The General's Daughter

“Right.” Cal looked at some sheets of typed paper on the bulletin board and matched something to something, then led us to a distant corner of the hangar where about a hundred white plaster casts of footprints sat on the floor, looking like the evidence of Pompeii’s populace heading out of town.

  The casts were numbered with black grease pencil, and he found the one he wanted, hefted it up, and carried it over to a table. There was a fluorescent lamp clamped to the table, and I turned it on.

  We all stared at the cast a few seconds, then Cal said, “Okay, this bootprint is St. John’s, heading toward the body. This little mark at the edge is the direction of the body. Okay, also heading toward the body is this bootprint, which is Colonel Kent’s.”

  I looked at the two bootprints. They were superimposed side by side, the left side of Kent’s left boot overlapping the right side of St. John’s right boot—or St. John’s overlapping Kent’s. That was the question. I didn’t say anything, and neither did Cynthia. Finally, Cal said, “Well. . . if you. . . do you see that indent there? That’s the wad of gum on St. John’s boot, but it wasn’t touched by Kent’s boot or vice versa. You see, we have two military boots of the same make, same tread, and the prints were made within hours of each other. . . and we have intersecting and interlocking tread marks. . .”

  “Do you need a deerstalker cap for this?”

  “A what?”

  “Why did someone put the shorter pin on Kent’s print on the diagram?”

  “Well, I’m not an expert on this.”

  “Where is the expert?”

  “He’s gone. But let me give it a try.” He changed the position of the lighting, then shut it off and looked at the cast in the shadowy overhead light of the hangar, then got a flashlight and tried different angles and distances. Cynthia and I looked as well, this not being an exact science but more a matter of common sense. In truth, it was nearly impossible to say with any certainty which bootprint had been made first.

  Cynthia ran her finger over the places where the two bootprints intersected. With a smooth sole, you could easily tell which was deeper, but even that was not proof that the deeper one was made first, given the fact that people walk differently and are of different weights. But the deeper print is usually first because it compresses the earth or the snow or the mud, and the next footstep is walking on compressed earth and will not sink in as far, unless the person is a real lard-ass. Cynthia said, “St. John’s print is a hair higher than Kent’s.”

  Cal said, “I’ve seen Kent, and he weighs about two hundred pounds. How about St. John?”

  I replied, “About the same.”

  “Well,” said Seiver, “it really depends on how hard they came down. Relative to their other prints on the diagram, and considering the flat impressions of both prints, neither was running. In fact, I’d guess that both were walking slowly. So if Kent’s print is a hair deeper, you’d have to guess that Kent’s print was made first, and St. John walked over Kent’s print later. But that’s just a guess.” He added, “I wouldn’t send anybody to the gallows on that.”

  “No, but we can scare the shit out of him.”

  “Right.”

  “Can you get the latent-footprint guy back here tonight?”

  Cal shook his head. “He’s off to Oakland Army Base on assignment. I can get someone else flown in by chopper.”

  “I want the original guy. Get this cast on a flight to Oakland and have him analyze it again. Don’t tell him what he thought the first time. Right? He’s not going to remember this one out of a few hundred.”

  “Right. We’ll see if we get the same analysis. I’ll get on it. We may have to put it on a commercial flight out of Atlanta to San Francisco. I may go myself.”

  “No way, pal. You’re stuck at Hadley with me.”

  “Shit.”

  “Right. Okay, I do want a latent-footprint team from Gillem. I want them out at the rifle range at first light. They’re looking for more of Colonel Kent’s bootprints. Have them look alongside the road, out further on the range, around the body again, and near the latrines and so on. I want a clear diagram showing only Kent’s prints. Better yet, feed everything into a computer program, and be prepared to show it by noon tomorrow. Okay?”

  “We’ll do our best.” He hesitated, then asked, “Are you sure about this?”

