'Maybe he was doing a few lines of coke and decided to have sex with somebody,' Marino said. 'And at some point he got up close to look through the hole to make sure the camera was going.'
'Maybe,' I said. 'How fast can we look at the tape?'
'I don't want to do it here.'
'I don't blame you. The camera's so small we couldn't see much anyway.'
'I'll take it to the Intelligence Division as soon as we finish up.
'
'I'll take it to the Intelligence Division as soon as we finish up.'
There was little left for us to do at the scene. As he suspected, Vander found significant residues in the gun cabinet, but no blood anywhere else in the house. The neighbors on either side of Sheriff Brown's property were cloistered amid trees and had not heard or seen any activity late last night or early this morning.
'If you'll just drop me by my car,' I said as we drove away.
Marino glanced suspiciously at me. 'Where are you going?'
'Petersburg.'
'What the hell for?' he said.
'I've got to talk to a friend about boots.'
There were many trucks and much construction along a stretch of 1-95 South that I always found bleak. Even the Philip Morris plant with its building-high pack of Merits was stressful, for the fragrance of fresh tobacco bothered me. I desperately missed smoking, especially when I was driving alone on a day like this. My mind streaked, eyes constantly on mirrors as I looked for a dark blue van.
The wind flailed trees and swamps, and snow-flakes were flying. As I got closer to Ft. Lee I began to see barracks and warehouses where breastworks once had been built upon dead bodies during this nation's cruelest hour. That war seemed close when I thought of Virginia swamps and woods and missing dead. Not a year passed when I didn't examine old buttons and bones, and Minie balls turned into the labs. I had touched the fabrics and faces of old violence, too, and it felt different from what I put my hands on now. Evil, I believed, had mutated to a new extreme.
The US Army Quartermaster Museum was located in Ft. Lee, just past Kenner Army Hospital. I slowly drove past offices and classrooms housed in rows of white trailers, and squads of young men and women in camouflage and athletic clothes. The building I wanted was brick with a blue roof and columns and the heraldry of an eagle, crossed sword and key just left of the door. I parked and went inside, looking for John Gruber.
The museum was the attic for the Quartermaster Corps, which since the American Revolution had been the army's innkeeper. Troops were clothed, fed and sheltered by the QMC, which also had supplied Buffalo soldiers with spurs and saddles, and General Fatten with bullhorns for his jeep. I was familiar with the museum because the corps was also responsible for collecting, identifying and burying the army's dead. Ft. Lee had the only Graves Registration Division in the country, and its officers rotated through my office regularly.
I walked past displays of field dress, mess kits, and a World War II trench scene with sandbags and grenades. I stopped at Civil War uniforms that I knew were real and wondered if tears in cloth were from shrapnel or age. I wondered about the men who had worn them.
'Dr. Scarpetta?'
I turned around.
'Dr. Gruber,' I said warmly. 'I was just looking for you. Tell me about the whistle.' I pointed at a showcase filled with musical instruments.
'That's a Civil War pennywhistle,' he said. 'Music was very important. They used it to tell the time of day.'
Dr. Gruber was the museum's curator, an older man with bushy gray hair and a face carved of granite. He liked baggy trousers and bow ties. He called me when an exhibit was related to war dead, and I visited him whenever unusual military objects turned up with a body. He could identify virtually any buckle, button or bayonet at a glance.
'I take it you've got something for me to look at?' he asked, nodding at my briefcase.
'The photographs I mentioned to you over the phone.'
'Let's go to the office. Unless you'd like to look around a bit.' He smiled like a bashful grandfather talking about his grandchildren.
'We have quite an exhibit on Desert Storm. And General Eisenhower's mess uniform. I don't believe that was here when you were here last.'
'Dr. Gruber, please let me do it another time.' I did not put up any pretenses. My face showed him how I felt.
He patted my shoulder and led me through a back door that took us out of the museum into a loading area where an old trailer painted army green was parked.
'Belonged to Eisenhower,' Dr. Gruber said as we walked. 'He lived in there at times, and it wasn't too bad unless Churchill visited. Then the cigars. You can imagine.'
We crossed a narrow street, and the snow was blowing harder. My eyes began to water as I again envisioned the pennywhistle in the showcase and thought about the woman we called Jane. I wondered if Gault had ever come here. He seemed to like museums, especially those displaying artifacts of violence. We followed a sidewalk to a small beige building I had visited before. During World War II it had been a filling station for the army. Now it was the repository for the Quartermaster archives.
Dr. Gruber unlocked a door and we entered a room crowded with tables and manikins wearing uniforms from antiquity. Tables were covered with the paperwork necessary to catalog acquisitions. In back was a large storage area where the heat was turned low and aisles were lined with large metal cabinets containing clothing, parachutes, mess kits, goggles, glasses. What we were interested in was found in large wooden cabinets against a wall.
'May I see what you've got?' Dr. Gruber asked, turning on more lights. 'I apologize about the temperature, but we've got to keep it cold.'
I opened my briefcase and pulled out an envelope, from which I slid several eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs of the footprints found in Central Park. Mainly, I cared about those we believed had been left by Gault. I showed the photographs to Dr. Gruber, and he moved them closer to a light.
1 realize it's rather difficult to see since they were left in snow,' I said. 'I wish there were a little more shadow for contrast.'
'This is quite all right. I'm getting a very good idea. This is definitely military, and it's the logotype that fascinates me.'
I looked on as he pointed to a circular area on the heel that had a tail on one side.
'Plus you've got this area of raised diamonds down here and two holes, see?' He showed me. 'Those could be shoe grip holes for climbing trees.' He handed the photographs to me. 'This looks very familiar.'
He went to a cabinet and opened its double doors, revealing rows of army boots on shelves. One by one he picked up boots and turned them over to look at the soles. Then he went to the second cabinet, opened its doors and started again. Toward the back he pulled out a boot with green canvas uppers, brown leather reinforcements and two brown leather straps with buckles at the top. He turned it over.
