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"It&039;s the only complaint he everto people?"
"All kinds of people Right here, and by phone far and wide"
"Were you careful?"
"Very And it&039;s the only coainst you"
"You checked that too?"
She nodded "All the way back to when God&039;s dog was a puppy"
"You wanted to knohat kind of a guy you&039;re dealing with here?"
"No, I wanted to be able to show the Delta guys you don&039;t have a history With Carbone or with anyone else"
"You&039;re protectingto have to I was just over there, and they&039;re plenty mad"
I nodded Brubaker
"I&039;m sure they are," I said I pictured Delta&039;s lonely prison barracks, first designed to keep people in, then used to keep strangers out, now serving to keep their unity boiling like a pressure cooker I pictured Brubaker&039;s office, wherever it was, quiet and deserted I pictured Carbone&039;s cell, standing empty
"So where was Carbone&039;s new P7?" I said "I didn&039;t find it in his quarters"
"In their armory," Summer said "Cleaned, oiled, and loaded They check their personal weapons in and out They&039;ve got a cage inside their hangar You should see that place It&039;s like Santa&039;s grotto Special arrenade launchers, clayht vision stuff They could equip a Central African dictatorship all by the," I said
"Sorry," she said
"Why did he file the complaint?"
"I don&039;t know," she said
I pictured Carbone in the strip club, New Year&039;s night I had walked in and I had seen a group of four eants The swirl of the crowd had turned three of them away from me and one of them toward me in a co to be there, they hadn&039;t knoas going to show up I had never met any of them before The encounter was as close to pure chance as it was possible to get Yet Carbone had tagged me for the kind of tame mayhem he must have seen a thousand times before The kind of tame mayhem he must have joined in with a hundred times before Show ht a civilian in a bar, and I&039;ll show you a liar
"Are you Catholic?" I asked
"No, why?" Summer said
"I wondered if you knew any Latin"
"It&039;s not just Catholics who know Latin I went to school"
"OK, cui bono?" I said
"Who benefits? What, frouide to s with it History, politics, everything"
"Like, follow the money?"
"Approximately," I said "Except I don&039;t think there&039;s money involved here But there must have been some benefit for Carbone Otherould he do it?"
"Could have been aMaybe he was driven to do it"
"Not if it was his first complaint in sixteen years Heand one nose It was no kind of a big deal This is the arardening club all these years"
"I don&039;t know," she said again
I slid her the slip of paper with 973 written on it
"That&039;s our suspect pool," I said
"He was in the bar until eight o&039;clock," she said "I checked that too He left alone Nobody saw hi about his uys don&039;t havehu?"
"One beer"
"So he just walked out of the ht, no nerves, no worries?"
"Apparently so"
"He knew the guy he was
"Sanchez called again while you were out," I said "Colonel Brubaker was shot in the back of the head A double tap, close in, fro too"
"Very likely," I said "One twenty-three in the ht 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&039;ll spread the word"
"They won&039;t believe you"
"Do you think there&039;s a connection between Carbone and Brubaker?"
"Common sense says there has to be But I don&039;t see how And I don&039;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 hiht he had to"
"You think we&039;ll ever have gays in the ays 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 ay And on that war, as I recall, last ti time"
"It&039;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&039;s crap now Right? You&039;re here and you&039;re doing OK"
"Are you a Catholic?"