  I gave him a slight nod, which was all the encouragement he needed to roust people out of bed and get them back to Hadley at dawn. I said, “Cal, the FBI might come around tonight or early tomorrow. They have jurisdiction over this case as of noon tomorrow. But not until then.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Work out some kind of early warning signal with the MPs outside, and alert Grace so she can stuff the disk she’s working on.”

  “No problem.”

  “Thanks. You’ve done a good job.”

  Cynthia and I went back to Grace Dixon, who was making a neat pile of printouts on her desk. She said, “Here’s the last one. That’s all the diary entries that mention Bill Kent, William Kent, Kent, and so on.”

  “Good.” I took the stack and leafed through it. There were about forty sheets of paper, some with more than one dated entry, the first going back to June of two years ago, and the most recent was just last week.

  Cynthia commented, “They saw a lot of each other.”

  I nodded. “Okay, thanks again, Grace. Why don’t you put the disk in your secret place and go get some sleep?”

  “I’m okay. You look like hell.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  I took the printouts with me, and we made the long walk across the hangar and exited through the small door. It was one of those still nights where the humidity hung in the air, and you couldn’t even smell the pines unless you were on top of them. “Shower?” I asked.

  “No,” Cynthia replied. “Provost office. Colonel Moore and Ms. Baker-Kiefer. Remember them?”

  We got into my Blazer, and the clock on the dashboard said ten thirty-five. That gave us less than fourteen hours to tie it up.

  Cynthia saw me looking at the clock and said, “The FBI guys are probably yawning and thinking about turning in. But they’ll be all over the place tomorrow morning.”

  “Right.” I put the Blazer in gear, and we headed away from Jordan Field. I said, “I don’t care if they get credit for solving this case. I’m not into the petty crap. I’ll turn this all over to them at noon tomorrow, and they can run with it. But the closer we get to the perpetrator, the less dirt they have to dig up. I’ll point them in Kent’s direction and hope that’s as far as it goes.”

  “Well, that’s very big of you to let them wind it up. Your career is sort of winding up, too. But I could use the credit.”

  I glanced at her. “We’re military. We just take orders. In fact, you take orders from me.”

  “Yes, sir.” She sulked for a minute, then said, “The FBI are masters at the public relations game, Paul. Their PR people make the Army Public Information Office look like an information booth at a bus station. We’ve got to finish this ourselves, even if it means putting a gun to Kent’s head and threatening to blow his brains out unless he signs a confession.”

  “My, my, aren’t we assertive tonight.”

  “Paul, this is important. And you’re right about the FBI digging up unnecessary dirt. They’ll leak the contents of that diary to every paper in the country, and to add insult to injury, they’ll say they found the disk and cracked it. These guys are good, but they’re ruthless. They’re almost as ruthless as you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And they don’t care about the Army. Talk about Nietzsche—the FBI philosophy is, ‘Whatever makes any other law enforcement agency or institution look bad makes us look better.’

  So we have to wrap it up by noon.”

  “Okay. Who’s the murderer?”

  “Kent.”

  “Positive?”

  “No. Are you?”

  I shrugged. “I like the guy.”

&n
bsp; She nodded. “I don’t dislike him, but I’m not overly fond of him.”

  It was funny, I thought, how men and women often had a different opinion of the same person. The last time I can remember when a woman and I both agreed that we really liked a guy, the woman was my wife, and she ran off with the guy. I asked, as a matter of information, “What is it about Kent that you don’t like?”

  “He cheated on his wife.”

  Makes sense to me. I added to that, “He may also be a killer. Minor point, but I thought I’d mention it.”

  “Can the sarcasm. If he murdered Ann Campbell, he did it on the spur of the moment. Cheating on his wife was a two-year, premeditated infidelity. It shows weakness of character.”

  “I’ll say.” I headed up the long, dark road through the pine forest. In the distance, I could see the lights of Bethany Hill, and I wondered what was going on at the Fowler house and the Kent house. I said, “I wouldn’t want to be up there for dinner tonight.”

