walking slowly. So if Kent’s print is a hair deeper, you’d have to guess that Kent’s print was made first, and St. John walked over Kent’s print later. But that’s just a guess.” He added, “I wouldn’t send anybody to the gallows on that.”
“No, but we can scare the shit out of him.”
“Right.”
“Can you get the latent-footprint guy back here tonight?”
Cal shook his head. “He’s off to Oakland Army Base on assignment. I can get someone else flown in by chopper.”
“I want the original guy. Get this cast on a flight to Oakland and have him analyze it again. Don’t tell him what he thought the first time. Right? He’s not going to remember this one out of a few hundred.”
“Right. We’ll see if we get the same analysis. I’ll get on it. We may have to put it on a commercial flight out of Atlanta to San Francisco. I may go myself.”
“No way, pal. You’re stuck at Hadley with me.”
“Shit.”
“Right. Okay, I do want a latent-footprint team from Gillem. I want them out at the rifle range at first light. They’re looking for more of Colonel Kent’s bootprints. Have them look alongside the road, out further on the range, around the body again, and near the latrines and so on. I want a clear diagram showing only Kent’s prints. Better yet, feed everything into a computer program, and be prepared to show it by noon tomorrow. Okay?”
“We’ll do our best.” He hesitated, then asked, “Are you sure about this?”
I gave him a slight nod, which was all the encouragement he needed to roust people out of bed and get them back to Hadley at dawn. I said, “Cal, the FBI might come around tonight or early tomorrow. They have jurisdiction over this case as of noon tomorrow. But not until then.”
“I hear you.”
“Work out some kind of early warning signal with the MPs outside, and alert Grace so she can stuff the disk she’s working on.”
“No problem.”
“Thanks. You’ve done a good job.”
Cynthia and I went back to Grace Dixon, who was making a neat pile of printouts on her desk. She said, “Here’s the last one. That’s all the diary entries that mention Bill Kent, William Kent, Kent, and so on.”
“Good.” I took the stack and leafed through it. There were about forty sheets of paper, some with more than one dated entry, the first going back to June of two years ago, and the most recent was just last week.
Cynthia commented, “They saw a lot of each other.”
I nodded. “Okay, thanks again, Grace. Why don’t you put the disk in your secret place and go get some sleep?”
“I’m okay. You look like hell.”
“See you tomorrow.”
I took the printouts with me, and we made the long walk across the hangar and exited through the small door. It was one of those still nights where the humidity hung in the air, and you couldn’t even smell the pines unless you were on top of them. “Shower?” I asked.
“No,” Cynthia replied. “Provost office. Colonel Moore and Ms. Baker-Kiefer. Remember them?”
We got into my Blazer, and the clock on the dashboard said ten thirty-five. That gave us less than fourteen hours to tie it up.
Cynthia saw me looking at the clock and said, “The FBI guys are probably yawning and thinking about turning in. But they’ll be all over the place tomorrow morning.”
“Right.” I put the Blazer in gear, and we headed away from Jordan Field. I said, “I don’t care if they get credit for solving this case. I’m not into the petty crap. I’ll turn this all over to them at noon tomorrow, and they can run with it. But the closer we get to the perpetrator, the less dirt they have to dig up. I’ll point them in Kent’s direction and hope that’s as far as it goes.”
“Well, that’s very big of you to let them wind it up. Your career is sort of winding up, too. But I could use the credit.”
I glanced at her. “We’re military. We just take orders. In fact, you take orders from me.”
“Yes, sir.” She sulked for a minute, then said, “The FBI are masters at the public relations game, Paul. Their PR people make the Army Public Information Office look like an information booth at a bus station. We’ve got to finish this ourselves, even if it means putting a gun to Kent’s head and threatening to blow his brains out unless he signs a confession.”
“My, my, aren’t we assertive tonight.”
“Paul, this is important. And you’re right about the FBI digging up unnecessary dirt. They’ll leak the contents of that diary to every paper in the country, and to add insult to injury, they’ll say they found the disk and cracked it. These guys are good, but they’re ruthless. They’re almost as ruthless as you.”
“Thank you.”
“And they don’t care about the Army. Talk about Nietzsche—the FBI philosophy is, ‘Whatever makes any other law enforcement agency or institution look bad makes us look better.’
So we have to wrap it up by noon.”
“Okay. Who’s the murderer?”
“Kent.”
“Positive?”
“No. Are you?”
I shrugged. “I like the guy.”
She nodded. “I don’t dislike him, but I’m not overly fond of him.”
It was funny, I thought, how men and women often had a different opinion of the same person. The last time I can remember when a woman and I both agreed that we really liked a guy, the woman was my wife, and she ran off with the guy. I asked, as a matter of information, “What is it about Kent that you don’t like?”
“He cheated on his wife.”
Makes sense to me. I added to that, “He may also be a killer. Minor point, but I thought I’d mention it.”
“Can the sarcasm. If he murdered Ann Campbell, he did it on the spur of the moment. Cheating on his wife was a two-year, premeditated infidelity. It shows weakness of character.”
“I’ll say.” I headed up the long, dark road through the pine forest. In the distance, I could see the lights of Bethany Hill, and I wondered what was going on at the Fowler house and the Kent house. I said, “I wouldn’t want to be up there for dinner tonight.”
Cynthia looked out the windshield. “What a mess. I came here to Hadley to investigate a rape, and I wind up involved with the aftershock of a ten-year-old rape.”
“Crime breeds crime breeds crime,” I pointed out.
“Right. Did you know that a rape victim is statistically more likely to get raped again than a female who has never been raped?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“But no one seems to know why. There’s no common denominator like job, age, neighborhood, or anything like that. It’s just that if it happened once, it’s more likely to happen again. Makes no sense. It’s scary, like there’s some sort of evil out there that knows. . .”
“Spooky,” I agreed. I didn’t have that experience in homicide cases. You only get killed once.
Cynthia began talking about her job, about how the job got her down sometimes, and how it had probably affected her marriage.
Cynthia obviously needed to talk, to start healing herself before the next case. But there’s always a residue of each case, and it’s like a soul toxin that makes you spiritually sicker each year. But it’s a job that needed to be done, and some people decided to do it, and some people decided they needed another job. You form a callus around your heart, I think, but it’s only as thick as you want it to be, and sometimes a particularly vicious crime cuts right through the callus, and you’re wounded again.
Cynthia kept talking, and I supposed I realized that this talk was not just about her, or her marriage, or the job, but about me, and about us.
She said, “I think I might apply for a transfer to. . . something else.”
