offended.’
‘Only if we do it wrong.’
‘What are the chances of doing it right?’
‘We might be able to manipulate the situation. There’ll be an
embarrassment factor. She won’t want it broadcast.’
‘We can’t push her to the point where she calls Willard.’
‘You scared of him?’
‘I’m scared of what he can do to us bureaucratically. Doesn’t
help anyone if we both get transferred to Alaska.’
‘Your call.’
I was quiet for a long moment. Thought back to Kramer’s
hardcover book. This was like July 13th, 1943, the pivotal day of
the Battle of Kursk. We were like Alexander Vasilevsky, the
Soviet general. If we attacked now, this minute, we had to keep
on and on attacking until the enemy was run off his feet and the
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war was won. If we bogged down or paused for breath even for
a second, we would be overrun again.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’
We found Andrea Norton in the 0 Club lounge and I asked her
if she would spare us a minute in her office. I could see she was
puzzled as to why. I told her it was a confidential matter. She
stayed puzzled. Willard had told her that Carbone was a closed
case, and she couldn’t see what else we would have to talk to
her about. But she agreed. She told us she would meet us there
in thirty minutes.
Summer and I spent the thirty minutes in my office with her list
of who was on post and who wasn’t at Carbone’s time of death.
She had yards of computer paper neatly folded into a large
concertina about an inch thick. There was a name, rank and
number printed on each line with pale dot-matrix ink. Almost
every name had a check mark next to it.
‘What are the marks?’ I asked her. ‘Here or not here?’
‘Here,’ she said.
I nodded. I was afraid of that. I rifled through the concertina
with my thumb.
‘How many?’ I asked.
‘Nearly twelve hundred.’
I nodded again. There was nothing intrinsically difficult
about boiling down twelve hundred names and finding one sole
perpetrator. Police files everywhere are full of larger suspect
pools. There had been cases in Korea where the entire U.S.
military strength had been the suspect pool. But cases like that
require unlimited manpower, big staffs, and endless resources.
And they require everybody’s total co-operation. They can’t be
handled behind a CO’s back, in secret, by two people acting
alone.
‘Impossible,’ I said.
‘Nothing’s impossible,’ Summer said.
‘We have to go at it a different way.’
‘How?’
‘What did he take to the scene?’
‘Nothing.’
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‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘He took himself.’
Summer shrugged. Dragged her fingers up the folded edges
of her paper. The stack thickened and then thinned back down
as the air sighed out from between the pages.
‘Pick a name,’ she said.
‘He took a K-bar,’ I said.
‘Twelve hundred names, twelve hundred K-bars.’
‘He took a tyre iron or a crowbar.’
She nodded.
‘And he took yogurt,’ I said.
She said nothing.
‘Four things,’ I said. ‘Himself, a K-bar, a blunt instrument, and
yogurt. Where did the yogurt come from?’
‘His refrigerator in his quarters,’ Summer said. ‘Or one of the
mess kitchens, or one of the mess buffets, or the commissary,
or a supermarket or a deli or a grocery store somewhere off
post.’
I pictured a man, breathing hard, walking fast, maybe sweating,
a bloodstained knife and a crowbar clutched together
in his right hand, an empty yogurt pot in his left, stumbling in
the dark, nearing a destination, looking down, seeing the pot,
hurling it into the undergrowth, putting the knife in his pocket,
slipping the crowbar under his coat.
‘We should look for the container,’ I said.
Summer said nothing.
‘He’ll have ditched it,’ I said. ‘Not close to the scene, but not
far from it either.’
‘Will it help us?’
‘It’ll have some kind of a product code on it. Maybe a best
before date. Stuff like that. It might lead us to where it was
bought.’
Then I paused.
‘And it might have prints on it,’ I said.
‘He’ll have worn gloves.’