“Right. What time was that?”
“At 0032. And at about 0100, Ann Campbell left Post Headquarters, got into the humvee, and drove out to rifle range six.” Cynthia asked me, “What was Kent doing in his wife’s car across the street?”
“What every lovesick jerk does. Just sitting there watching the light in the window.”
“Maybe he had something more malevolent in mind.”
“Maybe. Could be, though, that he was just trying to decide if he should go into the building and say hello. Or he was waiting for St. John to leave on some business. Or he was waiting for the object of his desire to do the same, which she in fact did.”
Cynthia tucked her feet under her, sort of like the lotus position. I don’t know how people can sit like that. I sat in the only chair, which faced the bed, and noticed that she’d kept her panties on. She modestly adjusted her kimono. I said, “If my wife had gotten a letter like that from my girlfriend, I’d be damned angry, and I’d keep my distance from the girlfriend. On the other hand, if my wife had left town because of the letter, and my girlfriend was working late, I might not he able to resist the temptation to try to make contact.”
“Sounds like you’ve been there.”
“Hey, we’ve all been there.”
“Not I,” said Cynthia, “except there was this guy once in Brussels, and I would make sure I bumped into him wherever he went, and the jerk finally figured it out.”
“The jerk probably figured it out sooner than you think, but you looked like trouble.”
“No comment.” She thought a moment—I guess the lotus position lends itself to contemplation—then said, “He followed her, obviously.”
“Right. But he may also have confronted her in the headquarters parking lot first. We don’t know.”
“But how could he follow her without her seeing his vehicle on the range road?”
“It was his wife’s vehicle.”
“Would Ann know Mrs. Kent’s vehicle?”
I replied, “Every girlfriend knows every wife’s car. But there’re enough Jeep Cherokees on this post to transport a battalion, so it wouldn’t stand out. Fact is, the Fowlers own a Cherokee, though it’s red.”
“Still, Paul, how far down Rifle Range Road could Kent follow her without her becoming concerned about the headlights behind her?”
“Not too far. But far enough.” I stood and rummaged around in a side pocket of my overnight bag, coming up with a marking pen. There was a blank expanse of white wall between the windows, and I began drawing. “Okay, the road goes south from main post and dead-ends at the last rifle range, a distance of about ten miles. There are only two turnoffs—the first, here, is General Pershing Road, coming off to the left; the second, a mile farther down to the right, is Jordan Field Road, here.” I drew a road on the wall. “Okay, he follows her at a normal distance with his headlights on, sees that she doesn’t turn left on General Pershing Road, and he keeps following. She also doesn’t turn off on Jordan Field Road, but he knows that he has to turn off there, or she will realize she’s being followed. Right?”
“So far.”
“So he turns toward Jordan Field, and she sees this in her rearview mirror and breathes easy. But Kent now knows that she’s bottled up on the range road and can’t go anywhere except to the end and back. Correct?”
She looked at my scribbles on the wall and nodded. “Sounds right. What does he do then? Follow without lights? Walk? Wait?”
“Well… what would I do? It’s a moonlit night, and, even without headlights, the vehicle can be seen at a few hundred meters. Also, there’s the noise of the engine, and the interior lights when you open the door, and even the brake lights could be seen at certain angles. So for maximum stealth, you have to walk—or jog. So he puts the Cherokee in four-wheel drive and pulls into the pines where Jordan Field Road and Rifle Range Road intersect. He gets out and heads south on Rifle Range Road on foot.”
“This is supposition.”
“Partly. Partly it’s intuition and detection, and partly it’s just the logical solution to a standard field problem. We’ve all been to the same schools, and we’ve all been through these night exercises. You have to consider your mission, the weather, distances, time, security, and all that, and you have to know, for instance, when to stay with your motor transportation, and when to dismount and hump the bush.”
“Okay, he dismounts, and walks or jogs.”
“Right. By this time, it’s somewhere between 0115 and 0130 hours. Colonel Moore has already traveled the road and is waiting for Ann Campbell. That much we know for sure. General Campbell has not yet received the phone call. Kent is double-timing along the road, looking for the headlights of the humvee up ahead. But, at some point, Ann turned her lights off and has now reached rifle range six and has met Colonel Moore.” I put an “X” to mark rifle range six.
Cynthia, still sitting on the bed, seemed unimpressed with my cartography. She asked, “What is Bill Kent thinking about now? What is his purpose?”
“Well… he’s very curious about why she’s out there alone, though he knows she could be just checking the last guard post. If this is the case, he will meet her coming back, stand in the road, and confront her. He had a taste of rape a few weeks ago, and he might be thinking of doing it again.”
“She’s armed.”
“So is he.” I added, “Even in modern relationships, you should never pull a gun on your date. Especially if she’s armed, too. However, he thinks he can handle it. Maybe he just wants to talk.”
“Maybe. But I wouldn’t want to meet an ex-lover on a lonely road. I’d run him over.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. But he doesn’t know how women think. He can’t relate to how she might feel about him following her and his waylaying her. All he knows is that they’re lovers, and this is special to him. His wife’s out of town, and he’s a horny, lovesick jerk. He wants to talk. Really he wants to have sex with her, one way or the other. He is what we call sexually obsessed.”
