with blood. I guessed when we rolled him over we would find
that his genitals had been removed.
I backtracked along the trail of clothes and made it to the
road. Stepped over next to the MP private. He was still staring
down at the ground.
‘Where are we exactly?’ I asked him.
‘Sir?’
‘No question we’re still on the base?’
He nodded. ‘We’re a mile inside the fence line. In every
direction.’
‘OK,’ I said. Jurisdiction was clear. Army guy, army property.
‘We’ll wait here. Nobody gets access in there until I say so.
Clear?’
‘Sir,’ he said.
‘You’re doing a good job,’ I said.
‘You think?’
‘You’re still on your feet,’ I said.
I went back to my Humvee and radioed my sergeant. Told her
what was up and where and asked her to find Lieutenant
Summer and have her call me on the emergency channel. Then
I waited. An ambulance arrived two minutes later. Then two
Humvees showed up with the crime scene specialists I had
called before leaving my office. Guys spilled out. I told them to
stand by. There was no burning urgency.
Summer got on the radio within five minutes.
‘Dead guy in the woods,’ I told her. ‘I want you to find that
Psy-Ops woman you were telling me about.’
‘Lieutenant Colonel Norton?’
‘I want you to bring her out here.’
‘Willard said you can’t work with me.’
‘He said I can’t involve you in special unit stuff. This is
regular police business.’
‘Why do you want Norton there?’
‘I want to meet her.’
112
She clicked off and I got out of my truck. Joined the medics
and the forensics people. We all stood around in the cold. We
kept our engines running to keep the batteries charged and the
heaters working. Clouds of diesel smoke drifted and pooled and
fo-med horizontal strata, like smog. I told the crime scene
people to start listing the clothing on the road. I told them not
to touch it and not to leave the track.
We waited. There was no moon. No stars. No light and no
sound beyond our headlights and our idling diesels. I thought
about Leon Garber. Korea was one of the biggest branch
offices the U.S. Army had to offer. Not the most glamorous, but
probably the most active and certainly the most difficult. MP
command out there was a feather in anyone’s cap. It meant he
would probably retire with two stars, which was way more than
he could have ever hoped for. If my brother was right and axes
were getting ready to fall, then Leon had already come out on
the right side of the cut. I was happy for him. For about ten
minutes. Then I started looking at his situation from a different
perspective. I worried at it for another ten minutes and got
nowhere with it.
Summer showed up before I was finished thinking. She was
driving a Humvee and she had a bareheaded blonde woman in
BDUs about four feet away from her in the front passenger seat.
She stopped the truck in the centre of the track with her
headlights full on us. She stayed in the vehicle and the blonde
got out and scanned the crowd and stepped into the matrix of
headlight beams and made straight for me. I saluted her out
of courtesy and checked her nametape. It said: Norton. She
had a light colonel’s oak leaves sewn on her lapels. She was a
little older than me, but not much. She was tall and thin and had
the kind of face that should have made her an actress or a
model.
‘How can I help you, major?’ she said. She sounded like she
was from Boston and not very pleased about being dragged
outside in the middle of the night.
‘Something I need you to see,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Maybe you’ll have a professional opinion.’
‘Why me?’
113
‘Because you’re here in North Carolina. It would take me
hours to get someone from somewhere else.’
‘What kind of someone do you need?’
‘Someone in your line of work.’
‘I’m aware that I work in a classroom,’ she said. ‘I don’t need