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I had never eaten yogurt myself but I had seen some and my impression was that individual portions came in small pots about two inches wide, which meant you could fit about three hundred of them in a square yard Which meant you could fit nearly a million and a half of them in an acre Which meant you could hide a hundred-fifty billion of them inside Fort Bird&039;s peri for one would be like looking for a single anthrax spore in Yankee Stadium I did the calculation while I showered and dressed in the predawn darkness

Then I sat onout there andthe 1-in-150-billion chance because it was too dark to see properly But as I sat I started to figure we could narrow the odds by being intelligent about where exactly we looked The guy with the yogurt obviously made it back from A to B We knehere A was A here Carbone had been killed And there was a limited choice of places for B B was either a rando the s So if ere smart, we could cut the billions toin a hundred years instead of a thousand

Unless it was already licked clean inside so raccoon&039;s den

I ht and full of energy but we didn&039;t talk There was nothing to say, except that the task we had set for ourselves was iuessed neither of us wanted to confirm that out loud So we didn&039;t speak We just picked a Hue, the same three-minute journey I had driven thirty-so to the Humvee&039;s tripto its compass we traveled south and west, and then we arrived at the crime scene There were still tatters of MP tape on soot out I climbed up on the hood and sat on the roof above the windshield Gazed west and north, and then turned around and gazed east and south The air was cold There was a breeze The landscape was brown and dead and immense The dawn sun eak and pale

"Which way did he go?" I called

"North and east," Summer called back

She sounded pretty sure about it

"Why?" I called

She climbed up on the hood and sat next to me

"He had a vehicle," she said

"Why?"

"Because we didn&039;t find one left out here, and I doubt if they walked"

"Why?"

"Because if they&039;d walked, it would have happened closer to where they started This is at least a thirty-uy concealing a tire iron or a crowbar for thirty solidside by side Under a coat, it would ed So they drove In the bad guy&039;s vehicle He had the weapon under a jacket or sourt too"

"Where did they start?"

"Doesn&039;t uy went afterward And if he was in a vehicle, he didn&039;t drive outward toward the wire We can assume there are no vehicle-sized holes in it Man-sized h to drive a truck or a car through"

"OK," I said

"So he headed back to the post He can&039;t have gone anywhere else Can&039;t just drive a vehicle into thethe track and parked his vehicle and went about his business"

I nodded Looked at the western horizon ahead ofthe track Back toward the post A mile and a half of track I pictured the aerodynaht plastic, cup-shaped, a torn foil closure flapping like an air brake I pictured throwing one, hard It would sail and stall in the air It would travel ten feet, tops A mile and a half of track, ten feet of shoulder, on the left, on the driver&039;s side I felt millions shrink to thousands Then I felt them expand all the way back up to billions

"Good news and bad news," I said "I think you&039;re right, so you&039;ve cut the search area down by about ninety-nine percent Maybe ood"

"But?"

"If he was in a vehicle, did he throw it out at all?"

Summer was silent

"He could have just dropped it on the floor," I said "Or chucked it in the back"

"Not if it was a pool vehicle"

"So maybe he put it in a sidewalk trash can later, after he parked Or maybe he took it home with him"

"Maybe It&039;s a fifty-fifty situation"

"Seventy-thirty at best," I said

"We should look anyway"

I nodded Braced the palms of my hands on the windshield&039;s header rail and vaulted down to the ground

It was January, and the conditions were pretty good February would have been better In a teht back in February It gets as thin and sparse as it ever will But January was OK The undergroas low and the ground was flat and brown It was the color of dead bracken and leaf litter There was no snow The landscape was even and neutral and organic It was a good background I figured a container for a dairy product would be bright white Or cream Or maybe pink, for a strawberry or a raspberry flavor Whatever, it would be a helpful color It wouldn&039;t be black, for instance Nobody puts a dairy product in a black container So if it was there and we came close to it, ould find it

