“It doesn’t look good, sir,” said King. “You want to just read it for yourself, sir?” Despite the informality of their greeting, King was careful to preserve the deferential “sir,” with which he either began or ended his sentences. The word carried more than respect. It meant thanks.
“No, come on, Terry, you know me better than that. What do you think I put you on this thing for? Exercise? Give it to me straight. What’s up with this business? The supe’s been on my back all day. I’ve got to have something for him before he goes down to that dinner for the local civilian biggies at the Bear Mountain Inn tonight. He’s champing at the bit.”
“Looks like this kid … let me see … here it is … David Hand … Company F-4 … looks like he might have been killed, General, sir.”
“What in hell! Come again with that.”
“There’s a pretty strong possibility the kid was murdered, sir. I’ve been on this thing since you called me at home this morning. They found him about 0530. You called me about 0545. I was up there by 0615, on the scene at 0630.
“Good. What did you find out?”
“Well, sir, one of the companies found him on a reveille run. Somebody spotted the body floating about ten feet off shore in Popolopen. At first they thought it was a parachute. Looked white. You know, back up, just a shiny white surface, like a piece of nylon in the water. The skydiving team is always jumping into Popolopen in wet suits, so they thought it was one of the team chutes. Then one of the upperclassmen took off his boots and waded in. Water was about chest-deep. He reached out and touched it, and it was the kid’s back. Dead a couple of days. Bloated. White as this piece of paper. They say the guy puked, right there in the lake.”
“Really?”
“Yessir. So another cadet waded in, and they hauled him up on shore. He was in one of the other companies. Nobody knew him. They didn’t even know if he was a cadet. Thought he might be one of the kids from the post, a high school kid. Fishing accident. So they left him where they found him, ran back to the barracks at Camp Buckner, and reported the body to the duty officer. They still hadn’t identified him by the time I got there. His face was totally misshapen by the water; the whole thing was pretty ugly.”
“Yeah. Go on.”
“Sir, first thing I did was to get rid of all the cadets who were hanging around. I got hold of Lieutenant Colonel Evans Fitzgerald, the provost marshal—he’s class of ‘58—and got him up there. He brought his MPs and put them on a search for personal effects around the general area where the body was found. I kept Fitzgerald with me. I told him right off to keep this thing tight. He was very co-operative. We both figured we had a dead cadet on our hands, even though there was no way of telling, not at 0630 in half light, anyway. And the kid was nude. Not a stitch.”
“The body was nude? Completely naked?”
“Yessir. We covered the body with a tarp from Fitzgerald’s jeep, put him on a stretcher, and hauled the kid out of the area quick. No sense in too many cadets getting a look. You know how these things get around.”
“I certainly do. I’ve been hearing about it all afternoon.”
“Yessir. I got back to Headquarters Building at Buckner, got all the upper-class company commanders together, and ordered a check of morning reports. Nothing. Then I told them to have everybody form up for a normal breakfast formation and to take extra care with the reports. No counts. Name by name. Ten minutes later we had our man. Hand. David. Home town: New Orleans. Company F-4. Sixth Training Company at Buckner. The plebes had only been up there at Buckner for two days, and the kid had simply gotten lost in the shuffle. He drowned the first night they were up there, moving in. And with a thousand plebes moving all their summer gear into those crowded Quonsets and tents, nobody assigned to their regular squads or platoons from the regular academic year, all the companies in the roster order they’ll be in for July, when summer training starts for the plebes … well, sir, the kid got lost, and nobody missed him. That’s all.”
“Well, somebody’s head’s gonna roll for that. Terry, I want the man who’s responsible in here this afternoon. I want him standing tall in front of this desk. I want some ass kicked, and I want it kicked today.”
“I’m not so sure you will when you hear the rest of it, sir.”
“What’s that you say?”
