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"We can take him out too"
"Thirty-one, then," she said "And Vassell and Cooain on the fourth at seven o&039;clock"
"Take the dinner Fish, and steak"
"Twenty-nine," she said "Twenty-two enlisted, seven officers"
"OK," I said "Now go to Post HQ and pull their medical records"
"Why?"
"To find out how tall they are"
"Can&039;t do that for the driver Vassell and Coomer had on New Year&039;s Day Major Marshall He was a visitor His records won&039;t be here"
"He wasn&039;t here the night Carbone died," I said "So you can take hio pull twenty-eight sets of records," I said
She slid me a slip of white paper I picked it up It was the one I had written 973 on Our original suspect pool
"We&039;re ress," she said
I nodded She smiled and stood up Walked out the door I took her place behind the desk The chair ar, until it went away Then I picked up the phone Asked et the post quartermaster on the line It took her a fewhiured I had just ruined his dinner too, as well as the pathologist&039;s But then, I hadn&039;t eaten anything yet uy said He sounded a little annoyed
"I&039;ve got a question, Chief," I said "So only you will know"
"Like what?"
"Average height and weight for a , but I felt his annoyance fade away The Quartermaster Corps buys millions of uniforet, so you can bet it knows the tale of the tape to the nearest half-inch and the nearest half-ounce It can&039;t afford not to, literally And it loves to show off its specialized knowledge
"No probleed twenty to fifty as a whole in Aht We&039;re overrepresented with Hispanics by cos our ht and a half We train pretty hard, which brings ourgenerally heavier than fat"
"Those are this year&039;s figures?"
"Last year&039;s," he said "This year is only a few days old"
"What&039;s the spread in height?"
"What are you looking for?"
"How ot six-three or better?"
"One in ten," he said "In the army as a whole, maybe ninety thousand Call it a Super Bowl crowd On a post this size, maybe a hundred and twenty Call it a half-empty airplane"
"OK, Chief," I said "Thanks"
I hung up One in ten Suht uys too sht, if ere lucky, only two of the at Three, if ere unlucky Two or three, down froress I looked at the clock Eight-thirty I sht
Shit happened, for sure, but it happened to us, not Willard Averages and medians played their little arithht charts and all twenty-eight of theinal six-foot-one, and he was a reed-thin one hundred sixty pounds, and he was a padre
Once when I was a kid we lived for atable My mother called people and had one delivered It caether All the parts were there There was a la steel bolts We laid thes, four bolts But there was no way to fit theether No way at all It was so would join up We knelt side by side and worked on it We sat cross-legged on the floor, with the dust bunnies and the cockroaches The sh, where the laether Joe came in, and tried, and failed My dad tried, and failed We ate in the kitchen for a ether e ain Nothing went together Everything looked good at first, and then everything stalled and died
"The crowbar didn&039;t walk in by itself," Suht it in Obviously It can&039;t have gotten here any other way"
I said nothing
"Want dinner?" she said
"I think better when I&039;s to think about"
I nodded Gathered the twenty-eight ether and piled theinal list of thirty-three names on top Thirty-three,the crowbar in hiist, because he wasn&039;t a convincing suspect, and because he was short, and because his practice swings with the crowbar had been weak Minus Vassell and Coomer and their driver, Marshall, because their alibis were too good Vassell and Coo their faces, and Marshall hadn&039;t even come at all
"Why wasn&039;t Marshall here?" I said
Summer nodded "That&039;s always botheredto hide from him"
"All they did was eat dinner"
"But Marshall ht there at Kramer&039;s funeral with them So they must have specifically told hiet out of the car and stay hoovernton National Cemetery, under a leaden January sky Pictured the cere, the salute fro procession back to the cars, bareheaded ainst the cold,the Mercury&039;s rear doors, for Vassell first, then for Cooon lot and then gotten out and watched Coomer move up into the driver&039;s seat
"We should talk to him," I said "Find out exactly what they told hihtly aard moment A blue-eyed boy like that must have felt a little excluded"
I picked up the phone and spoke to et a number for Major Marshall Told her he was a XII Corps staffer based at the Pentagon She said she would get back to azed at the ured we should take the pin out of Columbia It distorted the picture Brubaker hadn&039;t been killed there He had been killed somewhere else North, south, east, or west
"Are you going to call Willard?" Summer asked me
"Probably," I said "Toht?"
"I don&039;t want to give him the satisfaction"
"That&039;s a risk"
"I&039;ht not last forever"
"Doesn&039;tafterelse seeht," she said "That would be my advice"
I looked at her
"As a friend," she said "AWOL is a big deal No point s worse"
"OK," I said
"Do it now," she said "Why not?"
"OK," I said again I reached out for the phone but before I could get eant put her head in the door She told us Major Marshall was no longer based in the United States His temporary detached duty had been prematurely terminated He had been recalled to Germany He had been flown out of Andrews Air Force Base late in theof the fifth of January
"Whose orders?" I asked her
"General Vassell&039;s," she said
"OK," I said
She closed the door
"The fifth of January," Su after Carbone and Brubaker died," I said
"He knows so"
"He wasn&039;t even here"
"Why else would they hide him away afterward?"
"It&039;s a coincidence"
"You don&039;t like coincidences"
I nodded
"OK," I said "Let&039;s go to Germany"