The Enemy

“They don’t need to be armed. Not those guys. You should have them confined to quarters. You could do that. You’re acting MP CO here.”

I shook my head. “Anything else?”

“You need to call Colonel Willard before midnight, or he’s going to write you up as AWOL. He said that’s a promise.”

I nodded. It was Willard’s obvious next move. An AWOL charge wouldn’t reflect badly on a CO. Wouldn’t make him look like he had lost his grip. An AWOL charge was always on the man who ran, fair and square.

“Anything else?” I said again.

“Sanchez wants a ten-sixteen,” she said. “Down at Fort Jackson. And your brother called again.”

“Any message?” I said.

“No message.”

“OK,” I said.

I went inside to my desk. Picked up my phone. Summer stepped over to the map. Traced her fingers across the pins, D.C. to Sperryville, Sperryville to Green Valley, Green Valley to Fort Bird. I dialed Joe’s number. He answered, second ring.

“I called Mom,” he said. “She’s still hanging in there.”

“She said soon, Joe. Doesn’t mean we have to mount a daily vigil.”

“Bound to be sooner than we think. And than we want.”

“How was she?”

“She sounded shaky.”

“You OK?”

“Not bad,” he said. “You?”

“Not a great year so far.”

“You should call her next,” he said.

“I will,” I said. “In a few days.”

“Do it tomorrow,” he said.

He hung up and I sat for a minute. Then I dabbed the cradle to clear the line and asked my sergeant to get Sanchez for me. Down at Jackson. I held the phone by my ear and waited. Summer was looking right at me.

“A daily vigil?” she said.

“She’s waiting for the plaster to come off,” I said. “She doesn’t like it.”

Summer looked at me a little more and then turned back to the map. I put the phone on speaker and laid the handset down on the desk. There was a click on the line and we heard Sanchez’s voice.

“I’ve been hassling the Columbia PD about Brubaker’s car,” he said.

“Didn’t they find it yet?” I said.

“No,” he said. “And they weren’t putting any effort into finding it. Which was inconceivable to me. So I kept on hassling them.”

“And?”

“They dropped the other shoe.”

“Which is?”

“Brubaker wasn’t killed in Columbia,” he said. “He was dumped there, is all.”

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.”