eight

Most rural army posts are pretty big. Even if the built infrastructure is compact, there is often a huge acreage of spare land reserved around it. This was my first tour at Fort Bird, but I guessed it would be no exception. It would be like a small neat town surrounded by a county-sized horseshoe-shaped government-owned tract of poor sandy earth with low hills and shallow valleys and a thin covering of trees and scrub. Over the post’s long life the trees would have imitated the gray ashes of the Ardennes and the mighty firs of Central Europe and the swaying palms of the Middle East. Whole generations of infantry training theory would have come and gone there. There would be old trenches and foxholes and firing pits. There would be bermed rifle ranges and barbed-wire obstacles and isolated huts where psychiatrists would challenge masculine emotional security. There would be concrete bunkers and exact replicas of government offices where Special Forces would train to rescue hostages. There would be cross-country running routes where out-of-shape boot camp inductees would tire and stagger and where some of them would collapse and die. The whole thing would be ringed by miles of ancient rusty wire and claimed for the DoD forever by warning notices fixed to every third fence post.

I called a bunch of specialists and went out to the motor pool and found a Humvee that had a working flashlight in the clip on the dash. Then I fired it up and followed the private’s directions south and west of the inhabited areas until I was on a rough sandy track leading straight out into the hinterland. The darkness was absolute. I drove more than a mile and then I saw another Humvee’s headlights in the distance. The private’s vehicle was parked at a sharp angle about twenty feet off the road and its high beams were shining into the trees and casting long evil shadows deep into the woods. The private himself was leaning up against its hood. His head was bowed and he was looking down at the ground.

First question: How does a guy on motor patrol in the dark spot a corpse hidden way the hell out here, deep in the trees?

I parked next to him and took the flashlight out of the clip and slid out into the cold and immediately understood how. There was a trail of clothing starting in the center of the track. Right on the crown of the camber was a single boot. It was a standard-issue black leather combat boot, old, worn, not very well shined. West of it was a sock, a yard away. Then another boot, another sock, a BDU jacket, an olive drab undershirt. The clothes were all spaced out in a line, like a grotesque parody of the domestic fantasy where you get home and find abandoned lingerie items leading you up the stairs to the bedroom. Except that the jacket and the undershirt were stained dark with blood.

I checked the condition of the ground at the edge of the track. It was rock hard and frosted over. I wasn’t going to compromise the scene. I wasn’t going to blur any footprints, because there weren’t going to be any footprints. So I took a deep breath and followed the trail of clothes to its conclusion. When I got there I understood why my guy had thrown up twice. At his age I might have thrown up three times.

The corpse was facedown in the frozen leaf litter at the base of a tree. Naked. Medium height, compact. It was a white guy, but he was mostly covered in blood. There were bone-deep knife cuts all over his arms and shoulders. From behind I could see that his face looked beaten and swollen. His cheeks were protruding. His dog tags were missing. There was a slim leather belt cinched tight around his neck. It had a brass buckle and the long tail looped away from his head. There was some kind of thick pink-white liquid pooled on his back. He had a broken tree limb rammed up his ass. Below it the ground was black with blood. I guessed when we rolled him over we would find that his genitals had been removed.

I backtracked along the trail of clothes and made it to the road. Stepped over next to the MP private. He was still staring down at the ground.

“Where are we exactly?” I asked him.

“Sir?”

“No question we’re still on the base?”

He nodded. “We’re a mile inside the fence line. In every direction.”

“OK,” I said. Jurisdiction was clear. Army guy, army property. “We’ll wait here. Nobody gets access in there until I say so. Clear?”

“Sir,” he said.

“You’re doing a good job,” I said.

“You think?”

“You’re still on your feet,” I said.

I went back to my Humvee and radioed my sergeant. Told her what was up and where and asked her to find Lieutenant Summer and have her call me on the emergency channel. Then I waited. An ambulance arrived two minutes later. Then two Humvees showed up with the crime scene specialists I had called before leaving my office. Guys spilled out. I told them to stand by. There was no burning urgency.

