“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.”
“Good idea.”
“I have to be in Panama by the end of this month. I’d like to finalize the divorce before then or it’ll take another six months if I’m out of the country.”
“Right. I got my divorce papers delivered in the mail call by chopper while I was under fire.”
“Really?”
“Really. Plus a dunning letter for my car loan, and antiwar literature from a peace group in San Francisco. Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed. Actually, I had no bed. Goes to show you. Things could be worse.”
“Things could be better. We’ll have a good weekend.”
“Looking forward to it.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
We arrived back at the provost marshal’s building. The media had decamped, and I parked in a no-parking zone on the road. Carrying the printouts of Ann Campbell’s diary, we went inside the building.
I said to Cynthia, “We’ll speak with Colonel Moore first, then see what Ms. Kiefer has found.”
As we walked toward the holding cells, Cynthia observed, “It’s hard to comprehend that the man who runs this whole place could be a criminal.”
“Right. It kind of messes up the protocols and the standard operating procedures.”
“Sure does. How do you feel about that bootprint?”
“It’s about all we’ve got,” I replied.
She thought a moment, then said, “But we’ve got motive and opportunity. Though I’m not certain about our psychological profile of the killer or Kent’s will to act. Also, we have almost no circumstantial evidence.” She added, “But after having drinks with him, I think our intuition is correct.”
“Good. Tell it to the FBI.”
I asked the lockup sergeant to accompany us, and we went to Colonel Moore’s cell. Moore was sitting up in his cot, fully dressed except for his shoes. Dalbert Elkins had pulled his chair up to the common bars and was talking to Moore, who was either listening very intently or had gone into a catatonic trance.
They both saw us approaching and both stood. Elkins seemed glad to see me, but Moore looked apprehensive, not to mention disheveled.
Elkins said to me, “Still set for tomorrow, Chief? No problem?”
“No problem.”
“My wife says to say thanks to you.”
“She does? She told me to keep you here.”
Elkins laughed.
I said to the MP sergeant, “Will you unlock Colonel Moore, please?”
“Yes, sir.” He unlocked Moore’s cell and asked me, “Cuffs?”
“Yes, please, Sergeant.”
The MP sergeant barked at Moore, “Wrists, front!”
Moore thrust his clenched hands to his front, and the sergeant snapped the cuffs on him.
Without a word, we walked down the long, echoing corridor, past the mostly empty cells. Moore, in his stockinged feet, made no echoes. There are few places on this earth more dismal than a cell block, and few scenes more melancholy than a prisoner in handcuffs. Moore, for all his intellectualizing, was not handling this well, which was the purpose.
We went into an interrogation room, and the sergeant left us. I said to Moore, “Sit.”
He sat.
Cynthia and I sat at a table opposite him.
I said to him, “I told you that the next time we spoke, it would be here.”
He didn’t reply. He looked a little frightened, a little dejected, and a little angry, though he was trying to suppress that, since he realized it wouldn’t do him any good. I said to him, “If you’d told us everything you knew the first time, you might not be here.”
No reply.
“Do you know what makes a detective really, really angry? When the detective has to waste valuable time and energy on a witness who’s being cute.”
I verbally poked him around awhile, assuring him that he made me sick, that he was a disgrace to his uniform, his rank, his profession, his country, and to God, the human race, and the universe.
All the while, Moore stayed silent, though I don’t think this was an expression of his Fifth Amendment right to do so as much as it was his accurate estimate that I wanted him to shut his mouth.
Cynthia, meanwhile, had taken the printouts of the diary and had gotten up and left for most of the verbal abuse. After about five minutes, she came back without the printouts, but she was carrying a plastic tray on which was a Styrofoam cup of milk and a donut.
Moore’s eyes flashed to the food, and he stopped paying attention to me.
Cynthia said to him, “I brought you this.” She set the tray down out of his reach and said to him, “I’ve asked the MP to unlock your cuffs so you can eat. He’ll be here when he gets a moment.”
Moore assured her, “I can eat with my cuffs on.”
Cynthia informed him, “It’s against regulations to make a prisoner eat with wrist manacles, chains, cuffs, and such.”
“You’re not
“Sorry. Wait for the sergeant.”
Moore kept looking at the donut, which, I suspected, was the first mess hall donut he’d ever shown any interest in. I said to him, “Let’s get on with this. And don’t jerk us around like you did the last few times. Okay, to show you how much shit you’re in, I’m going to tell you what we already know from the forensic evidence. Then you’re going to fill in the details. First, you and Ann Campbell planned this for at least a week—from the time her father gave her the ultimatum. Okay, I don’t know whose idea it was to re-create the West Point rape”—I stared at him and saw his reaction to this, then went on—“but it was a sick idea. Okay, you called her at Post Headquarters, coordinated the times, and drove out to rifle range five, where you pulled across the gravel lot and behind the bleachers there. You got out of your car, carrying the tent pegs, rope, a hammer, and so forth, and also a mobile
