Dead end.
"OK," I said. "Forget the whole thing."
"Really?"
"Orders are orders," I said. "The alternative is anarchy and chaos."
I went back to my office and called Rock Creek. I figured Willard would be long gone. He was the type of guy who keeps bankers' hours his whole life. I got hold of a company clerk and asked him to find a copy of the original order moving me from Panama to Bird. It was five minutes before he came back on the line. I spent them reading Summer's lists. They were full of names that meant nothing to me.
"I've got the order here now, sir," the guy on the phone said.
"Who signed it?" I asked him.
"Colonel Garber, sir."
"Thank you," I said, and put the phone down. Then I sat for ten minutes wondering why people were lying to me. Then I forgot all about that question, because my phone rang again and a young MP private on routine base patrol told me we had a homicide victim in the woods. It sounded like a real bad one. My guy had to pause twice to throw up before he got to the end of his report.
Chapter Eight
Most rural army posts are pretty big. Even if the built infrastructure is compact, there is often a huge acreage of spare land reserved around it. This was my first tour at Fort Bird, but I guessed it would be no exception. It would be like a small neat town surrounded by a county-sized horseshoe-shaped government-owned tract of poor sandy earth with low hills and shallow valleys and a thin covering of trees and scrub. Over the post's long life the trees would have imitated the gray ashes of the Ardennes and the mighty firs of Central Europe and the swaying palms of the Middle East. Whole generations of infantry training theory would have come and gone there. There would be old trenches and foxholes and firing pits. There would be bermed rifle ranges and barbed-wire obstacles and isolated huts where psychiatrists would challenge masculine emotional security. There would be concrete bunkers and exact replicas of government offices where Special Forces would train to rescue hostages. There would be cross-country running routes where out-of-shape boot camp inductees would tire and stagger and where some of them would collapse and die. The whole thing would be ringed by miles of ancient rusty wire and claimed for the DoD forever by warning notices fixed to every third fence post.
I called a bunch of specialists and went out to the motor pool and found a Humvee that had a working flashlight in the clip on the dash. Then I fired it up and followed the private's directions south and west of the inhabited areas until I was on a rough sandy track leading straight out into the hinterland. The darkness was absolute. I drove more than a mile and then I saw another Humvee's headlights in the distance. The private's vehicle was parked at a sharp angle about twenty feet off the road and its high beams were shining into the trees and casting long evil shadows deep into the woods. The private himself was leaning up against its hood. His head was bowed and he was looking down at the ground.
First question: How does a guy on motor patrol in the dark spot a corpse hidden way the hell out here, deep in the trees?
I parked next to him and took the flashlight out of the clip and slid out into the cold and immediately understood how. There was a trail of clothing starting in the center of the track. Right on the crown of the camber was a single boot. It was a standard-issue black leather combat boot, old, worn, not very well shined. West of it was a sock, a yard away. Then another boot, another sock, a BDU jacket, an olive drab undershirt. The clothes were all spaced out in a line, like a grotesque parody of the domestic fantasy where you get home and find abandoned lingerie items leading you up the stairs to the bedroom. Except that the jacket and the undershirt were stained dark with blood.
I checked the condition of the ground at the edge of the track. It was rock hard and frosted over. I wasn't going to compromise the scene. I wasn't going to blur any footprints, because there weren't going to be any footprints. So I took a deep breath and followed the trail of clothes to its conclusion. When I got there I understood why my guy had thrown up twice. At his age I might have thrown up three times.
The corpse was facedown in the frozen leaf litter at the base of a tree. Naked. Medium height, compact. It was a white guy, but he was mostly covered in blood. There were bone-deep knife cuts all over his arms and shoulders. From behind I could see that his face looked beaten and swollen. His cheeks were protruding. His dog tags were missing. There was a slim leather belt cinched tight around his neck. It had a brass buckle and the long tail looped away from his head. There was some kind of thick pink-white liquid pooled on his back. He had a broken tree limb rammed up his ass. Below it the ground was black with blood. I guessed when we rolled him over we would find that his genitals had been removed.
I backtracked along the trail of clothes and made it to the road. Stepped over next to the MP private. He was still staring down at the ground.
"Where are we exactly?" I asked him.
"Sir?"
"No question we're still on the base?"
He nodded. "We're a mile inside the fence line. In every direction."
"OK," I said. Jurisdiction was clear. Army guy, army property. "We'll wait here. Nobody gets access in there until I say so. Clear?"
"Sir," he said.
"You're doing a good job," I said.
"You think?"
"You're still on your feet," I said.
I went back to my Humvee and radioed my sergeant. Told her what was up and where and asked her to find Lieutenant Summer and have her call me on the emergency channel. Then I waited. An ambulance arrived two minutes later. Then two Humvees showed up with the crime scene specialists I had called before leaving my office. Guys spilled out. I told them to stand by. There was no burning urgency.
Summer got on the radio within five minutes.
"Dead guy in the woods," I told her. "I want you to find that Psy-Ops woman you were telling me about."
"Lieutenant Colonel Norton?"
"I want you to bring her out here."
"Willard said you can't work with me."
"He said I can't involve you in special unit stuff. This is regular police business."
"Why do you want Norton there?"
"I want to meet her."
She clicked off and I got out of my truck. Joined the medics and the forensics people. We all stood around in the cold. We kept our engines running to keep the batteries charged and the heaters working. Clouds of diesel smoke drifted and pooled and formed horizontal strata, like smog. I told the crime scene people to start listing the clothing on the road. I told them not to touch it and not to leave the track.
We waited. There was no moon. No stars. No light and no sound beyond our headlights and our idling diesels. I thought about Leon Garber. Korea was one of the biggest branch offices the U.S. Army has to offer. Not the most glamorous, but probably the most active and certainly the most difficult. MP command out there was a feather in anyone's cap. It meant he would probably retire with two stars, which was way more than he could have ever hoped for. If my brother was right and axes were getting ready to fall, then Leon had already come out on the right side of the cut. I was happy for him. For about ten minutes. Then I started looking at his situation from a different perspective. I worried at it for another ten minutes and got nowhere with it.
Summer showed up before I was finished thinking. She was driving a Humvee and she had a bareheaded blonde woman in BDUs about four feet away from her in the front passenger seat. She stopped the truck in the center of the track with her headlights full on us. She stayed in the vehicle and the blonde got out and scanned the crowd and stepped into the matrix of headlight beams and made straight for me. I saluted her out of courtesy and checked her nametape. It said: Norton. She had a light colonel's oak leaves sewn on her lapels. She was a little older than me, but not much. She was tall and thin and had the kind of face that should have made her an actress or a model.