Apparently, I was wrong.
The disappointment must’ve shown in my face. Kill leaned forward and slipped the photograph into a folder. “We’ll catch the right man,” he said. “You’ll see.”
I told him about Ernie and me being ordered back to Seoul.
Kill’s face hardened. “Eighth Army promised us your services until this case was solved.”
“I know. But my partner was involved in an argument with a superior officer. They’re very angry about that.”
“The people of Korea,” Kill said, “are very angry about the Blue Train rapist.”
He walked me out of his office and down the long corridor. “I will contact my superiors,” he said. “They will contact yours. Don’t leave Pusan until you’ve heard from me.”
I promised I wouldn’t.
In the foyer, just in front of the arched entranceway to the Pusan Police Station, a small group of people waited. Two were old grandparents wearing traditional Korean hanbok, supporting themselves on canes; another was a middle-aged man in a natty blue suit. With them were three children, a boy and two girls. The blue-suited man’s eyes widened when he spotted Inspector Kill. He stepped forward and bowed. The man wore glasses; he had a square face with high cheekbones, and I could see that his eyes were deeply lined in red. The children cowered next to their grandparents.
“This,” Mr. Kill told me, “is Mr. Ju, the husband of Hyon Mi-sook.”
In Korea, a wife doesn’t adopt her husband’s family name but keeps the name she was born with. This then was the husband of the woman who’d been brutally raped and then murdered in the Shindae Hotel. The children staring at me in wide-eyed horror had huddled in the bathtub while their mother had been humiliated, stabbed, and partially dismembered.
Without thinking, I held out my hand.
Mr. Ju recoiled from it. He stepped back, waving his palm negatively. “Andei.” No good. He launched into a vituperative spiel, some of which I couldn’t understand but, unfortunately, much of which I could. He said the American government must certainly know who had murdered his wife because soldiers are controlled and all their time accounted for, and therefore we Americans must be protecting the man who tore apart his family. He accused me of trying to block the investigation, trying to stall for time, hoping Koreans would forget about the outrage. He vowed he would never forget. He would continue to demand that we give up the killer even if it meant that Korea finally stood up for its rights and forced every last miscreant American G.I. to leave the country.
By now he was screaming, pointing his finger at me. The children were crying, burying their faces in the folds of their grandparents’ silk garments. A few uniformed cops loitered nearby, not sure what to do. Inspector Kill stepped toward Mr. Ju and held up two open palms.
Involuntarily I retreated from Mr. Ju’s assault, wanting to say it wasn’t true, we weren’t hiding anyone, but afraid of what he was saying; afraid of the truth of what he was saying. In each unit of the United States Army-especially while stationed overseas-we live cheek by jowl, both on duty and off. We know all about one another, often more than we want to know. If someone was leaving his unit, leaving his place of work, leaving his bunk in the barracks, and traveling around the country raping and murdering women, somebody who lived or worked with him would know of his strange behavior, or at least have strong suspicions. As of yet, no one had contacted 8th Army law enforcement. Not one tip. Partly that was because the story hadn’t appeared in the Pacific Stars and Stripes and therefore hadn’t risen above the level of rumor. But Riley confirmed to us that no tips had come in to the 8th Army CID office or the 8th Army MP station or any MP station in the entire country.
Was Mr. Ju right? Was 8th Army covering something up?
It had happened before. The Army protects its own. That’s not just an observation, it’s a motto that many soldiers-if not most-live by.
I stepped away from the screaming man, away from the crying children, away from Inspector Kill, who was trying to calm down the hysterical civilian. With a knot in my gut as big as a winter cabbage, I shoved my way out of the Pusan Police Station and stumbled down the stone steps. Ernie was in the sedan waiting for me, engine idling.
When I climbed in the front passenger seat, Riley said, “What the hell happened to you?”
My only response was “Drive.”
Ernie slipped the car in gear, stepped on the gas, and roared his way through the midday Pusan traffic.
After a few minutes, I started to calm down. The roads had widened now and were filled with fewer cars but, so far, no one had said a word. Even Riley was keeping his big trap shut. To fill the silence, Ernie started to explain what had happened between him and Captain Freddy Ray Embry.
“The USO popped for some really nice rooms in downtown Taegu,” Ernie told us. “Marnie and I were on the sixth floor-”
“What’s this ‘Marnie and I’?” Riley growled.
“Just what I said,” Ernie repeated. “‘Marnie and I.’ We were staying in room 607, up on the sixth floor.”
“You’re supposed to be guarding those broads,” Riley said. “Not cohabitating with ’em.”
Ernie shrugged. “So, anyway, it was just before the midnight curfew hit and suddenly there’s this pounding on the door. For a minute I thought it was the bed because Marnie was screaming at the time and thrashing around a bit-she’s a big girl-but finally I realized that somebody was at the door. I tried to get up, but Marnie wouldn’t let me go until finally I broke her grip and slipped on my jockey shorts. When I opened the door, there’s this big ugly G.I. screaming at me, wanting to know what I was doing with his Marnie.”
“She was really thrashing around that much?” Riley asked.
“Like I said, she’s a big girl. It was Freddy Ray at the door, raising all kinds of hell, so naturally I told him to get bent. He tried to barge into the room, and I shoved him back, and then he came at me again, and next thing I know we’re wrestling in the hallway, knocking shit over, and finally I break free and pop him with a couple of good lefts. By now, heads were poking out of doors, most of them the other girls from the Country Western All Stars, but a few Korean faces. Freddy Ray and I bounced around for a while, trading punches, but neither one of us getting the best of the other until finally, from out of the emergency stairwell, about a dozen Korean National Police wearing helmets and riot gear storm into the hallway. After a little more pushing and shoving, they take us both into custody. By now, Marnie’s wearing a see-through pink nightgown and she’s out in the hallway screaming at the cops to let Freddy Ray go. They can’t believe it. A half-naked American woman, taller than most of them, and they don’t know whether to use their batons on her or punch her out or what. And she wrestles with them and knocks a couple of the KNPs down, but finally they form a moving wall and shove her back into the room and shut the door.”
“She was naked,” Riley asked, “in her see-through nightgown?”
“Yeah,” Ernie replied, eyeing Riley. “Try to remain calm.”
“What happened then?”
“They handcuffed me and took me downstairs and threw me in a police van in the back along with Freddy Ray Embry and drove us over to the monkey house.”
“Did you and Freddy Ray get into it again?”
“What were we going to do? Butt heads? Our hands were cuffed behind our backs. He cussed me out and I gave him what-for, but mainly I was thinking about how freaking cold I was.”
“Was Freddy Ray hurt bad?”
“Hell, no. I think he cut himself on one of those flower vases on a stand. A lot of blood, and when the MPs arrived he was complaining like I was Jack the Ripper, but if it took even a half-dozen stitches I’d be surprised.”