Summer got on the radio within five minutes.

“Dead guy in the woods,” I told her. “I want you to find that Psy-Ops woman you were telling me about.”

“Lieutenant Colonel Norton?”

“I want you to bring her out here.”

“Willard said you can’t work with me.”

“He said I can’t involve you in special unit stuff. This is regular police business.”

“Why do you want Norton there?”

“I want to meet her.”

She clicked off and I got out of my truck. Joined the medics and the forensics people. We all stood around in the cold. We kept our engines running to keep the batteries charged and the heaters working. Clouds of diesel smoke drifted and pooled and formed horizontal strata, like smog. I told the crime scene people to start listing the clothing on the road. I told them not to touch it and not to leave the track.

We waited. There was no moon. No stars. No light and no sound beyond our headlights and our idling diesels. I thought about Leon Garber. Korea was one of the biggest branch offices the U.S. Army has to offer. Not the most glamorous, but probably the most active and certainly the most difficult. MP command out there was a feather in anyone’s cap. It meant he would probably retire with two stars, which was way more than he could have ever hoped for. If my brother was right and axes were getting ready to fall, then Leon had already come out on the right side of the cut. I was happy for him. For about ten minutes. Then I started looking at his situation from a different perspective. I worried at it for another ten minutes and got nowhere with it.

Summer showed up before I was finished thinking. She was driving a Humvee and she had a bareheaded blonde woman in BDUs about four feet away from her in the front passenger seat. She stopped the truck in the center of the track with her headlights full on us. She stayed in the vehicle and the blonde got out and scanned the crowd and stepped into the matrix of headlight beams and made straight for me. I saluted her out of courtesy and checked her nametape. It said: Norton. She had a light colonel’s oak leaves sewn on her lapels. She was a little older than me, but not much. She was tall and thin and had the kind of face that should have made her an actress or a model.

“How can I help you, Major?” she said. She sounded like she was from Boston and not very pleased about being dragged outside in the middle of the night.

“Something I need you to see,” I said.

“Why?”

“Maybe you’ll have a professional opinion.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re here in North Carolina. It would take me hours to get someone from somewhere else.”

“What kind of someone do you need?”

“Someone in your line of work.”

“I’m aware that I work in a classroom,” she said. “I don’t need 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 toward 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, 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 labeled. 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 stenciled 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 color 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 understand.”

“I’m not a criminal profiler.”

“I don’t want you to be. I just want some input, fast. I want to know if I’m starting out in the right direction.”

She nodded. Swept her hair back off her face.

“The obvious conclusion is that he was a homosexual,” she said. “Possibly killed because of it. Or if not, then with full awareness of it on the part of his attackers.”

I nodded.

“There was genital amputation,” she said.

“You checked?”

“I moved him a little,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know you asked me not to.”

I looked at her. She hadn’t been wearing gloves. She was a tough lady. Maybe her classroom-bound reputation was undeserved.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“My guess is you’ll find his testicles and his penis in his mouth. I doubt if his cheeks would have swelled that much simply from a beating. It’s an obvious symbolic statement, from the point of view of a homophobic attacker. Removing the deviant organs, simulating oral sex.”

I nodded.

“Likewise the nudity and the missing dog tags,” she said. “Removing the army from the deviant is the same thing as removing the deviant from the army.”

I nodded.

“The foreign object insertion speaks for itself,” she said. “In the anus.”

I nodded.

“And then there’s the fluid on his back,” she said.

“Yogurt,” I said.

“Probably strawberry,” she said. “Or maybe raspberry. It’s the old joke. How does a gay man fake an orgasm?”

“He groans a bit,” I said. “And then he throws yogurt on his lover’s back.”

“Yes,” she said. She didn’t smile. And she watched me, to see if I would.

“What about the cuts and the beating?” I said.

“Hate,” she said.

“And the belt around the neck?”

She shrugged. “It’s suggestive of an autoerotic technique. Partial asphyxiation creates heightened pleasure during orgasm.”

