The General's Daughter (11 page)

“Rope.”

“Rope? Oh…”

And there it was: a length of nylon cord, curled up in the bottom drawer. I took it out and examined it.

Cynthia said, “Is it the same?”

“Possibly. This looks like the rope at the scene—standard Army-green tent cord, but there’s about six million miles of it
out there. Still, it is suggestive.” I looked at the bed, which was an old four-poster, suitable for bondage. I don’t know
a great deal about sexual deviations except for what I’ve read in the CID manual, but I do know that bondage is a risky thing.
I mean, a big healthy woman like Ann Campbell could probably defend herself if something got out of hand. But if you’re spread-eagled
on the bed or the ground with your wrists and ankles tied to something, you’d better know the guy real well, or something
bad could happen. Actually, it did.

I turned out the lights and we left the bedroom. Cynthia swung the framed recruiting poster closed. I found a tube of wood
glue on the workbench, opened the hinged poster a crack, and ran a bead of glue along the wood frame. That would help a little,
but once you figured out that some floor space was missing, you’d figure out the rest of it, and if you didn’t realize some
space was missing, the poster looked like it belonged there. I said to Cynthia, “Fooled me for a minute. How smart are MPs?”

“It’s more a matter of spatial perception than brains. And if they don’t find it, the police might when they get here.” She
added, “Someone might want that poster. I think we either have to let the MPs empty the room for the CID lab, or we cooperate
with the civilian police before they padlock this place.”

“I think we do neither. We take a chance. That room is our secret. Okay?”

She nodded. “Okay, Paul. Maybe your instincts are good on this.”

We went up the basement stairs, turned off the lights, and closed the door.

In the front foyer, Cynthia said to me, “I guess your instincts were right about Ann Campbell.”

“Well, I thought we’d be lucky if we found a diary and a few steamy love notes. I didn’t expect a secret door that led into
a room decorated for Madame Bovary by the Marquis de Sade.” I added, “I guess we all need our space. The world would actually
be a better place if we all had a fantasy room in which to act out.”

“Depends on the script, Paul.”

“Indeed.”

We left by the front door, got into Cynthia’s Mustang, and headed back up Victory Drive, passing a convoy of Army trucks heading
the other way as we approached the post.

As Cynthia drove, I stared out the side window, deep in thought.
Weird,
I thought.
Weird.
Weird things, right on the other side of a gung-ho recruiting poster. And that was to become metaphor for this case: shiny
brass, pressed uniforms, military order and honor, a slew of people above reproach, but if you went a little deeper, opened
the right door, you would find a profound corruption as rank as Ann Campbell’s bed.

A
s Cynthia drove, she divided her attention between the road and Ann Campell’s address book, mostly at the expense of the road.
I said, “Give me that.”

She threw it on my lap in a gesture that was definitely meant to be aggressive.

I flipped through the address book, a thick leather-bound and well-worn book of good quality, written in a neat hand. Every
space was filled with names and addresses, a good number of them crossed out and reentered with a new address as people changed
duty stations, homes, wives, husbands, units, countries, and from alive to dead. In fact, I saw two entries marked KIA. It
was a typical address book of a career soldier, spanning the years and the world, and, while I knew it was probably her desktop
official address book and not the little black book that we hadn’t yet found, I was still fairly certain that someone in this
book knew something. If I had two years, I could question all of them. Clearly, I had to give the book to headquarters in
Falls Church, Virginia, where my immediate superior, Colonel Karl Gustav Hellmann, would parcel it out all over the world,
generating a stack of transcribed interviews taller than the great Teutonic pain-in-the-ass himself. Maybe he’d decide to
read them and stay off my case.

A word about my boss. Karl Hellmann was actually born a German citizen close to an American military installation near Frankfurt,
and, like many hungry children whose families were devastated by the war, he had made himself a sort of mascot for the American
troops and eventually joined the U.S. military to support his family. There were a good number of these galvanized German
Yankees in the U.S. military years ago, and many of them became officers, and some are still around. On the whole, they make
excellent officers, and the Army is lucky to have them. The people who have to work for them are not so lucky. But enough
whining. Karl is efficient, dedicated, loyal, and correct in both senses of the word. The only mistake I ever knew him to
make was when he decided I liked him. Wrong, Karl. But I do respect him, and I would trust him with my life. In fact, I have.

