that.”
She threw it on my lap in a gesture that was definitely meant to be aggressive.
I flipped through the address book, a thick leather-bound and well-worn book of good quality, written in a neat hand. Every
space was filled with names and addresses, a good number of them crossed out and reentered with a new address as people changed
duty stations, homes, wives, husbands, units, countries, and from alive to dead. In fact, I saw two entries marked KIA. It
was a typical address book of a career soldier, spanning the years and the world, and, while I knew it was probably her desktop
official address book and not the little black book that we hadn’t yet found, I was still fairly certain that someone in this
book knew something. If I had two years, I could question all of them. Clearly, I had to give the book to headquarters in
Falls Church, Virginia, where my immediate superior, Colonel Karl Gustav Hellmann, would parcel it out all over the world,
generating a stack of transcribed interviews taller than the great Teutonic pain-in-the-ass himself. Maybe he’d decide to
read them and stay off my case.
A word about my boss. Karl Hellmann was actually born a German citizen close to an American military installation near Frankfurt,
and, like many hungry children whose families were devastated by the war, he had made himself a sort of mascot for the American
troops and eventually joined the U.S. military to support his family. There were a good number of these galvanized German
Yankees in the U.S. military years ago, and many of them became officers, and some are still around. On the whole, they make
excellent officers, and the Army is lucky to have them. The people who have to work for them are not so lucky. But enough
whining. Karl is efficient, dedicated, loyal, and correct in both senses of the word. The only mistake I ever knew him to
make was when he decided I liked him. Wrong, Karl. But I do respect him, and I would trust him with my life. In fact, I have.
Obviously, this case needed a breakthrough, a shortcut by which we could get to the end quickly, before careers and reputations
were flushed down the toilet. Soldiers are encouraged to kill in the proper setting, but killing within the service is definitely
a slap in the face to good order and discipline. It raises too many questions about that thin line between the bloodcurdling,
screaming bayonet charge—“What’s the spirit of the bayonet?
To kill! To kill!”
—and peacetime garrison duty. A good soldier will always be respectful of rank, gender, and age. Says so in the
Soldier’s Handbook.
The best I could hope for in this case was that the murder was committed by a slimeball civilian with a previous arrest record
going back ten years. The worst I could imagine was… well, early indications pointed to it, whatever it was.
Cynthia said, apropos of the address book, “She had lots of friends and acquaintances.”
“Don’t you?”
“Not in this job.”
“True.” In fact, we were a bit out of the mainstream of Army life, and so our colleagues and good buddies are fewer in number.
Cops tend to be cliquish all over the world, and when you’re a military cop on continuing TDY—temporary duty—you don’t make
many friends, and relationships with the opposite sex tend to be short and strained, somewhat like temporary duty itself.
Midland is officially six miles from Fort Hadley, but as I said, the town has grown southward along Victory Drive, great strips
of neon commerce, garden apartments, and car dealers, so that the main gate resembles the Brandenburg Gate, separating chaotic
private enterprise and tackiness from spartan sterility. The beer cans stop at the gate.
Cynthia’s Mustang, which I had noted sported a visitor’s parking sticker, was waived through the gate by an MP, and within
a few minutes we were in the center of the main post, where traffic and parking are only slightly better than in
She threw it on my lap in a gesture that was definitely meant to be aggressive.
I flipped through the address book, a thick leather-bound and well-worn book of good quality, written in a neat hand. Every
space was filled with names and addresses, a good number of them crossed out and reentered with a new address as people changed
duty stations, homes, wives, husbands, units, countries, and from alive to dead. In fact, I saw two entries marked KIA. It
was a typical address book of a career soldier, spanning the years and the world, and, while I knew it was probably her desktop
official address book and not the little black book that we hadn’t yet found, I was still fairly certain that someone in this
book knew something. If I had two years, I could question all of them. Clearly, I had to give the book to headquarters in
Falls Church, Virginia, where my immediate superior, Colonel Karl Gustav Hellmann, would parcel it out all over the world,
generating a stack of transcribed interviews taller than the great Teutonic pain-in-the-ass himself. Maybe he’d decide to
read them and stay off my case.
A word about my boss. Karl Hellmann was actually born a German citizen close to an American military installation near Frankfurt,
and, like many hungry children whose families were devastated by the war, he had made himself a sort of mascot for the American
troops and eventually joined the U.S. military to support his family. There were a good number of these galvanized German
Yankees in the U.S. military years ago, and many of them became officers, and some are still around. On the whole, they make
excellent officers, and the Army is lucky to have them. The people who have to work for them are not so lucky. But enough
whining. Karl is efficient, dedicated, loyal, and correct in both senses of the word. The only mistake I ever knew him to
make was when he decided I liked him. Wrong, Karl. But I do respect him, and I would trust him with my life. In fact, I have.
Obviously, this case needed a breakthrough, a shortcut by which we could get to the end quickly, before careers and reputations
were flushed down the toilet. Soldiers are encouraged to kill in the proper setting, but killing within the service is definitely
a slap in the face to good order and discipline. It raises too many questions about that thin line between the bloodcurdling,
screaming bayonet charge—“What’s the spirit of the bayonet?
To kill! To kill!”
—and peacetime garrison duty. A good soldier will always be respectful of rank, gender, and age. Says so in the
Soldier’s Handbook.
The best I could hope for in this case was that the murder was committed by a slimeball civilian with a previous arrest record
going back ten years. The worst I could imagine was… well, early indications pointed to it, whatever it was.
Cynthia said, apropos of the address book, “She had lots of friends and acquaintances.”
“Don’t you?”
“Not in this job.”
“True.” In fact, we were a bit out of the mainstream of Army life, and so our colleagues and good buddies are fewer in number.
Cops tend to be cliquish all over the world, and when you’re a military cop on continuing TDY—temporary duty—you don’t make
many friends, and relationships with the opposite sex tend to be short and strained, somewhat like temporary duty itself.
Midland is officially six miles from Fort Hadley, but as I said, the town has grown southward along Victory Drive, great strips
of neon commerce, garden apartments, and car dealers, so that the main gate resembles the Brandenburg Gate, separating chaotic
private enterprise and tackiness from spartan sterility. The beer cans stop at the gate.
Cynthia’s Mustang, which I had noted sported a visitor’s parking sticker, was waived through the gate by an MP, and within
a few minutes we were in the center of the main post, where traffic and parking are only slightly better than in
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