The Door to Bitterness

7

I followed, frightened at first by the darkness.

When my mother lay dying, when I was a child barely able to talk, her room had been dark like this. Women stood by, lace mantillas covering their heads, and a priest hovered near her bed. They brought me forward. My mother’s face, which had once been smiling and vibrant, appeared wan in the flickering candlelight. She grabbed my hand. Her fingers were cold. So cold I pulled away. But she beckoned and I stepped forward and grabbed her hand in both of mine. Her fingers, and then her palm, became warm again and she smiled at me, a smile as radiant as the wings of a flight of angels.

Suddenly I was back in Tango, shoving such thoughts out of my mind, forcing my concentration back to my immediate surroundings. I’m an adult now. A soldier. A CID investigator. Time to do my job. And accept my ass-chewing if that is what I was here for.

There was a box with a handle on a desk. It was metal, larger than a construction worker’s lunch box, and sticking out of the top was a six-inch-wide bulb. It lit up the desktop but nothing else. The rest of the room was dark. Still, there was enough light to see the man who sat behind the desk. He was thin to the point of emaciation, his receding gray hairline cut so close to the scalp you couldn’t be sure where his forehead ended and the top of his skull began. He wore highly starched fatigues with a razor sharp crease running from the top of the shoulder down to the wrist. On his pressed collar were four black stars. His name tag said ARM-BREWSTER.

Ernie and I both knew who he was, as did every American GI in country. General Frederick K. Armbrewster, Commanding General of the United Nations Command, U.S. Forces Korea, and the 8th United States Army.

Bony fingers shuffled through stacks of paperwork. Much of the paper had already been placed in a box labeled “Out.” More was stacked on the other side of the desk, next to a box labeled “In.”

“Bullshit,” General Armbrewster said. His voice sounded dry. Crackling. As if he needed desperately to gulp down a glass of water. “That’s what it is,” he continued. “All paperwork is bullshit. Designed by the politicians and lawyers to keep themselves rich.”

Then he looked up at us, his mouth set in a straight line.

Ernie and I saluted, both feeling awkward, what with our unshaven faces and grimy clothes. General Armbrewster didn’t seem to notice. Listlessly, he returned our salute and told us to sit on two folding metal chairs in front of his desk.

He didn’t bother to explain the lighting, or why he had to work with a battery-powered lamp on his desk. This was a man who didn’t bother with trifles.

He continued to finish up the paperwork in front of him, hardly noticing us. But he hadn’t made Ernie and me remain at attention while he worked. That seemed out of character. Usually, when we received ass-chewings-and Ernie and I were experts on them-the person doing the chewing took every opportunity to humiliate us; to keep us standing at attention while they leisurely finished their task. That was standard procedure. In the army, humiliating subordinates is what lifers live for. General Armbrewster was different. He hadn’t brought us here to chew us out. Such minute disciplinary detail would be beneath his dignity. He’d brought us here for another reason. Something that had to be done face to face.

Suddenly, I was nervous. Much more nervous than I had been before.

The General finished with the paperwork, slipped a metal clip on a short stack, and tossed it into the “Out” basket. Then he stared at us, each in turn, long and steady.

“First,” he said, “forget all the bullshit.”

I sat with my back ramrod straight in the chair.

He turned his attention fully to me. “They’re going to bring a Report of Survey down on you, Sueno, for losing your forty-five. A Report of Survey that could lead to court-martial.” He stared at me for a few moments. I stared back. He turned toward Ernie. “And an official reprimand against you, Bascom, for being the senior man and allowing it to happen.”

He waited for a reaction, but Ernie and I were still too stunned at being in the presence of a four-star general to say anything. Ernie shows no reverence for anyone alive. And I’ve seen him mouth off in circumstances that were bound to get him slapped in the stockade or even killed, but he chose to mouth off anyway. Threats don’t scare him. Yet even he knew that now was not the time to say anything. A private audience with the Commanding General of 8th Army was not something two lowly CID agents experienced every day. It was as if we’d suddenly been shoved in a cage with a Bengal tiger.

“I believe in redemption,” General Armbrewster declared. “We all make mistakes. The test of a man is whether or not he corrects them.”

He paused and seemed to want a response to this. Was he saying that neither Ernie nor I would be punished if we caught the people who stole my. 45 and shot Han Ok-hi? I think he was. However, I was afraid to say so out loud. Negotiating with a four-star general was not something I was used to. The silence grew longer. Finally, I found the courage to speak. “Yes, sir,” I said. Nothing more.

