The Enemy

“Only one woman ate with Vassell and Coomer,” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Lieutenant Colonel Andrea Norton.”

“The Psy-Ops person?”

“The very same.”

“She was at a party on New Year’s Eve?”

Summer made a face. “You know what those parties are like. A bar in town, hundreds of people, in and out all the time, noise, confusion, drinks, people disappearing two by two. She could have slipped away.”

“Where was the bar?”

“Thirty minutes from the motel.”

“Then she would have been gone an hour, absolute minimum.”

“That’s possible.”

“Was she in the bar at midnight? Holding hands and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’? Whoever was standing next to her should be able to say for sure.”

“People say she was there. But she could have made it back by then anyway. The kid said the Humvee left at eleven twenty-five. She’d have been back with five minutes to spare. It could have looked natural. You know, everybody comes out of the woodwork, ready for the ball to drop. The party kind of starts over.”

I said nothing.

“She would have taken the case to sanitize it. Maybe her phone number was in there, or her name or her picture. Or a diary. She didn’t want the scandal. But once she was through with it, she didn’t need the rest of the stuff anymore. She’d have been happy to hand it back when asked.”

“How would Vassell and Coomer know who to ask?”

“Hard to hide a long-standing affair in this fishbowl.”

“Not logical,” I said. “If people knew about Kramer and Norton, why would someone go to the house in Virginia?”

“OK, maybe they didn’t know. Maybe it was just there on the list of possibilities. Maybe way down the list. Maybe it was something that people thought was over.”

I nodded. “What can we get from her?”

“We can get confirmation that Vassell and Coomer arranged to take possession of the briefcase last night. That would prove they were looking for it, which puts them in the frame for Mrs. Kramer.”

“They made no calls from the hotel, and they didn’t have time to get down there themselves. So I don’t see how we can put them in the frame. What else can we get?”

“We can be certain about what happened to the agenda. We can know that Vassell and Coomer got it back. Then at least the army can relax because we’ll know for sure it isn’t going to wind up on some public trash pile for a journalist to find.”

I nodded. Said nothing.

“And maybe Norton saw it,” Summer said. “Maybe she read it. Maybe she could tell us what all this fuss is about.”

“That’s tempting.”

“It sure is.”

“Can we just walk in and ask her?”

“You’re from the 110th. You can ask anyone anything.”

“I have to stay under Willard’s radar.”

“She doesn’t know he warned you off.”

“She does. He spoke to her after the Carbone thing.”

“I think we have to talk to her.”

“Difficult kind of a talk to have,” I said. “She’s likely to get offended.”

“Only if we do it wrong.”

“What are the chances of doing it right?”

“We might be able to manipulate the situation. There’ll be an embarrassment factor. She won’t want it broadcast.”

“We can’t push her to the point where she calls Willard.”

“You scared of him?”

“I’m scared of what he can do to us bureaucratically. Doesn’t help anyone if we both get transferred to Alaska.”

“Your call.”

I was quiet for a long moment. Thought back to Kramer’s hardcover book. This was like July thirteenth, 1943, the pivotal day of the Battle of Kursk. We were like Alexander Vasilevsky, the Soviet general. If we attacked now, this minute, we had to keep on and on attacking until the enemy was run off his feet and the war was won. If we bogged down or paused for breath even for a second, we would be overrun again.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

We found Andrea Norton in the O Club lounge and I asked her if she would spare us a minute in her office. I could see she was puzzled as to why. I told her it was a confidential matter. She stayed puzzled. Willard had told her that Carbone was a closed case, and she couldn’t see what else we would have to talk to her about. But she agreed. She told us she would meet us there in thirty minutes.

Summer and I spent the thirty minutes in my office with her list of who was on-post and who wasn’t at Carbone’s time of death. She had yards of computer paper neatly folded into a large concertina about an inch thick. There was a name, rank, and number printed on each line with pale dot-matrix ink. Almost every name had a check mark next to it.

“What are the marks?” I asked her. “Here or not here?”

“Here,” she said.

I nodded. I was afraid of that. I riffed through the concertina with my thumb.

“How many?” I asked.

“Nearly twelve hundred.”

I nodded again. There was nothing intrinsically difficult about boiling down twelve hundred names and finding one sole perpetrator. Police files everywhere are full of larger suspect pools. There had been cases in Korea where the entire U.S. military strength had been the suspect pool. But cases like that require unlimited manpower, big staffs, and endless resources. And they require everybody’s total cooperation. They can’t be handled behind a CO’s back, in secret, by two people acting alone.

“Impossible,” I said.

“Nothing’s impossible,” Summer said.

“We have to go at it a different way.”

“How?”

“What did he take to the scene?”

“Nothing.”

“Wrong,” I said. “He took himself.”

Summer shrugged. Dragged her fingers up the folded edges of her paper. The stack thickened and then thi

“Pick a name,” she said.

“He took a K-bar,” I said.

“Twelve hundred names, twelve hundred K-bars.”

“He took a tire iron or a crowbar.”

She nodded.

“And he took yogurt,” I said.

She said nothing.

“Four things,” I said. “Himself, a K-bar, a blunt instrument, and yogurt. Where did the yogurt come from?”

“His refrigerator in his quarters,” Summer said. “Or one of the mess kitchens, or one of the mess buffets, or the commissary, or a supermarket or a deli or a grocery store somewhere off-post.”

I pictured a man breathing hard, walking fast, maybe sweating, a bloodstained knife and a crowbar clutched together in his right hand, an empty yogurt pot in his left, stumbling in the dark, nearing a destination, looking down, seeing the pot, hurling it into the undergrowth, putting the knife in his pocket, slipping the crowbar under his coat.

“We should look for the container,” I said.

Summer said nothing.

“He’ll have ditched it,” I said. “Not close to the scene, but not far from it either.”

“Will it help us?”

“It’ll have some kind of a product code on it. Maybe a best before date. Stuff like that. It might lead us to where it was bought.”

Then I paused.

“And it might have prints on it,” I said.

“He’ll have worn gloves.”

I shook my head. “I’ve seen people opening yogurt containers. But I’ve never seen anyone do it with gloves on. There’s a foil closure. With a tiny little tab to pull.”

“We’re on a hundred thousand acres here.”

I nodded. Square one. Normally a couple of phone calls would get me all the grunts on the post lined up a yard apart on their knees, crawling slowly across the terrain like a giant human comb, staring down at the ground and parting every blade of grass by hand. And then doing it again the next day, and the next, until one of them found what we were looking for. With manpower like the army has, you can find a needle in a haystack. You can find both halves of a broken needle. You can find the tiny chip of chrome that flaked off the break.

Summer looked at the clock on the wall.