The Enemy

slid out to meet him and leaned back in and took the crowbar out of the backseat. He glanced at it. Led me inside. He seemed to understand what I wanted to do. He unlocked his office and hit the lights and unlocked his drawer. Opened it and lifted out the crowbar that had killed Carbone. Laid it on his desk. I laid the borrowed specimen next to it. Pulled the tissue paper off it. Lined it up at the same angle. It was exactly identical.
    “Are there wide variations?” the pathologist asked. “With crowbars?”
    “More than you would think,” I said. “I just had a big crowbar lesson.”
    “These two look the same.”
    “They are the same. They’re peas in a pod. Count on it. They’re custom-made. They’re unique in all the world.”
    “Did you ever meet Carbone?”
    “Very briefly,” I said.
    “What was his posture like?”
    “In what way?”
    “Did he stoop?”
    I thought back to the dim interior of the lounge bar. To the hard light in the parking lot. Shook my head.
    “He wasn’t tall enough to stoop,” I said. “He was a wiry guy, solid, stood up pretty straight. Kind of on the balls of his feet. He looked athletic.”
    “OK.”
    “Why?”
    “It was a downward blow. Not a downward chop, but a horizontal swing that dipped as it hit. Maybe it was just below horizontal. Carbone was seventy inches tall. The wound was sixty-five inches off the ground, assuming he wasn’t stooping. But it was delivered from above. So his attacker was tall.”
    “You told us that already,” I said.
    “No, I mean
tall,
” he said. “I’ve been working on it. Mapping it out. The guy had to be six-four or six-five.”
    “Like me,” I said.
    “And as heavy as you too. Not easy to break a skull as badly as that.”
    I thought back to the crime scene. It had been pocked with small hummocks of dead grass and there were wrist-thick branches here and there on the ground, but it was basically a flat area. No way one guy could have been standing higher than the other. No way of assuming a relative height difference when there really wasn’t one.
    “Six-four or six-five,” I said. “Are you prepared to go to bat on that?”
    “In court?”
    “It was a training accident,” I said. “We’re not going to court. This is just between you and me. Am I wasting my time looking at people less than six feet four inches tall?”
    The doctor breathed in, breathed out.
    “Six-three,” he said. “To be on the safe side. To allow a margin for experimental error. I’d go to bat on six-three. Count on it.”
    “OK,” I said.
    He shooed me out the door and hit the lights and locked up again.

    Summer was sitting behind my desk when I got back, doing nothing. She was through with the gender analysis. It hadn’t taken her long. The strength lists were comprehensive and accurate and alphabetical, like most army paperwork.
    “Thirty-three men,” she told me. “Twenty-three enlisted, ten officers.”
    “Who are they?”
    “A little bit of everything. Delta and Ranger leave was completely canceled, but they had evening passes. Carbone himself was in and out on the first, obviously.”
    “We can cross him off.”
    “OK, thirty-two men,” she said. “The pathologist is one of them.”
    “We can take him out too.”
    “Thirty-one, then,” she said. “And Vassell and Coomer are still in there. In and out on the first and in again on the fourth at seven o’clock.”
    “Take them out,” I said. “They were eating dinner. Fish, and steak.”
    “Twenty-nine,” she said. “Twenty-two enlisted, seven officers.”
    “OK,” I said. “Now go to Post HQ and pull their medical records.”
    “Why?”
    “To find out how tall they are.”
    “Can’t do that for the driver Vassell and Coomer had on New Year’s Day. Major Marshall. He was a visitor. His records won’t be here.”
    “He wasn’t here the night Carbone died,” I said. “So you can take him out, too.”
    “Twenty-eight.”
    “So go pull twenty-eight sets of records,” I said.
    She slid me a slip of white paper. I picked it up. It was the one I had written
973
on. Our original suspect pool.
    “We’re making progress,” she said.
    I nodded. She smiled and stood up. Walked out the door. I took her place behind the desk. The chair was warm from her body. I savored the feeling, until it went away. Then I picked up the phone. Asked my sergeant to get the post quartermaster on the line. It took her a few minutes to find him. I figured she had to drag