The Enemy

the floor,” I said. “Or chucked it in the back.”
    “Not if it was a pool vehicle.”
    “So maybe he put it in a sidewalk trash can later, after he parked. Or maybe he took it home with him.”
    “Maybe. It’s a fifty-fifty situation.”
    “Seventy-thirty at best,” I said.
    “We should look anyway.”
    I nodded. Braced the palms of my hands on the windshield’s header rail and vaulted down to the ground.

    It was January, and the conditions were pretty good. February would have been better. In a temperate northern hemisphere climate, vegetation dies right back in February. It gets as thin and sparse as it ever will. But January was OK. The undergrowth was low and the ground was flat and brown. It was the color of dead bracken and leaf litter. There was no snow. The landscape was even and neutral and organic. It was a good background. I figured a container for a dairy product would be bright white. Or cream. Or maybe pink, for a strawberry or a raspberry flavor. Whatever, it would be a helpful color. It wouldn’t be black, for instance. Nobody puts a dairy product in a black container. So if it was there and we came close to it, we would find it.
    We checked a ten-foot belt all around the perimeter of the crime scene. Found nothing. So we went back to the track and set off north and east along it. Summer walked five feet from the track’s left-hand edge. I walked five feet to her left. If we both scanned both ways we would cover a fifteen-foot strip, with two pairs of eyes on the crucial five-foot lane between us, which is exactly where the container should have landed, according to my aerodynamic theory.
    We walked slow, maybe half-speed. I used short paces and settled into a rhythm of moving my head from one side to the other with every step. I felt pretty stupid doing it. I must have looked like a penguin. But it was an efficient method. I lapsed into a kind of autopilot mode and the ground blurred beneath me. I wasn’t seeing individual leaves and twigs and blades of grass. I was tuning out what should be there. I felt like something that shouldn’t be there would leap right out at me.
    We walked for ten minutes and found nothing.
    “Swap?” Summer said.
    We changed places and moved on. We saw a million tons of forest debris, and nothing else. Army posts are kept scrupulously clean. The weekly litter patrol is a religion. Outside the wire we would have been tripping over all kinds of stuff. Inside, there was nothing. Nothing at all. We did another ten minutes, another three hundred yards, and then we paused and swapped positions again. Moving slow in the cold air was chilling me. I stared at the earth like a maniac. I felt we were close to our best chance. A mile and a half is 2,640 yards. I figured the first few hundred and the last few hundred were poor hunting grounds. At first the guy would have been feeling the pure urge to escape. Then close to the post buildings he knew he had to be ready and done and composed. So the middle stretch was where he would have sanitized. Anyone with any sense would have coasted to a stop, breathed in, breathed out, and thought things through. He would have buzzed his window down and felt the night air on his face. I slowed down and looked harder, left and right, left and right. Saw nothing.
    “Did he have blood on him?” I said.
    “A little, maybe,” Summer said, on my right.
    I didn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on the ground.
    “On his gloves,” she said. “Maybe on his shoes.”
    “Less than he might have expected,” I said. “Unless he was a doctor he would have expected some pretty bad bleeding.”
    “So?”
    “So he didn’t use a pool car. He expected blood and didn’t want to risk leaving it all over a vehicle that someone else was going to drive the next day.”
    “So like you said, with his own car, he’ll have thrown it in the back. So we aren’t going to find anything out here.”
    I nodded. Said nothing. Walked on.

    We covered the whole of the middle section and found nothing. Two thousand yards of dormant organic material and not one single man-made item. Not a cigarette butt, not a scrap of paper, no rusted cans, no empty bottles. It was a real tribute to the post commander’s enthusiasm. But it was disappointing. We stopped with the main post buildings clearly visible, three hundred yards in front of us.
    “I want to backtrack,” I said. “I want to do the middle part again.”
    “OK,” she said.