The General's Daughter (49 page)

“Okay. I get it. How about the third time he walked out to the body?”

Cal shrugged. “He walked there when I was there, but we had tarps down by then. I guess he went out to the body more than
once before you two got there, because it seems that we’ve got three trails of his prints from the road to the body. But even
that’s hard to say for sure because no trail is complete. We got prints over prints, and we got soft ground and hard ground,
and grass.”

“Right.” We all studied the pins, the arrows, and the notations.

I said, “There was a man and woman out there also, wearing civilian shoes. I could get you the shoes, but what I’m interested
in is Colonel Kent. I think he visited the scene earlier, probably in uniform, with the same boots he wore later, somewhere
between, say, 0245 and 0330 hours.”

Cal Seiver thought a moment, then replied, “But the body wasn’t found until. . . what time?. . . 0400, by the duty sergeant,
St. John.”

I didn’t reply.

Seiver scratched his bald head and stared at the diagram. “Well. . . could be. . . I mean, here’s something that doesn’t make
sense. . . here’s St. John’s bootprint. Orange. That’s a definite. The guy had a wad of gum on his sole and it printed. Okay.
. . so here we have St. John’s bootprint, and it
seems
to be superimposed on a bootprint that we
think
is Colonel Kent’s. Kent had very new boots with clear tread. So. . . I mean, if St. John was there at 0400 hours, and Colonel
Kent didn’t arrive until the MPs called him at what. . . after 0500 hours, then St. John’s bootprint
on top of
Kent’s bootprint wouldn’t make sense. But you have to understand that while we can ID the impressions of most footwear if
the medium is good—snow, mud, soft soil, and such—it’s not as precise as fingerprints. And in this case, where we have two
good prints, we can’t say for certain which was superimposed on which.”

“But you have St. John’s noted as being superimposed on Kent’s.”

“Well, that’s a judgment call by the tech. Could be a mistake. Probably was, now that I see it. St. John was there first,
so he couldn’t have walked over Kent’s. . . but you’re saying you think Kent was there before St. John found the body.”

“I’m saying it,” I replied, “but you will not say it to anyone.”

“I only give information to you two and to a court-martial board.”

“Correct.”

Cynthia said to Cal, “Let’s see the plaster impression of this spot.”

“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.”

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.”