I stood up.

“Call me if you need me,” I said. “You know, if there’s anything I can do.”

The adjutant nodded.

“Thanks for the visit,” he said. “Better than a phone call.”

I went back to my office. Summer wasn’t there. I wasted more than an hour with her personnel lists. I made a shortcut decision and took the pathologist out of the mix. I took Summer out. I took Andrea Norton out. Then I took all the women out. The medical evidence was pretty clear about the attacker’s height and strength. I took the O Club dining room staff out. Their NCO had said they were all hard at work, fussing over their guests. I took the cooks out, and the bar staff, and the MP gate guards. I took out anyone listed as hospitalized and nonambulatory. I took myself out. I took Carbone out, because it wasn’t suicide.

Then I counted the remaining check marks, and wrote the number 973 on a slip of paper. That was our suspect pool. I stared into space. My phone rang. I picked it up. It was Sanchez again, down at Fort Jackson.

“Columbia PD just called me,” he said. “They’re sharing their initial findings.”

“And?”

“Their medical examiner doesn’t entirely agree with me. Time of death wasn’t three or four in the morning. It was one twenty-three A.M., the night before last.”

“That’s very precise.”

“Bullet caught his wristwatch.”

“A broken watch? Can’t necessarily rely on that.”

“No, it’s firm enough. They did a lot of other tests. Wrong season for measurable insect activity, which would have helped, but the stomach contents were exactly right for five or six hours after he ate a heavy dinner.”

“What does his wife say?”

“He disappeared at eight that night, after a heavy dinner. Got up from the table and never came back.”

“What did she do about it?”

“Nothing,” Sanchez said. “He was Special Forces. Their whole marriage, he’ll have been disappearing with no warning, the middle of dinner, the middle of the night, days or weeks at a time, never able to say where or why afterward. She was used to it.”

“Did he get a phone call or something?”

“She assumes he did, at some point. She’s not really sure. She was in the spa before dinner. They’d just played twenty-seven holes.”

“Can you call her yourself? She’ll talk to you faster than civilian cops.”

“I could try, I suppose.”

“Anything else?” I said.

“The GSWs were nine-millimeter,” he said. “Two rounds fired, both of them through and through, neat entry wounds, bad exit wounds.”

“Full metal jackets,” I said.

“Contact shots. There were powder burns. And soot.”

I paused. I couldn’t picture it. Two rounds fired? Contact shots? So one of the bullets goes in, comes out, loops all the way around, comes back, and drops down and smashes his wristwatch?

“Did he have his hands on his head?”

“He was shot from behind, Reacher. A double tap, to the back of the skull. Bang bang, thank you and good night. The second round must have gone through his head and caught his watch. Downward trajectory. Tall shooter.”

I said nothing.

“Right,” Sanchez said. “How likely is all that? Did you know him?”

“Never met him,” I said.

“He was way above average. He was a real pro. And he was a thinker. Any angle, any advantage, any wrinkle, he knew it and he was ready to use it.”

“But he got himself shot in the back of the head?”

“He knew the shooter, definitely. Had to. Why else would he turn his back, in the middle of the night, in an alley?”

“You looking at people from Jackson?”

“That’s a lot of people.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Did he have enemies at Bird?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” I said. “He had enemies up the chain of command.”

“Those pussies don’t meet people in alleys in the middle of the night.”

“Where was the alley?”

“Not in a quiet part of town.”

“So did anyone hear anything?”

“Nobody,” Sanchez said. “Columbia PD ran a canvass and came up empty.”

“That’s weird.”

“They’re civilians. What else would they be?”

He went quiet.

“You met Willard yet?” I asked him.

“He’s on his way here right now. Seems to be a real hands-on type of asshole.”

“What was the alley like?”

“Whores and crack dealers. Nothing that the Columbia city fathers are likely to put in their tourism brochures.”

“Willard hates embarrassment,” I said. “He’s going to be nervous about image.”

“Columbia’s image? What does he care?”

“The army’s image,” I said. “Willard won’t want Brubaker put next to whores and crack dealers. Not an elite colonel. He figures this Soviet stuff is going to shake things up. He figures we need good PR right now. He figures he can see the big picture.”

“The big picture is I can’t get near this case anyway. So what kind of pull does he have with the Columbia PD and the FBI? Because that’s what it’s going to take.”

“Just be ready for trouble,” I said.

“Are we in for seven lean years?”

“Not that long.”

“Why not?”

“Just a feeling,” I said.

“You happy with me handling liaison down here? Or should I get them to call you direct? Brubaker is your dead guy, technically.”

“You do it,” I said. “I’ve got other things to do.”

We hung up and I went back to Summer’s lists. Nine hundred seventy-three. Nine hundred seventy-two innocent, one guilty. But which one?

Summer came back inside another hour. She walked in and gave me a sheet of paper. It was a photocopy of a weapons requisition that Sergeant First Class Christopher Carbone had made four months ago. It was for a Heckler amp; Koch P7 handgun. Maybe he had liked the H amp;K submachine guns Delta was using, and therefore he wanted the P7 for his personal sidearm. He had asked for it to be chambered for the standard nine-millimeter Parabellum cartridge. He had asked for the thirteen-round magazine, and three spares. It was a perfectly standard requisition form, and a perfectly reasonable request. I was sure it had been granted. There would have been no political sensitivities. H amp;K was a German outfit and Germany was a NATO country, last time I checked. There would have been no compatibility issues either. Nine-millimeter Parabellums were standard NATO loads. The U.S. Army had no shortage of them. We had warehouses crammed full of them. We could have filled thirteen-round magazines with them a million times over, every day for the rest of history.

“So?” I said.

“Look at the signature on it,” Summer said. She took my copy of Carbone’s complaint out of her inside pocket and handed it over. I spread it out on my desk, side by side with the requisition form. Looked from one to the other.

The two signatures were identical.

“We’re not handwriting experts,” I said.

“We don’t need to be. They’re the same, Reacher. Believe it.”

I nodded. Both signatures read C. Carbone, and the four capital letter Cs were very distinctive. They were fast, elongated, curling flourishes. The lower-case e on the end of each sample was distinctive too. It made a small round shape, and then the tail of the letter whipped way out to the right of the page, well beyond the name itself, horizontally, and exuberantly. The a-r-b-o-n in the middle was fast and fluid and linear. As a whole it was a bold, proud, legible, self-confident signature, developed no doubt by long years of signing checks and bar bills and leases and car papers. No signature was impossible to forge, of course, but I figured this one would have been a real challenge. A challenge that I guessed would have been impossible to meet between midnight and 0845 on a North Carolina army post.

“OK,” I said. “The complaint is genuine.”

I left it on the desk. Summer reversed it and read it through, although she must have read it plenty of times already.