“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not that smart.”

I stopped in my outer office and the sergeant with the baby son gave me coffee. Then I went into my inner office and found Summer waiting for me there. She had come to collect her lists, because the Kramer case was closed.

“Did you check the other women?” I asked her. “Apart from Norton?”

She nodded. “They all have alibis. It’s the best night of the year for alibis. Nobody spends New Year’s Eve alone.”

“I did,” I said.

She said nothing back. I butted the papers into a neat stack and put them back inside their folder and unclipped the note off the front. Hope your mom was OK. I dropped the note in my drawer and handed the file to her.

“What did Norton tell you?” she asked.

“She agreed with me that it was homicide dressed up to look like gay-bashing. I asked her if any of the symbols came from Psy-Ops classes and she didn’t really say yes or no. She said they were psychologically generic. She resented being asked.”

“So what now?”

I yawned. I was tired. “We’ll work it like we work any of them. We don’t even know who the victim is yet. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow. On deck at seven, OK?”

“OK,” she said, and headed for my door, carrying her file.

“I called Rock Creek,” I said. “Asked a clerk to find their copy of the order bringing me here from Panama.”

“And?”

“He said it’s got Garber’s signature on it.”

“But?”

“That’s not possible. Garber got me on the phone on New Year’s Eve and was surprised I was here.”

“Why would a clerk lie?”

“I don’t think a clerk would. I think the signature is a forgery.”

“Is that conceivable?”

“It’s the only explanation. Garber couldn’t have forgotten he’d transferred me here forty-eight hours previously.”

“So what’s this all about?”

“I have no idea. Someone somewhere is playing chess. My brother told me I should find out who wants me here bad enough to pull me out of Panama and replace me with an asshole. So I tried to find out. And now I’m thinking maybe we should be asking the same question about Garber. Who wants him out of Rock Creek bad enough to replace him with an asshole?”

“But Korea has to be a genuine merit promotion, doesn’t it?”

“Garber deserves it, no question,” I said. “Except it’s too early. It’s a one-star job. DoD has to bring it to the Senate. That process happens in the fall, not in January. This was a panic move, spur of the moment.”

“But that would be pointless chess,” Summer said. “Why bring you in and pull him out? The two moves neutralize each other.”

“So maybe there are two people playing. Like a tug-of-war. Good guy, bad guy. Win one, lose one.”

“But the bad guy could have won both, easily. He could have discharged you. Or sent you to prison. He’s got the civilian complaint to work with.”

I said nothing.

“It doesn’t add up,” Summer said. “Whoever’s playing on your side is willing to let Garber go but is powerful enough to keep you here, even with the civilian complaint on the table. Powerful enough that Willard knew he couldn’t proceed against you, even though he probably wanted to. You know what that means?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

She looked straight at me.

“It means you’re seen as more important than Garber,” she said. “Garber’s gone, and you’re still here.”

Then she looked away and went quiet.

“Permission to speak freely, Lieutenant,” I said.

She looked back at me.

“You’re not more important than Garber,” she said. “You can’t be.”

I yawned again.

“No argument from me,” I said. “Not on that particular subject. This is not about a choice between me and Garber.”

She paused. Then she nodded.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t. This is about a choice between Fort Bird and Rock Creek. Fort Bird is seen as more important. What’s happening here on the post is seen as more sensitive than what’s happening at special unit headquarters.”

“Agreed,” I said. “But what the hell is happening here?”

nine

I took the first tentative step toward finding out at one minute past seven the next morning, in Fort Bird’s mortuary. I had slept for three hours and I hadn’t eaten breakfast. There aren’t many hard-and-fast rules involved in military crime investigation. Mostly we depend on instinct and improvisation. But one of the few rules that exist is: You don’t eat before you walk into an army postmortem.

So I spent the breakfast hour with the crime scene report. It was a fairly thick file, but it had no useful information in it. It listed all the recovered uniform items and described them in minute detail. It described the corpse. It listed times and temperatures. All the thousands of words were backed by dozens of Polaroid photographs. But neither the words nor the pictures told me what I needed to know.

I put the file in my desk drawer and called the Provost Marshal’s office for any AWOL or UA reports. The dead guy might have been missed already, and we might have been able to pick up on his identity that way. But there were no reports. Nothing out of the ordinary. The post was humming along with all its ducks in a row.

I walked out into the morning cold.

The mortuary had been custom-built during the Eisenhower administration and it was still fit for its purpose. We weren’t looking for a high degree of sophistication. This wasn’t the civilian world. We knew last night’s victim hadn’t slipped on a banana skin. I didn’t much care which particular injury had been the fatal one. All I wanted to know was an approximate time of death, and who he was.

There was a tiled lobby inside the main doors with exits to the left, the center, and the right. If you went left, you found the offices. If you went right, you found cold storage. I went straight ahead, where knives cut and saws whined and water sluiced.

There were two dished metal tables set in the center of the room. They had bright lights above them and noisy drains below. They were surrounded by greengrocer scales hanging on chains ready to weigh excised organs, and by rolling steel carts with empty glass jars ready to receive them, and other carts with rows of knives and saws and shears and pliers lying ready for use on green canvas sheets. The whole place was glazed with white subway tiles and the air was cold and sweet with the smell of formaldehyde.

The right-hand table was clean and empty. The left-hand table was surrounded by people. There was a pathologist and an assistant and a clerk taking notes. Summer was there, standing back, observing. They were maybe halfway through the process. The tools were all in use. Some of the glass jars were filled. The drain was sucking loudly. I could see the corpse’s legs through the crowd. They had been washed. They looked blue-white under the lamps above them. All the smeared dirt and blood was gone.

I stood next to Summer and took a look. The dead guy was on his back. They had taken the top of his skull off. They had cut around the center of his forehead and peeled the skin of his face down. It was lying there inside out, like a blanket pulled down on a bed. It reached to his chin. His cheekbones and his eyeballs were exposed. The pathologist was dissecting his brain, looking for something. He had used the saw on his skull and popped the top off like a lid.

“What’s the story?” I asked him.

“We got fingerprints,” he said.

“I faxed them in,” Summer said. “We’ll know today.”

“Cause of death?”

“Blunt trauma,” the doctor said. “To the back of the head. Three heavy blows, with something like a tire iron, I should think. All this dramatic stuff is postmortem. Pure window dressing.”

“Any defensive injuries?”

“Not a thing,” the doctor said. “This was a surprise attack. Out of the blue. There was no fight, no struggle.”