"I thought there would be more swelling and bruising," I said.
The pathologist glanced at me.
"I told you," he said. "All the drama was after he was dead. No heartbeat, no blood pressure, no circulation, therefore no swelling and no contusions. Not much bleeding either. It was just leaking out by gravity. If he'd been alive when they cut him, it would have been running like a river."
He turned back to the table and finished up inside the guy's brain pan and put the lid of bone back where it belonged. He tapped it twice to get a good seal and wiped the leaky join with a sponge. Then he pulled the guy's face back into place. Poked and prodded and smoothed with his fingers and when he took his hands away I saw the Special Forces sergeant I had spoken to in the strip club, staring blindly upward into the bright lights above him.
I took a Humvee and drove past Andrea Norton's Psy-Ops school to the Delta Force station. It was pretty much self-contained in what had been a prison back before the army collected all its miscreants together at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The old wire and the walls suited its current purpose. There was a giant WW2-era airplane hangar next to it. It looked like it had been dragged in from some closed base and bolted back together to house their racks of stores and their trucks and their up-armored Humvees and maybe even a couple of fast-response helicopters.
The sentry on the inner gate let me in and I went straight to the adjutant's office. Seven-thirty in the morning, and it was already lit up and busy, which told me something. The adjutant was at his desk. He was a captain. In the upside-down world of Delta Force the sergeants are the stars, and the officers stay home and do the housework.
"You got anyone missing?" I asked him.
He looked away, which told me something more.
"I assume you know I do," he said. "Otherwise why would you be here?"
"You got a name for me?"
"A name? I assumed you had arrested him for something."
"This is not about an arrest," I said.
"So what's it about?"
"Does this guy get arrested a lot?"
"No. He's a fine soldier."
"What's his name?"
The captain didn't answer. Just leaned down and opened a drawer and pulled a file. Handed it to me. Like all the Delta files I had ever seen, it was heavily sanitized for public consumption. There were just two pages in it. The first was a name-rank-and-number ID sheet and a bare-bones career summary for a guy called Christopher Carbone. He was an unmarried sixteen-year veteran. He had served four years in an infantry division, four in an airborne division, four in a Ranger company, and four in Special Forces Detachment D. He was five years older than me. He was a sergeant first class. There were no theater details and no mention of awards or decorations.
The second sheet contained ten inky fingerprints and a color photograph of the man I had spoken to in the bar and just left on the mortuary slab.
"Where is he?" the captain asked. "What happened?"
"Someone killed him," I said.
"What?"
"Homicide," I said.
"When?"
"Last night. Nine or ten o'clock."
"Where?"
"Edge of the woods."
"What woods?"
"Our woods. On-post."
"Jesus Christ. Why?"
I put the file back together and slipped it under my arm.
"I don't know why," I said. "Yet."
"Jesus Christ," he said again. "Who did it?"
"I don't know," I said. "Yet."
"Jesus Christ," the guy said, for the third time.
"Next of kin?" I asked.
The captain paused. Breathed out.
"I think he has a mother somewhere," he said. "I'll let you know."
"Don't," I said. "You'll be making the call."
He said nothing.
"Did Carbone have enemies here?" I asked.
"None that I knew about."
"Any points of friction?"
"Like what?"
"Any lifestyle issues?"
He stared at me. "What are you saying?"
"Was he gay?"
"What? Of course not."
I said nothing.
"You're saying Carbone was a fag?" the captain whispered.
I pictured Carbone in my mind, lounging six feet from the strip club runway, six feet from whoever was crawling around at the time on her elbows and knees with her ass up in the air and her nipples brushing the stage, a long-neck bottle in his hand and a big smile on his face. It seemed like a weird way for a gay man to spend his leisure time. But then I pictured the detachment in his eyes and his embarrassed gesture as he waved the brunette hooker away.
"I don't know what Carbone was," I said.
"Then keep your damn mouth shut," his captain said. "Sir."
I took Carbone's file with me back to the mortuary and collected Summer and took her to the O Club for breakfast. We sat on our own in a corner, far from everyone else. I ate eggs and bacon and toast. Summer ate oatmeal and fruit and glanced through the file. I drank coffee. Summer drank tea.
"The pathologist is calling it gay-bashing," she said. "He thinks it's obvious."
"He's wrong."
"Carbone's not married."
"Neither am I," I said. "Neither are you. Are you gay?"
"No."
"There you go."
"But misdirection has to be based on something real, right? I mean, if they knew he was a gambler, for instance, they might have crammed IOU slips in his mouth or thrown playing cards all around the place. Then we might have thought it was about gambling debts. You see what I mean? It just doesn't work if it's not based on anything. Something that can be disproved in five minutes looks stupid, not clever."
"Your best guess?"
"Carbone was gay, and someone knew it, but it wasn't the reason."
I nodded.
"It wasn't the reason," I said. "Let's say he was gay. He was in sixteen years. He survived most of the seventies and all of the eighties. So why would it happen now? Times are changing, getting better, he's getting better at hiding it, going out to strip joints with his buddies. No reason for it to happen now, all of a sudden. It would have happened before. Four years ago, or eight, or twelve, or sixteen. Whenever he joined a new unit and new people got to know him."
"So what was the reason?"
"No idea."
"Whatever, it could be embarrassing. Just like Kramer and his motel."
I nodded again. "Bird seems to be a very embarrassing place."
"You think this is why you're here? Carbone?"
"It's possible. Depends on what he represents."
I asked Summer to file and forward all the appropriate notifications and reports and I headed back to my office. Rumor was spreading fast. I found three Delta sergeants waiting for me, looking for information. They were typical Special Forces guys. Small, lean, whippy, slightly unkempt, hard as nails. Two of them were older than the third. The young one was wearing a beard. He was tan, like he was just back from somewhere hot. They were all pacing in my outer office. My sergeant with the baby son was there with them. I guessed she was pulling a swing shift. She was looking at them like they might have been alternating spells of pacing with spells of hitting on her. She looked very civilized, in comparison to them. Almost genteel. I ushered them all into my inner office and closed the door and sat down at my desk and left them standing in front of it.