Armbrewster nodded his bony head, taking my statement as complete acquiescence. Which, of course, it was.

“On the other hand, if one doesn’t correct one’s mistakes…”

The General let the sentence trail off, spreading both his hands, as if allowing sand to sift through his fingers.

His meaning was clear. If Ernie and I don’t catch the people who perpetrated these crimes, he’d allow all charges to be brought against us. The full force and power of the Uniform Code of Military Justice would hammer us senseless.

These weren’t idle threats. In the military justice system, the commanding officer performs the same function that the district attorney and the grand jury do in civilian proceedings. He decides who is going to be prosecuted and who isn’t. In addition, he appoints the officers who will preside as judges over the trial. And often there’s an understanding as to what the CG expects the verdict to be. So the Commanding General functions as the district attorney and grand jury and also-if he chooses to-as the judge and the jury. Ernie and I were toast if the CG decided against us, and we both knew it.

When General Armbrewster was satisfied that we understood what he was saying, he crossed his arms and leaned back in his swivel chair.

“He’s a killer.”

Ernie and I both jerked forward. My first thought was for Han Ok-hi-she hadn’t made it, after all-but the General said, “A traveling man.”

“Where?” Ernie croaked.

“Up in Songtan.”

We knew the place. The village outside Osan Air Force Base, the largest U.S. Air Base in Korea.

“I don’t know much more about the victim yet,” General Armbrewster said. “An old hag who works the streets, they tell me.”

“Who told you, sir?” Ernie was already investigating.

“The Korean National Police Liaison Officer,” Armbrewster answered. “He says the KNPs are worried because they don’t have access to our compounds or much good intelligence amongst the GIs who work mischief off base. He’s going to need American help.”

“How do the KNPs know it’s the same guy?” I asked.

“The way she was killed. Raped, strangled, stabbed, and then she was…”

“But that’s not the way Han Ok-hi was hurt,” Ernie interrupted. “Not at all.”

“I’m not finished.” Armbrewster stared at Ernie until he quieted. “Once this cretin was through with the old bag, he put a hole in her skull. With a forty-five.”

My side was still throbbing from the knife wound last night. In fact, I was worried it had started bleeding again. But now it felt as if another hot blade had been shoved into my stomach, by the same guy who had pulled the trigger of my pistol.

“It could be anybody’s forty-five,” I said. “The KNPs couldn’t run a ballistics test that quickly.”

“No, they couldn’t,” Armbrewster agreed. “But they also have this.”

He shoved a small piece of cardboard wrapped in plastic across his desk. Then, while Ernie and I leaned forward, he lifted the portable lamp and shone the beam directly onto the document.

It was made of rectangular white cardboard. Wallet-sized. Perforated edges. A standard 8th Army Form: USFK 108-b, Weapons Receipt. The card that was needed by every GI when he checked out his weapon from his unit’s arms room. This one described the type of weapon authorized-. 45 pistol, automatic, one-each-and next to that the serial number of the specific weapon.

I recognized the serial number. I had memorized it over a year ago, when I’d arrived in Korea and been assigned to the 8th Army CID Detachment.

I also recognized the name typed into the top square: Sueno, George (NMI).

There was a thumbprint on the card. Brown. Probably dried blood. Clear. As if it had been purposely placed there by a professional.

I looked back at General Armbrewster, still too stunned to speak. Ernie spoke for me.

“He wants us to catch him,” Ernie said.

General Armbrewster nodded his skeleton-like skull.

“Yes. On that, if nothing else, I and this cretin agree. I want you to catch him. Now. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but now! I saw your MPRFs.” Military Personnel Records Folders. General Armbrewster took a deep breath. “You’re both a couple of fuck-offs. You never do anything right. Your black market arrest statistics are for shit, and you’re always embarrassing some staff officer with a lot of scrambled eggs on the brim of his cap. Why? Because you don’t care about a damn thing except catching crooks.” He looked directly at us, eyes blazing. “Good work, goddamn it! Keep the bastards on their toes. You two are the only cops I’ve got who can find out anything in the ville. All the other investigators are like the assholes who work for me here in the headshed. Always trying to impress somebody, disdainful of going where the real soldiering is. This case fell on you two like a ton of latrine waste. God only knows why. But it’s yours now. You solve it. You catch this creep. You do it now. Not later. Now! Before he kills again. And if anybody gives you any bullshit, any bullshit at all, you contact me. You understand?”

