I said nothing.

“Meanwhile, watch your step,” Joe said. “I wouldn’t want Willard for a boss.”

“I’ll be OK,” I said.

“We should have stayed in Paris,” he said, and hung up.

I found Summer in the O Club bar. She had a beer on the go and was leaning on the wall with a couple of W2s. She moved away from them when she saw me.

“Garber’s gone to Korea,” I said. “We got a new guy.”

“Who?”

“A colonel called Willard. From Intelligence.”

“So how is he qualified?”

“He isn’t qualified. He’s an asshole.”

“Doesn’t that piss you off?”

I shrugged. “He’s telling us to stay away from the Kramer thing.”

“Are we going to?”

“He’s telling me to stop talking to you. He says he’s going to turn down your application.”

She went very quiet. Looked away.

“Shit,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you wanted it.”

She looked back at me.

“Is he serious about the Kramer thing?” she asked.

I nodded. “He’s serious about everything. He had me arrested at the airport, to make all his various points.”

“Arrested?”

I nodded again. “Someone ratted me out for those guys in the parking lot.”

“Who?”

“One of the grunts in the audience.”

“One of ours? Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s cold.”

I nodded. “Never happened to me before.”

She went quiet again.

“How was your mom?” she said.

“She broke her leg,” I said. “No big deal.”

“They can get pneumonia.”

I nodded again. “She had the X ray. No pneumonia.”

Her lower eyelids moved upward.

“Can I ask the obvious question?” she said.

“Is there one?”

“Aggravated battery against civilians is a big deal. And apparently there’s a report and an eyewitness, good enough to get you arrested.”

“So?”

“So why are you still walking around?”

“Willard’s sitting on it.”

“But why would he, if he’s an asshole?”

“Out of respect for my record. That’s what he said.”

“Did you believe him?”

I shook my head.

“There must be something wrong with the complaint,” I said. “An asshole like Willard would use it if he could, that’s for sure. He doesn’t care about my record.”

“Can’t be something wrong with the complaint. A military witness is the best kind they can get. He’ll testify to whatever they tell him to. It’s like Willard would be writing the complaint himself.”

I said nothing.

“And why are you here at all?” she asked.

I heard Joe say: You should find out who wanted you at Bird badly enough to pull you out of Panama and replace you with an asshole.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” I said. “I don’t know anything. Tell me about Lieutenant Colonel Norton.”

“We’re off the case.”

“So just tell me for interest’s sake.”

“It isn’t her. She’s got an alibi. She was at a party in a bar off-post. All night long. About a hundred people were there with her.”

“Who is she?”

“Psy-Ops instructor. She’s a psychosexual Ph.D. who specializes in attacking an enemy’s internal emotional security concerning his feelings of masculinity.”

“She sounds like a fun lady.”

“She was invited to a party in a bar. Someone thinks she’s a fun lady.”

“Did you check who drove Vassell and Coomer down here?”

Summer nodded. “Our gate guys list him as a Major Marshall. I looked him up, and he’s a XII Corps staffer on temporary detached duty at the Pentagon. Some kind of a blue-eyed boy. He’s been over here since November.”

“Did you check phone calls out of the D.C. hotel?”

She nodded again.

“There weren’t any,” she said. “Vassell’s room took one incoming call at twelve twenty-eight in the morning. I’m assuming that was XII Corps calling from Germany. Neither of them made any outgoing calls.”

“None at all?”

“Not a one.”

“Are you sure?”

“Totally. It’s an electronic switchboard. Dial nine for an outside line, and the computer records it automatically. It has to, for the bill.”

Dead end.

“OK,” I said. “Forget the whole thing.”

“Really?”

“Orders are orders,” I said. “The alternative is anarchy and chaos.”

I went back to my office and called Rock Creek. I figured Willard would be long gone. He was the type of guy who keeps bankers’ hours his whole life. I got hold of a company clerk and asked him to find a copy of the original order moving me from Panama to Bird. It was five minutes before he came back on the line. I spent them reading Summer’s lists. They were full of names that meant nothing to me.

“I’ve got the order here now, sir,” the guy on the phone said.

“Who signed it?” I asked him.

“Colonel Garber, sir.”

“Thank you,” I said, and put the phone down. Then I sat for ten minutes wondering why people were lying to me. Then I forgot all about that question, because my phone rang again and a young MP private on routine base patrol told me we had a homicide victim in the woods. It sounded like a real bad one. My guy had to pause twice to throw up before he got to the end of his report.

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.