  Cynthia looked out the windshield. “What a mess. I came here to Hadley to investigate a rape, and I wind up involved with the aftershock of a ten-year-old rape.”

  “Crime breeds crime breeds crime,” I pointed out.

  “Right. Did you know that a rape victim is statistically more likely to get raped again than a female who has never been raped?”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “But no one seems to know why. There’s no common denominator like job, age, neighborhood, or anything like that. It’s just that if it happened once, it’s more likely to happen again. Makes no sense. It’s scary, like there’s some sort of evil out there that knows. . .”

  “Spooky,” I agreed. I didn’t have that experience in homicide cases. You only get killed once.

  Cynthia began talking about her job, about how the job got her down sometimes, and how it had probably affected her marriage.

  Cynthia obviously needed to talk, to start healing herself before the next case. But there’s always a residue of each case, and it’s like a soul toxin that makes you spiritually sicker each year. But it’s a job that needed to be done, and some people decided to do it, and some people decided they needed another job. You form a callus around your heart, I think, but it’s only as thick as you want it to be, and sometimes a particularly vicious crime cuts right through the callus, and you’re wounded again.

  Cynthia kept talking, and I supposed I realized that this talk was not just about her, or her marriage, or the job, but about me, and about us.

  She said, “I think I might apply for a transfer to. . . something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “The Army band.” She laughed. “I used to play the flute. Do you play anything?”

  “Just the radio. How about Panama?”

  She shrugged. “You go where they send you. I don’t know. . . Everything’s up in the air.”

  I guess I was supposed to say something, to offer an alternative. But in truth, I wasn’t as confident and decisive in my personal life as I was in my professional life. When a woman says “commitment,” I ask for an aspirin. When she says “love,” I immediately lace up my running shoes.

  Yet, this thing with Cynthia was real, because it had withstood some test of time, and because I’d missed her and thought about her for a year. But now that she was here, right beside me, I was starting to panic. But I wasn’t going to blow it again, so I said to her, “I still have that farmhouse outside of Falls Church. Maybe you’d like to see it.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Good.”

  “When?”

  “I guess. . . day after tomorrow. When we go back to headquarters. Stay the weekend. Longer if you want.”

  “I have to be at Benning on Monday.”

  “Why?”

  “Lawyers. Papers. I’m getting divorced in Georgia. I was married in Virginia. You’d think there’d be a national divorce law for people like us.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I have to be in Panama by the end of this month. I’d like to finalize the divorce before then or it’ll take another six months if I’m out of the country.”

  “Right. I got my divorce papers delivered in the mail call by chopper while I was under fire.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Plus a dunning letter for my car loan, and antiwar literature from a peace group in San Francisco. Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed. Actually, I had no bed. Goes to show you. Things could be worse.”

  “Things could be better. We’ll have a good weekend.”

  “Looking forward to it.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-TWO

  We arrived back at the provost marshal’s building. The media had decamped, and I parked in a no-parking zone on the road. Carrying the printouts of Ann Campbell’s diary, we went inside the building.

  I said to Cynthia, “We’ll speak with Colonel Moore first, then see what Ms. Kiefer has found.”

  As we walked toward the holding cells, Cynthia observed, “It’s hard to comprehend that the man who runs this whole place could be a criminal.”

  “Right. It kind of messes up the protocols and the standard operating procedures.”

  “Sure does. How do you feel about that bootprint?”

  “It’s about all we’ve got,” I replied.

  She thought a moment, then said, “But we’ve got motive and opportunity. Though I’m not certain about our psychological profile of the killer or Kent’s will to act. Also, we have almost no circumstantial evidence.” She added, “But after having drinks with him, I think our intuition is correct.”

  “Good. Tell it to the FBI.”

  I asked the lockup sergeant to accompany us, and we went to Colonel Moore’s cell. Moore was sitting up in his cot, fully dressed except for his shoes. Dalbert Elkins had pulled his chair up to the common bars and was talking to Moore, who was either listening very intently or had gone into a catatonic trance.