I nodded.

“OK,” I said.

“OK what?”

“Those were your first impressions. Do you have an opinion based on them?”

“Do you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You first.”

“I think it’s bogus.”

“Why?”

“Too much going on,” I said. “There were six things there. The nudity, the missing tags, the genitals, the tree branch, the yogurt, and the belt. Any two would have done it. Maybe three. It’s like they were trying to make a point, instead of just going ahead and making one. Maybe trying too hard.”

Norton said nothing.

“Too much,” I said again. “Like shooting someone, then strangling him, then stabbing him, then drowning him, then suffocating him, then beating him to death. It’s like they were decorating a damn Christmas tree with clues.”

She stayed quiet. She was watching me, deep inside her pool of light. Maybe assessing me.

“I have my doubts about the belt,” she said. “Autoeroticism isn’t exclusively homosexual. All men have the same orgasms physiologically, gay or not.”

“The whole thing was faked,” I said.

She nodded, finally.

“I agree with you,” she said. “You’re a smart guy.”

“For a cop?”

She didn’t smile. “But we know as officers that to permit homosexuals to serve is illegal. So we better be sure we’re not letting a defense of the army cloud our judgment.”

“It’s my job to protect the army,” I said.

“Exactly,” Norton said.

I shrugged. “But I’m not taking a position. I’m not saying this guy definitely wasn’t gay. Maybe he was. I really don’t care. And maybe his attackers knew, maybe they didn’t. I’m saying either way, that’s not why they killed him. They wanted it to look like the reason. But they weren’t really feeling it. They were feeling something else. So they larded on the clues, in a rather self-conscious way.”

Then I paused.

“In a rather academic way,” I said.

She stiffened.

“An academic way?” she said.

“Do you guys teach anything about this kind of stuff in class?”

“We don’t teach people how to kill,” she said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

She nodded. “We talk about it. We have to. Cutting off your enemy’s dick is as basic as it gets. It’s happened all through history. Happened all through Vietnam. Afghan women have been doing it to captured Soviet soldiers for the last ten years. We talk about what it symbolizes, what it communicates, and the fear it creates. There are whole books about the fear of grotesque wounds. It’s always a message to the target population. We talk about violation with foreign objects. We talk about the deliberate display of violated bodies. The trail of abandoned clothing is a classic touch.”

“Do you talk about yogurt?”

She shook her head. “But that’s a very old joke.”

“And the asphyxiation thing?”

“Not on the Psy-Ops courses. But most of the people here can read magazines. Or they can watch porn on videotape.”

“Do you talk about questioning an enemy’s sexuality?”

“Of course we do. Impugning an enemy’s sexuality is the whole point of our course. His sexual orientation, his virility, his capability, his capacity. It’s a core tactic. It always has been, everywhere, throughout history. It’s designed to work both ways. It diminishes him, and it builds us up by comparison.”

I said nothing.

She looked right at me. “Are you asking me if I recognized the fruits of our lessons, out there in the woods?”

“I guess I am,” I said.

“You didn’t really want my opinion, did you?” she asked. “That was all preamble. You already knew what you were seeing.”

I nodded. “I’m a smart guy, for a cop.”

“The answer is no,” she said. “I did not recognize the fruits of our lessons, out there in the woods. Not specifically.”

“But possibly?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“Did you meet General Kramer when you were at Fort Irwin?” I asked.

“Once or twice,” she said. “Why?”

“When did you last see him?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Not recently?”

“No. Not recently. Why?”

“How did you meet him?”

“Professionally,” she said.

“You teach your stuff to Armored Branch?”

“Irwin isn’t exclusively Armored Branch. It’s the National Training Center too, don’t forget. People used to come to us there. Now we go to them.”

I said nothing.

“Does it surprise you we taught Armored people?”

I shrugged again. “A little, I guess. If I was riding around in a seventy-ton tank, I don’t suppose I’d feel a need for any more of a psychological edge.”

