constant reminders.’
‘What?’
‘It seems to be a popular sport here, reminding Andrea
Norton that she’s just a bookish academic, while everybody else
is out there busy with the real thing.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that. I’m new here. I just want first
impressions from someone in your line of work, is all.’
‘You’re not trying to make a point?’
‘I’m trying to get some help.’
She made a face. ‘OK.’
I offered her my flashlight. ‘Follow the trail of clothes to the
end. Please don’t touch anything. Just fix your first impressions
in your mind. Then I’d like to talk to you about them.’
She said nothing. Just took my flashlight from me and set off.
She was brightly backlit for the first twenty feet by the MP
private’s headlights. His Humvee was still facing the woods.
Her shadow danced ahead of her. Then she stepped beyond the
range of the headlights’ illumination and I saw her flashlight
beam move onward, bobbing and spearing through the darkness.
Then I lost sight of it. All that was visible was a faint
reflection from the underside of leafless branches, far in the
distance, high in the air.
She was gone about ten minutes. Then I saw the flashlight
beam sweeping back towards us. She came out of the woods,
retracing her steps. She walked right up to me. She looked pale.
She clicked the flashlight off and handed it back.
‘My office,’ she said. ‘In one hour.’
She got back in Summer’s Humvee and Summer backed up
and turned and accelerated away into the dark.
‘OK, guys, go to work,’ I said. I sat in my truck and watched
drifting smoke and flashlight beams quartering the ground
and bright blue camera flashes freezing the motion all around
me. I radioed my sergeant again and told her to get the base
mortuary opened up. Told her to have a pathologist standing by,
114
first thing in the morning. After thirty minutes the ambulance
backed up onto the shoulder and my guys loaded a sheet
draped shape into it. They closed the doors and slapped on
them and the truck took off. Clear plastic evidence bags were
filled and labelled. Crime scene tape was wound between tree
trunks. It was tied off in a rough rectangle maybe forty yards by fifty.
I left them to finish up by themselves and drove back through
the dark to the main post buildings. Checked with a sentry
and got directions to the Psy-Ops facility. It was a low brick
structure with green doors and windows that might have
housed the quartermaster offices way back when it was built. It
was set at a distance from post headquarters, maybe halfway to
where Special Forces bunked. There was darkness and silence
all around it but there was a light burning in the central hallway
and in one of the office windows. I parked my truck and went
inside. Made it through gloomy tiled corridors and came to a
door with a pebble-glass window set in its upper half. The glass
had light behind it and Lt/Col. A. Norton stencilled on it. I
knocked and went in. I saw a small neat office. It was clean and
it smelled feminine. I didn’t salute again. I figured we were past
that point.
Norton was behind a big oak army-issue desk and she had it
covered with open textbooks. She had so many on the go that
she had taken her telephone off the desk and put it down on the
floor. She had a yellow legal pad in front of her with handwritten
notes on it. The pad was in a pool of light from her desk
lamp and its colour was reflected upward into her hair.
‘Hello,’ she said.
I sat down in her visitor’s chair.
‘Who was he?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ll get a visual ID. He
was too badly beaten. We’ll have to use fingerprints. Or teeth. If
he’s got any left in there.’
‘Why did you want me to look at him?’
‘I told you why. I wanted your opinion.’
‘Why did you think I would have an opinion?’
‘Seemed to me there were elements in there that you would