taken her long. The strength lists were comprehensive and
accurate and alphabetical, like most army paperwork.
‘Thirty-three men,’ she said. ‘Twenty-three enlisted, ten
officers.’
‘Who are they?’
‘A little bit of everything. Delta and Ranger leave was
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completely cancelled, but they had evening passes. Carbone
himself was in and out on the first, obviously.’
‘We can cross him off.’
‘OK, thirty-two men,’ she said. ‘The pathologist is one of
them.’
‘We can take him out, too.’
‘Thirty-one, then,’ she said. ‘And Vassell and Coomer are still
in there. In and out on the first and in again on the fourth at
seven o’clock.’
‘Take them out,’ I said. ‘They were eating dinner. Fish, and
steak.’
‘Twenty-nine,’ she said. ‘Twenty-two enlisted, seven officers.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Now go to Post HQ and pull their medical
records.’
‘Why?’
‘To find out how tall they are.’
‘Can’t do that for the driver Vassell and Coomer had on New
Year’s Day. Major Marshall. He was a visitor. His records won’t
be here.’
‘He wasn’t here the night Carbone died,’ I said. ‘So you can
take him out too.’
‘Twenty-eight,’ she said.
‘So go pull twenty-eight sets of records,’ I said.
She slid me a slip of white paper. I picked it up. It was the one
I had written 973 on. Our original suspect pool.
‘We’re making progress,’ she said.
I nodded. She smiled and stood up. Walked out the door. I
took her place behind the desk. The chair was warm from her
body. I savoured the feeling, until it went away. Then I picked
up the phone. Asked my sergeant to get the post quartermaster
on the line. It took her a few minutes to find him. I figured she
had to drag him out of the mess hall. I figured I had just ruined
his dinner, too, as well as the pathologist’s. But then, I hadn’t
eaten anything yet myself.
‘Yes, sir?’ the guy said. He sounded a little annoyed.
‘I’ve got a question, chief,’ I said. ‘Something only you will
know.’
‘Like what?’
‘Average height and weight for a male U.S. Army soldier.’
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The guy said nothing, but I felt his annoyance fade away. The
Quartermaster Corps buys millions of uniforms a year, and
twice as many boots, all on a budget, so you can bet it knows
the tale of the tape to the nearest half-inch and the nearest
half-ounce. It can’t afford not to, literally. And it loves to show
off its specialized knowledge.
‘No problem,’ the guy said. ‘Male adult population aged
twenty to fifty as a whole in America goes five-nine and a half,
and one-seventy-eight. We’re over-represented with Hispanics
by comparison with the nation as a whole which brings our
median height down one whole inch to five-eight and a half. We
train pretty hard which brings our median weight up three
pounds to one-eighty-one, muscle being generally heavier than
fat.’
‘Those are this year’s figures?’
‘Last year’s,’ he said. ‘This year is only a few days old.’
‘What’s the spread in height?’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘How many guys have we got six-three or better?’
‘One in ten,’ he said. ‘In the army as a whole, maybe ninety
thousand. Call it a Superbowl crowd. On a post this size, maybe
a hundred and twenty. Call it a half-empty airplane.’
‘OK, chief,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
I hung up. One in ten. Summer was going to come back
with twenty-eight medical charts. Nine out of ten of them were
going to be for guys too small to worry about. So out of
twenty-eight, if we were lucky, only two of them would need
looking at. Three, if we were unlucky. Two or three, down from
nine hundred seventy-three. Making progress. I looked at the
clock. Eight thirty. I smiled to myself. Shit happens, Willard, I thought.
Shit happened, for sure, but it happened to us, not Willard.
Averages and medians played their little arithmetic tricks and
Summer came back with twenty-eight charts and all twenty
eight of them were for short guys. Tallest among them was a
marginal six-foot-one, and he was a reed-thin one hundred sixty
pounds, and he was a padre.
Once when I was a kid we lived for a month in an off-post