"How can I help you, Major?" she said. She sounded like she was from Boston and not very pleased about being dragged outside in the middle of the night.
"Something I need you to see," I said.
"Why?"
"Maybe you'll have a professional opinion."
"Why me?"
"Because you're here in North Carolina. It would take me hours to get someone from somewhere else."
"What kind of someone do you need?"
"Someone in your line of work."
"I'm aware that I work in a classroom," she said. "I don't need constant reminders."
"What?"
"It seems to be a popular sport here, reminding Andrea Norton that she's just a bookish academic, while everybody else is out there busy with the real thing."
"I wouldn't know about that. I'm new here. I just want first impressions from someone in your line of work, is all."
"You're not trying to make a point?"
"I'm trying to get some help."
She made a face. "OK."
I offered her my flashlight. "Follow the trail of clothes to the end. Please don't touch anything. Just fix your first impressions in your mind. Then I'd like to talk to you about them."
She said nothing. Just took my flashlight from me and set off. She was brightly backlit for the first twenty feet by the MP private's headlights. His Humvee was still facing the woods. Her shadow danced ahead of her. Then she stepped beyond the range of the headlights' illumination and I saw her flashlight beam move onward, bobbing and spearing through the darkness. Then I lost sight of it. All that was visible was a faint reflection from the underside of leafless branches, far in the distance, high in the air.
She was gone about ten minutes. Then I saw the flashlight beam sweeping back toward us. She came out of the woods, retracing her steps. She walked right up to me. She looked pale. She clicked the flashlight off and handed it back.
"My office," she said. "In one hour."
She got back in Summer's Humvee and Summer backed up and turned and accelerated away into the dark.
"OK, guys, go to work," I said. I sat in my truck and watched drifting smoke and flashlight beams quartering the ground and bright blue camera flashes freezing the motion all around me. I radioed my sergeant again and told her to get the base mortuary opened up. Told her to have a pathologist standing by, first thing in the morning. After thirty minutes the ambulance backed up onto the shoulder and my guys loaded a sheet-draped shape into it. They closed the doors and slapped on them and the truck took off. Clear plastic evidence bags were filled and labeled. Crime scene tape was wound between tree trunks. It was tied off in a rough rectangle maybe forty yards by fifty.
I left them to finish up by themselves and drove back through the dark to the main post buildings. Checked with a sentry and got directions to the Psy-Ops facility. It was a low brick structure with green doors and windows that might have housed the quartermaster offices way back when it was built. It was set at a distance from post headquarters, maybe halfway to where Special Forces bunked. There was darkness and silence all around it but there was a light burning in the central hallway and in one of the office windows. I parked my truck and went inside. Made it through gloomy tiled corridors and came to a door with a pebble-glass window set in its upper half. The glass had light behind it and Lt/Col. A. Norton stenciled on it. I knocked and went in. I saw a small neat office. It was clean and it smelled feminine. I didn't salute again. I figured we were past that point.
Norton was behind a big oak army-issue desk and she had it covered with open textbooks. She had so many on the go that she had taken her telephone off the desk and put it down on the floor. She had a yellow legal pad in front of her with handwritten notes on it. The pad was in a pool of light from her desk lamp and its color was reflected upward into her hair.
"Hello," she said.
I sat down in her visitor's chair.
"Who was he?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I don't think we'll get a visual ID. He was too badly beaten. We'll have to use fingerprints. Or teeth. If he's got any left in there."
"Why did you want me to look at him?"
"I told you why. I wanted your opinion."
"Why did you think I would have an opinion?"
"Seemed to me there were elements in there that you would understand."
"I'm not a criminal profiler."
"I don't want you to be. I just want some input, fast. I want to know if I'm starting out in the right direction."
She nodded. Swept her hair back off her face.
"The obvious conclusion is that he was a homosexual," she said. "Possibly killed because of it. Or if not, then with full awareness of it on the part of his attackers."
I nodded.
"There was genital amputation," she said.
"You checked?"
"I moved him a little," she said. "I'm sorry. I know you asked me not to."
I looked at her. She hadn't been wearing gloves. She was a tough lady. Maybe her classroom-bound reputation was undeserved.
"Don't worry about it," I said.
"My guess is you'll find his testicles and his penis in his mouth. I doubt if his cheeks would have swelled that much simply from a beating. It's an obvious symbolic statement, from the point of view of a homophobic attacker. Removing the deviant organs, simulating oral sex."
I nodded.
"Likewise the nudity and the missing dog tags," she said. "Removing the army from the deviant is the same thing as removing the deviant from the army."
I nodded.
"The foreign object insertion speaks for itself," she said. "In the anus."
I nodded.
"And then there's the fluid on his back," she said.
"Yogurt," I said.
"Probably strawberry," she said. "Or maybe raspberry. It's the old joke. How does a gay man fake an orgasm?"
"He groans a bit," I said. "And then he throws yogurt on his lover's back."
"Yes," she said. She didn't smile. And she watched me, to see if I would.
"What about the cuts and the beating?" I said.
"Hate," she said.
"And the belt around the neck?"
She shrugged. "It's suggestive of an autoerotic technique. Partial asphyxiation creates heightened pleasure during orgasm."
I nodded.
"OK," I said.
"OK what?"
"Those were your first impressions. Do you have an opinion based on them?"
"Do you?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
"You first."
"I think it's bogus."
"Why?"
"Too much going on," I said. "There were six things there. The nudity, the missing tags, the genitals, the tree branch, the yogurt, and the belt. Any two would have done it. Maybe three. It's like they were trying to make a point, instead of just going ahead and making one. Maybe trying too hard."
Norton said nothing.
"Too much," I said again. "Like shooting someone, then strangling him, then stabbing him, then drowning him, then suffocating him, then beating him to death. It's like they were decorating a damn Christmas tree with clues."
She stayed quiet. She was watching me, deep inside her pool of light. Maybe assessing me.
"I have my doubts about the belt," she said. "Autoeroticism isn't exclusively homosexual. All men have the same orgasms physiologically, gay or not."