to make them double-check Kramer’s autopsy.’
I said nothing.
‘This makes his death automatically suspicious. I mean, what
are the chances? It’s one in forty or fifty thousand that an
individual soldier will die on any given day, but to have his wife
die on the same day? For her to be a homicide victim on the
same day?’
‘Wasn’t the same day,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t even the same year.’
She nodded. ‘OK, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day. But
that just makes my point. It’s inconceivable that Walter Reed
had a pathologist scheduled to work last night. So they
had to drag one in, specially. And from where? From a party,
probably.’
I smiled, briefly. ‘So you want us to go up there and say, hey,
are you sure your doc could see straight last night? Sure he
wasn’t too juiced up to spot the difference between a heart
attack and a homicide?’
‘We have to check,’ she said. ‘I don’t like coincidences.’
‘What do you think happened in there?’
‘Intruder,’ she said. ‘Mrs Kramer was woken up by the noise
at the door, got out of bed, grabbed a shotgun she kept near at
hand, came downstairs, headed for the kitchen. She was a brave
lady.’
I nodded. Generals’ wives, tough as they come.
‘But she was slow,’ Summer said. ‘The intruder was already
all the way into the study and was able to get her from the side.
With the crowbar he had used on the door. As she walked past.
He was taller than she was, maybe by a foot, probably right
handed.’
I said nothing.
‘So are we going to Walter Reed?’
45
‘I think we have to,’ I said. ‘We’ll go as soon as we’ve finished
here.’
We called the Green Valley cops from a wall phone we found
in the kitchen. Then we called Garber and gave him the news.
He said he would meet us at the hospital. Then we waited.
Summer watched the front of the house, and I watched the
back. Nothing happened. The cops came within seven minutes.
They made a tight little convoy, two marked cruisers, a detective’s
car, an ambulance. They had lights and sirens going. We
heard them a mile away. They howled into the driveway and
then shut down. Summer and I stepped back in the sudden
silence and they all swarmed past us. We had no role. A
general’s wife is a civilian, and the house was inside a civilian
jurisdiction. Normally I wouldn’t let such fine distinctions get in
my way, but the place had already told me what I needed to
know. So I was prepared to stand back and earn some Brownie
points by doing it by the book. Brownie points might come in
useful later.
A patrolman watched us for twenty long minutes while the
other cops poked around inside. Then a detective in a suit came
out to take our statements. We told him about Kramer’s heart
attack, the widow trip, the banging door. His name was Clark
and he had no problem with anything we had to say. His
problem was the same as Summer’s. Both Kramers had died
miles apart on the same night, which was a coincidence, and he
didn’t like coincidences any better than Summer did. I started
to feel sorry for Rick Stockton, the deputy chief down in North
Carolina. His decision to let me haul Kramer’s body away was
going to look bad, in this new light. It put half the puzzle in the
military’s hands. It was going to set up a conflict.
We gave Clark a phone number where he could reach us at
Bird, and then we got back in the car. I figured D.C. was
another seventy miles. Another hour and ten. Maybe less, the
way Summer drove. She took off and found the highway again
and put her foot down until the Chevy was vibrating fit to bust.
‘I saw the briefcase in the photographs,’ she said. ‘Did you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Does it upset you to see dead people?’
‘No,’ I said.
46
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. You?’
‘It upsets me a little.’
I said nothing.
‘You think it was a coincidence?’ she said.