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.

“How can I help you, Major?” she said. She sounded like she was from Boston and not very pleased about being dragged outside in the middle of the night.

“Something I need you to see,” I said.

“Why?”

“Maybe you’ll have a professional opinion.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re here in North Carolina. It would take me hours to get someone from somewhere else.”

“What kind of someone do you need?”

“Someone in your line of work.”

“I’m aware that I work in a classroom,” she said. “I don’t need constant reminders.”

“What?”

“It seems to be a popular sport here, reminding Andrea Norton that she’s just a bookish academic, while everybody else is out there busy with the real thing.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. I’m new here. I just want first impressions from someone in your line of work, is all.”

“You’re not trying to make a point?”

“I’m trying to get some help.”

She made a face. “OK.”

I offered her my flashlight. “Follow the trail of clothes to the end. Please don’t touch anything. Just fix your first impressions in your mind. Then I’d like to talk to you about them.”

She said nothing. Just took my flashlight from me and set off. She was brightly backlit for the first twenty feet by the MP private’s headlights. His Humvee was still facing the woods. Her shadow danced ahead of her. Then she stepped beyond the range of the headlights’ illumination and I saw her flashlight beam move onward, bobbing and spearing through the darkness. Then I lost sight of it. All that was visible was a faint reflection from the underside of leafless branches, far in the distance, high in the air.

She was gone about ten minutes. Then I saw the flashlight beam sweeping back toward us. She came out of the woods, retracing her steps. She walked right up to me. She looked pale. She clicked the flashlight off and handed it back.

“My office,” she said. “In one hour.”

She got back in Summer’s Humvee and Summer backed up and turned and accelerated away into the dark.

“OK, guys, go to work,” I said. I sat in my truck and watched drifting smoke and flashlight beams quartering the ground and bright blue camera flashes freezing the motion all around me. I radioed my sergeant again and told her to get the base mortuary opened up. Told her to have a pathologist standing by, first thing in the morning. After thirty minutes the ambulance backed up onto the shoulder and my guys loaded a sheet-draped shape into it. They closed the doors and slapped on them and the truck took off. Clear plastic evidence bags were filled and labeled. Crime scene tape was wound between tree trunks. It was tied off in a rough rectangle maybe forty yards by fifty.

I left them to finish up by themselves and drove back through the dark to the main post buildings. Checked with a sentry and got directions to the Psy-Ops facility. It was a low brick structure with green doors and windows that might have housed the quartermaster offices way back when it was built. It was set at a distance from post headquarters, maybe halfway to where Special Forces bunked. There was darkness and silence all around it but there was a light burning in the central hallway and in one of the office windows. I parked my truck and went inside. Made it through gloomy tiled corridors and came to a door with a pebble-glass window set in its upper half. The glass had light behind it and Lt/Col. A. Norton stenciled on it. I knocked and went in. I saw a small neat office. It was clean and it smelled feminine. I didn’t salute again. I figured we were past that point.