‘I didn’t do a taste test.’
Next to the jars of organs was a short stack of four Polaroid
photographs. They were all of the fatal wound site. The first one
was as-discovered. The guy’s hair was relatively long and dirty
and matted with blood and I couldn’t make out much detail. The
second was with the blood and dirt rinsed away. The third was
with the hair cut back with scissors. The fourth was with the
hair completely shaved away, with a razor.
‘How about a crowbar?’ I asked.
‘Possible,’ the doctor said. ‘Maybe better than a tyre iron. I
took a plaster cast, anyway. You bring me the weapon, I’ll tell
you yes or no.
I stepped in a little and took a closer look. The corpse was
very clean. It was grey and white and pink. It smelled faintly of
soap, as well as blood and other rich organic odours. The groin
was a mess. Like a butcher’s shop. The knife cuts on the arms
and the shoulders were deep and obvious. I could see muscle
and bone. The edges of the wounds were blue and cold. The
blade had gone right through a tattoo on his left upper arm. An
eagle was holding a scroll with Mother written on it. Overall, the
guy was not a pleasant sight. But he was in better shape than I
had feared he would be.
‘I thought there would be more swelling and bruising,’ I said.
The pathologist glanced at me.
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘All the drama was after he was dead.
No heartbeat, no blood pressure, no circulation, therefore no
swelling and no contusions. Not much bleeding either. It was
just leaking out by gravity. If he’d been alive when they cut him,
it would have been running like a river.’
He turned back to the table and finished up inside the guy’s
brain pan and put the lid of bone back where it belonged. He
tapped it twice to get a good seal and wiped the leaky join with a
sponge. Then he pulled the guy’s face back into place. Poked
and prodded and smoothed with his fingers and when he took
126
his hands away I saw the Special Forces sergeant I had spoken
to in the strip club, staring blindly upward into the bright lights
above him.
I took a Humvee and drove past Andrea Norton’s Psy-Ops
school to the Delta Force station. It was pretty much self
contained in what had been a prison back before the army
collected all its miscreants together at Fort Leavenworth in
Kansas. The old wire and the walls suited its current purpose.
There was a giant WW2-era airplane hangar next to it. It looked
like it had been dragged in from some closed base and bolted
back together to house their racks of stores and their trucks
and their up-armoured Humvees and maybe even a couple of
fast-response helicopters.
The sentry on the inner gate let me in and I went straight to
the adjutant’s office. Seven thirty in the morning, and it was
already lit up and busy, which told me something. The adjutant
was at his desk. He was a captain. In the upside-down world of
Delta Force the sergeants are the stars, and the officers stay
home and do the housework.
‘You got anyone missing?’ I asked him.
He looked away, which told me something more.
‘I assume you know I do,’ he said. ‘Otherwise why would you
be here?’
‘You got a name for me?’
‘A name? I assumed you had arrested him for something.’
‘This is not about an arrest,’ I said.
‘So what’s it about?’
‘Does this guy get arrested a lot?’
‘No. He’s a fine soldier.’
‘What’s his name?’
The captain didn’t answer. Just leaned down and opened a
drawer and pulled a file. Handed it to me. Like all the Delta
files I had ever seen, it was heavily sanitized for public
consumption. There were just two pages in it. The first was
a name-rank-and-number ID sheet and a bare-bones career
summary for a guy called Christopher Carbone: He was an
unmarried sixteen-year veteran. He had served four years in an