“Sir, I said I’m not so sure you’ll want to move right away when you hear the rest of it, sir. I think, if I might respectfully make a suggestion, sir, that the best thing for us to do at this point is to keep this whole thing as low-key as possible. If we go dealing out a huge slug to some cadet company commander because Hand dropped out of sight and nobody missed him, the whole corps is going to be buzzing. They’re going to know something’s up, and they’re going to want to know what it is.”
“Okay, okay. I see what you mean. Get on with it. The supe’s going to be on the horn any minute.”
“Yessir. Anyway, Evans Fitzgerald and I stuck pretty close together all day. We got the body down to the hospital early, and Fitzgerald got in touch with one of the doctors he deals with all the time on auto accidents, that kind of thing. Somebody named George Consor, major, class of ’59. Fitz says we can trust him. Consor did the autopsy. Sure enough, he’d been in the water almost two days—about thirty-six hours, to be exact. That means he drowned about 2100, night before last, the first night the plebes were up at Buckner for their June Week orientation.”
“So where’d they find the body? You never said.”
“Sorry, sir. Slipped by me. Let me see … here it is. They found him down at the far end of Flirtation Walk, down near Class Rock, you know, that huge boulder the plebes paint with the class numerals every spring. Seventy-one. The numbers are already up there. Apparently, they’d painted them on the rock that afternoon—the afternoon before he died. But I had Fitz check it out quietly with the kid’s company. Hand wasn’t on the rock-painting detail. Wasn’t his kind of thing. Closest anyone can recall, he spent the whole afternoon in his bunk, reading.”
“Go on. What did the autopsy show?”
“Death by drowning. No signs of struggle. Water in the lungs. No internal injuries. No sign of heart seizure, or any other … what the hell did that doc call it … of yeah, no sign of any other trauma which might have caused death. Fitz checked with the Office of Physical Education. The OPE guys say he was an excellent swimmer, took Advanced, scored a 2.8 out of a possible 3.0, received a Red Cross Life Saving badge, the whole works. Kid was a fish.”
“So what makes you figure the kid might have been killed? Any sign of drugs, alcohol?”
“None. The doc ran a complete autopsy. I wasn’t in the room, of course. I had a lot of running around to do, but I left Fitzgerald at the hospital to make sure nobody got in on the autopsy. The doc did the whole thing himself. No nurses, no aides. I figured the best way to handle it, to keep the lid on, like you said, was to limit access to sensitive data to grads.”
“Good move, Terry. Outstanding. But get to it. What else?”
“The doc found out the kid had sex almost immediately before he drowned.”
“Sex? You mean he got laid? How’d he know that?”
“Semen in the urinary tract. The major, Consor, says there are always traces of semen in the urinary canal after sex, unless you urinate right afterward. Well, apparently the kid didn’t piss. Normally, the doc says, the relaxation of the muscular system upon death would have caused the bladder to partially empty. But apparently the temperature of the water caused the kid’s penis to shrink up so much it was damn near up inside his crotch. The bladder never got a chance to release any urine. So the semen was still in there. The fact is this, according to the doc: The kid was fucking just before he drowned.”
“Maybe he masturbated, then went for a swim. Then he just waded in and killed himself. Maybe he was the only guilt-ridden wanker we got here. Christ, anything could have happened. What makes you so sure it was murder?”
“Fitzgerald. He’s damned sharp
for an MP, you know. He ran Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the crisis. And he investigated one hell of a lot of murders over there in Germany committed by whores, pimps, or both. A lot of GIs got it in the back in Krautland, General. I’m sure you know that.”
“Yeah, I remember. I had one in my company. In ‘54, in Stuttgart. Some German bitch ran a knife up under the guy’s ribs right in bed. Hellish scene over there.”
“Yessir. Well, Fitzgerald says there are two dead giveaways. One: The kid was stark naked. The kid probably wouldn’t have stripped naked to jerk off. Two: Fitzgerald’s MPs found the kid’s uniform up in a rock formation not far from the scene—about a hundred fifty feet up the side of the hill, over the edge of a little rocky outcropping with a flat top. His uniform was neatly folded, his shoes aligned, socks tucked neatly into his shoes. Nothing missing. Wallet, money, ID, everything intact. The whole area was rocky, and the top of the outcropping was heavily carpeted with leafy mulch. No footprints, nothing they could pick up, anyway. But Fitzgerald went over the scene like a pro. He must have spent about two hours up there alone, poking around. He says there were two people up there, and the other person was not a young lady.”
