The Enemy

exercise, anything. He tripped and fell and hit his head. Case closed. That is a direct order.”
    “I’ll need it in writing,” I said.
    “Grow up,” he said.

    We sat quiet for a moment or two, just glaring at each other across the desk. I sat still, and Willard rocked and plucked. I clenched my fist, out of his sight. I imagined smashing a straight right to the center of his chest. I figured I could stop his lousy heart with a single blow. I could write it up as a training accident. I could say he had been practicing getting in and out of his chair, and he had slipped and caught his sternum on the corner of the desk.
    “What was the time of death?” he asked.
    “Nine or ten last night,” I said.
    “And you were off-post until eleven?”
    “Asked and answered,” I said.
    “Can you prove that?”
    I thought of the gate guards in their booth. They had logged me in.
    “Do I have to?” I said.
    He went quiet again. Leaned to his left in the chair.
    “Next item,” he said. “You claim the butt-bandit wasn’t killed because he was a butt-bandit. What’s your evidence?”
    “The crime scene was overdone,” I said.
    “To obscure the real motive?”
    I nodded. “That’s my judgment.”
    “What was the real motive?”
    “I don’t know. That would have required an investigation.”
    “Let’s speculate,” Willard said. “Let’s assume the hypothetical perpetrator would have benefited from the homicide. Tell me how.”
    “The usual way,” I said. “By preventing some future action on Sergeant Carbone’s part. Or to cover up a crime that Sergeant Carbone was a party to or had knowledge of.”
    “To silence him, in other words.”
    “To dead-end something,” I said. “That would be my guess.”
    “And you do this stuff for a living.”
    “Yes,” I said. “I do.”
    “How would you have located this person?”
    “By conducting an investigation.”
    Willard nodded. “And when you found this person, hypothetically, assuming you were able to, what would you have done?”
    “I would have taken him into custody,” I said.
Protective custody,
I thought. I pictured Carbone’s squadron buddies in my mind, pacing anxiously, ready to lock and load.
    “And your suspect pool would have been whoever was on-post at the time?”
    I nodded. Lieutenant Summer was probably struggling with reams of printout paper even as we spoke.
    “Verified via strength lists and gate logs,” I said.
    “Facts,” Willard said. “I would have thought that facts would be extremely important to someone who does this stuff for a living. This post covers nearly a hundred thousand acres. It was last strung with perimeter wire in 1943. Those are facts. I discovered them with very little trouble, and you should have too. Doesn’t it occur to you that not everyone on the post has to come through the main gate? Doesn’t it occur to you that someone recorded as
not
being here could have slipped in through the wire?”
    “Unlikely,” I said. “It would have given him a walk of well over two miles, in pitch dark, and we run random motor patrols all night.”
    “The patrols might have missed a trained man.”
    “Unlikely,” I said again. “And how would he have rendezvoused with Sergeant Carbone?”
    “Prearranged location.”
    “It wasn’t a location,” I said. “It was just a spot near the track.”
    “Map reference, then.”
    “Unlikely,” I said, for the third time.
    “But possible?”
    “Anything’s possible.”
    “So a man could have met with the shirtlifter, then killed him, then gotten back out through the wire, and then walked around to the main gate, and then signed in?”
    “Anything’s possible,” I said again.
    “What kind of timescale are we looking at? Between killing him and signing in?”
    “I don’t know. I would have to work out the distance he walked.”
    “Maybe he ran.”
    “Maybe he did.”
    “In which case he would have been out of breath when he passed the gate.”
    I said nothing.
    “Best guess,” Willard said. “How much time?”
    “An hour or two.”
    He nodded. “So if the fairy was offed at nine or ten, the killer could have been logging in at eleven?”
    “Possible,” I said.
    “And the motive would have been to dead-end something.”
    I nodded. Said nothing.
    “And you took six hours to complete a four-hour journey, thereby leaving a potential two-hour gap, which you explain with the vague claim that you took a slow route.”
    I said nothing.
    “And