“Did they know each other?”
Kent shrugged. “Maybe in passing. They don’t work together. He’s in the motor pool. She’s an instructor at the Special Operations School. They just came down on orders and wound up together.”
“What does she teach?”
“Psy-ops.” He added, “She’s got—she had a master’s in psychology.”
“Still has.” There’s always a question of tenses when referring to the recently dead. I asked Kent, “Do instructors usually pull that sort of duty?”
“No, not usually. But Ann Campbell put her name on several duty rosters she didn’t have to be on.” He added, “She tried to set an example. General’s daughter.”
“I see.” The Army runs duty rosters for officers, noncommissioned officers, and enlisted men and women. These are completely random lists, ensuring that as nearly as possible everyone gets his or her chance at some sort of crap duty. There was a time when female personnel were not on all lists, such as guard duty, but times change. What doesn’t change is that young ladies walking around alone at night are at some risk. The hearts of evil men remain the same; the compulsion to stick it in the most available vagina supersedes Army regulations. I asked, “And she was armed?”
“Sure. Had her sidearm.”
“Go on.”
“Well, at about 0100 hours, Campbell says to St. John that she is going to take the jeep and check the guard posts—”
“Why? Isn’t that something the sergeant of the guard or the officer of the guard should do? The duty officer should stay with the phones.”
Kent replied, “St. John said the officer of the guard was some young lieutenant, still pissing water from West Point. And Campbell, as I’ve indicated, is gung ho and she wants to go out there and check things for herself. She knew the sign and countersign, so off she goes.” Kent turned onto Rifle Range Road. He continued, “At about 0300 hours, St. John says he got a little concerned—”
“Why concerned?”
“I don’t know… You know, it’s a woman and—well, maybe he was annoyed because he thought she was goofing off somewhere and maybe he wanted to go to the latrine and didn’t want to leave the phones.”
“How old is this guy?” I asked.
“Fifty something. Married. Good record.”
“Where is he now?”
“Back at the provost building catching some cot time. I told him to stay put.”
We had passed rifle ranges one, two, three, and four, all of which lie to the right of the road, huge expanses of flat, open terrain, backed by a continuous earthen berm. I hadn’t been out here in over twenty years, but I remembered the place.
Colonel Kent continued, “So St. John calls the guardhouse, but Captain Campbell is not there. He asks the sergeant of the guard to call the guard posts and see if Campbell has come by. The sergeant of the guard calls back a while later and reports negative. So St. John asks the sergeant of the guard to send a responsible person to headquarters to watch the phones, and when one of the guards shows up, St. John gets in his POV and heads out. He starts checking the posts in order—NCO Club, Officers’ Club, and so on—but not one of the guards has seen Captain Campbell. So, at about 0400 hours, he goes out toward the last guard post, which is an ammo storage shed, and on the way, at rifle range six, he sees her jeep… in fact, there it is.”
Up ahead, off to the right on the narrow road, was the humvee, which we old guys still refer to as a jeep, in which, presumably, Ann Campbell had driven to her rendezvous with death, if you will. Near the humvee was someone’s POV—a red Mustang. I asked Kent, “Where is the guard post and the guard?”
“The ammo shed is another klick up the road. The guard, a PFC Robbins, heard nothing, but saw headlights.”
“You questioned him?”
“Her. Mary Robbins.” Kent smiled for the first time. “PFC is a gender-neutral term, Paul.”
“Thank you. Where is PFC Robbins now?”
“On a cot in the provost building.”
“Crowded in there. But good thinking.”
Kent stopped the car near the humvee and the red Mustang. It was nearly light now, and I could see the six MPs—four men, two women—standing at various spots around the area. All of the rifle ranges had open bleacher seats off to the left side of the road facing the ranges, where the troops received classroom instruction before proceeding to the firing line. In the nearby bleachers to my left sat a woman in jeans and windbreaker, writing on a pad. Kent and I got out of the car, and he said to me, “That is Ms. Sunhill. She’s a woman.”
I knew that. I asked Kent, “Why is she here?”
“I called her.”
“Why?”
“She’s a rape counselor.”
“The victim doesn’t need counseling. She’s dead.”
“Yes,” Kent agreed, “but Ms. Sunhill is also a rape investigator.”
“Is that a fact? What is she doing at Hadley?”
“That female nurse, Lieutenant Neely. You know about that?”
“Only what I read in the papers. Could there be a connection between these cases?”
“No. An arrest was made yesterday.”
“What time yesterday?”
“About four P.M. Ms. Sunhill made the arrest and by five P.M. we had a confession.”
I nodded. And at six P.M. Ms. Sunhill was having a drink in the O Club, quietly celebrating her success, and Ann Campbell, I was about to discover, was alive and having dinner there, and I was at the bar watching Cynthia and trying to get up the courage to say hello or make a strategic withdrawal.
Kent added, “Sunhill was supposed to go off to another assignment today. But she says she’ll stay for this.”
“How lucky we are.”
“Yes, it’s good to have a woman on these kinds of things. And she’s good. I saw her work.”
