“What’s your promising line of inquiry?” he asked.

“There might be a military connection with Mrs. Kramer. We might be able to give you the guy on a plate all tied up with a bow.”

“I’d really like that.”

“Cooperation,” I said. “Makes the world go around.”

“Sure does,” he said.

He sounded happy. He bought the whole bill of goods. He promised to expand his search and copy me in. I hung up the phone and it rang again immediately. I picked it up and heard a woman’s voice. It sounded warm and intimate and Southern. It asked me to 10- 33 a 10-16 from the MP XO at Fort Jackson, which meant Please stand by to take a secure landline call from your opposite number in South Carolina. I waited with the phone by my ear and heard an empty electronic hiss for a moment. Then there was a loud click and my oppo in South Carolina came on and told me I should know that Colonel David C. Brubaker, Fort Bird’s Special Forces CO, had been found that morning with two bullets in his head in an alley in a crummy district of Columbia, which was South Carolina’s capital city, and which was all of two hundred miles from the North Carolina golf course hotel where he had been spending his holiday furlough with his wife. And according to the local paramedics he had been dead for a day or two.

fourteen

My oppo at Jackson was a guy called Sanchez. I knew him fairly well, and I liked him better. He was smart, and he was good. I put the call on the speaker to include Summer and we talked briefly about jurisdiction, but without much enthusiasm. Jurisdiction was always a gray area, and we all knew we were beaten from the get-go. Brubaker had been on vacation, he had been in civilian clothes, he had been in a city alley, and therefore the Columbia PD was claiming him. There was nothing we could do about it. And the Columbia PD had notified the FBI, because Brubaker’s last known whereabouts were the North Carolina golf hotel, which added a possible interstate dimension to the situation, and interstate homicide was the Bureau’s bag. And also because an army officer is technically a federal employee, and killing federal employees is a separate offense, which would give them another charge to throw at the perp if by any miracle they ever found him. Neither Sanchez nor I nor Summer cared a whole hell of a lot about the difference between state courts and federal courts, but we all knew if the FBI was involved the case was well beyond our grasp. We agreed the very best we could hope for was that we might eventually see some of the relevant documentation, strictly for informational purposes only, and strictly as a courtesy. Summer made a face and turned away. I took the phone off the speaker and picked it up and spoke to Sanchez one-on-one again.

“Got a feeling?” I asked him.

“Someone he knew,” Sanchez said. “Not easy to surprise a Delta soldier as good as Brubaker was, in an alley.”

“Weapon?”

“Paramedics figured it for a nine-millimeter handgun. And they should know. They see plenty of GSWs. Apparently they do a lot of cleaning up every Friday and Saturday night, in that part of town.”

“Why was he there?”

“No idea. Rendezvous, presumably. With someone he knew.”

“Got a feeling about when?”

“The body’s stone cold, the skin is a little green, and rigor is all gone. They’re saying twenty-four or forty-eight hours. Safe bet would be to split the difference. Let’s call it the middle of the night before last. Maybe three, four A.M. City garbage truck found him at ten this morning. Weekly trash collection.”

“Where were you on December twenty-eighth?”

“Korea. You?”

“Panama.”

“Why did they move us?”

“I keep thinking we’re about to find out,” I said.

“Something weird is going on,” Sanchez said. “I checked, because I was curious, and there are more than twenty of us in the same boat, worldwide. And Garber’s signature is on all the orders, but I don’t think it’s legit.”

“I’m certain it isn’t legit,” I said. “Anything happening down there before this Brubaker situation?”

“Not a thing. Quietest week I ever spent.”

We hung up. I sat still for a long moment. Seemed to me that Columbia in South Carolina was about two hundred miles from Fort Bird. Drive southwest on the highway, cross the state line, find I-20 heading west, drive some more, and you were there. About two hundred miles. The night before last was the night we found Carbone’s body. I had left Andrea Norton’s office just before two o’clock in the morning. She could alibi me up until that point. Then I had been in the mortuary at seven o’clock, for the postmortem. The pathologist could confirm that. So I had two unconnected alibi bookends. But 0200 until 0700 still gave me a possible five-hour window, with Brubaker’s likely time of death right there in the middle of it. Could I have driven two hundred miles there and two hundred miles back in five hours?

“What?” Summer said.

“The Delta guys have already got me in the frame for Carbone. Now I’m wondering whether they’re going to be coming at me for Brubaker too. How does four hundred miles in five hours sound to you?”

“I could probably do it,” she said. “Average of eighty miles an hour all the way. Depends on what car I was using, of course, and road construction, and traffic, and weather, and cops. It’s definitely possible.”

“Terrific.”

“But it’s marginal.”

“It better be marginal. Killing Brubaker will be like killing God, to them.”

“You going over there to break the news?”

I nodded. “I think I have to. It’s a question of respect. But you inform the post commander for me, OK?”

The Special Forces adjutant was an asshole, but he was human too. He went very pale when I told him about Brubaker, and there was clearly more to it than an anticipation of mere bureaucratic hassle. From what I had heard Brubaker was stern and distant and authoritarian, but he was a real father figure, to his men individually and to his unit as a whole. And to his unit as a concept. Special Forces generally and Delta in particular hadn’t always been popular inside the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. The army hates change and it takes a long time to get used to things. The idea of a ragtag bunch of hunter-killers had been a hard sell at the outset, and Brubaker had been one of the guys doing the selling, and he had never let up since. His death was going to hit Special Forces the way the death of a president would hit the nation.

“Carbone was bad enough,” the adjutant said. “But this is unbelievable. Is there a connection?”

I looked at him.

“Why would there be a connection?” I said. “Carbone was a training accident.”

He said nothing.

“Why was Brubaker at a hotel?”

“Because he likes to play golf. He’s got a house near Bragg from way back, but he doesn’t like the golf there.”

“Where was the hotel?”

“Outside of Raleigh.”

“Did he go there a lot?”

“Every chance he got.”

“Does his wife play golf?”

The adjutant nodded. “They play together.”

Then he paused.

“Played,” he said, and then he went quiet and looked away from me. I pictured Brubaker in my mind. I had never met him, but I knew guys just like him. One day they’re talking about how to angle a claymore mine so the little ball bearings explode outward at exactly the right angle to rip the enemy’s spines out of their backs with maximum efficiency. Next day they’re wearing pastel shirts with small crocodiles on the breast, playing golf with their wives, maybe holding hands and smiling as they ride together along the fairways in their little electric carts. I knew plenty of guys like that. My own father had been one. Not that he had ever played golf. He watched birds. He had been in most countries in the world, and he had seen a lot of birds.