We both nodded.

He handed us each another wallet-sized card. This one clean, no blood on it, only his name and personal phone number and his radio call sign. English on one side, Korean on the other. The card was stamped “Secret.”

“Don’t stop until you find him.”

We both stood and were about to salute again when General Armbrewster waved us off. “I told you. Forget about the bullshit. Get this guy. Get him now.”

We turned and started to walk out, but he called me back, as if he’d forgotten something.

“Sueno,” he said. General Armbrewster was standing. “One more thing. Sorry to have to break this to you, but that casino dealer in Inchon, the woman named Han Ok-hi. Bad news. She died less than an hour ago.”

He twisted the portable lamp, aiming it at the paperwork on his desk until his face was again deep in shadow. Then he sat down and began reading, ignoring me completely. I thought of Han Ok-hi’s parents. Their daughter was gone. I thought of my own responsibility. I wanted to speak, but what was there to say? So I stood there, silently, the only sound in the room the scratch, scratch, scratch, of a fountain pen on parchment.

A squad of Military Police vehicles, sirens blaring, escorted us south, away from Seoul, away from Tango, toward the town known as Songtan.

“VIP treatment,” Ernie said. “About time.”

We were in the back seat of yet another Army-issue sedan. This time with two MPs up front, one driving, the other holding an M-16 rifle across his lap.

Ernie leaned forward. “You guys ever seen two GIs being treated better than this?”

“Yeah,” the driver drawled. “When we transport them in chains down to the stockade.”

The other MP guffawed. Ernie sat back in his seat and turned to me and smirked. “Jealousy is a terrible thing.”

But I wasn’t so sure the MPs were wrong. We’d just been handed a hot potato by the Commanding General of the 8th United States Army and we’d just been given permission to ride roughshod over any military staff officer who dared to stand in our way. In the Machiavellian world of the 8th Army bureaucracy, such power had to be used with caution. Staff officers have long memories. And they know how to bite. Not to mention that failure meant court-martial. But I tried not to think about that.

We were off the expressway now, on a country road leading south toward Songtan-up. The town of Songtan. “Si” on the end of a place name means city, “up” means town, and “li” or “ni” means village. The farther down the hierarchy you go, the farther out in the country you are. Rice paddies stretched away on either side, and the MP convoy occasionally was forced to swerve around an ox-drawn cart laden with piles of moist alfalfa. The weather was cold and hazy, the way I like it. When I was growing up in L.A., we didn’t experience many days like this: overcast, fresh air, a brisk chill invigorating a gentle breeze. What we got mostly was blazing hot sidewalks and smog thick enough to make breathing painful when we tried to play.

It was autumn now. According to ancient poets, the most beautiful time of the year on the Korean Peninsula. The time when the name Chosun, the Land of the Morning Calm, seems most appropriate. When leaves turn brown and red and yellow, and farmers harvest the last dry fields of grain, and rice paddies are flooded in preparation for the winter freeze. Autumn is the time of Chusok, the harvest moon festival, on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month. When families gather and perform the seibei ceremony and then trek out into the countryside, toward grave mounds dotting round hills, to commune with the dead. To eat a family lunch with long-departed relatives and provide them with updates on the progress of the living. It’s a warm time, a family time, a time of bounty and good cheer. And a melancholy time for an American GI alone in a strange country. But I’m used to that. I grew up in foster homes in L.A., and I felt alone in a strange country there too.

Straw-thatched huts lined the two-lane road but they soon gave way to tile-roofed buildings. Behind a line of hills was the vast acreage of Osan Air Force Base, the largest American air base in Korea.

At the edge of Songtan, we passed the open parking lot of the bustling Songtan Bus Station and hung a right across a double line of railroad tracks. The one-lane road narrowed, and we slowed to a crawl. The road became even narrower, and we spotted the first pool halls and beer joints, and finally the lead jeep pulled over. The MPs parked their vehicles, leaving one MP behind as a guard, and we stepped into the maze of passageways and alleys that branched out from the main road.

Shops filled every nook and cranny: brassware emporiums, leather goods stores, sporting equipment outlets, and then, at last, the bars. One nightclub after another, each with brightly colored neon just now blinking on in the late-afternoon dusk. Business girls, most freshly made-up for their night’s work, loitered in bead-draped doorways. They waved at the MPs, inviting them in, laughing, cooing at us. A few of the MPs waved back.