“How’s he so sure about that?”
“This.” Colonel King reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a cadet summer dress shirt epaulet, a gray wool-covered rectangle, pointed at one end, squared off at the other. The epaulet King held in his right hand was distinctive for two reasons: It was emblazoned by a light gray cadet crest, the color assigned to the cadet junior class, second-classmen, cows. The epaulet also had a stripe of thin gold braid running along its squared-off edge, the insignia of a cadet corporal, a rank reserved for cadet second-class squad leaders. The colonel held the epaulet in his hand and both men stared at it.
“Didn’t belong to Hand,” said Hedges.
“Nosir,” said King. “Both his epaulets were on his dress shirt. Whoever was up there with Hand lost his epaulet, and he was a cow.”
“Any way of telling who it belongs to?”
“Fitzgerald had it printed. Negative. Brass on the crest freshly shined. And there’s no regulation requiring the cadets to mark the damn things with their names, because they’re passed from one class to another.”
“You sure it couldn’t have been left up there from before, by somebody who might have been up there last week?”
“Fitzgerald doesn’t think so, sir. It rained the night before the kid died. This epaulet doesn’t show any signs of dampness. The other thing was where it was found.”
“Where was that?”
“Right under the kid’s trousers. Fitzgerald says whoever was up there with Hand lost the epaulet, looked around for it, but it was dark, and he just didn’t find it.”
“That’s it?” The two men continued to stare at the cadet epaulet in disbelief.
“Well, sir, here is the scene, as reconstructed by Fitzgerald. This Hand kid goes down to the end of Flirtation Walk after dark with this … upperclassman. Whoever. Obviously, they don’t want to be found out. They climb this rock formation, not an easy climb. Hand disrobes. The … perpetrator probably does the same, judging by the fact that he loses his epaulet. There is sex. Anyway, Hand comes. They decide to go skinny-dipping. Hand is pushed underwater by someone stronger than him and held there until he drowns. Or he is surprised by someone not stronger than him. Take your pick. The kid’s an excellent swimmer in good health. He didn’t paddle out there and start drinking Popolopen until he sank.”
“So maybe he cramped up. Who knows?”
“The doc says the chances are slim. He says in such cases there are normally signs of internal muscular contractions, even after death. With Hand … negative. The doc says he figures Hand was surprised from behind, in water over his head, and held under. He sucked in a good volume of water, an indication that he wasn’t tired or out of breath, the doc says. And he didn’t find any skin under Hand’s fingernails, so if he struggled, all he did was flail around. The doc says he was surprised from behind. Fitzgerald agrees.”
“All right. This Hand was probably killed. Then what?”
“The killer goes back to the hill, climbs up the rocks, dresses, cleans up the area, leaves Hand’s clothes as he left them, making it look like a solitary swim and accidental drowning. Exits scene. Fitzgerald says most probably the guys didn’t realize he’d lost his epaulet until he got back to the barracks. Cadets are losing the damn things all the time and not noticing they’re missing. I must have personally written up three or four cadets in the past week, since they went into the summer white dress shirt, for missing epaulets.”
“That sounds plausible.”
“Yessir. The whole damn thing is plausible. Almost too plausible. You know what Fitzgerald said, sir? He said what he’d like to think is we’ve got some civilian psycho prowling the woods, surprised Hand and killed him. But that’s so goddamn unlikely … ignores the semen, lack of struggle, and the goddamn cow epaulet.” King held the thing in his hand as if it were alive.