We checked a ten-foot belt all around the peri So ent back to the track and set off north and east along it Sue I walked five feet to her left If we both scanned both ould cover a fifteen-foot strip, with two pairs of eyes on the crucial five-foot lane between us, which is exactly where the container should have landed, according to my aerodynamic theory

We walked slow, maybe half-speed I used short paces and settled into a rhyth my head from one side to the other with every step I felt pretty stupid doing it I uin But it was an efficient round blurred beneath s and blades of grass I was tuning out what should be there I felt like soht out at

"Swap?" Sued places andelse Army posts are kept scrupulously clean The weekly litter patrol is a religion Outside the ould have been tripping over all kinds of stuff Inside, there was nothing Nothing at all We did another ten minutes, another three hundred yards, and then we paused and swapped positions again Moving slow in the cold air was chilling me I stared at the earth like a maniac I felt ere close to our best chance A ured the first few hundred and the last few hundred were poor hunting grounds At first the guy would have been feeling the pure urge to escape Then close to the post buildings he knew he had to be ready and done and composed So the middle stretch here he would have sanitized Anyone with any sense would have coasted to a stop, breathed in, breathed out, and thought things through He would have buzzed his n and felt the night air on his face I slowed down and looked harder, left and right, left and right Saw nothing

"Did he have blood on him?" I said

"A little, ht

I didn&039;t look at her I kept loves," she said "Maybe on his shoes"

"Less than he ht have expected," I said "Unless he was a doctor he would have expected so"

"So?"

"So he didn&039;t use a pool car He expected blood and didn&039;t want to risk leaving it all over a vehicle that so to drive the next day"

"So like you said, with his own car, he&039;ll have thrown it in the back So we aren&039;t going to find anything out here"

I nodded Said nothing Walked on

We covered the whole of theTwo thousand yards of dorle arette butt, not a scrap of paper, no rusted cans, no empty bottles It was a real tribute to the post co We stopped with the s clearly visible, three hundred yards in front of us

"I want to backtrack," I said "I want to do the ain"

"OK," she said "About-face"

She turned and itched positions We decided ould cover each three-hundred-yard section the opposite way around from the first pass Where I had walked inboard, I would walk outboard, and vice versa No real reason, except our perspectives were different and we felt we should alternate I was more than a foot taller than she was, and therefore sionometry meant I could see more than a foot farther in either direction She was closer to the ground and she claiood for detail

We walked back, slow and steady

Nothing in the first section We swapped positions I took up station ten feet froht The as in our faces, andfro in the second section We changed positions again I walked five feet fro in the third section We changed yet again I did math in my head as alked So far we had swept a fifteen-foot swath along a 2,340-yard length That made 11,700 square yards, which was a hair better than two-point-four acres Nearly two and a half acres, out of a hundred thousand Odds of forty thousand to one, approxi a dollar on a lottery ticket But not er and we got colder We saw nothing

Then I saw soht Maybe twenty feet fronored it because it ell outside the zone of possibility No lightweight plastic unaerodyna thrown from a car on the track So my eyes spotted it and my brain processed it and rejected it instantly, on a purely preprogra up on it Out of pure animal instinct

Because it looked like a snake The lizard part of ot that little priht that had kept my ancestors alive and ay back in evolution It was all over in a split second It was smothered immediately The modern educated part of my mind stepped in and said, No snakes here in January, bud Way too cold I breathed out and moved on a step and then paused to look back, purely out of curiosity

There was a curved black shape in the dead grass Belt? Garden hose? But it was settled deeper down a made of leather or fabric or rubber could have fallen It was right down there a the roots Therefore it was heavy And it had to be heavy to have traveled so far from the track Therefore it was metal Solid, not tubular Therefore it was unfamiliar Very little military equipment is curved

I walked over Got close Knelt down

It was a crowbar

A black-painted crowbar, all matted on one end with blood and hair

I stayed with it and sent Sued all the way back for it because she returned sooner than I expected and out of breath

