The General's Daughter by Nelson DeMille Page B

Cynthia’s Mustang, and headed back up Victory Drive, passing a convoy of Army trucks heading
     the other way as we approached the post.
    As Cynthia drove, I stared out the side window, deep in thought.
Weird,
I thought.
Weird.
Weird things, right on the other side of a gung-ho recruiting poster. And that was to become metaphor for this case: shiny
     brass, pressed uniforms, military order and honor, a slew of people above reproach, but if you went a little deeper, opened
     the right door, you would find a profound corruption as rank as Ann Campbell’s bed.

CHAPTER
SEVEN
    A s Cynthia drove, she divided her attention between the road and Ann Campell’s address book, mostly at the expense of the road.
     I said, “Give me 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