“So he walks down the lonely, dark road, looking for her humvee.”
“Right. The other thing that he gets into his mind is that she’s out there for a sexual rendezvous with someone else. This would not be out of character for Ann Campbell, and Bill Kent’s heart is pounding at the thought of surprising her with a lover, and he’s nuts with jealousy. Sound right to you?”
“If you say so.”
“Okay, by now it’s around 0215 hours, and Colonel Moore has made the recorded call to General Campbell, has tied up Ann Campbell, and is waiting near the latrines for the general to show up. Bill Kent is on his own mission, and he’s following the manual. He knows that he can see the headlights of a car at least a half mile away on the dark, straight road, so a car traveling at, say, forty-five miles an hour could be on him in less than a minute unless he sees its headlights first. So every thirty seconds or so, he looks back over his shoulder. At about 0215, he in fact sees headlights behind him, and he drops into the drainage ditch on the side of the road and waits for the car to pass.”
“He thinks this is her lover.”
“Probably. In some perverse way, he would like to catch her in flagrante delicto. He got a charge out of kicking Major Bowes out of Ann’s house, then raping her. This is a very troubled and irrational man who thinks that Ann Campbell will respond well to his aggressive virility, to his shining armor, and to his slaying dragons for her. Correct?”
She nodded. “There is that type. Half the rapists I interview claim the women enjoyed it. None of the women ever seconded that.”
“Right. But to be a little fair to Bill Kent, Ann Campbell never disabused him of that notion.”
“True. But the letter to his wife should have told him that she was finished with him. But, okay, he’s as crazy as she was. So he sees the car pass him.”
“Right. Coming up the road at about 0215 with its headlights on. These are the headlights that PFC Robbins saw. Moore had traveled the last mile or so
without lights, and so had Ann Campbell. The general did not. The general’s car passes, and Kent gets up on one knee. He may or may not recognize Mrs. Campbell’s Buick.”
Cynthia commented, “So here we have two high-profile guys—Colonel Kent and General Campbell—sneaking around at night in their wives’ cars.”
“Right. If everyone on post knew your staff car, and you had the unofficial radio call sign of Randy Six, you might choose alternate transportation as well.”
“I might just stay home. Okay, so at this point, Kent speeds up his pace. Meanwhile, Moore is running back along the log trail, gets into his car at range five, and heads north on Rifle Range Road, back toward post. But he didn’t see Kent walking toward him.”
“No,” I replied. “Kent was either past rifle range five by now, or Kent spotted the headlights as Moore came across the gravel field, and Kent dropped into the ditch again. By this time, Kent figures that his girlfriend is entertaining a procession of lovers, one every fifteen or twenty minutes, or, more likely, he’s confused.”
“Confused or not,” Cynthia replied, “he’s thinking the worst. He’s not thinking that she may just be doing her job, or that maybe she’s in danger, or that perhaps the two vehicles were unrelated to her. He’s sure she’s out there fucking. Is that what you would think?”
“Absolutely. I’m all man. I think too much with the little head, and not enough with the big head.”
Cynthia laughed despite herself. “Okay, enough. Go on.”
I sat back in the chair and thought a moment. “All right… it’s at this point that we can’t know exactly what happened. Kent rounds the bend where rifle range five and six connect, and up ahead in the moonlight he sees two vehicles parked on the road—the humvee and the Buick that passed him from behind. We know that by this time the scene between father and daughter is unfolding, or maybe it’s finished.”
Cynthia said, “In either case, Kent stayed where he was.”
“Yes, we know for sure that Kent did not dash up on this scene and discover that the Buick on the road had brought General Campbell to rifle range six. Kent watched from a distance—say, two or three hundred meters—and he may have heard something, because the wind was blowing from the south. But he decided not to make a complete fool of himself, not to get into a possible armed confrontation with another man.”
“Or,” Cynthia said, “the exchange between father and daughter was finished, and the general was back in his car by now.”
“Quite possible. At this point, the general’s car comes toward him, without headlights, and Kent again drops into the drainage ditch. This is the only way it could have happened—with Kent on foot—because neither Moore nor the general saw any other vehicle.”
“And when the general’s car passes, Bill Kent stands and walks toward Ann Campbell’s humvee.”
“Right. He’s moving very quickly, maybe with his sidearm drawn, ready for anything—rape, romance, reconciliation, or murder.”
We sat a moment, she on the bed, me in the chair, listening to the rain outside. I was wondering, and I’m sure Cynthia was, too, if we’d just fashioned a noose for an innocent man in the privacy of our own room. But even if we didn’t have the details just right, the man himself had as much as told us, or signaled to us, that he’d done it. There was no mistaking his tone, his manner, and his eyes. But what he was also saying is that she deserved it, and we’d never prove he did it. He was wrong on both counts.
Cynthia got out of the lotus position and let her legs dangle over the foot of the bed. She said, “And Kent finds Ann Campbell staked out on the range, probably still crying, and he can’t figure out if she’s been raped, or just waiting for the next friend to keep his appointment.”