"Do we have an evidence bag?" I asked

"It&039;s not evidence," she said "Training accidents don&039;t need evidence"

"I&039; it to court," I said "I just don&039;t want to touch it, is all Don&039;t want ive Willard ideas"

She checked the back of the truck

"No evidence bags," she said

I paused Normally you take exquisite care not to contan prints and hairs and fibers, so as not to confuse the investigation If you screw up, you can get your ass chewed by the prosecutors But this time the motivation had to be different, with Willard in the et my ass sent to jail Means, ood to be true If the training accident story ca he could get

"We could bring a specialist out here," Suht behind me I could sense her there

"Can&039;t involve anyone else," I said "I didn&039;t even want to involve you"

She carass out of the ith her hands, for a closer look

"Don&039;t touch it," I said

"Wasn&039;t planning to," she said

We looked at it together, close up It was a handheld wrecking bar forged froh-quality tool It looked brand new It was painted gloss black with the kind of paint people use on boats or cars It was shaped a little like an alto saxophone The htly S-shaped, and it had a shallow curve on one end and a full curve on the other, the shape of a capital letter J Both tips were flattened and notched into claws, ready for levering nails out of planks of wood Its design was streamlined and evolved, and simple, and brutal

"Hardly used," Summer said

"Never used," I said "Not for construction, anyway"

I stood up

"We don&039;t need to print it," I said "We can assu it"

Summer stood up next to me

"We don&039;t need to type the blood either," she said "We can assu

"We could just leave it here," Summer said

"No," I said "We can&039;t do that"

I bent down and untied ht boot Pulled the lace all the way out and used a reef knot to tie the ends together That gave me a closed loop about fifteen inches in diaed the free end across the dead stubble until I snagged it under the crowbar&039;s tip Then I closed ht carefully out of the grass I held it up, like a proud angler with a fish

"Let&039;s go," I said

I liing gently in midair and my boot half off I sat close to the transainst the floor just enough to stop it touching s as the vehicle moved

"Where to?" Summer asked

"The ist and his staff would be out eating breakfast, but they weren&039;t They were all in the building, working The pathologist hiht us in the lobby He was on his way somewhere with a file in his hand He looked at us and then he looked at the trophy dangling from my boot lace Took him half of a second to understand what it was, and the other half to realize it put us all in a very aard situation

"We could come back later," I said When you&039;re not here

"No," he said "We&039;ll go to my office"

He led the way I watched his, brisk, coh And I guessed he wasn&039;t stupid Very few medics are They have all kinds of coet to be where they want to be And I guessed he wasn&039;t unethical Very few medics were that either, in my experience They&039;re scientists at heart, and scientists generally retain a good-faith interest in facts and the truth Or at least they retain soood, because this guy&039;s attitude was going to be crucial He could stay out of our way, or he could sell us out with a single phone call

His office was a plain square rooray steel desks and file cabinets It was crowded There were framed diplomas on the walls There were shelves full of books and manuals No specimen jars No weird stuff pickled in formaldehyde It could have been an army lawyer&039;s office, except the diplomas were from medical schools, not law schools

He sat down in his rolling chair Placed his file on his desk Summer closed his door and leant on it I stood in thein space We all looked at each other Waited to see ouldaccident," the doctor said, like he washis first pao squares forward

I nodded

"No question," I said, like I was ot that straight," he said

But he said it in a voice that meant: Can you believe this shit?

I heard Summer breathe out, because we had an ally But we had an ally anted distance We had an ally anted to hide behind an elaborate charade And I didn&039;t altogether blae for his medical school tuition Therefore he was cautious Therefore he was an ally whose wishes we had to respect

"Carbone fell and hit his head," I said "It&039;s a closed case Pure accident, very unfortunate for all concerned"

"But?"

I held the crowbar a little higher

"I think this is what he hit his head on," I said

"Three times?"