Obviously, this case needed a breakthrough, a shortcut by which we could get to the end quickly, before careers and reputations
were flushed down the toilet. Soldiers are encouraged to kill in the proper setting, but killing within the service is definitely
a slap in the face to good order and discipline. It raises too many questions about that thin line between the bloodcurdling,
screaming bayonet charge—“What’s the spirit of the bayonet?
To kill! To kill!”
—and peacetime garrison duty. A good soldier will always be respectful of rank, gender, and age. Says so in the
Soldier’s Handbook.

The best I could hope for in this case was that the murder was committed by a slimeball civilian with a previous arrest record
going back ten years. The worst I could imagine was… well, early indications pointed to it, whatever it was.

Cynthia said, apropos of the address book, “She had lots of friends and acquaintances.”

“Don’t you?”

“Not in this job.”

“True.” In fact, we were a bit out of the mainstream of Army life, and so our colleagues and good buddies are fewer in number.
Cops tend to be cliquish all over the world, and when you’re a military cop on continuing TDY—temporary duty—you don’t make
many friends, and relationships with the opposite sex tend to be short and strained, somewhat like temporary duty itself.

Midland is officially six miles from Fort Hadley, but as I said, the town has grown southward along Victory Drive, great strips
of neon commerce, garden apartments, and car dealers, so that the main gate resembles the Brandenburg Gate, separating chaotic
private enterprise and tackiness from spartan sterility. The beer cans stop at the gate.

Cynthia’s Mustang, which I had noted sported a visitor’s parking sticker, was waived through the gate by an MP, and within
a few minutes we were in the center of the main post, where traffic and parking are only slightly better than in downtown
Midland.

She pulled up to the provost marshal’s office, an older brick building that was one of the first permanent structures built
when Fort Hadley was Camp Hadley back around World War I. Military bases, like towns, start with a reason for being, followed
by places to live, a jail, a hospital, and a church, not necessarily in that order.

We expected to be expected, but it took us a while, dressed as we were—a male sergeant and a female civilian—to get into his
majesty’s office. I was not happy with Kent’s performance and lack of forethought so far. When I went through Leadership School,
they taught us that lack of prior planning makes for a piss-poor performance. Now they say don’t be reactive, be proactive.
But I have the advantage of having been taught in the old school, so I know what they’re talking about. I said to Kent, in
his office, “Do you have a grip on this case, Colonel?”

“Frankly, no.”

Kent is also from the old school, and I respect that. I asked, “Why not?”

“Because you’re running it your way, with my support services and logistics.”

“Then you run it.”

“Don’t try to browbeat me, Paul.”

And so we parried and thrusted for a minute or two in a petty but classical argument between uniformed honest cop and sneaky
undercover guy.

Cynthia listened patiently for a minute, then said, “Colonel Kent, Mr. Brenner, there is a dead woman lying out on the rifle
range. She was murdered and possibly raped. Her murderer is at large.”

That about summed it up, and Kent and I hung our heads and shook hands, figuratively speaking. Actually, we just grumbled.

Kent said to me, “I’m going to General Campbell’s office in about five minutes with the chaplain and a medical officer. Also,
the victim’s off-post phone number is being forwarded to Jordan Field, and the forensic people are still at the scene. Here
are Captain Campbell’s medical and personnel files. The dental file is with the coroner, who also wants her medical file,
so I need it back.”

“Photocopy it,” I suggested. “You have my authorization.”

We were almost at it again, but Ms. Sunhill, ever the peacemaker, interjected, “I’ll copy the fucking file.”

This sort of stopped the fun, and we got back to business. Kent showed us into an interrogation room—now called the interview
room in newspeak—and asked us, “Who do you want to see first?”

