The Enemy

take a look. It was quicker than a verbal explanation. She came out again four minutes later, looking calm and composed.
Score one for Summer,
I thought.
    “You like coincidences?” she said.
    I said nothing.
    “We have to go to D.C.,” she said. “To Walter Reed. We have to make them double-check Kramer’s autopsy.”
    I said nothing.
    “This makes his death automatically suspicious. I mean, what are the chances? It’s one in forty or fifty thousand that an individual soldier will die on any given day, but to have his wife die on the
same
day? For her to be a homicide victim on the same day?”
    “Wasn’t the same day,” I said. “Wasn’t even the same year.”
    She nodded. “OK, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day. But that just makes my point. It’s inconceivable that Walter Reed had a pathologist scheduled to work last night. So they had to drag one in, specially. And from where? From a party, probably.”
    I smiled, briefly. “So you want us to go up there and say, hey, are you sure your doc could see straight last night? Sure he wasn’t too juiced up to spot the difference between a heart attack and a homicide?”
    “We have to check,” she said. “I don’t like coincidences.”
    “What do you think happened in there?”
    “Intruder,” she said. “Mrs. Kramer was woken up by the noise at the door, got out of bed, grabbed a shotgun she kept near at hand, came downstairs, headed for the kitchen. She was a brave lady.”
    I nodded. Generals’ wives, tough as they come.
    “But she was slow,” Summer said. “The intruder was already all the way into the study and was able to get her from the side. With the crowbar he had used on the door. As she walked past. He was taller than she was, maybe by a foot, probably right-handed.”
    I said nothing.
    “So are we going to Walter Reed?”
    “I think we have to,” I said. “We’ll go as soon as we’ve finished here.”
    We called the Green Valley cops from a wall phone we found in the kitchen. Then we called Garber and gave him the news. He said he would meet us at the hospital. Then we waited. Summer watched the front of the house, and I watched the back. Nothing happened. The cops came within seven minutes. They made a tight little convoy, two marked cruisers, a detective’s car, an ambulance. They had lights and sirens going. We heard them a mile away. They howled into the driveway and then shut down. Summer and I stepped back in the sudden silence and they all swarmed past us. We had no role. A general’s wife is a civilian, and the house was inside a civilian jurisdiction. Normally I wouldn’t let such fine distinctions get in my way, but the place had already told me what I needed to know. So I was prepared to stand back and earn some Brownie points by doing it by the book. Brownie points might come in useful later.
    A patrolman watched us for twenty long minutes while the other cops poked around inside. Then a detective in a suit came out to take our statements. We told him about Kramer’s heart attack, the widow trip, the banging door. His name was Clark and he had no problem with anything we had to say. His problem was the same as Summer’s. Both Kramers had died miles apart on the same night, which was a coincidence, and he didn’t like coincidences any better than Summer did. I started to feel sorry for Rick Stockton, the deputy chief down in North Carolina. His decision to let me haul Kramer’s body away was going to look bad, in this new light. It put half the puzzle in the military’s hands. It was going to set up a conflict.
    We gave Clark a phone number where he could reach us at Bird, and then we got back in the car. I figured D.C. was another seventy miles. Another hour and ten. Maybe less, the way Summer drove. She took off and found the highway again and put her foot down until the Chevy was vibrating fit to bust.
    “I saw the briefcase in the photographs,” she said. “Did you?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Does it upset you to see dead people?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t know. You?”
    “It upsets me a little.”
    I said nothing.
    “You think it was a coincidence?” she said.
    “No,” I said. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
    “So you think the postmortem missed something?”
    “No,” I said again. “I think the postmortem was probably accurate.”
    “So why are we driving all the way to D.C.?”
    “Because I need to apologize to the pathologist. I dropped him in it by