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.”

“Not if it was a pool vehicle.”

“So maybe he put it in a sidewalk trash can later, after he parked. Or maybe he took it home with him.”

“Maybe. It’s a fifty-fifty situation.”

“Seventy-thirty at best,” I said.

“We should look anyway.”

I nodded. Braced the palms of my hands on the windshield’s header rail and vaulted down to the ground.

It was January, and the conditions were pretty good. February would have been better. In a temperate northern hemisphere climate, vegetation dies right back in February. It gets as thin and sparse as it ever will. But January was OK. The undergrowth was low and the ground was flat and brown. It was the color of dead bracken and leaf litter. There was no snow. The landscape was even and neutral and organic. It was a good background. I figured a container for a dairy product would be bright white. Or cream. Or maybe pink, for a strawberry or a raspberry flavor. Whatever, it would be a helpful color. It wouldn’t be black, for instance. Nobody puts a dairy product in a black container. So if it was there and we came close to it, we would find it.

We checked a ten-foot belt all around the perimeter of the crime scene. Found nothing. So we went back to the track and set off north and east along it. Summer walked five feet from the track’s left-hand edge. I walked five feet to her left. If we both scanned both ways we would cover a fifteen-foot strip, with two pairs of eyes on the crucial five-foot lane between us, which is exactly where the container should have landed, according to my aerodynamic theory.

We walked slow, maybe half-speed. I used short paces and settled into a rhythm of moving my head from one side to the other with every step. I felt pretty stupid doing it. I must have looked like a penguin. But it was an efficient method. I lapsed into a kind of autopilot mode and the ground blurred beneath me. I wasn’t seeing individual leaves and twigs and blades of grass. I was tuning out what should be there. I felt like something that shouldn’t be there would leap right out at me.

We walked for ten minutes and found nothing.

“Swap?” Summer said.

We changed places and moved on. We saw a million tons of forest debris, and nothing else. Army posts are kept scrupulously clean. The weekly litter patrol is a religion. Outside the wire we would have been tripping over all kinds of stuff. Inside, there was nothing. Nothing at all. We did another ten minutes, another three hundred yards, and then we paused and swapped positions again. Moving slow in the cold air was chilling me. I stared at the earth like a maniac. I felt we were close to our best chance. A mile and a half is 2,640 yards. I figured the first few hundred and the last few hundred were poor hunting grounds. At first the guy would have been feeling the pure urge to escape. Then close to the post buildings he knew he had to be ready and done and composed. So the middle stretch was where he would have sanitized. Anyone with any sense would have coasted to a stop, breathed in, breathed out, and thought things through. He would have buzzed his window down and felt the night air on his face. I slowed down and looked harder, left and right, left and right. Saw nothing.

“Did he have blood on him?” I said.