The NCO in charge barked: “Knock off the bullshit!” The MPs turned away from the girls and resumed their grim-faced expressions.

There was no doubt where the crime scene was located. The entire walkway had been roped off, and two Korean National Policemen stood guard. Ernie showed them his CID badge, and I flashed my newly-minted military identification card. When they hesitated, Ernie said, “He’s with me.” He grabbed me by the arm, lifted the white police tape, and before the cops could react, the two of us ducked through.

Behind us, scantily-clad business girls flooded out of the front doorways of every bar lining the alleyway.

“Set up a perimeter,” the MP sergeant shouted. His men scurried, preparing to protect this crowded little walkway from the threat of a pack of mini-skirted Korean bargirls.

Why had General Armbrewster sent such a large contingent of MPs with us? I suppose because he wanted to show that he meant business. The murder of an innocent young woman had struck a nerve here in Korea, and the honchos of 8th Army were always wary of bad publicity. Ernie and I were to be provided with the resources we needed to conduct this investigation as we saw fit. Actually, we hoped to ditch the MP escort as soon as possible. Grabbing a lot of attention was good for advancing a military career, but it wasn’t much help in solving a murder.

Three men in khaki stood outside the mouth of a dark alley. As we approached, they watched us expectantly. Korean cops. One of the men I recognized. Captain Noh, commander of the Songtan contingent of the Korean National Police. We’d worked with him once or twice before. Results had been mixed but, fortunately, Ernie hadn’t pissed him off. Not much anyway.

We shook hands and rapid introductions were made. Without further ado, Captain Noh led us down the alleyway.

He was a grim-faced man with a lugubrious expression and a no-nonsense, by-the-book way of doing his job. Last time we’d worked with him he’d told Ernie and me that he’d been prowling the streets of Songtan for more than twenty years, since the end of the Korean War. Crime had gotten worse, according to him. After the war, people were starving, and they stole, robbed, and maimed in order to feed their families. Now, he said, they were becoming westernized. They stole, robbed, and maimed simply for kicks.

Ten-foot-high brick and cement-block walls loomed on either side of the narrow pathway. Behind the walls, pots clanged and radios blared. Families at home, hidden behind their barricades, cut off from the raucous world of the GI bar district. Every half meter or so, a brick-lined channel in the center of the cobbled lane was punctuated by three-inch-wide air vents. Sewage bubbled through subterranean passageways, reeking of ammonia and soap suds and waste. The air in the walkway was pungent not only with the smell of sewage, but with clouds of charcoal gas billowing out from beneath the warm ondol floors that heated the homes behind the walls.

The alley curved and then curved again. Sinuous, like a dragon winding its way through a stone maze. Finally, in front of a red tile-roofed overhang in the center of a red-brick wall, Captain Noh stopped. The wall didn’t look too welcoming. It was topped with rusted barbed wire and shards of glass embedded in mortar. Captain Noh rapped on the varnished wooden gate and shouted, “Na ya!” It’s me!

Immediately, the door in the gate opened.

Inside, a uniformed KNP came to attention and saluted. Captain Noh returned the salute as he ducked through the door. The rest of our entourage followed him inside. Before entering, I paused to study the recessed gate. Embedded in the cement wall next to the door was a metal speaker for an intercom system, and below that a brass placard. I pushed the buzzer. It worked. I pulled out my notebook and jotted down the name etched in the placard: Jo Kyong-ah, written in phonetic script. Jo being the family name, Kyong-ah a given name for a female. After the name, etched into the brass, was a Chinese character. I copied that down also. A complicated character, twenty strokes, female radical on the left. As I scribbled, the pronunciation and meaning of the word came to me: yang. The Korean word for “Miss.” Whoever owned this house was announcing to the world that she was a woman, and an unmarried woman at that.

Unusual in Korea. For an unmarried woman to be successful enough to own a home and then, more unusual, to be proud of her unmarried status. Whoever lived here-or had lived here-was a person who didn’t give a damn what other people thought.

I ducked through the small doorway.

Opulence. That’s the word that jumped to my mind.

Usually-at least in Itaewon-these hooches behind big walls are not much to shout about. Wood or brick tile-roofed buildings, single story, with a dusty courtyard containing a chicken coop and an outside cement byonso, usually stenciled with the letters “W.C.”

But this place was something else.

