west, heading straight for the highway.
“Permission to speak freely?” she said.
“Please,” I said.
“Is this a test?”
“Why would it be a test?”
“You’re from the 110th Special Unit, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
“I have an application pending.”
“To the 110th?”
“Yes,” she said. “So, is this a covert assessment?”
“Of what?”
“Of me,” she said. “As a candidate.”
“I needed a woman partner. In case the widow is a hugger. I picked you out at random. The captain with the busted arm couldn’t have driven the car. And it would be kind of inefficient for us to wait until we had a dead general to conduct personnel assessments.”
“I guess,” she said. “But I’m wondering if you’re sitting there waiting for me to ask the obvious questions.”
“I’d expect any MP with a pulse to ask the obvious questions, whether or not they had a special unit transfer pending.”
“OK, I’m asking. General Kramer had a twenty-hour layover in the D.C. area and he wanted to get his rocks off and he didn’t mind paying for the privilege. So why did he drive all the way down here to do it? It’s what, three hundred miles?”
“Two hundred and ninety-eight,” I said.
“And then he’d have to drive all the way back.”
“Clearly.”
“So why?”
“You tell me,” I said. “Come up with something I haven’t thought of myself and I’ll recommend you for the transfer.”
“You can’t. You’re not my CO.”
“Maybe I am,” I said. “This week, anyway.”
“Why are you even here? Is something happening I should know about?”
“I don’t know why I’m here,” I said. “I got orders. That’s all I know.”
“Are you really a major?”
“Last time I checked,” I said.
“I thought 110th investigators were usually warrant officers. Working plain clothes or undercover.”
“They usually are.”
“So why bring you here when they could send a warrant officer and have him dress up as a major?”
“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
“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
“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.”
