Major Marshall’s personal file. The XII Corps guy. I need you to
get a copy faxed in from somewhere.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I want to know where Vassell and Coomer parked their car
when they came down for dinner on the fourth. I want you to
see if anyone noticed.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Is that it?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to know where Major Marshall was on the
second and the third. Scare up some travel clerk somewhere
and see if any vouchers were issued. And I want a phone
number for the Jefferson Hotel in D.C.’
‘That’s an awful lot to do in three hours.’
‘That’s why I’m asking you instead of the day guy. You’re
better than he is.’
‘Stick it,’ she said. ‘Flattery doesn’t work on me.’
‘Hope springs eternal,’ I said.
We got back into the car and got back on the road. Headed east
for 1-95. I told Summer to go slow. If she didn’t, then the way
she was likely to drive on empty roads at night would get us to
the diner well before my sergeant, and I didn’t want that
to happen. My sergeant would get there around six thirty. I
wanted to get there after her, maybe six forty. I wanted to check
she hadn’t done her duty and dropped a dime on me and set up
an ambush. It was unlikely, but not impossible. I wanted to be
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able to drive by and check. I didn’t want to be already in a booth
drinking coffee when Willard showed up.
‘Why do you want all that stuff?’ Summer asked.
‘I know what happened to Mrs Kramer,’ I said.
‘How?’
‘I figured it out,’ I said. ‘Like I should have at the beginning.
But I didn’t think. I didn’t have enough imagination.’
‘It’s not enough to imagine things.’
‘It is,’ I said. ‘Sometimes that’s what it’s all about. Sometimes
that’s all an investigator has got. You have to imagine what
people must have done. The way they must have thought and
acted. You have to think yourself into being them.’
‘Being who?’
‘Vassell and Coomer,’ I said. ‘We know who they are. We
know what they’re like. Therefore we can predict what they
did.’
‘What did they do?’
‘They got an early start and flew all day from Frankfurt. On
New Year’s Eve. They wore Class As, trying to get an upgrade.
Maybe they succeeded, with American Airlines out of Germany.
Maybe they didn’t. Either way, they couldn’t have counted on it.
They must have been prepared to spend eight hours in coach.’
‘So?’
‘Would guys like Vassell and Coomer be happy to wait in the
Dulles taxi line? Or take a shuttle bus to the city? All cramped
and uncomfortable?’
‘No,’ Summer said. ‘They wouldn’t do either thing.’
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘They wouldn’t do either thing. They’re way
too important for that. They wouldn’t dream of it. Not in a
million years. Guys like that, they need to be met by a car and
a driver.’
‘Who?’
‘Marshall,’ I said. ‘That’s who. He’s their blue-eyed gofer. He
was already over here, at their service. He must have picked
them up at the airport. Maybe Kramer, too. Did Kramer take
the Hertz bus to the rental lot? I don’t think so. I think Marshall
drove him there. Then he drove Vassell and Coomer to the
Jefferson Hotel.’
‘And?’
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‘And he stayed there with them, Summer. I think he had a
room booked. Maybe they wanted him on the spot to drive
them to National the next morning. He was going with them,
after all. He was going to Irwin too. Or maybe they just wanted
to talk to him, urgently. Just the three of them, Vassell,
Coomer, and Marshall. Maybe it was easier to talk without
Kramer there. And Marshall had a lot of stuff to talk about.
They started his temporary detached duty in November. You
told me that yourself. November was when the Wall started
coming down. November was when the danger signals started
coming in. So they sent him over here in November to get his
ear close to the ground in the Pentagon. That’s my guess. But