  They both saw us approaching and both stood. Elkins seemed glad to see me, but Moore looked apprehensive, not to mention disheveled.

  Elkins said to me, “Still set for tomorrow, Chief? No problem?”

  “No problem.”

  “My wife says to say thanks to you.”

  “She does? She told me to keep you here.”

  Elkins laughed.

  I said to the MP sergeant, “Will you unlock Colonel Moore, please?”

  “Yes, sir.” He unlocked Moore’s cell and asked me, “Cuffs?”

  “Yes, please, Sergeant.”

  The MP sergeant barked at Moore, “Wrists, front!”

  Moore thrust his clenched hands to his front, and the sergeant snapped the cuffs on him.

  Without a word, we walked down the long, echoing corridor, past the mostly empty cells. Moore, in his stockinged feet, made no echoes. There are few places on this earth more dismal than a cell block, and few scenes more melancholy than a prisoner in handcuffs. Moore, for all his intellectualizing, was not handling this well, which was the purpose.

  We went into an interrogation room, and the sergeant left us. I said to Moore, “Sit.”

  He sat.

  Cynthia and I sat at a table opposite him.

  I said to him, “I told you that the next time we spoke, it would be here.”

  He didn’t reply. He looked a little frightened, a little dejected, and a little angry, though he was trying to suppress that, since he realized it wouldn’t do him any good. I said to him, “If you’d told us everything you knew the first time, you might not be here.”

  No reply.

  “Do you know what makes a detective really, really angry? When the detective has to waste valuable time and energy on a witness who’s being cute.”

  I verbally poked him around awhile, assuring him that he made me sick, that he was a disgrace to his uniform, his rank, his profession, his country, and to God, the human race, and the universe.

  All the while, Moore stayed silent, though I don’t think this was an e
xpression of his Fifth Amendment right to do so as much as it was his accurate estimate that I wanted him to shut his mouth.

  Cynthia, meanwhile, had taken the printouts of the diary and had gotten up and left for most of the verbal abuse. After about five minutes, she came back without the printouts, but she was carrying a plastic tray on which was a Styrofoam cup of milk and a donut.

  Moore’s eyes flashed to the food, and he stopped paying attention to me.

  Cynthia said to him, “I brought you this.” She set the tray down out of his reach and said to him, “I’ve asked the MP to unlock your cuffs so you can eat. He’ll be here when he gets a moment.”

  Moore assured her, “I can eat with my cuffs on.”

  Cynthia informed him, “It’s against regulations to make a prisoner eat with wrist manacles, chains, cuffs, and such.”

  “You’re not making me. I’m perfectly willing to—”

  “Sorry. Wait for the sergeant.”

  Moore kept looking at the donut, which, I suspected, was the first mess hall donut he’d ever shown any interest in. I said to him, “Let’s get on with this. And don’t jerk us around like you did the last few times. Okay, to show you how much shit you’re in, I’m going to tell you what we already know from the forensic evidence. Then you’re going to fill in the details. First, you and Ann Campbell planned this for at least a week—from the time her father gave her the ultimatum. Okay, I don’t know whose idea it was to re-create the West Point rape”—I stared at him and saw his reaction to this, then went on—“but it was a sick idea. Okay, you called her at Post Headquarters, coordinated the times, and drove out to rifle range five, where you pulled across the gravel lot and behind the bleachers there. You got out of your car, carrying the tent pegs, rope, a hammer, and so forth, and also a mobile phone, and maybe the tape player. You walked along the corduroy trail to the latrines at rifle range six, and perhaps called her again from there to confirm that she’d left Post Headquarters.”

  I spent the next ten minutes re-creating the crime for him, basing my narrative on forensic evidence, conjecture, and supposition. Colonel Moore looked duly impressed, very surprised, and increasingly unhappy.