“Sergeant St. John,” I replied. Rank has its privileges.

Sergeant Harold St. John was shown into the room, and I indicated a chair across a small table at which Cynthia and I sat.
I said to St. John, “This is Ms. Sunhill and I am Mr. Brenner.”

He glanced at my name tag, which said White, and my stripes, which said staff sergeant, and he didn’t get it at first, then
he got it and said, “Oh… CID.”

“Whatever.” I continued, “You are not a suspect in the case that we are investigating, so I will not read you your rights
under Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. You are therefore under orders to answer my questions fully and
truthfully. Of course, your voluntary cooperation would be preferable to a direct order. If, during the course of this interview,
you say something that I or Ms. Sunhill believes would make you a suspect, we will read you your rights, and you have the
right to remain silent at that point.” Not fucking likely, Harry. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” We chatted about nothing important for five minutes while I sized him up. St. John was a balding man of about fifty-five,
with a brownish complexion that I thought could be explained by caffeine, nicotine, and bourbon. His life and career in the
motor pool had probably predisposed him to look at the world as a continuing maintenance problem whose solution lay somewhere
in the
Maintenance Handbook.
It may not have occurred to him that some people needed more than an oil change and a tune-up to get them right.

Cynthia was jotting a few notes as St. John and I spoke, and in the middle of my small talk, he blurted out, “Look, sir, I
know I was the last person to see her alive, and I know that means something, but if I killed her, I wasn’t going to go report
I found her dead. Right?”

Sounded reasonable, except for the verb tenses and syntax. I said to him, “The last person to see her alive was the person
who murdered her. The person who murdered her was also the first person to see her dead. You were the second person to see
her dead. Right?”

“Yeah… yes, sir… What I meant—”

“Sergeant, if you would be good enough not to think ahead of the questions, I would really like that. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

Ms. Compassion said, “Sergeant, I know this has been very trying for you, and what you discovered must have been fairly traumatic,
even for a veteran—have you been in a theater of war?”

“Yes, ma’am. ’Nam. Saw lots of dead, but never nothing like that.”

“Yes, so when you discovered the body, you couldn’t believe what you were seeing. Correct?”

He nodded enthusiastically. “I couldn’t, you know, believe my eyes. I didn’t even think it was her. You know, I didn’t recognize
her at first, because… I never… never saw her that way… Jesus Christ, I never saw anybody that way. You know, there was a
good moon last night, and I see the humvee, and I get out of my car, and off a ways I see… you know—this thing lying there
on the rifle range, and I get a little closer and a little closer, and then I know what it is and go right up to her and see
if she’s dead or alive.”

“Did you kneel beside the body?”

“Hell, no, ma’am. I just beat feet the hell out of there, got into my car, and tore ass right over to the provost marshal.”

“Are you certain she was dead?”

“I know dead when I see dead.”

“You’d left headquarters at what time?”

“About 0400 hours.”

“What time did you find the body?” Cynthia asked.

“Well, must have been about twenty, thirty minutes later.”

“And you stopped at the other guard posts?”

“Some of them. Nobody saw her come by. Then I get to thinking she headed off toward the last post first. So I skipped some
posts and went right out there.”

“Did you ever think she was malingering somewhere?”

“No.”

“Think again, Sergeant.”

“Well… she wasn’t the type. But maybe I thought about it. I do remember thinking she could have got lost out on the reservation.
That ain’t hard to do at night.”

“Did you think she could have had an accident?”

“I thought about it, ma’am.”

“So when you found her, you weren’t actually taken by complete surprise?”

“Maybe not.” He fished around for his cigarettes and asked me, “Okay to smoke?”

“Sure. Don’t exhale.”

He smiled and lit up, puffed away, and apologized to Ms. Sunhill for fouling the air. Maybe what I don’t miss about the old
Army is twenty-five-cent-a-pack cigarettes, and the blue haze that hung over everything except the ammo dumps and fuel storage
areas.

I let him get his fix, then asked, “Did the word ‘rape’ ever cross your mind as you were driving around looking for her?”