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Chapter Seventeen
Sanchez told us the Columbia medical examiners had found confused lividity patterns on Brubaker's body that in their opinion meant he had been dead about three hours before being tossed in the alley. Lividity is what happens to a person's blood after death. The heart stops, blood pressure collapses, liquid blood drains and sinks and settles into the lowest parts of the body under the simple force of gravity. It rests there and over a period of time it stains the skin liverish purple. Somewhere between three and six hours later the color fixes permanently, like a developed photograph. A guy who falls down dead on his back will have a pale chest and a purple back. Vice versa for a guy who falls down dead on his front. But Brubaker's lividity was all over the place. The Columbia medical examiners figured he had been killed, then kept on his back for about three hours, then dumped in the alley on his front. They were pretty confident about their estimate of the three-hour duration, because three hours was the point where the stains would first start to fix. They said he had signs of early fixed lividity on his back and major fixed lividity on his front. They also said he had a broad stripe across the middle of his back where the dead flesh had been partially cooked.
"He was in the trunk of a car," I said.
"Right over the muffler," Sanchez said. "Three-hour journey, plenty of temperature. "
"This changes a lot of things. "
"It explains why they never found his Chevy in Columbia. "
"Or any witnesses," I said. "Or the shell cases or the bullets. "
"So what are we looking at?"
"Three hours in a car?" I said. "At night, with empty roads? Anything up to a two-hundred-mile radius. "
"That's a pretty big circle," Sanchez said.
"A hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles," I said. "Approximately. Pi times the radius squared. What's the Columbia PD doing about it?"
"Dropping it like a hot potato. It's an FBI case now. "
"What does the Bureau think about the dope thing?"
"They're a little skeptical. They figure heroin isn't our bag. They figure we're more into marijuana and amphetamines. "
"I wish," I said. "I could use a little of both right now. "
"On the other hand they know Delta guys go all over. Pakistan, South America. Which is where heroin comes from. So they'll keep it in their back pocket, in case they don't get anywhere, just like the Columbia PD was going to. "
"They're wasting their time. Heroin? A guy like Brubaker would die first. "
"They're thinking maybe he did. "
His end of the line clicked off. I killed the speaker and put the handset back.
"It happened to the north, probably," Summer said. "Brubaker started out in Raleigh. We should be looking for his car somewhere up there. "
"Not our case," I said.
"OK, the FBI should be looking. "
"I'm sure they already are. "
There was a knock at the door. It opened up and an MP corporal came in with sheets of paper under his arm. He saluted smartly and stepped a pace forward and placed the sheets of paper on my desk. Stepped the same pace back and saluted again.
"Copies of the gate log, sir," he said. "First through fourth of this month, times as requested. "
He turned around and walked back out of the room. Closed the door. I looked at the pile of paper. There were about seven sheets in it. Not too bad.
"Let's go to work," I said.
Operation Just Cause helped us again. The raised DefCon level meant a lot of leave had been canceled. No real reason, because the Panama thing was no kind of a big deal, but that was how the military worked. No point in having DefCon levels if they couldn't be raised up and dropped down, no point in moving them at all if there weren't any associated consequences. No point in staging little foreign dramas unless the whole establishment felt a remote and vicarious thrill.
No point in canceling leave without giving people something to fill their time either. So there were extra training sessions and daily readiness exercises. Most of them were arduous and started early. Therefore the big bonus for us was that almost everyone who had gone out to celebrate New Year's Eve was back on-post and in the rack relatively early. They must have straggled back around three or four or five in the morning, because there was very little gate activity recorded after six.
Incoming personnel during the eighteen hours we were looking at on New Year's Day totaled nineteen. Summer and I were two of them, returning from Green Valley and D. C. after the widow trip and the visit to Walter Reed. We crossed ourselves off the list.