“Indeed.” I noticed that the red Mustang, which was probably Cynthia’s car, had Virginia license plates, like my own POV, suggesting that she was working out of Falls Church, as I was. But fate had not caused our paths to cross at the home office but had put us here under these circumstances. It was inevitable, anyway.
I looked out over the rifle range, on which sat a morning mist. In front of the berm stood pop-up targets, at different ranges, dozens of nasty-looking fiberboard men with rifles. These lifelike targets have replaced the old black silhouette targets, the point being, I suppose, that if you’re being trained to kill men, then the targets should look you in the eye. However, from past experience, I can tell you that nothing prepares you for killing men except killing men. In any case, birds were perched on many of the mock men, which sort of ruined the effect, at least until the first platoon of the day fired.
When I went through infantry training, the firing ranges were bare of vegetation, great expanses of sterile soil unlike any battlefield condition you were likely to encounter, except perhaps the desert. Now, many firing ranges, like this one, were planted with various types of vegetation to partially obscure the fields of fire. About fifty meters opposite of where I was standing on the road there was a pop-up silhouette partially hidden by tall grass and evergreen bushes. Standing around this target and vegetation were two MPs, a man and a woman. At the base of the silhouette, I could make out something on the ground that didn’t belong there.
Colonel Kent said, “This guy was a sick puppy.” He added, as if I didn’t get it, “I mean, he did it to her right there on the rifle range, with that pop-up guy sort of looking down at her.”
If only the pop-up guy could talk. I turned and looked around the area. Some distance behind the bleachers and the fire control towers was a tree line in which I could see latrine sheds. I said to Colonel Kent, “Have you searched the area for any other possible victims?”
“No… well… we didn’t want to disturb evidence.”
“But someone else may also be dead, or alive and in need of assistance. Evidence is secondary to aiding victims. Says so in the manual.”
r /> “Right…” He looked around and called to an MP sergeant. “Get on the horn and have Lieutenant Fullham’s platoon get down here with the dogs.”
Before the sergeant could respond, a voice from the top of the bleachers said, “I already did that.”
I looked up at Ms. Sunhill. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I wanted to ignore her, but I knew this wasn’t going to be possible. I turned and walked onto the rifle range. Kent followed.
As we walked, Kent’s stride got a bit shorter, and he fell behind. The two MPs there were at parade rest, pointedly looking away from the ground upon which lay Captain Ann Campbell.
I stopped a few feet from the body, which was lying on its back. She was naked, as Kent had indicated, except for a sports watch on her left wrist. A few feet from the body lay what we call a commercially purchased undergarment—her bra. As Kent had also said, her uniform was missing from the scene. Also missing were her boots, socks, helmet, pistol belt, holster, and sidearm. More interestingly, perhaps, was the fact that Ann Campbell was spread-eagled on her back, her wrists and ankles bound to tent pegs with cord. The pegs were a green vinyl plastic, and the cord was green nylon, both Army issue.
Ann Campbell was about thirty and well built, the sort of build you see on female aerobic instructors with well-defined leg and arm muscles and not an ounce of flab. Despite her present condition, I recognized her face from Army posters. She was quite attractive in a clean-cut way, and wore her blond hair in a simple shoulder-length style, perhaps a few inches beyond regulations, which was the least of her problems at the moment.
Around her neck was a long length of the same nylon cord that bound her wrists and ankles, and beneath this cord were her panties, which had been pulled over her head, one leg of the panties around her neck, so that the cord did not bite directly into her neck, but was cushioned by the panties. I knew what this meant, but I don’t think anyone else did.
Cynthia came up beside me, but said nothing.
I knelt beside the body and noted that the skin appeared waxy and translucent, causing the powder blush on her cheeks to stand out sharply. Her fingernails and toenails, which had only a clear lacquer on them, had lost their pinkish color. Her face was unbruised, unscratched, and without lacerations or bite marks, and so were the parts of her body that I could see. Aside from the obscene position of her body, there were no outward signs of rape, no semen around the genitals, thighs, or in the pubic hair, no signs of struggle in the surrounding area, no grass or soil marks on her skin, no blood, dirt, or skin under her nails, and her hair was mostly in place.
I leaned over and touched her face and neck, where rigor mortis usually sets in first. There was no rigor, and I felt her underarms, which were still warm. There was some livor mortis, or lividity, that had settled into her thighs and buttocks, and the lividity was a deep purple color, which would be consistent with asphyxia, which in turn was consistent with the rope around her neck. I pressed my finger against the purplish skin above where her buttocks met the ground, and the depressed spot blanched. When I took my finger away, the livid color returned, and I was reasonably certain that death had occurred within the last four hours.
One thing I learned a long time ago was that you never take a witness’s statement as gospel truth. But so far, Sergeant St. John’s chronology seemed to hold up.
I bent over further and looked into Ann Campbell’s large blue eyes, which stared unblinking into the sun. The corneas were not yet cloudy, reinforcing my estimate of a recent death. I pulled at one of her eyelids and saw in the linings around the eye, small spotty hemorrhages, which is presumptive evidence of death by asphyxia. So far, what Kent had told me, and the scene that presented itself, seemed to comport with what I was discovering.