“Well… who knows at that point? But he definitely walked out to her, slowly, as Cal Seiver said, and he definitely kneeled beside her, and she was not happy to see him.”
“She was frightened out of her mind.”
“Well… she’s not the type. But she’s at a disadvantage. He says something, she says something. She, thinking her father has abandoned her, may have settled in for a long wait, knowing that the guard truck would be by at about 0700 hours, and she’s considered this possibility, and she thinks this would be a good payback for Daddy’s second betrayal. General’s daughter found naked by twenty guards.”
Cynthia nodded. She said, “But she knows that her father will eventually realize the same thing, and will have to come back in order to avoid that disgraceful occurrence. So in either case, she wants Kent gone.”
“Probably. He’s interfering with her script. He sees the bayonet stuck in the ground—assuming the general didn’t take it—and offers to cut her loose. Or he figures that she can’t walk away from a conversation with him under the circumstances, and he asks her what’s going on, or asks her to marry him, or whatever, and the dialogue develops, and Ann, who’s been tied to the bedposts many times in her basement, is not so much frightened or embarrassed as she is annoyed and impatient. We just don’t know what was said, what went on.”
“No, we don’t, but we know how the conversation ended.”
“Right. He may have twisted the rope to get her undivided attention, he may even have sexually stimulated her while he was causing sexual asphyxia, a trick he may have learned from her… but at some point, he twisted the rope and didn’t stop twisting.”
We sat there a full minute, playing it over again in our minds, then Cynthia stood and said, “That’s about what happened. Then he walked back to the road, realized what he’d done, and ran all the way back to his Jeep. He may have reached the Jeep before the Fowlers even started out, and he sped out of there and reached Bethany Hill as the Fowlers were leaving their house. He may even have passed them on one of the streets. He went home, parked his wife’s Jeep in the garage, went inside, probably cleaned up, and waited for the phone call from his MPs.” She added, “I wonder if he slept.”
“I don’t know, but when I saw him a few hours later, he looked composed, though now that I think about it, he was a little distracted.” I added, “He disassociated himself from the crime, as criminals usually do after the first few hours, but it’s coming back to him now.”
“Can we prove any of this?”
“No.”
“So what do we do?”
“Confront him. The time has come.”
“He’ll deny it all, and we’ll be looking for work in the civilian sector.”
“Probably. And you know what? We may be wrong.”
Cynthia was pacing now, having a debate with herself. She stopped and said, “How about finding the place where he pulled the Jeep off the road?”
“Yes, first light is at 0536. Should I call you or nudge you?”
She ignored this and said, “The tire tracks will be washed out. But if he broke brush, we can see where the vehicle left the road.”
“Right. This will remove some of our doubts. But it still leaves reasonable doubt, and we need beyond a reasonable doubt.”
She said, “There might be brush or pine needles stuck on his vehicle that can be matched to the vegetation that was broken.”
“There might be if the guy was an idiot, but he’s not. That Jeep is as clean as a humvee waiting for an IG inspection.”
“Damn it.”
“We have to confront him, and we have to do it at the right psychological moment… tomorrow, after the funeral service. That’s our first, last, and only chance to get a confession.”
Cynthia nodded. “If he’s going to talk, he’ll do it then. If he wants to get it off his chest, he’ll do it with us, not the FBI.”
“Correct.”
“Time for bed.” She picked up the phone and asked the CQ to ring us at 0400 hours, which would give me three hours sleep if I passed out in the next ten seconds. But I had another idea. I said, “Let’s shower now and save time.”
“Well…”
Bad response. As my father once said, “Women control seventy p
ercent of the wealth in this country, and a hundred percent of the pussy.” Cynthia and I were a little shy, I think, the way ex-lovers are when they try it again. And all the rape talk didn’t help set the mood. I mean, there was no music here, no candles, no champagne. The only thing here was the ghost of Ann Campbell, the thought of her murderer sleeping in his bed on Bethany Hill, and two exhausted people far from home. I said, “Maybe it wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“No, it wouldn’t be. Let’s wait until we can make it special. This weekend at your place. We’ll be glad we waited.”
Right, I’m absolutely fucking thrilled to wait. But I wasn’t in the mood to argue, and not clever enough to seduce. So I yawned and threw back the covers of my bed. “Bon soir, as we say in Brussels.”
“Good night…” She moved toward the bathroom door, then, as she did last time, she turned back. She said, “Something to look forward to.”
“Right.” I turned off the lamp, shucked my robe, and crawled, naked, into bed.
I heard the shower running in the bathroom, heard the rain outside, heard a couple giggling in the hallway.
I never heard the phone ring at 0400.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
Cynthia was dressed, the sun was coming in the window, and I smelled coffee.
She sat on the side of my bed, I sat up, and she handed me a plastic mug. “They have a coffee bar downstairs.”
I asked, “What time is it?”
“A little after seven.”
“Seven?” I started to get out of bed, but remembered I was buck naked. “Why didn’t you wake me?”