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.
8
Out in the courtyard, Captain Noh and his cohorts waited for us in front of the byonso. It was in its own separate little cement-block building up against the northern wall. When Captain Noh opened the wooden door, the smell of ammonia jabbed into our nostrils like a sharpened fingernail.
“There,” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“Right there. Inside.” He pointed down.
I stepped into the outhouse and gazed into the rectangular hole in the cement floor. Down into filth and blackness. Most Korean homes don’t have commodes. They just come out here and squat and do their business. If you’re a man urinating, you aim carefully.
“My weapons card?” I asked. “You found it here?”
“Yes,” Captain Noh said, his face unreadable. “First he do something. Then he drop card on top of it.”
Ernie crossed his arms, trying not to laugh.
“Thorough search,” Ernie told Captain Noh.
Captain Noh nodded, taking Ernie’s comment as a compliment. He turned and returned to his colleagues waiting in the courtyard.
I grimaced at Ernie.
“Apparently,” Ernie said, grinning broadly now, “the brown-haired GI holds you in high esteem.”
“Can it, Ernie.”
Then, with Captain Noh and his two assistants, Ernie and I left the home of the woman known as Jo Kyong-ah. “Miss” Jo Kyong-ah.