I stayed there. I didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t do anything, I
didn’t call anyone. My sergeant brought me a cup of coffee. I accepted it. Willard hadn’t told me to die of thirst.
After an hour I heard a voice in the outer office and then the
young Delta sergeant came back in, alone. The one with
the beard and the tan. I told him to take a seat and pondered
my orders. Don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything, don’t call
anyone. I guessed talking with the guy would amount to doing
something, which would contravene the don’t do anything part
of the command. But then, breathing was doing something,
technically. So was metabolizing. My hair was growing, my
beard was growing, all twenty of my nails were growing, I was
losing weight. It was impossible not to do anything. So I decided
that component of the order was purely rhetorical.
‘Help you, sergeant?’ I said.
‘I think Carbone was gay,’ the sergeant said.
‘You think he was?’
‘OK, he was.’
“Who else knew?’
‘All of us.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. I thought you should know, is all.’
132
‘You think it has a bearing?’
He shook his head. ‘We were comfortable with it. And whoever
killed him wasn’t one of us. It wasn’t anyone in the unit.
That’s not possible. We don’t do stuff like that. Outside the unit,
nobody knew. Therefore it wasn’t a factor.’
‘So why tell me?’
‘Because you’re bound to find out. I wanted you to be ready
for it. I didn’t want it to be a surprise.’
‘Because?’
‘Then maybe you can keep it quiet. Since it’s not a factor.’
I said nothing.
‘It would trash his memory,’ the sergeant said. ‘And that’s
wrong. He was a nice guy and a good soldier. Being gay
shouldn’t be a crime.’
‘I agree,’ I said.
‘The army needs to change.’
‘The army hates change.’
‘They say it damages unit cohesion,’ he said. ‘They should
have come and seen our squadron working. With Carbone right
there in it.’
‘I can’t keep it quiet,’ I said. ‘Maybe I would if I could. But
the way the crime scene looked, everyone’s going to get the
message.’
‘What? It was like a sex crime? You didn’t say that before.’
‘I was trying to keep it quiet,’ I said.
‘But nobody knew. Not outside the unit.’
‘Someone must have,’ I said. ‘Or else the perp is in your unit.’
‘That’s not possible. No way, no how.’
‘One thing or the other has got to be possible,’ I said. ‘Was he
seeing anyone on the outside?’
‘No, never.’
‘So he was celibate for sixteen years?’
The guy paused a beat.
‘I guess I don’t really know,’ he said.
‘Someone knew,’ I said. ‘But actually I don’t think it was a
factor: I think someone just tried to make it look like it was.
Maybe we can make that clear, at least.’
The sergeant shook his head. ‘It’ll be the only thing anyone
remembers about him.’
133
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘I’m not gay,’ he said.
‘I don’t really care either way.’
‘I’ve got a wife and a kid.’
He left me with that information and I went back to obeying
Willard’s orders.
I spent the time thinking. There had been no weapon recovered
at the scene. No significant forensics. No threads of clothing
snagged on a bush, no footprints in the earth, none of his
attacker’s skin under Carbone’s fingernails. All of that was
easily explicable. The weapon had been taken away by the
attacker, who had probably been wearing BDUs, which
the Department of the Army specifies very carefully just so that
they won’t fall apart and leave threads all over the place. Textile
mills across the nation have stringent quality targets to meet, in
terms of wear and tear standards for military twill and poplin.
The earth was frozen hard, so footprints were impossible. North
Carolina probably had a reliable frost window of about a month,
and we were smack in the middle of it. And it had been a
surprise attack. Carbone had been given no time to turn around
and claw and kick at his assailant.
So there was no material information. But we had some