The garden was well tended with neatly raked gravel, spotted with those stunted trees you see in Japanese travelogues, and in the center, a gurgling, stone-lined fountain. Golden fins splashed through water running blue. Arrayed along the walls, a row of three-foot-high earthenware jars stood at attention, freshly dusted, probably containing a bounty of cabbage and turnip and cucumber kimchee.

The raised floor of the hooch itself was freshly varnished and immaculately clean. To the left, a door opened into a large storeroom. The overhead bulb was switched on, splashing artificial light onto piles of cardboard boxes emblazoned with English and Japanese lettering. Each box touted the contents within: color TV sets, stereo components, electric fans, radios, tape recorders. Whoever lived here was running her own electronics shop. I stepped closer and inspected the boxes. None bore a Republic of Korea customs stamp.

Captain Noh and the other cops slipped off their shoes and stepped up onto the raised floor. As Ernie and I followed, the first thing I noticed was the odor of something burnt. Neither Captain Noh nor Ernie nor the other cops paid any attention to the smell, but I paused and inhaled deeply. The aroma was faint but unmistakable. Something cooked. Overcooked. Something natural, some sort of wood, or maybe an herb. Was it pine? I compared the odor swirling about me to the cloying sweetness of scented air freshener. This was much harsher. Sizzled sap. Nothing artificial about it.

The sliding doors leading to the main living room had been pulled open. Handle-level, the oil-paper in the latticework design was ripped open. Captain Noh pointed at the tear with his ballpoint pen.

“Somebody climb wall, break in here.”

Ernie knelt and examined the inner hasp. “Busted,” he said.

“Yes,” Captain Noh replied. “But look. No scratch.”

The metal hasp was still in pristine condition, but the wood around the hasp had been splintered inward.

“He didn’t use a tool,” Ernie said.

“Right. He just push.” Captain Noh mimicked the action of shoving the sliding door inward.

“That would’ve made a lot of noise,” Ernie said.

“Yes. Lot of noise.”

“So the people inside, they must’ve woken up.”

“Yes.” Captain Noh nodded. “Only one person inside. Woman. She wake up. She fight.”

In Korea, the custom was that if a burglar broke into a home, and the home was empty, he had every right to take whatever he wanted. After all, if the owner valued those possessions, he would’ve left someone home to guard them. If, however, someone inside the home made their presence known-by coughing or banging on doors, or otherwise preparing to confront the burglar-the burglar was obliged, by tradition, to withdraw. If the burglar was in the process of withdrawing and the homeowner chased and beat him, the homeowner could be charged with assault. On the other hand, if the burglar refused to withdraw when he discovered that someone was in the home, 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 right over the windpipe and with enough force cut off all air, stifle sound from the vocal chords, and even in some cases snap the neck bone itself. This would be much more difficult to do from the back.

And why set up this little table with this jewelry-case display? It was almost as if it were some sort of shrine. But a shrine to what?

Another anomaly occurred to me.

“Where did he leave my weapons card?” I asked.

Captain Noh shook his head and held up one finger, to let me know that he’d answer in a minute.

We all backed out of the room, took off our gloves and our masks, and returned to the front room. I veered off toward the kitchen. It was a rectangular room, not much bigger than a large pantry in an American household, the cement floor lowered two feet below the wooden foundation of the rest of the house. On a low cement bench sat three propane burners. Atop one was a flat, round skillet. The fire below had been turned off and the knob dusted with fingerprint powder.

Captain Noh stood behind me. “He start fire,” he said.

There was a box of stick matches next to the burners.

“Why?” Ernie asked.

Captain Noh turned to look at him. The three of us were jammed into the narrow kitchen doorway.

“He want cook something.”

“What?”

Captain Noh pointed. I stepped down into the kitchen, sliding my toes into a pair of plastic sandals. In the round skillet was spread a single layer of charred black things that looked like needles. Using my thumb and forefinger, I picked up a few. They crumbled to dust in my hand.

Captain Noh said something in Korean. “Solip.” I didn’t understand the word at first, but then I figured it out. Pine needles. Roasted at a low temperature. That explained the burnt odor.

“Why?” I asked Captain Noh.

He shrugged. “Maybe because of smell.” Then he turned quickly and walked away.

Ernie glanced at me and raised an eyebrow.

I felt the same way. Captain Noh wasn’t telling us something. Why would he be so sensitive about burnt pine needles? I almost ran after him to question him further but stopped myself. No sense pressing. When Koreans decide to keep a secret from a foreigner, no power on earth can pry it out of them. Best to wait, figure it out for yourself. Usually, in due time, I can.