Lee Child - The Enemy

I left them to finish up by themselves and drove back through the dark to the main post buildings. Checked with a sentry and got directions to the Psy-Ops facility. It was a low brick structure with green doors and windows that might have housed the quartermaster offices way back when it was built. It was set at a distance from post headquarters, maybe halfway to where Special Forces bunked. There was darkness and silence all around it but there was a light burning in the central hallway and in one of the office windows. I parked my truck and went inside. Made it through gloomy tiled corridors and came to a door with a pebble-glass window set in its upper half. The glass had light behind it and Lt/Col. A. Norton stenciled on it. I knocked and went in. I saw a small neat office. It was clean and it smelled feminine. I didn’t salute again. I figured we were past that point.

Norton was behind a big oak army-issue desk and she had it covered with open textbooks. She had so many on the go that she had taken her telephone off the desk and put it down on the floor. She had a yellow legal pad in front of her with handwritten notes on it. The pad was in a pool of light from her desk lamp and its color was reflected upward into her hair.

“Hello,” she said.

I sat down in her visitor’s chair.

“Who was he?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think we’ll get a visual ID. He was too badly beaten. We’ll have to use fingerprints. Or teeth. If he’s got any left in there.”

“Why did you want me to look at him?”

“I told you why. I wanted your opinion.”

“Why did you think I would have an opinion?”

“Seemed to me there were elements in there that you would understand.”

“I’m not a criminal profiler.”

“I don’t want you to be. I just want some input, fast. I want to know if I’m starting out in the right direction.”

She nodded. Swept her hair back off her face.

“The obvious conclusion is that he was a homosexual,” she said. “Possibly killed because of it. Or if not, then with full awareness of it on the part of his attackers.”

I nodded.

“There was genital amputation,” she said.

“You checked?”

“I moved him a little,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know you asked me not to.”

I looked at her. She hadn’t been wearing gloves. She was a tough lady. Maybe her classroom-bound reputation was undeserved.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“My guess is you’ll find his testicles and his penis in his mouth. I doubt if his cheeks would have swelled that much simply from a beating. It’s an obvious symbolic statement, from the point of view of a homophobic attacker. Removing the deviant organs, simulating oral sex.”

I nodded.

“Likewise the nudity and the missing dog tags,” she said. “Removing the army from the deviant is the same thing as removing the deviant from the army.”

I nodded.

“The foreign object insertion speaks for itself,” she said. “In the anus.”

I nodded.

“And then there’s the fluid on his back,” she said.

“Yogurt,” I said.

“Probably strawberry,” she said. “Or maybe raspberry. It’s the old joke. How does a gay man fake an orgasm?”

“He groans a bit,” I said. “And then he throws yogurt on his lover’s back.”

“Yes,” she said. She didn’t smile. And she watched me, to see if I would.

“What about the cuts and the beating?” I said.

“Hate,” she said.

“And the belt around the neck?”

She shrugged. “It’s suggestive of an autoerotic technique. Partial asphyxiation creates heightened pleasure during orgasm.”

I nodded.

“OK,” I said.

“OK what?”

“Those were your first impressions. Do you have an opinion based on them?”

“Do you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You first.”

“I think it’s bogus.”

“Why?”

“Too much going on,” I said. “There were six things there. The nudity, the missing tags, the genitals, the tree branch, the yogurt, and the belt. Any two would have done it. Maybe three. It’s like they were trying to make a point, instead of just going ahead and making one. Maybe trying too hard.”

Norton said nothing.

“Too much,” I said again. “Like shooting someone, then strangling him, then stabbing him, then drowning him, then suffocating him, then beating him to death. It’s like they were decorating a damn Christmas tree with clues.”

She stayed quiet. She was watching me, deep inside her pool of light. Maybe assessing me.

“I have my doubts about the belt,” she said. “Autoeroticism isn’t exclusively homosexual. All men have the same orgasms physiologically, gay or not.”

“The whole thing was faked,” I said.

She nodded, finally.

“I agree with you,” she said. “You’re a smart guy.”

“For a cop?”

She didn’t smile. “But we know as officers that to permit homosexuals to serve is illegal. So we better be sure we’re not letting a defense of the army cloud our judgment.”

“It’s my job to protect the army,” I said.

“Exactly,” Norton said.

I shrugged. “But I’m not taking a position. I’m not saying this guy definitely wasn’t gay. Maybe he was. I really don’t care. And maybe his attackers knew, maybe they didn’t. I’m saying either way, that’s not why they killed him. They wanted it to look like the reason. But they weren’t really feeling it. They were feeling something else. So they larded on the clues, in a rather self-conscious way.”

Then I paused.

“In a rather academic way,” I said.

She stiffened.

“An academic way?” she said.

“Do you guys teach anything about this kind of stuff in class?”

“We don’t teach people how to kill,” she said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

She nodded. “We talk about it. We have to. Cutting off your enemy’s dick is as basic as it gets. It’s happened all through history. Happened all through Vietnam. Afghan women have been doing it to captured Soviet soldiers for the last ten years. We talk about what it symbolizes, what it communicates, and the fear it creates. There are whole books about the fear of grotesque wounds. It’s always a message to the target population. We talk about violation with foreign objects. We talk about the deliberate display of violated bodies. The trail of abandoned clothing is a classic touch.”

“Do you talk about yogurt?”

She shook her head. “But that’s a very old joke.”

“And the asphyxiation thing?”

“Not on the Psy-Ops courses. But most of the people here can read magazines. Or they can watch porn on videotape.”

“Do you talk about questioning an enemy’s sexuality?”

“Of course we do. Impugning an enemy’s sexuality is the whole point of our course. His sexual orientation, his virility, his capability, his capacity. It’s a core tactic. It always has been, everywhere, throughout history. It’s designed to work both ways. It diminishes him, and it builds us up by comparison.”

I said nothing.

She looked right at me. “Are you asking me if I recognized the fruits of our lessons, out there in the woods?”

“I guess I am,” I said.

“You didn’t really want my opinion, did you?” she asked. “That was all preamble. You already knew what you were seeing.”

I nodded. “I’m a smart guy, for a cop.”

“The answer is no,” she said. “I did not recognize the fruits of our lessons, out there in the woods. Not specifically.”

“But possibly?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“Did you meet General Kramer when you were at Fort Irwin?” I asked.