he was compounding his crime, and the punishment he could expect would increase by an order of magnitude.
This burglar was one of those Westernized criminals Captain Noh found so repugnant. The homeowner had risen, confronted him, and he had refused to withdraw. To say the least.
We followed Captain Noh deeper into the hooch.
The next room was immaculate. Delicate celadon vases on shelves, low mother-of-pearl cabinets displaying books and handcrafted artifacts that looked like antiques. Clocks, dolls in glass cases, brass incense burners, hand- painted porcelain dishware. Fragile works of art that wouldn’t last five minutes in the barracks I lived in. But nothing had been disturbed.
We walked down a short hallway.
The odor of burnt pine faded slightly. The source was behind me now, on the far side of the house. Possibly in the kitchen.
When we reached the end of the hallway, Captain Noh paused at a closed sliding door. He reached into his coat pocket, and the other two Korean cops did the same. They pulled out gauze face masks and slipped them over their noses and mouths. Captain Noh pulled out two more masks and handed one each to Ernie and me. Without comment, Ernie slipped his on. So did I.
Then Captain Noh passed out sets of white cotton gloves. When all our hands and fingers were properly attired, he slid back the oil-papered door.
The stench hit me first. Blood. I knew what it was because I’d smelled it before. There must’ve been a lot of it to put out such a powerful odor.
Why hadn’t I smelled it in the hallway? Because the woodwork in this home was handcrafted and everything, including the runners on the sliding doors, were shaped and planed and sealed with meticulous care.
Who was this woman who lived in such finery? Who owned so many precious things? And what did she have to do with the woman who stole my. 45 and my badge and the men who robbed the Olympos Casino in Inchon? Was she just a random victim, or was there some method to this madness?
No sense thinking about those things now. Time to observe, gather facts. There’d be time to sort them out later.
Captain Noh switched on a tinted glass lamp, suffusing the room in a purple glow.
Opulence again. An armoire, of the same expensive mother-of-pearl design. A low dressing table. No bed, just another varnished wood slat floor: ondol, heated by steam running through stone ducts below. A thick down- filled mat had been bunched up and skewed away from the center of the floor. A silk-covered comforter, hand- embroidered with white cranes rising from green reeds, was wadded in a corner, smeared with blood.
Here, in this room, there was no neatness. Dozens of vases and bottles and vials of lotion and unguents and creams had been stepped on and smashed against walls and smeared on the floor, mingling with the jellylike coagulated blood.
“She fought,” Captain Noh said. “Before they took her body away, I look.” He held up his own hand and picked at the space beneath his fingernails. “How you say? Skin?”
“Flesh,” Ernie corrected. “Beneath her fingernails. She scratched him?”
Ernie clawed the air like a tomcat.
“Yes. She scratch. She punch too. And bite. Knuckles bruised. Very dark. Two tooth broken.” He opened his mouth and pointed at his incisors.
“She did a number on the guy,” Ernie said.
Captain Noh stared blankly.
“She hurt him,” Ernie said.
Captain Noh nodded. “Yes. She hurt him. And he hurt her.”
Meanwhile, the other two cops were kneeling and studying the broken bric-a-brac around the room.
Everything was still dusted with fingerprint powder, and Captain Noh went on to explain that in the hours they had been waiting for us, not only had the body been taken away, but his technicians had already collected bits of flesh and broken fingernails and body hair. All evidence had been rushed to Seoul for evaluation in the main KNP lab. Results would start trickling in tomorrow.
A representative from the Songtan coroner’s office had measured liver temperature and rigor mortis, and the other things that coroners measure, and estimated the time of death at sometime early this morning. Probably before dawn.
There was a bullet hole in the floor. The wood surrounding it had been singed upon entry. Already, the KNP technicians had pried out the bullet and it would be evaluated in the lab in Seoul along with the other evidence. The initial indication was that it had come from a. 45 automatic pistol.
Like mine.
So far, the evidence seemed clear. The man had broken into the home, confronted the woman who lived here, wrestled with her, subdued her, raped her, and then killed her. Not necessarily in that order. The woman’s purse lay next to the mother-of-pearl armoire, all contents dumped on the floor. Everything apparently there-Korean National Identification Card, keys, photographs, etc.-except no money. After robbing the woman, as a final farewell, he had shot her through the back of the head with a. 45 automatic pistol.
A pistol that I believed to be mine.
Ernie and I looked at one another. The Caucasian criminal we had chased out of the Yellow House last night could never have made it here in time to commit this crime. Not with a midnight-to-four curfew enforced all over the Republic of Korea. All traffic stops-except for those vehicles with governmentally approved emergency dispatches. We had rousted the guy out of his hiding place less than an hour before midnight. He never could’ve arranged for transportation all the way to Songtan in that amount of time.
It had to be the other guy. The guy with the curly brown hair. The guy who looked like me. The guy who’d departed the Inchon Train Station in the company of the smiling woman.
Ernie read my mind. “Could be the brown-haired guy,” he said. “Or maybe they sold your. 45 and weapons card to someone else.”
“Why the weapons card? What value does that have? And even if they did give the card to someone, why would that person leave it at a murder site?”
Ernie thought about that for a moment, but didn’t answer.
I believed that the guy who perpetrated this crime was the same brown-haired man who had robbed the Olympos Casino in Inchon and shot Miss Han Ok-hi in the back. He left my weapons card here because he wanted us to know that he had struck again.
Ernie felt the same as I did. He shook his head sadly.
“Whoever this guy is,” Ernie said, “he’s a bad boy. A very bad boy.”
Captain Noh described how the body had been found.
“Here,” he said, pointing to the center of the room. “Face down. Arms out.” He raised his arms over his head as if preparing to take a leap off a high dive. “He shoot in back of head. But before he do, he try to strangle her. Here.” He pointed toward the back of his neck, and then thrust his hands in front of him, leaning down, as if applying pressure toward the floor.
“He strangled her from the back?” Ernie asked.
“Yes. Rape her from back too. Push down very hard. Front of her neck touch floor, head, how you say, back.”
He mimicked the motion again, twisting the top of his head back toward his shoulder blades.
“Her head was tilted back,” Ernie said, “because he was pushing her neck down onto the floor.”
“Yes,” Captain Noh said.
In front of where the body had lain was a small foot-high table with folding legs. The type Koreans use for everything from eating dinner to putting on makeup. Set like sentries across the table were three jewelry boxes. One large-the one in the center-and two smaller, on either flank. It was some sort of display.
While the brown-haired GI had clenched her neck, the woman had been forced to her knees in front of this small table with the neat display of jewelry boxes. Then he had shoved her face down on the floor and had tried to strangle her from behind. It hadn’t worked. Apparently, she was a determined woman. She’d struggled. And when he hadn’t been able to kill her by strangulation, he’d pulled out the. 45 and shot her in the back of the head. Her heart hadn’t stopped right away. That’s why all the blood.
But why try to strangle her from the back? From the front of the neck, a strong man can place his thumbs
