The Enemy

“Good question,” I said. “Maybe one day I’ll find out.”

“May I ask what your orders were?”

“Temporary detached duty as Fort Bird ’s Provost Marshal’s executive officer.”

“The Provost Marshal isn’t on-post,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I found that out. He transferred out the same day I transferred in. Some temporary thing.”

“So you’re acting CO.”

“Like I said.”

“MP XO isn’t a special unit job,” she said.

“I can fake it,” I said. “I started out a regular MP, just like you.”

Summer said nothing. Just drove.

“Kramer,” I said. “Why did he contemplate a six-hundred-mile round-trip? That’s twelve hours’ driving time out of his twenty. Just to spend fifteen bucks on a room and twenty on a whore?”

“Why does it matter? A heart attack is a heart attack, right? I mean, was there any question about it?”

I shook my head. “Walter Reed already did the autopsy.”

“So it doesn’t really matter where or when it happened.”

“His briefcase is missing.”

“I see,” Summer said.

I saw her thinking. Her lower eyelids flicked upward a fraction.

“How do you know he had a briefcase?” she said.

“I don’t. But did you ever see a general go to a conference without one?”

“No,” she said. “You think the hooker ran off with it?”

I nodded. “That’s my working hypothesis right now.”

“So, find the hooker.”

“Who was she?”

Her eyelids moved again.

“Doesn’t make sense,” she said.

I nodded again. “Exactly.”

“Four possible reasons Kramer didn’t stay in the D.C. area. One, he might have been traveling with fellow officers and didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of them by having a hooker come to his room. They might have seen her in the corridor or heard her through the walls. So he invented an excuse and stayed in a different place. Two, even if he was traveling alone he might have been on a DoD travel voucher and he was paranoid about a desk clerk seeing the girl and calling The Washington Post. That happens. So he preferred to pay cash in some anonymous dive. Three, even if he wasn’t on a government ticket he might have been a well-known guest or a familiar face in a big-city hotel. So likewise he was looking for anonymity somewhere out of town. Or four, his sexual tastes ran beyond what you can get from the D.C. Yellow Pages, so he had to go where he knew for sure he could get what he wanted.”

“But?”

“Problems one, two, and three could be answered by going ten or fifteen miles, maybe less. Two hundred and ninety-eight is completely excessive. And whereas I’m prepared to believe there are tastes that can’t be satisfied in D.C., I don’t see how they’re more likely to be satisfied way out here in the North Carolina boonies, and anyway I would guess such a thing would cost a lot more than twenty bucks wherever you eventually found it.”

“So why did he take the six-hundred-mile detour?”

She didn’t answer. Just drove, and thought. I closed my eyes. Kept them closed for about thirty-five miles.

“He knew the girl,” Summer said.

I opened my eyes. “How?”

“Some men have favorites. Maybe he met her a long time ago. Fell for her, in a way. It can happen like that. It can almost be a love thing.”

“Where would he have met her?”

“Right there.”

“Bird is all infantry. He was Armored Branch.”

“Maybe they had joint exercises. You should check back.”

I said nothing. Armored and the infantry run joint exercises all the time. But they run them where the tanks are, not where the grunts are. Much easier to transport men across a continent than tanks.

“Or maybe he met her at Irwin,” Summer said. “In California. Maybe she worked Irwin, but had to leave California for some reason, but she liked working military bases, so she moved to Bird.”

“What kind of a hooker would like working military bases?”

“The kind that’s interested in money. Which is all of them, presumably. Military bases support their local economies in all kinds of ways.”

I said nothing.

“Or maybe she always worked Bird, but followed the infantry to Irwin when they did a joint exercise out there one time. Those things can last a month or two. No point in hanging around at home with no customers.”

“Best guess?” I said.

“They met in California,” she said. “Kramer will have spent years at Irwin, on and off. Then she moved to North Carolina, but he still liked her enough to make the detour whenever he was in D.C.”

“She doesn’t do anything special, not for twenty bucks.”

“Maybe he didn’t need anything special.”

“We could ask the widow.”

Summer smiled. “Maybe he just liked her. Maybe she made damn sure he did. Hookers are good at that. They like repeat customers best of all. It’s much safer for them if they already know the guy.”

I closed my eyes again.

“So?” Summer said. “Did I come up with something you didn’t think of?”

“No,” I said.

I fell asleep before we were out of the state and woke up again nearly four hours later when Summer took the Green Valley ramp too fast. My head rolled to the right and hit the window.