She still didn’t smile. “We taught them. As I recall General Kramer didn’t like it if the infantry was getting things his people weren’t. It was an intense rivalry.”

“Who do you teach now?”

“Delta Force,” she said. “Exclusively.”

“Thank you for your help,” I said.

“I didn’t recognize anything tonight that we would take responsibility for.”

“Not specifically.”

“It was psychologically generic,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

“And I resent being asked.”

“OK,” I said again. “Good night, ma’am.”

I got up out of the chair and headed for the door.

“What was the real reason?” she asked. “If the display we saw was bogus?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not that smart.”

 

I stopped in my outer office and the sergeant with the baby son gave me coffee. Then I went into my inner office and found Summer waiting for me there. She had come to collect her lists, because the Kramer case was closed.

“Did you check the other women?” I asked her. “Apart from Norton?”

She nodded. “They all have alibis. It’s the best night of the year for alibis. Nobody spends New Year’s Eve alone.”

“I did,” I said.

She said nothing back. I butted the papers into a neat stack and put them back inside their folder and unclipped the note off the front. Hope your mom was OK. I dropped the note in my drawer and handed the file to her.

“What did Norton tell you?” she asked.

“She agreed with me that it was homicide dressed up to look like gay-bashing. I asked her if any of the symbols came from Psy-Ops classes and she didn’t really say yes or no. She said they were psychologically generic. She resented being asked.”

“So what now?”

I yawned. I was tired. “We’ll work it like we work any of them. We don’t even know who the victim is yet. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow. On deck at seven, OK?”

“OK,” she said, and headed for my door, carrying her file.

“I called Rock Creek,” I said. “Asked a clerk to find their copy of the order bringing me here from Panama.”

“And?”

“He said it’s got Garber’s signature on it.”

“But?”

“That’s not possible. Garber got me on the phone on New Year’s Eve and was surprised I was here.”

“Why would a clerk lie?”

“I don’t think a clerk would. I think the signature is a forgery.”

“Is that conceivable?”

“It’s the only explanation. Garber couldn’t have forgotten he’d transferred me here forty-eight hours previously.”

“So what’s this all about?”

“I have no idea. Someone somewhere is playing chess. My brother told me I should find out who wants me here bad enough to pull me out of Panama and replace me with an asshole. So I tried to find out. And now I’m thinking maybe we should be asking the same question about Garber. Who wants him out of Rock Creek bad enough to replace him with an asshole?”

“But Korea has to be a genuine merit promotion, doesn’t it?”

“Garber deserves it, no question,” I said. “Except it’s too early. It’s a one-star job. DoD has to bring it to the Senate. That process happens in the fall, not in January. This was a panic move, spur of the moment.”

“But that would be pointless chess,” Summer said. “Why bring you in and pull him out? The two moves neutralize each other.”

“So maybe there are two people playing. Like a tug-of-war. Good guy, bad guy. Win one, lose one.”

“But the bad guy could have won both, easily. He could have discharged you. Or sent you to prison. He’s got the civilian complaint to work with.”

I said nothing.

“It doesn’t add up,” Summer said. “Whoever’s playing on your side is willing to let Garber go but is powerful enough to keep you here, even with the civilian complaint on the table. Powerful enough that Willard knew he couldn’t proceed against you, even though he probably wanted to. You know what that means?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

She looked straight at me.

“It means you’re seen as more important than Garber,” she said. “Garber’s gone, and you’re still here.”

Then she looked away and went quiet.

“Permission to speak freely, Lieutenant,” I said.

She looked back at me.

“You’re not more important than Garber,” she said. “You can’t be.”

I yawned again.

“No argument from me,” I said. “Not on that particular subject. This is not about a choice between me and Garber.”

She paused. Then she nodded.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t. This is about a choice between Fort Bird and Rock Creek. Fort Bird is seen as more important. What’s happening here on the post is seen as more sensitive than what’s happening at special unit headquarters.”

“Agreed,” I said. “But what the hell is happening here?”