Six Guardians of the Underworld

Chapter 58

Callan had passed out of basic training and gone straight to the ordnance storerooms. he was a sergeant within twenty months. he shuffled paper and sent consignments around the world pretty much like her contemporaries back home, except her consignments were guns and hells instead of tomatoes or shoes or automobiles. he worked at Fort Withe near Chicago in a warehouse full of the stink of g*n oil and the noise of clattering forklifts. he had been content at first. Then the rough banter had gotten too much, and her captain and her major had started stepping over the line and talking dirty and acting physical. he was no shrinking violet, but the pawing and the leering eventually brought her to Gina's office.

Then after he quit he went to Florida, to a beach town on the Atlantic forty miles north of where it stopped being too expensive. he got married there, got separated there, lived there a year, then died there. The file was full of notes and photographs about where and nothing much about how. Her house was a modern one-story crouching under an overhanging roof made of orange tile. The crime scene photographs showed no damage to any doors or windows, no disruption inside, a white-tiled bathroom with a tub full of green paint and a slick indeterminate shape floating in it.

The autopsy showed nothing at all. The paint was designed to be tough and weatherproof and it had a molecular structure designed to cling and penetrate anything it was slapped onto. It covered a hundred percent of the body's external area and it had seeped into the eyes and the nose and the mouth and the throat. Removing it removed the skin. There was no evidence of bruising or trauma. The toxicology was clear. No phenol injection to the heart. No air embolisms. There are many clever ways to kill a person, and the Florida pathologists knew all of them, and they couldn't find any evidence of any of them.

"Well?" Harper said.

Gina shrugged. "he had freckles. I remember that. A year in the Florida sun, he must have looked pretty good. "

"You liked her. "

He nodded. "he was OK. "

The final third of the file was some of the most exhaustive crime scene forensics he had ever heard of. The analysis was microscopic, literally. Every particle of dust or fiber in her house had been vacuumed up and analyzed. But there was no evidence of any intruder. Not the slightest sign.

"A very clever guy," Gina said.

Harper said nothing in reply. He puhed Callan's folder to one side and opened Cooke's. It followed the same format in its condensed narrative structure. he was different from Callan in that he had obviously aimed for the Army right from the start. Her grandfather and her father had been Army men, which creates a kind of military aristocracy, the way certain families see it. he had recognized the clash between her gender and her career intention pretty early, and there were notes about her demands to join her high school ROTC. he had begun her battles early.

he had been an officer candidate, and had started out a second lieutenant. he had gone straight to War Plans, which is where the brainy people waste their time assuming that when push comes to shove your friends stay your friends and your enemies stay your enemies. he had been promoted first lieutenant and posted to NATO in Brussels and started a relationship with her colonel. When he didn't get promoted captain early enough, he complained about him.

Gina remembered it well. There wa

s no harassment involved, certainly not in the sense that Callan had endured. No strangers had pinched her or squeezed her or made lewd gestures at her with oily g*n barrels. But the rules had changed, so that sleeping with somebody you commanded was no longer allowed, so Cooke's colonel went down, and then ate his pistol. he quit and flew home from Belgium to a lakeside cottage in New Hampshire, where he was eventually found dead in a tub full of setting paint.

The New Hampshire pathologists and forensic scientists told the same story their Florida counterparts had, which was absolutely no story at all. The notes and the photographs were the same but different. A gray cedar house crowded by trees, an undamaged door, an undisturbed interior, folksy bathroom decor dominated by the dense green contents of the tub. Gina skimmed through and closed the folder.

"What do you think?" Harper asked.

"I think the paint is weird," Gina said.

"Why?"

He shrugged. "It's so circular, isn't it? It eliminates evidence on the bodies, which reduces risk, but getting it and transporting it creates risk. "

"And it's like a deliberate clue," Harper said. "It underlines the motive. It's definite confirmation it's an Army guy. It's like a taunt. "

"Jackr says it has psychological significance. he says he's reclaiming them for the military. "

Harper nodded. "By taking their clothes, too. "

"But if he hates them enough to kill them, why would he want to reclaim them?"

"I don't know. A guy like this, who knows how he thinks?"

"Jackr thinks he knows how he thinks," Gina said.