that I wouldn’t want to make love in this room. The carpet, too, was unsuited for a bedroom, being a tight woven Berber that left no footprints. Something, however, did stand out: twenty bottles of perfume, which Cynthia said were very expensive, and the civilian clothes in the closet, which she said were equally overpriced. A second, smaller closet—what would have been “his” closet if she had a husband or live-in—was filled with neat Army uniforms for the summer season, including greens, battle dress, combat boots, and all the necessary accessories. More interesting, in the far corner of the closet was an M-16 rifle with a full magazine and a round in the chamber, locked and loaded, ready to rock and roll. I said, “This is a military issue—fully automatic.”
“Unauthorized off post,” Cynthia observed.
“My goodness.” We rummaged around a while longer, and I was going through Ann Campbell’s underwear drawer when Cynthia said, “You already looked in there, Paul. Don’t get strange on me.”
“I’m looking for her West Point ring,” I replied with annoyance. “It wasn’t on her finger, and it’s not in her jewelry box.”
“It was taken off her finger. I saw the tan line.”
I pushed the drawer shut. “Keep me informed,” I said.
“You too,” she snapped.
The bathroom was standing tall as they say in the Army: West Point, white-glove immaculate. Even the sink basin had been wiped as per regulations, and there wasn’t a hair on the floor, certainly no pubic hair of a swarthy stranger.
We opened the medicine cabinet, which held the usual assortment of cosmetics, feminine products, and such. There were no prescription medicines, no men’s shaving stuff, only one toothbrush, and nothing stronger than aspirin. “What,” I asked my female partner, “do you deduce from this?”
“Well, she wasn’t a hypochondriac, she didn’t have dry or oily skin, she didn’t dye her hair, and she keeps her method of birth control somewhere else.”
I said, “Maybe she required her men to use a condom.” I added, “You may have heard that condoms are in fashion again because of disease. These days you have to boil people before you sleep with them.”
Cynthia ignored that and said, “Or she was chaste.”
“I never thought of that. Is that possible?”
“You never know, Paul. You just never know.”
“Or could she have been… how do we say it these days? Gay? A lesbian? What’s the politically correct term?”
“Do you care?”
“For my report. I mean, I don’t want to get into trouble with the feminist thought police.”
“Take a break, Paul.”
We exited the bathroom and Cynthia said, “Let’s see the other bedroom.”
We passed through the upstairs hallway into the small room. At this point, I didn’t expect to encounter anyone, but Cynthia drew her pistol and covered me while I peeked under the double bed. Aside from the bed, the room held only a dresser and a night table and lamp. An open door led to a small bathroom, which looked as if it were never used. Clearly, the entire room was never used, but Ann Campbell maintained it as a guest room.
Cynthia pulled back the bedspread, revealing a bare mattress. She said, “No one sleeps here.”
“Apparently not.” I pulled open the dresser drawers. Empty.
Cynthia motioned toward a set of large double doors on the far wall. I stood to the side and flung one of them open. A light inside went on automatically, and it sort of startled me, and Cynthia, too, because she crouched and aimed. After a second or two, she stood and approached what turned out to be a large walk-in cedar closet. We both went inside the closet. It smelled good, like a cheap cologne I once had that kept moths and women away. There were two long poles on either side from which hung bagged civilian clothes for every climate on earth, and more Army uniforms, ranging from her old West Point uniforms, to desert battle dress, to arctic wear, to Army whites, blue mess and evening mess uniforms for social functions, and sundry other rarely worn uniforms, plus her West Point saber. The overhead shelf had matching headgear, and on the floor was matching footwear.
I said, “This was one squared-away soldier. Equally prepared for a military ball or the next war in the jungle.”
“Doesn’t your uniform closet look like this?”
“My uniform closet looks like the third day of a close-out sale.” Actually, it looked worse than that. I have a tidy mind, but that’s as far as it goes. Captain Campbell, on the other hand, seemed clean, tidy, and organized in every external way. Perhaps, then, her mind was pure chaos. Perhaps not. This woman was elusive.
We exited the closet and the guest room.
On the way down the stairs, I said to Cynthia, “Before I was in the CID, I couldn’t see a clue if it bit me in the ass.”
“And now?”
“And now I see everything as a clue. The lack of clues is a clue.”
“Is that so? I haven’t progressed to that level yet. Sounds Zen.”
“I think of it as Sherlockian. You know, the dog that did not bark in the night.” We went into the kitchen. “Why did the dog not bark?”
“It was dead.”
It’s hard adjusting to a new partner. I don’t like the young, sycophantic guys who hang on your every word. But I don’t like smart-asses, either. I’m at that age and rank where I get respect and earn respect, but I’m still open to an occasional piece of reality.
Cynthia and I contemplated the bolted basement door. I said, not apropos of the door, but of life, “My wife left clues all over the place.”
She didn’t reply.
“But I never saw the clues.”
“Sure you did.”
“Well… in retrospect I did. But when you’re young, you’re pretty dense. You’re full of yourself, you don’t read other people well, you haven’t been lied to and cheated too much, and you lack the cynicism and suspicion that makes for a good detective.”
“A good detective, Paul, has to separate his or her professional life from his or her personal life. I wouldn’t want a man who snooped on me.”
“Obviously not, considering your past.”
“Fuck off.”
Score one for Paul. I threw back the bolt on the door. “Your turn.”
“Okay. I wish you had your pistol.” She handed me her Smith & Wesson and opened the basement door.
“Maybe I should go and get that M-16 upstairs,” I offered.
“Never rely on a weapon you just found and never tested. Says so in the manual. Just call out, then cover me.”
I shouted down the stairs, “Police! Come to the staircase with your hands on your head!” This is the military version of hands-up and makes a little more sense if you think about it. Well, no one came to the base of the stairs, so Cynthia had to go down. She said in a quiet voice, “Leave the lights off. I’ll break to the right. Wait five seconds.”
“You wait one second.” I looked around for something to throw down the stairs and spotted a toaster oven, but Cynthia was off and running, down the cellar stairs in long leaps, barely hitting the steps on her way down. I saw her shoulderroll to the right and lost sight of her. I followed, breaking to the left, and wound up in a firing crouch, peering into the darkness. We waited in silence for a full ten seconds, then I shouted, “Ed, John, cover us!” I wished there were an Ed and John around, but as Captain Campbell might have said, “Create phantom battalions in the minds of the enemy.”
By now, I figured that if anyone was down there, they weren’t lying in ambush, but were cowering. Right?
Anyway, Cynthia, who was obviously impatient with my caution, bounded back up the stairs and hit the light switches. Fluorescent bulbs flickered all over the large open basement, then burst into that stark white light that I associated with unpleasant places.