“Fitzgerald says this was a neat job, sir. He says this is murder premeditated. He says whoever killed Hand knew him, had his trust, probably had sex with him … at least watched him. General, it looks very strongly like we’ve got a homosexual cadet murder on our hands, and we have no suspects, Zero. Nobody saw Hand go up Flirtation Walk that night. Afterward, his absence went unnoticed for thirty-six hours. Nobody saw nothing. We’ve got problems.”
Hedges straightened the bottom of his uniform jacket and looked across the room at his trusted deputy, Phineas Terrance King. He knew King had done a good job. An exhaustive job. He sensed King was right. He smelled it. Every nerve ending in his body tingled with that crazy mix of fear and excitement that comes when adrenaline fires the system. Hedges ran his fingers through his hair, felt the dampness forming imperceptibly on his forehead. His lips wore a thin smile. He knew about the smile. It was something he couldn’t control. He knew about it from seeing his face in photos taken up in the C & C ship in combat in Nam. The thin smile was always there. By the time they landed, back at base, it went away. He’d never seen the smile in a mirror. It was as if his mind wouldn’t allow his face to show itself what it looked like under stress. Hedges felt secretly embarrassed. The thin smile hid from everything but the camera. King broke the silence.
“Sir, what are we going to do about this thing?”
“How many copies of that report have been made?”
“This is the only one, sir.”
“Fitzgerald know I called you this morning? He know you came up here to see me this afternoon?”
“Nosir. He thought I was post duty officer—something like that. He assumed I was there on official duty. Never asked any different. Good man, Fitz. I’ve always liked the hell out of him.”
“Roger. Anybody else? I mean, anybody else know you’re up here reporting to me?”
“Your secretary, sir.”
“Besides her. The doctor. This man, Consor. He know?”
“Nosir. We left him at the hospital hours ago and told him to go about his duties normally, as if nothing had happened.”
“You have a driver drop you here in an official sedan?”
“Nosir. I used my POV all day. You said you smelled trouble this morning when you first called me, and I took you at your word, General. I remember what used to happen back in Nam when you smelled trouble. Jesus.”
Hedges felt his thin smile turn into a grin. He leaned back on the leather sofa, ran his fingers along the creases on his trouser legs.
“Damn fine job, Terry. Damn fine. I’ll see that the supe knows what a hell of a job you’ve done for us on this. Now, here’s what we’re going to do. You give me the report. Give me the epaulet. I guess it’s evidence, and the supe’s certainly going to want to look at it. I’ll get over to the supe’s right away. You get back to Fitzgerald. Tell him this thing is hot. Tell him it’s going all the way to the top, and he’s not to speak to anyone. You have him talk
to the doctor, the major, and have him tell the doc the same thing. Nobody talks. And any MPs Fitzgerald had sniffing around with him …”
“The MPs, sir. You were saying?”
“Yeah. The MPs. How many were actually involved in the investigation, on the scene? How many got a look at the body, the evidence?”
“Fitzgerald handled it mostly himself. I think one or two MPs were up there with him at one point.”
“Tell Fitzgerald to have them transferred. Korea. Germany. Someplace out of the country. I do not want those men available. Tell him the word came from the top. Do not specify me or the supe. Let him draw his own conclusions. I don’t care if he thinks the chief is involved. Just tell him to get those MPs off this post by tomorrow, and on their way overseas by next week, understand?”
“Yessir. I don’t think there will be any problem. Fitz is very well connected with MP personnel branch down at the Pentagon. He’ll get the job done.”
“Terry, give me the report and the epaulet.” King handed them over. “Now, you let me handle the supe. He’s got one hell of a lot on his mind with June Week coming up. I think you know I’ve got good instincts when it comes to dealing with crises like this.”
“Roger that, sir. I remember that time in Nam …”
“Now listen up, Terry,” Hedges cut him off. “I want this kept ultra-quiet. It is an accident. The kid was skinny-dipping and he drowned, right? I want the death announced in the mess hall the way they announced those two firsties who killed themselves in that goddamn Corvette last week. Accident. Tragedy for all concerned. The Corps of Cadets sends its condolences. A moment of prayer. Whatever you think is best, understand?”
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