The Affair

Chapter 26

I followed the same long loop Deveraux had used and tiptoed in from the north side. I squatted down next to her. I put my elbows on my knees. I clasped my hands together.

I looked, right to left, and then left to right.

The corpse was male.

And white.

Forty-five years old, maybe a little less, maybe a little more.

Maybe five-ten, maybe a hundred and eighty pounds. Dark hair, going mousy. Two or three days’ stubble, going white. A green work shirt, a brown canvas windbreaker jacket. Blue jeans. Brown engineer boots, creased and cracked and starved of polish and caked with dirt.

I asked Deveraux, “Do you know him?”

She said, “I never saw him before.”

He had bled to death. He had taken what I guessed was a high-velocity rifle round through the meat of his right thigh. His pants were soaked with blood. Almost certainly the round had torn his femoral artery. The femoral artery is a high-capacity vessel. Absolutely crucial. Any significant breach will be fatal within minutes, absent prompt and effective emergency treatment.

But what was extraordinary about the scene in front of us was that prompt and effective emergency treatment had been attempted. The guy’s pants leg had been slit with a knife. The wound was partially covered with an absorbent bandage pad.

The absorbent bandage pad was a general-issue military field dressing.

Deveraux stood up and backed away, short mincing tiptoe steps, her eyes on the corpse, until she got ten or twelve feet away. I did the same thing and joined her. She talked low, as if noise was disrespectful. As if the corpse could hear us. She asked, “What do you make of that?”

“There was a dispute,” I said. “A shot was fired. Probably a warning shot that went astray. Or a giddy-up shot that came too close.”

“Why not a killing shot that missed?”

“Because the shooter would have tried again right away. He would have stepped in closer and put one through the guy’s head. But he didn’t do that. He tried to help the guy instead.”

“And?”

“And he saw that he was failing in his attempt. So he panicked and ran away. He left the guy to die. Won’t have taken long.”

“The shooter was a soldier.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Who else carries GI field dressings?”

“Anyone who shops at surplus stores.”

Deveraux turned around. Turned her back on the corpse. She raised her arm and pointed at the horizon on our right. A short sweep of her arm.

She asked, “What do you see?”

I said, “Kelham’s perimeter.”

“I told you,” she said. “They’re enforcing a quarantine zone.”

Deveraux headed back to her car for something and I stood still and looked at the ground around my feet. The earth was soft and there were plenty of footprints. The dead guy’s looped and staggered, some of them backward like an old-fashioned dance chart. Their curving sequence ended where he lay. All around the lower half of his body were toe marks and round depressions from knees, where his assailant had first squatted and then knelt to work on him. Those marks were at the head of a long straight line of partial prints, mostly toe, not much heel, all widely spaced. The shooter had run in fast. A reasonably tall person. Not a giant. Not especially heavy. There were identical prints facing the other way, where the shooter had run away again. I didn’t recognize the tread patterns. They were unlike any army boot I had ever seen.

Deveraux came back from her car with a camera. It was a silver SLR. She got ready to take her crime-scene pictures and I followed the line of panicked running prints away from the area. I kept them three feet to my right and tracked them a hundred yards, and then they petered out on a broad vein of bone-hard dirt. Some kind of a geological issue, or an irrigation thing, or I had reached the limit of what old man Clancy liked to plow. I saw no reason why a fleeing man would change direction at that point, so I kept on going straight, hoping to pick up the prints again, but I didn’t. Within fifty yards the ground became matted with low wiry weeds of some description. Ahead of me they grew a little taller, and then they shaded into the brush that had grown up at the base of Kelham’s fence. I saw no bruised stalks, but it was tough vegetation and I wouldn’t have expected it to show much damage.

I turned back and took a step and saw a glint of light twelve feet to my right. Metallic. Brassy. I detoured and bent down and saw a cartridge case lying on the dirt. Bright and fresh. New. Long, from a rifle. Best case, it was a.223 Remington, made for a sporting gun. Worst case, it was a 5.56 millimeter NATO round, made for the military. Hard to tell the difference, with the naked eye. The Remington case has thinner brass. The NATO case is heavier.

I picked it up and weighed it in my palm.

Dollars to doughnuts, it was a military round.

I looked ahead at Deveraux and Pellegrino and the dead guy in the distance. They were about a hundred and forty yards away. Practically touching distance, for a rifleman. The 5.56 NATO round was designed to penetrate one side of a steel helmet at six hundred meters, which works out to about six hundred and fifty yards. The dead guy was more than four times closer than that. An easy shot. Hard to miss, which was my only real consolation. The kind of guy that gets sent from Benning to Kelham for finishing school isn’t the kind of guy that misplaces a round at point-blank range. Yet this was clearly an unintentional hit. The bandage proved it. It was a warning shot gone wrong. Or a giddy-up shot. But the kind of guy that gets sent from Benning to Kelham has worked out his testosterone issues long ago. He puts his warning shots high and wide. And his giddy-up shots. All the subject needs is to see the muzzle flash and hear the noise of the gun. That’s all the situation requires. And no soldier does more than he has to. No soldier ever has, since Alexander the Great first put his army together. Initiative in the ranks usually ends in tears. Especially where live ammunition is involved. And civilians.

I put the brass in my pocket and hiked back. I saw nothing else of significance. Deveraux had snapped a whole roll of film, and she rewound it and took it out of her camera and sent Pellegrino back to the pharmacy to get it printed. She told him to ask for rush service, and then she told him to bring the doctor back with him, with the mortuary wagon. He departed on cue and Deveraux and I were left standing together in a thousand acres of emptiness, with nothing for company except a corpse and a blasted tree.

I asked, “Did anyone hear a shot?”

She said, “Mr. Clancy is the only one who could. Pellegrino talked to him already. He claims not to have heard anything.”

“Any yelling? A warning shot presupposes some yelling first.”

“If he didn’t hear a shot, he wouldn’t have heard yelling.”

“A single NATO round far away and outdoors isn’t necessarily loud. The yelling could have been louder. Especially if it was two-way yelling, which it might have been, back and forth. You know, if there was a dispute or an argument.”

“You accept it was a NATO round now?”

I put my hand in my pocket and came out with the shell case. I held it in my open palm. I said, “I found it a hundred and forty yards out, twelve feet off the straight vector. Exactly where an M16 ejection port would have put it.”

Deveraux said, “It could be a Remington.223,” which was kind of her. Then she took it from me. Her nails felt sharp on the skin of my palm. It was the first time we had touched. The first physical contact. We hadn’t shaken hands when we met.

She did what I had done. She weighed the brass in her palm. Unscientific, but long familiarity can be as accurate as a laboratory instrument. She said, “NATO for sure. I’ve fired a lot of these, and picked them up afterward.”

“Me too,” I said.

“I’m going to raise hell,” she said. “Soldiers against civilians, on American soil? I’ll go all the way to the Pentagon. The White House, if I have to.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“Why the hell not?”

“You’re a country sheriff. They’ll crush you like a bug.”

She said nothing.

“Believe me,” I said. “If they’ve gotten as far as deploying soldiers against civilians, they’ve gotten as far as working out ways to beat local law enforcement.”