a purple back. Vice versa for a guy who falls down dead on
his front. But Brubaker’s lividity was all over the place. The
Columbia medical examiners figured he had been killed, then
kept on his back for about three hours, then dumped in the alley
on his front. They were pretty confident about their estimate of
the three-hour duration, because three hours was the point
where the stains would first start to fix. They said he had signs
of early fixed lividity on his back and major fixed lividity on his
front. They also said he had a broad stripe across the middle of
his back where the dead flesh had been partially cooked.
259
‘He was in the trunk of a car,’ I said.
‘Right over the muffler,’ Sanchez said. ‘Three-hour journey,
plenty of temperature.’
‘This changes a lot of things.’
‘It explains why they never found his Chevy in Columbia.’
‘Or any witnesses,’ I said. ‘Or the shell cases or the bullets.’
‘So what are we looking at?’
‘Three hours in a car?’ I said. ‘At night, with empty roads?
Anything up to a two-hundred-mile radius.’
‘That’s a pretty big circle,’ Sanchez said.
‘A hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles,’ I
said. ‘Approximately. Pi times the radius squared. What’s the
Columbia PD doing about it?’
‘Dropping it like a hot potato. It’s an FBI case now.’
‘What does the Bureau think about the dope thing?’
‘They’re a little sceptical. They figure heroin isn’t our
bag. They figure we’re more into marijuana and amphetamines.’
‘I wish,’ I said. ‘I could use a little of both right now.’
‘On the other hand they know Delta guys go all over.
Pakistan, South America. Which is where heroin comes from.
So they’ll keep it in their back pocket, in case they don’t get
anywhere, just like the Columbia PD was going to.’
‘They’re wasting their time. Heroin? A guy like Brubaker
would die first.’
‘They’re thinking, maybe he did.’
His end of the line clicked off. I killed the speaker and put the
handset back.
‘It happened to the north, probably,’ Summer said. ‘Brubaker
started out in Raleigh. We should be looking for his car somewhere
up there.’
‘Not our case,’ I said.
‘OK, the FBI should be looking.’
‘I’m sure they already are.’
There was a knock at the door. It opened up and an MP
corporal came in with sheets of paper under his arm. He saluted
smartly and stepped a pace forward and placed the sheets of
paper on my desk. Stepped the same pace back and saluted
again.
26O
‘Copies of the gate log, sir,’ he said. ‘First through fourth of
this month, times as requested.’
He turned around and walked back out of the room. Closed
the door. I looked at the pile of paper. There were about seven
sheets in it. Not too bad.
‘Let’s go to work,’ I said.
Operation Just Cause helped us again. The raised DefCon
level meant a lot of leave had been cancelled. No real reason,
because the Panama thing was no kind of a big deal, but that
was how the military worked. No point in having DefCon levels
if they couldn’t be raised up and dropped down, no point
in moving them at all if there weren’t any associated consequences.
No point in staging little foreign dramas unless the
whole establishment felt a remote and vicarious thrill.
No point in cancelling leave without giving people something
to fill their time, either. So there were extra training sessions
and daily readiness exercises. Most of them were arduous and
started early. Therefore the big bonus for us was that almost
everyone who had gone out to celebrate New Year’s Eve was
back on post and in the rack relatively early. They must have
straggled back around three or four or five in the morning,
because there was very little gate activity recorded after six.
Incoming personnel during the eighteen hours we were
looking at on New Year’s Day totalled nineteen. Summer and I
were two of them, returning from Green Valley and D.C. after
the widow trip and the visit to Walter Reed. We crossed ourselves
off the list.
Incoming personnel other than ourselves on January 2nd