Read The Enemy for Free Online

Then she moved to North Carolina, but he still liked her enough to make the detour whenever he was in D.C."
    "She doesn't do anything special, not for twenty bucks."
    "Maybe he didn't need anything special."
    "We could ask the widow."
    Summer smiled. "Maybe he just liked her. Maybe she made damn sure he did. Hookers are good at that. They like repeat customers best of all. It's much safer for them if they already know the guy."
    I closed my eyes again.
    "So?" Summer said. "Did I come up with something you didn't think of?"
    "No," I said. I fell asleep before we were out of the state and woke up again nearly four hours later when Summer took the Green Valley ramp too fast. My head rolled to the right and hit the window.
    "Sorry," she said. "You should check Kramer's phone records. He must have called ahead, to make sure she was around. He wouldn't have driven all that way on the off-chance."
    "Where would he have called from?"
    "Germany," she said. "Before he left."
    "More likely he used a pay phone at Dulles. But we'll check."
    "We?"
    "You can partner with me."
    She said nothing. "Like a test," I said.
    "Is this important?"
    "Probably not. But it might be. Depends what the conference is about. Depends what paperwork he was taking to it. He might have had the whole ETO order of battle in his case. Or new tactics, assessment of shortcomings, all kinds of classified stuff."
    "The Red Army is going to fold."
    I nodded. "I'm more worried about red faces. Newspapers, or television. Some reporter finds classified stuff on a trash pile near a strip club, there'll be major embarrassment all around."
    "Maybe the widow will know. He might have discussed it with her."
    "We can't ask her," I said. "As far as she's concerned he died in his sleep with the blanket pulled up to his chin, and everything else was kosher. Any worries we've got at this point stay strictly between me, you, and Garber."
    "Garber?" she said.
    The, you, and him," I said.
    I saw her smile. It was a trivial case, but working it with Garber was a definite stroke of luck, for a person with a ll0th Special Unit transfer pending. Green Valley was a picture-perfect colonial town and the Kramer house was a neat old place in an expensive part of it. It was a Victorian confection with fish-scale tiles on the roof and a bunch of turrets and porches all painted white, sitting on a couple of acres of emerald lawn. There were stately evergreen trees dotted about. They looked like someone had positioned them with care, which they probably had, a hundred years ago. We pulled up at the curb and waited, just looking. I don't know what Summer was thinking about, but I was scanning the scene and filing it away under A for America.
    I have a Social Security number and the same blue and silver passport as everyone else but between my old man's Stateside tours and my own I can only put together about five years' worth of actual residence in the continental U.S. So I know a bunch of basic elementary school facts like state capitals and how many grand slams Lou Gehrig hit and some basic high-school stuff like the Constitutional amendments and the importance of Antietam, but I don't know much about the price of milk or how to work a pay phone or how different places look and smell. So I soak it up when I can. And the Kramer house was worth soaking up. That was for sure.
    A watery sun was shining on it. There was a faint breeze and the smell of woodsmoke in the air and a kind of intense cold-afternoon quiet all around us. It was the kind of place you would have wanted your grandparents to live. You could have visited in the fall and raked leaves and drunk apple cider and then come back in the summer and loaded a ten year-old station wagon with a canoe and headed for a lake somewhere. It reminded me of the places in the picture books they gave me in Manila and Guam and Seoul. Until we got inside.
    "Ready?" Summer said.
    "Sure," I said. "Let's do it. Let's do the widow thing."
    She was quiet. I