I shook ht 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 olf with his wife I gave her a clear plastic ruler from my desk drawer and she checked thetimes and distances
"Bear in mind most of us don&039;t drive as fast as you do," I said
"None of you drive as fast as I do," she said
She h and Columbia and called it five to allow for the way US 1 snaked slightly She held the ruler against the scale in the legend box
"Two hundred h after dinner, he could have been in Coluht, easily An hour or so before he died"
Then she checked the distance between Fort Bird and Columbia She cainally guessed
"Three hours," she said "To be comfortable"
Then she looked at uy," she said "If Carbone was killed at nine or ten, the saht or one, ready for Brubaker"
She put her little finger on the Fort Bird pin
"Carbone," she said
Then she spanned her hand and put her index finger on the Columbia pin
"Brubaker," she said "It&039;s a definite sequence"
"It&039;s a definite guess," I said
She didn&039;t reply
"Do we know that Brubaker drove down froh?" I said
"We can assume he did"
"We should check with Sanchez," I said "See if they found his car anywhere See if his wife says he took it with him in the first place"
"OK," she said She went out to eant&039;s desk to make the call Left me with the interminable personnel lists She came back in ten minutes later
"He took his car," she said "His wife told Sanchez they had two cars up at the hotel His and hers They always did it that way because he was always rushing off so stuck"
"What kind of car?" I said I figured she would have asked
"Chevy Impala SS"
"Nice car"
"He left after dinner and his wife&039;s assu back here to Bird That would have been normal But the car hasn&039;t turned up anyplace yet At least, not according to the Columbia PD and the FBI"
"OK," I said
"Sanchez thinks they&039;re holding out on hi we don&039;t"
"That would be nor them But it&039;s difficult"
"It always is"
"He&039;ll call us," she said "As soon as he gets anywhere"
We got a call thirty minutes later But not from Sanchez Not about Brubaker or Carbone The call was froinia It was about Mrs Kra," he said
He sounded very pleased with himself He launched into a blow-by-blow account of the ent He had used a ure out all the likely approaches to Green Valley from as much as three hundred miles away Then he had used phone books to co those approaches He had started his guys calling theht in the center of the spiderweb He had figured that crowbar sales would be slointer Major retime onward Nobody wants their walls torn down for kitchen extensions when the weather is cold So he had expected to get very few positive reports After three hours he had gotten none at all People had spent the post-Christ power drills and electric screwdrivers Sooing Those with pioneer fantasies had bought axes But nobody had been interested in inert and prosaic things like crowbars
So he inally he planned to look for reports of other criht narron a location He didn&039;t find anything that ht there on his NCIC colary at a sinia The store was a lonely place on a dead-end street According to the owner the fronthad been kicked in sometime in the early hours of New Year&039;s Day Because it was a holiday, there had been no ister As far as the store owner could tell, the only thing that had been stolen was a single crowbar
Summer stepped back to the h the center of Sperryville, Virginia Sperryville was a small place and the plastic barrel of the pin obscured it coh Green Valley The two pins finished up about a quarter-inch apart They were al They represented about ten miles of separation
"Look at this," Suot up and stepped over Looked at the map Sperryville was on the elbow of a crooked road that ran southwest to Green Valley and beyond In the other direction it didn&039;t really go anywhere at all except Washington DC So Suton DC She put the tip of her little finger on it Put her er on Green Valley
"Vassell and Coomer," she said "They left DC, they stole the crowbar in Sperryville, they broke into Mrs Kramer&039;s house in Green Valley"
"Except they didn&039;t," I said "They were just in from the airport They didn&039;t have a car And they didn&039;t call for one You checked the phone records yourself"
She said nothing
"Plus they&039;re lard-ass staff officers," I said "They wouldn&039;t kno to burgle a hardware store if their lives depended on it"
She took her hand off the ain and butted the personnel lists into a neat pile
"We need to concentrate on Carbone," I said
"Then we need a new plan," she said "Detective Clark is going to stop looking for crowbars now He&039;s found the one he&039;s interested in"
I nodded "Back to traditional tiation"
"Which are?"
"I don&039;t really knoent to West Point I didn&039;t go to MP school"
My phone rang I picked it up The sah the same 10-33, 10-16 froed and hit the speaker button and leaned all the way back in my chair and waited The room filled with electronic hum Then there was a click
"Reacher?" Sanchez said
"And Lieutenant Summer," I said "We&039;re on the speaker"
"Anyone else in the room?"
"No," I said
"Door closed?"
"Yes What&039;s up?"
"Coluthe like crazy"
"Why?"
"Because Brubaker had heroin in his pocket, that&039;s why Three di wad of cashdeal that went bad"