Incoming personnel other than ourselves on January second totaled sixteen. Twelve, on January third. Seventeen, before 2000 hours on January fourth. Sixty-two names in total, during the eighty-six-hour window. Nine of them were civilian delivery drivers. We crossed them off. Eleven of them were repeats. They had come in, gone out, come in again. Like commuters. My night-duty sergeant was one of them. We crossed her off, because she was a woman. And short. Elsewhere we deleted the second and any subsequent entries in each case.
We ended up with forty-one individuals, listed by name, rank, and initial. No way of telling which were men and which were women. No way of telling which of the men were tall and strong and right-handed.
"I'll work on the genders," Summer said. "I've still got the basic strength lists. They have full names on them. "
I nodded. Left her to it. Got on the phone and scared up the pathologist and asked him to meet me in the mortuary, right away.
I drove our Chevy between my office and his because I didn't want to be seen walking around with a crowbar. I parked outside the mortuary entrance and waited. The guy showed up inside five minutes, walking, from the direction of the O Club. I probably interrupted his dessert. Or maybe even his main course. I slid out to meet him and leaned back in and took the crowbar out of the backseat. He glanced at it. Led me inside. He seemed to understand what I wanted to do. He unlocked his office and hit the lights and unlocked his drawer. Opened it and lifted out the crowbar that had killed Carbone. Laid it on his desk. I laid the borrowed specimen next to it. Pulled the tissue paper off it. Lined it up at the same angle. It was exactly identical.
"Are there wide variations?" the pathologist asked. "With crowbars?"
"More than you would think," I said. "I just had a big crowbar lesson. "
"These two look the same. "
"They are the same. They're peas in a pod. Count on it. They're custom-made. They're unique in all the world. "
"Did you ever meet Carbone?"
"Very briefly," I said.
"What was his posture like?"
"In what way?"
"Did he stoop?"
I thought back to the dim interior of the lounge bar. To the hard light in the parking lot. Shook my head.
"He wasn't tall enough to stoop," I said. "He was a wiry guy, solid, stood up pretty straight. Kind of on the balls of his feet. He looked athletic. "
"OK. "
"Why?"
"It was a downward blow. Not a downward chop, but a horizontal swing that dipped as it hit. Maybe it was just below horizontal. Carbone was seventy inches tall. The wound was sixty-five inches off the ground, assuming he wasn't stooping. But it was delivered from above. So his attacker was tall. "
"You told us that already," I said.
"No, I mean tall," he said. "I've been working on it. Mapping it out. The guy had to be six-four or six-five. "
"Like me," I said.
"And as heavy as you too. Not easy to break a skull as badly as that. "
I thought back to the crime scene. It had been pocked with small hummocks of dead grass and there were wrist-thick branches here and there on the ground, but it was basically a flat area. No way one guy could have been standing higher than the other. No way of assuming a relative height difference when there really wasn't one.
"Six-four or six-five," I said. "Are you prepared to go
to bat on that?"
"In court?"
"It was a training accident," I said. "We're not going to court. This is just between you and me. Am I wasting my time looking at people less than six feet four inches tall?"
The doctor breathed in, breathed out.
"Six-three," he said. "To be on the safe side. To allow a margin for experimental error. I'd go to bat on six-three. Count on it. "
"OK," I said.
He shooed me out the door and hit the lights and locked up again.
Summer was sitting behind my desk when I got back, doing nothing. She was through with the gender analysis. It hadn't taken her long. The strength lists were comprehensive and accurate and alphabetical, like most army paperwork.
"Thirty-three men," she told me. "Twenty-three enlisted, ten officers. "
"Who are they?"
"A little bit of everything. Delta and Ranger leave was completely canceled, but they had evening passes. Carbone himself was in and out on the first, obviously. "
"We can cross him off. "
"OK, thirty-two men," she said. "The pathologist is one of them. "
"We can take him out too. "
"Thirty-one, then," she said. "And Vassell and Coomer are still in there. In and out on the first and in again on the fourth at seven o'clock. "
"Take them out," I said. "They were eating 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. "
