“Was he?”

“No,” I said. “Why do you need to know where he died?”

There was a long pause. Their attitudes changed again. The smugness fell away and they replaced it with a kind of winsome frankness.

“We don’t really need to know,” Vassell said. He leaned forward and glanced at Summer like he wished she weren’t there. Like he wanted this new intimacy to be purely man-to-man with me. “And we have no specific information or direct knowledge at all, but we’re worried that General Kramer’s private arrangements could lead to the potential for embarrassment, in light of the circumstances.”

“How well did you know him?”

“On a professional level, very well indeed. On a personal level, about as well as anyone knows his brother officer. Which is to say, perhaps not well enough.”

“But you suspect in general terms what his arrangements might have been.”

“Yes,” he said. “We have our suspicions.”

“So it wasn’t a surprise to you that he didn’t bunk at the hotel.”

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

“And it wasn’t a surprise when I told you he wasn’t visiting with his wife.”

“Not entirely, no.”

“So you suspected roughly what he might be doing, but you didn’t know where.”

Vassell nodded his head. “Roughly.”

“Did you know with whom he might have been doing it?”

Vassell shook his head.

“We have no specific information,” he said.

“OK,” I said. “Doesn’t really matter. I’m sure you know the army well enough to realize that if we discover a potential for embarrassment, we’ll cover it up.”

There was a long pause.

“Have all traces been removed?” Coomer asked. “From wherever it was?”

I nodded. “We took his stuff.”

“Good.”

“I need the Irwin conference agenda,” I said.

There was another pause.

“There wasn’t one,” Vassell said.

“I’m sure there was,” I said. “This is the army. It’s not the Actors Studio. We don’t do free improvisation sessions.”

There was a pause.

“There was nothing on paper,” Coomer said. “I told you, Major, it was no big deal.”

“How did you spend your day today?”

“Chasing rumors about the general.”

“How did you get down here from D.C.?”

“We have a car and a driver on loan from the Pentagon.”

“You checked out of the Jefferson?”

“Yes, we did.”

“So your bags are in the Pentagon car?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Where is the car?”

“Waiting outside your post headquarters.”

“It’s not my post headquarters,” I said. “I’m here on temporary detachment.”

I turned to Summer and told her to go fetch their briefcases from the car. They got all outraged, but they knew they couldn’t stop me doing it. Civilian notions about unreasonable search and seizure and warrants and probable cause stop at an army post main gate. I watched their eyes while Summer was gone. They were annoyed, but they weren’t worried. So either they were telling the truth about the Irwin conference or they had already ditched the relevant paperwork. But I went through the motions anyway. Summer got back carrying two identical briefcases. They were exactly like the one Kramer had in his silver-framed photographs. Staffers kiss up in all kinds of ways.

I searched through them on my desk. I found passports, plane tickets, travel vouchers, and itineraries in both of them. But no agendas for Fort Irwin.

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” I said.

“Happy now, son?” Vassell said.

“Kramer’s wife is dead too,” I said. “Did you know that?”

I watched them carefully, and I saw that they didn’t know. They stared at me and stared at each other and started to get pale and upset.

“How?” Vassell said.

“When?” Coomer said.

“Last night,” I said. “She was a homicide victim.”

“Where?”

“In her house. There was an intruder.”

“Do we know who it was?”

“No, we don’t. It’s not our case. It’s a civilian jurisdiction.”

“What was it? A burglary?”

“It maybe started out that way.”

They said nothing more. Summer and I walked them out to the sidewalk in front of post headquarters and watched them climb into their Pentagon car. It was a Mercury Grand Marquis, a couple of model years newer than Mrs. Kramer’s big old boat, and black rather than green. Their driver was a tall guy in BDUs. He had subdued-order badges on and I couldn’t make out his name or his rank in the dark. But he didn’t look like an enlisted man. He U-turned smoothly across the empty road and drove Vassell and Coomer away. We watched his taillights disappear north, through the main gate, and away into the darkness beyond.

“What do you think?” Summer said.

“I think they’re full of shit,” I said.

“Important shit or regular flag-rank shit?”

“They’re lying,” I said. “They’re uptight, they’re lying, and they’re stupid. Why am I worried about Kramer’s briefcase?”

“Sensitive paperwork,” she said. “Whatever he was carrying to California.”

I nodded. “They just defined it for me. It’s the conference agenda itself.”

“You’re sure there was one?”

“There’s always an agenda. And it’s always on paper. There’s a paper agenda for everything. You want to change the dog food in the K-9 kennels, you need forty-seven separate meetings with forty-seven separate paper agendas. So there was one for Irwin, that’s for damn sure. It was completely stupid to say there wasn’t. If they’ve got something to hide, they should have just said it’s too secret for me to see.”

“Maybe the conference really wasn’t important.”

“That’s bullshit too. It was very important.”

“Why?”

“Because a two-star general was going. And a one-star. And because it was New Year’s Eve, Summer. Who flies on New Year’s Eve and spends the night in a lousy stopover hotel? And this year in Germany was a big deal. The Wall is coming down. We won, after forty-five years. The parties must have been incredible. Who would miss them for something unimportant? To have gotten those three guys on a plane on New Year’s Eve, this Irwin thing had to be some kind of a very big deal.”

“They were upset about Mrs. Kramer. More than about Kramer himself.”

I nodded. “Maybe they liked her.”

“They must have liked Kramer too.”

“No, he’s just a tactical problem for them. It’s an unsentimental business, up there at their level. They hitched themselves to him, and now he’s dead, and they’re worrying about where that leaves them.”

“Ready for promotion, maybe.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But if Kramer turns out to be an embarrassment, they could go down with him.”

“Then they should be reassured. You promised them a cover-up.”

There was something prim in her voice. Like she was suggesting I shouldn’t have promised them any such thing.

“We protect the army, Summer,” I said. “Like family. That’s what we’re for.” Then I paused. “But did you notice they didn’t shut up after that? They should have taken the hint. Cover-up requested, cover-up promised. Asked and answered, mission accomplished.”

“They wanted to know where his stuff was.”

“Yes,” I said. “They did. And you know what that means? It means they’re looking for Kramer’s briefcase too. Because of the agenda. Kramer’s copy is the only one still outside of their direct control. They came down here to check if I had it.”

Summer looked in the direction their car had gone. I could still smell its exhaust in the air. An acid tang from the catalyst.

“How do civilian medics work?” I asked her. “Suppose you’re my wife, and I go down with a heart attack? What do you do?”

“I call 911.”

“And then what happens?”

“The ambulance shows up. Takes you to the emergency room.”

“And let’s say I’m DOA when I get there. Where would you be?”

“I would have ridden to the hospital with you.”

“And where would my briefcase be?”

“At home,” she said. “Wherever you left it.” Then she paused. “What? You think someone went to Mrs. Kramer’s house last night looking for the briefcase?”