate on Carbone," I said.
"Then we need a new plan," she said. "Detective Clark is going to stop looking for crowbars now. He's found the one he's interested in."
I nodded. "Back to traditional time-honored methods of investigation."
"Which are?"
"I don't really know. I went to West Point. I didn't go to MP school."
My phone rang. I picked it up. The same warm Southern voice I had heard before went through the same 10-33, 10-16 from Jackson routine I had heard before. I acknowledged and hit the speaker button and leaned all the way back in my chair and waited. The room filled with electronic hum. Then there was a click.
"Reacher?" Sanchez said.
"And Lieutenant Summer," I said. "We're on the speaker."
"Anyone else in the room?"
"No," I said.
"Door closed?"
"Yes. What's up?"
"Columbia PD came through again, is what. They're feeding me stuff bit by bit. And they're having themselves a real good time doing it. They're gloating like crazy."
"Why?"
"Because Brubaker had heroin in his pocket, that's why. Three dime bags of brown. And a big wad of cash money. They're saying it was a drug deal that went bad."
Chapter Fifteen
I was born in 1960, which made me seven during the Summer of Love, and thirteen at the end of our effective involvement in Vietnam, and fifteen at the end of our official involvement there. Which meant I missed most of the American military's collision with narcotics. The heavy-duty Purple Haze years passed me by. I had caught the later, stable phase. Like many soldiers I had smoked a little weed from time to time, maybe just enough to develop a preference among different strains and sources, but nowhere near enough to put me high on the list of U.S. users in terms of lifetime volume consumed. I was a part-timer. I was one of those guys who bought, not sold.
But as an MP, I had seen plenty sold. I had seen drug deals. I had seen them succeed, and I had seen them fail. I knew the drill. And one thing I knew for sure was that if a bad deal ends up with a dead guy on the floor, there's nothing in the dead guy's pocket. No cash, no product. No way. Why would there be? If the dead guy was the buyer, the seller runs away with his dope intact and the buyer's cash. If the dead guy was the seller, then the buyer gets the whole stash for free. The deal money walks right back home with him. Either way someone takes a nice big profit in exchange for a couple of bullets and a little rummaging around.
"It's bullshit, Sanchez," I said. "It's faked."
"Of course it is. I know that."
"Did you make that point?"
"Did I need to? They're civilians, but they ain't stupid."
"So why are they gloating?"
"Because it gives them a free pass. If they can't close the case, they can just write it off. Brubaker ends up looking bad, not them."
"They found any witnesses yet?"
"Not a one."
"Shots were fired," I said. "Someone must have heard something."
"Not according to the cops."
"Willard is going to freak," I said.
"That's the least of our problems."
"Are you alibied?"
"Me? Do I need to be?"
"Willard's going to be looking for leverage. He's going to use anything he can invent to get you to toe the line."
Sanchez didn't answer right away. Some kind of electronic circuitry in the phone line brought the background hiss up loud to cover the silence. Then he spoke over it.
"I think I'm fireproof here," he said. "It's the Columbia PD making the accusations, not me."
"Just take care," I said.
"Bet on it," he said.
I clicked the phone off. Summer was thinking. Her face was tense and her lower lids were moving.
"What?" I said.
"You sure it was faked?" she said.
"Had to be," I said.
"OK," she said. "Good." She was still standing next to the map. She put her hand back on it. Little finger on the Fort Bird pin, index finger on the Columbia pin. "We agree that it was faked. We're sure of it. So there's a pattern now. The drugs and the money in Brubaker's pocket are the exact same thing as the branch up Carbone's ass and the yogurt on his back. Elaborate misdirection. Concealment of the true motive. It's a definite MO. It's not just a guess anymore. The same guy did both. He killed Carbone here and then jumped in his car and drove down to Columbia and killed Brubaker there. It's a clear sequence. Everything fits. Times, distances, the way the guy thinks."