I loosened the rope around Ann Campbell’s neck and examined the panties beneath the rope. The panties were not torn and were not soiled by the body or by any foreign substance. There were no dog tags under the panties, so these, too, were missing. Where the ligature, the rope, had circled the neck there was only a faint line of bruising, barely discernible if you weren’t looking for it. Yet, death had come by strangulation, and the panties lessened the damage the rope would normally have done to the throat and neck.
I stood and walked around the body, noting that the soles of her feet were stained with grass and soil, meaning she had walked barefoot for at least a few steps. I leaned down and examined the bottom of her feet, discovering on her right foot a small tar or blacktop stain on the soft fleshy spot below her big toe. It would appear that she had actually been barefoot back on the road, which might mean she had taken off her clothes, or at least her boots and socks, near the humvee and was made to walk here, fifty meters away, barefoot or perhaps naked, though her bra and panties were near the body. I examined her bra and saw that the front clasp was intact, not bent or broken, and there were no signs of dirt or stress on the fabric.
All this time no one said a word, and you could hear the morning birds in the trees, and the sun had risen above the line of white pines beyond the berm, and long morning shadows spread across the firing ranges.
I addressed Colonel Kent. “Who was the first MP on the scene?”
Kent called over the female MP nearby, a young PFC, and said to her, “Give your report to this man.”
The MP, whose name tag said Casey, looked at me and reported, “I received a radio call at 0452 hours advising me that a female body had been found at rifle range six, approximately fifty meters west of a humvee parked on the road. I was in the vicinity and I proceeded to this location and reached the scene at 0501 hours and saw the humvee. I parked and secured my vehicle, took my M-16, and proceeded onto the rifle range, where I located the body. I felt for a pulse, listened for a heartbeat, tried to detect breathing, and shined my flashlight into the victim’s eyes, but they did not respond to the light. I determined that the victim was dead.”
I asked her, “Then what did you do?”
“I returned to my vehicle and called for assistance.”
“You followed the same path to and from the body?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you touch anything except the body? The ropes, the tent pegs, the undergarments?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you touch the victim’s vehicle?”
“No, sir. I did not touch the evidence beyond determining that the victim was dead.”
“Anything else you want to mention?”
“No, sir.”
“Thank you.”
PFC Casey saluted, turned, and resumed her position.
Kent, Cynthia, and I glanced at one another, as if trying to see what the others were thinking, or feeling. Truly, moments like this try the soul and become indelibly burned into the mind. I have never forgotten a death scene, and never want to.
I looked down at Ann Campbell’s face for a full minute, knowing I would not see it again. This is important, I think, because it establishes a communion between the living and the dead, between the investigator and the victim. Somehow it helps—not her, but me.
We went back to the road and walked around the humvee that Ann Campbell had driven, then looked inside the driver’s side window, which was open. Many military vehicles have no ignition keys, only a starter button switch, and the switch on the humvee was in the off position. On the front passenger seat was a black leather nonmilitary-issue handbag. Cynthia said to me, “I would have gone through the bag, but I didn’t want to do that without your permission.”
“We’re off to a good start. Retrieve the handbag.”
She went around to the passenger side, and, using a handkerchief, opened the door, took out the bag with the handkerchief, then sat on the lower bench of the bleachers and began laying out the contents.
I got down on the road and slid under the humvee, but there was nothing unusual on the blacktop. I touched the exhaust system at various points and found it slightly warm in spots.
&nbs
p; I stood, and Colonel Kent said to me, “Any ideas?”
“Well, a few possible scenarios come to mind. But I have to wait until forensic gets finished. I assume you called them.”
“Of course. They’re on their way from Gillem.”
“Good.” Fort Gillem is outside Atlanta, about two hundred miles north of Hadley, and the CID lab there is a state-of-the-art operation that handles all of North America. The people who work there are good, and like me they go where they’re needed. Major crimes are still relatively rare in the Army, so the lab can usually muster the resources it needs when a big one comes down. In this case, they’d probably show up with a caravan. I said to Colonel Kent, “When they get here, tell them to be very curious about a black smudge on the sole of her right foot. I want to know what it is.”
Kent nodded, probably thinking to himself, Typical CID bullshit. And he might well have been right.
“Also, I want you to do a grid search. Let’s say two hundred meters in each direction from the body, excluding an area fifty meters immediately around the body.” This would mess up any footprints, but there were hundreds of bootprints in the area of the rifle range anyway, and the only ones I was interested in were those within fifty meters of the body. I said to Kent, “I want your people to gather up anything that isn’t natural flora—cigarette butts, buttons, paper, bottles, and all that, and record the grid where they found it. All right?”
“No problem. But I think this guy got in and got out clean. Probably by vehicle, just like the victim.”
“I think you’re right, but we’re creating files.”
“We’re covering our asses.”
“Right. We go by the book.” Which was safe and sometimes even effective. Bottom line on this one, though, I was going to have to get real creative, and I was going to piss off a lot of important people. That’s the fun part.
I said to Kent, “I need Captain Campbell’s personnel and medical files sealed and in your office before noon.”