He led me down the hallway to a holding cell and I peered through the one-way glass.
A chubby buck sergeant in wrinkled fatigues slumped on a wooden bench, his elbows on his knees. His brown hair was cut short and a narrow mustache drooped from his round nose.
“This is the guy?” I asked.
“That’s him,” the Desk Sergeant said proudly. “Caught him red-handed.”
A wave of nausea rumbled through my gut. For a minute I thought I was going to throw up but I fought back the feeling. The head of the buck sergeant lolled listlessly from his shoulders.
He wasn’t Bo Shipton. He wasn’t even close.
36
The guy reminded me of an overweight chipmunk. He kept rubbing his hands and wouldn’t make eye contact with anybody; really ashamed of what he had done.
“I thought it would be easy money,” he whined. “I’d seen the guy around compound once or twice, couple of months ago. He asked me where I worked and we shot the breeze, but this morning he sits down with me at the snack bar and shows me this ration control card and asks me if it looks like the real thing. It did. So he tells me I can have it. Cheap. I tell him it won’t do me any good without a phony ID card. So he pulls one out and shows me how the plastic is already slit and I can slip my photo right in there. So I ask him how much and he says a hundred bucks, but I can tell he’s in a real hurry so I get him down to forty and I figure I have a pretty good buy.”
“You did,” I said. “But you should’ve had the ID card relaminated.”
“Yeah. Now you tell me.”
“Did this guy give you his name?”
“No. Just a passing acquaintance, you know? Said, ‘hey,’ya know?”
“You saw him in the snack bar a few times? Anywhere else?”
“On the shuttle bus going to Camp Walker. In the PX.” He shrugged.
“What’d he tell you? Was he retired? Active duty? Civilian? What?”
“He didn’t say. I just figured he was on leave.”
I pulled out the photograph. “Is this him?”
The buck sergeant took it with the tips of his fingers. “That’s him,” he said sadly.
I snatched the photo back. “Did he say where he was going?”
“No.”
“Did he hang out with anybody around here?”
“Not that I know of.”
I slipped the photo in my wallet and stood up to leave. The guy looked at me, his big brown eyes starting to water. “Say, how much trouble am I in?”
I said, “Enough to fuck up your whole career.”
His mustache drooped all the way to his knees.
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
For some reason Shipton had tried to draw me to Taegu. Was it to pull me away from Pusan, or to keep me away from Seoul? Or was it for some other reason altogether?
Or was it so he could lure me into a secluded spot and slice me up like he’d done Whitcomb and Miss Ku and the Nurse? And the two lovers before them.
One thing was for sure: there was no sense chasing ration control numbers all over the country anymore. Shipton had probably sold them all off, scattering them to the wind like a flock of pheasants exploding from a bush.
He knew I was following. Maybe he’d had a scare on Texas Street. After all, we’d been right on his heels, hadn’t missed him by much on the Kitty Hawk. But he’d be more cautious now. He’d be a lot harder to catch.
The First Sergeant was probably right. I needed the resources we could pull together in Seoul. Now that Shipton was onto us, I could no longer do this alone.
Bo Shipton was trying to manipulate me. The best way to avoid that was to go back to what he was after. Secrets. Classified information. All the black-marketing stuff was just to make money to support his operations.
Had the Kitty Hawk been his last big score? Would he disappear for good now, his mission accomplished?
I didn’t think so. If it was, I didn’t think he would’ve murdered Miss Ku. Instead, he would’ve run to Pusan, stolen what he wanted, and vanished. If Miss Ku had given us information, he would’ve been gone before it did us any good.
Of course, I was assuming he was still rational. Which maybe he wasn’t. After all, he’d had no good reason to kill the Nurse. He killed her just to warn me off. Or was there maybe another reason she had to die? One I hadn’t thought of yet?
It took two hours for me to interrogate the buck sergeant the Camp Henry MP’s had arrested and write up my report. The sun was just going down and I was half starved when I stopped in the NCO Club and had half a chicken and a mess of greasy french fries. Afterward, I wandered toward the front gate.
It was nice here. The rain and snow had stopped. The wind had died down. The sky was clearer than in Seoul. The moon and stars blinked at me between banks of drifting clouds.
At the pedestrian exit an MP stopped me and checked my ID card. After he glanced at it, I showed him Shipton’s photo.
“Do you recognize this guy?”
He shook his head and stepped past me to check the trunk of a PX taxi that was leaving compound.
Black market. Eighth Army was so preoccupied with it that we let all the big stuff slide.
Outside the compound, four cabs sat in front of the cement block walls. I told the driver of the first one to take me to Mikun piheing chang. The American army airfield.
Thirty minutes later I had bummed a ride in a helicopter heading north. We floated through billowing gray clouds and gathering dusk. After forty-five minutes, I lifted the visor on my helmet. Lights sparkled in the distance.
The Emerald City of Seoul.
We landed on the helipad on the south post of Yongsan Compound. I thanked the pilots, hiked the long mile back to the main compound, and wound through the brick buildings of the headquarters complex. The lights of the CID building were off, but the front door was open. So much for security. The Admin Office was locked, however, so I pulled out my key and opened it.
I switched on the light, tossed my bag into a chair, and started puttering around with the coffee maker. I wasn’t really sure why I was here. Maybe just to check the blotter reports, see if anything unusual had happened, anything that might lead me to Shipton.
The coffee started to perk and I sat down in one of the vinyl-cushioned lounge chairs.
I’d lost my best chance on Texas Street. Shipton would be hard to find now.. Maybe impossible.
The only thing I could do was to anticipate his next move. But how the hell would I do that?
I was mulling this over when all the faces I’d been dealing with in this case started to swim before my eyes: Cecil Whitcomb, Eun-hi, Miss Ku, the Nurse, Herbalist So, Shipton. When I got to the Chinese woman, I imagined her offering me a steaming bowl of tea. I sipped on it and suddenly felt totally relaxed. She studied me with her almond eyes. Then I was gone.
I jerked awake, twisting around, struggling to remember where I was.
Moonlight filtered down, illuminating the coffinlike shape of Riley’s desk. The pot of coffee was full now. Untouched. I could smell its gentle aroma.
What had awakened me had been a loud noise. A door slamming, as if someone were leaving the building. Or entering?
All was silent now. No noise, not even the clanging of the rusty pipes of the radiator. The heat was turned off. I was cold.
