The Enemy

“A little, maybe,” Summer said, on my right.

I didn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on the ground.

“On his gloves,” she said. “Maybe on his shoes.”

“Less than he might have expected,” I said. “Unless he was a doctor he would have expected some pretty bad bleeding.”

“So?”

“So he didn’t use a pool car. He expected blood and didn’t want to risk leaving it all over a vehicle that someone else was going to drive the next day.”

“So like you said, with his own car, he’ll have thrown it in the back. So we aren’t going to find anything out here.”

I nodded. Said nothing. Walked on.

We covered the whole of the middle section and found nothing. Two thousand yards of dormant organic material and not one single man-made item. Not a cigarette butt, not a scrap of paper, no rusted cans, no empty bottles. It was a real tribute to the post commander’s enthusiasm. But it was disappointing. We stopped with the main post buildings clearly visible, three hundred yards in front of us.

“I want to backtrack,” I said. “I want to do the middle part again.”

“OK,” she said. “About-face.”

She turned and we switched positions. We decided we would cover each three-hundred-yard section the opposite way around from the first pass. Where I had walked inboard, I would walk outboard, and vice versa. No real reason, except our perspectives were different and we felt we should alternate. I was more than a foot taller than she was, and therefore simple trigonometry meant I could see more than a foot farther in either direction. She was closer to the ground and she claimed her eyes were good for detail.

We walked back, slow and steady.

Nothing in the first section. We swapped positions. I took up station ten feet from the track. Sca

Nothing in the second section. We changed positions again. I walked five feet from the track, parallel to its edge. Nothing in the third section. We changed yet again. I did math in my head as we walked. So far we had swept a fifteen-foot swath along a 2,340-yard length. That made 11,700 square yards, which was a hair better than two-point-four acres. Nearly two and a half acres, out of a hundred thousand. Odds of forty thousand to one, approximately. Better than driving to town and spending a dollar on a lottery ticket. But not much better.

We walked on. The wind got stronger and we got colder. We saw nothing.

Then I saw something.

It was far to my right. Maybe twenty feet from me. Not a yogurt container. Something else. I almost ignored it because it was well outside the zone of possibility. No lightweight plastic unaerodynamic item could have gone that far after being thrown from a car on the track. So my eyes spotted it and my brain processed it and rejected it instantly, on a purely preprogrammed basis.

And then it hung up on it. Out of pure animal instinct.

Because it looked like a snake. The lizard part of my brain whispered snake and I got that little primeval jolt of fright that had kept my ancestors alive and well way back in evolution. It was all over in a split second. It was smothered immediately. The modern educated part of my mind stepped in and said, No snakes here in January, bud. Way too cold. I breathed out and moved on a step and then paused to look back, purely out of curiosity.

There was a curved black shape in the dead grass. Belt? Garden hose? But it was settled deeper down among the stiff brown stalks than something made of leather or fabric or rubber could have fallen. It was right down there among the roots. Therefore it was heavy. And it had to be heavy to have traveled so far from the track. Therefore it was metal. Solid, not tubular. Therefore it was unfamiliar. Very little military equipment is curved.

I walked over. Got close. Knelt down.

It was a crowbar.

A black-painted crowbar, all matted on one end with blood and hair.

I stayed with it and sent Summer to get the truck. She must have jogged all the way back for it because she returned sooner than I expected and out of breath.

“Do we have an evidence bag?” I asked.

“It’s not evidence,” she said. “Training accidents don’t need evidence.”

“I’m not pla

She checked the back of the truck.

“No evidence bags,” she said.

I paused. Normally you take exquisite care not to contaminate evidence with foreign prints and hairs and fibers, so as not to confuse the investigation. If you screw up, you can get your ass chewed by the prosecutors. But this time the motivation had to be different, with Willard in the mix. If I screwed up, I could get my ass sent to jail. Means, motive, opportunity, my prints on the weapon. Too good to be true. If the training accident story came back to bite him, he would jump all over anything he could get.

“We could bring a specialist out here,” Summer said. She was standing right behind me. I could sense her there.

“Can’t involve anyone else,” I said. “I didn’t even want to involve you.”

She came around beside me and crouched low. Smoothed stalks of grass out of the way with her hands, for a closer look.

“Don’t touch it,” I said.

“Wasn’t pla

We looked at it together, close up. It was a handheld wrecking bar forged from octagonal-section steel. It looked like a high-quality tool. It looked brand new. It was painted gloss black with the kind of paint people use on boats or cars. It was shaped a little like an alto saxophone. The main shaft was about three feet long, slightly S-shaped, and it had a shallow curve on one end and a full curve on the other, the shape of a capital letter J. Both tips were flattened and notched into claws, ready for levering nails out of planks of wood. Its design was streamlined and evolved, and simple, and brutal.

“Hardly used,” Summer said.

“Never used,” I said. “Not for construction, anyway.”

I stood up.

“We don’t need to print it,” I said. “We can assume the guy was wearing gloves when he swung it.”

Summer stood up next to me.

“We don’t need to type the blood either,” she said. “We can assume it’s Carbone’s.”

I said nothing.

“We could just leave it here,” Summer said.

“No,” I said. “We can’t do that.”

I bent down and untied my right boot. Pulled the lace all the way out and used a reef knot to tie the ends together. That gave me a closed loop about fifteen inches in diameter. I draped it over my right palm and dragged the free end across the dead stubble until I snagged it under the crowbar’s tip. Then I closed my fist and lifted the heavy steel weight carefully out of the grass. I held it up, like a proud angler with a fish.

“Let’s go,” I said.

I limped around to the front passenger seat with the crowbar swinging gently in midair and my boot half off. I sat close to the transmission tu

“Where to?” Summer asked.

“The mortuary,” I said.

I was hoping the pathologist and his staff would be out eating breakfast, but they weren’t. They were all in the building, working. The pathologist himself caught us in the lobby. He was on his way somewhere with a file in his hand. He looked at us and then he looked at the trophy dangling from my boot lace. Took him half of a second to understand what it was, and the other half to realize it put us all in a very awkward situation.

“We could come back later,” I said. When you’re not here.