no kind of a big deal. This is the army, Summer. I assume he
hadn’t been confusing it with a gardening club all these years.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said again.
I slid her the slip of paper with 973 written on it.
‘That’s our suspect pool,’ I said.
‘He was in the bar until eight o’clock,’ she said. ‘I checked
that, too. He left alone. Nobody saw him again after that.’
‘Anyone say anything about his mood?’
‘Delta guys don’t have moods. Too much danger of appearing
human.’
2O5
‘Had he been drinking?’
‘One beer.’
‘So he just walked out of the mess at eight, no nerves, no
worries?’
‘Apparently so.’
‘He knew the guy he was meeting,’ I said.
Summer said nothing.
‘Sanchez called again while you were out,’ I said. ‘Colonel
Brubaker was shot in the back of the head. A double-tap, close
in, from behind.’
‘So he knew the guy he was meeting, too.’
‘Very likely,’ I said. ‘One twenty-three in the morning. Bullet
caught his watch. Between three and a half and four and a half
hours after Carbone.’
‘That puts you in the clear with Delta. You were still here at
one twenty-three.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was. With Norton.’
‘I’ll spread the word.’
‘They won’t believe you.’
‘Do you think there’s a connection between Carbone and
Brubaker?’
‘Common sense says there has to be. But I don’t see how.
And I don’t see why. I mean, sure, they were both Delta
soldiers. But Carbone was here and Brubaker was there, and
Brubaker was a high-profile mover and shaker, and Carbone
was a nobody who kept himself to himself. Maybe because he
thought he had to.’
‘You think we’ll ever have gays in the military?’
‘We’ve already got gays in the military. We always have had.
World War Two, the western allies had fourteen million men in
uniform. Any kind of reasonable probability says at least a
million of them were gay. And we won that war, as I recall, last
time I checked with the history books. We won it big time.’
‘It’s a hell of a step,’ she said.
‘They took the same step when they let black soldiers in. And
women. Everyone pissed and moaned about that, too. Bad for
morale, bad for unit cohesion. It was crap then and it’s crap
now. Right? You’re here and you’re doing OK.’
‘Are you a Catholic?’
206
I shook my head. ‘My mother taught us the Latin. She cared
about our education. She taught us things, me and my brother
Joe.’
‘You should call her.’
‘Why?’
‘To see how her leg is.’
‘Maybe later,’ I said.
I went back to the personnel lists and Summer went out and
came back in with a map of the eastern United States. She taped
it flat to the wall below the clock and marked our location at
Fort Bird with a red push pin. Then she marked Columbia,
South Carolina, where Brubaker had been found. Then she
marked Raleigh, North Carolina, where he had been playing
golf with his wife. I gave her a clear plastic ruler from my desk
drawer and she checked the map’s scale and started calculating
times and distances.
‘Bear in mind most of us don’t drive as fast as you do,’ I said.
‘None of you drive as fast as I do,’ she said.
She measured four and a half inches between Raleigh and
Columbia and called it five to allow for the way U.S.1 snaked
slightly. She held the ruler against the scale in the legend box.
‘Two hundred miles,’ she said. ‘So if Brubaker left Raleigh
after dinner, he could have been in Columbia by midnight,
easily. An hour or so before he died.’
Then she checked the distance between Fort Bird and
Columbia. She came up with a hundred and fifty miles, less
than I had originally guessed.
‘Three hours,’ she said. ‘To be comfortable.’
Then she looked at me.
‘It could have been the same guy,’ she said. ‘If Carbone was
killed at nine or ten, the same guy could have been in Columbia
at midnight or one, ready for Brubaker.’
She put her little finger on the Fort Bird pin.