“Her mother?” Korvacheck asked.
“Yes. Jill hasn’t contacted her. No letter, no phone call, no nothing.”
Anne’s brow furrowed and she started to chew on the nail of her thumb.
“You promised you wouldn’t tell,” I said. “Didn’t you?”
When she didn’t answer, I took her silence for consent. “But it’s beyond that now,” I continued. “Jill Matthewson could be in danger. She could be hurt. She could be praying that someone finds her.”
Anne Korvachek let out a deep sigh. “I didn’t want to tell that other guy. What’s his name?”
“Bufford,” Ernie said again.
Korvachek nodded. “Yeah, Bufford. He acted like Jill had done something wrong.”
She had, actually. In the military, not reporting for duty is a crime but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said, “We don’t think she’s a criminal. We think she needs help.”
She studied Ernie and me again and made her decision. “I don’t know much. While she was on patrol, out in the ville with the other MPs, she came to know some of the girls who work there. Korean girls. You know, strippers and stuff like that. She said they weren’t so bad and some of them were friendly and started talking to her. One of them helped her find a hooch. A cheap place, somewhere in the ville, away from the bar district. I don’t know exactly where ’cos she never invited me to go with her. But it’s quiet, she told me, and there was a nice old mama-san who taught her how to do things. You know, how to get water out of the well, where to hang her laundry, how to change the charcoal, things like that. It was the only place where Jill could get away from all the GIs leering at her and making comments and trying to talk her into taking off her pants.”
“This friend of hers,” I asked, “this stripper who helped her find the hooch, do you know her name?”
“No.”
“Which club does she work at?”
“I don’t know. More than one, I think. And I don’t know what she looks like. Jill and I weren’t close.”
Neither Ernie nor I asked why. Instead, we stared at her. When she could no longer bear the silence, Anne Korvacheck said, “Me and Jill, we’re into different things, you know?”
We knew. According to everyone we’d talked to, Corporal Jill Matthewson didn’t smoke or drink or do drugs and, until she disappeared, the Division chaplain claimed that she’d attended church services every Sunday. Something told me that Anne Korvachek hadn’t attended church services in quite a while. I wanted to hug her and tell her to forget all this military stuff and go home to her family. Instead, I remembered she was a soldier. And I remembered that she might have information important to our investigation.
“Druwood,” I said.
“The dead guy?”
“Yes. Do you know what happened to him?”
“Jumped off the tower at the obstacle course. That’s what everyone says.”
“Do you believe it?”
“In this hellhole? Why wouldn’t I?”
“So you think he killed himself.”
Anne Korvachek shrugged. “How would I know?”
“Did you know him?” Ernie asked.
“No. But Jill did. He was an MP.”
“Did she know him well?”
“Too well. He was always hanging around the barracks, asking about her.”
Ernie and I froze. This could be the connection we were looking for, the type of connection that broke a case. I didn’t want to ask a question that would lead Anne Korvacheck down a preconceived path, so I used an old technique. I simply repeated the last thing she had said.
“Asking about her?”
“Yeah. You know. Trying to get a date. Hoping she’d start liking him. Jill didn’t dislike him but she didn’t like him either. She avoided him.”
Ernie glanced around, listening. I heard it, too. Squeaks. Shoe leather? No, more like mice. Pest control should’ve been a high priority in a huge warehouse like this. Apparently not so. I turned my attention back to Anne Korvachek.
“Was he stalking her?”
“No. Nothing like that. He was just a big dumb puppy dog. Sick with love.”
“Love for Jill Matthewson?”
“Not ‘love’ love. A crush, like.”
I was about to ask Anne Korvachek another question when something hard thumped against wood. Anne and I glanced toward the sound but Ernie looked up. And then he leaped at us. Screaming.
For a moment I thought my partner, Ernie Bascom, had gone mad. He shoved me with his right hand and shoved Anne Korvachek with his left and knocked us both against the open wood frame foundation of the holding bin. I clunked my skull against a two-by-four but Ernie kept pushing until I dropped to a sitting position and kicked myself backwards beneath the safety of the wood-slat platform. Anne Korvachek did the same.
The Central Issue Facility rained shovels.
About two tons of them. They clattered to the cement floor with an enormous din, sometimes slamming down hard on their flat metal edges, sometimes gouging sharp corners into the cement, leaving half-inch-thick, arrow-shaped dents. Ernie kept shoving Anne and me until our arms and legs and other vulnerable body parts were protected beneath the wooden platform from the landslide of entrenching tools.
Finally, the shovels stopped falling.
Ernie and I clawed our way out of the avalanche. He ran behind the platform that had only recently held the entrenching tools. I followed. When we found no one there, we ran toward the door that had opened and slammed.
No one there either. Not inside. Not outside.
Wheel marks in gravel. Nothing we could trace. Apparently a getaway vehicle had been waiting. Whoever had slipped into the warehouse and toppled the enormous pile of entrenching tools had planned his escape well.
Ernie and I dusted ourselves off.
Sergeant Hollings and his crew were still cowering, afraid to come out of the back office. When we frightened them into talking, they claimed they hadn’t seen anyone enter or leave the warehouse, and they had no idea who’d tried to shove two tons of entrenching tools atop Ernie, me, and Anne Korvachek.
I believed them. But only because they appeared to be genuinely scared. But why were they so scared? What was happening on Camp Casey that was creating a climate of fear? When I asked that question I received only shrugs and grunts and finally I gave up. I figured there was no way-short of torture-I was going to extract any information from them.
In a corner of the warehouse, Anne Korvachek sat alone on a stool. Crying. I tried to comfort her but it didn’t work. Instead, when she wouldn’t stop sobbing, I told her to get herself back into the rehab program. She said she didn’t want to and anyway it was none of my business.
I thanked her for her cooperation and we left.
Coincidences, of course, are something cops are taught never to believe in. The fact that another young MP, Private Druwood, had been involved in a serious incident-an incident that led to his death-only a few days after Corporal Jill Matthewson’s disappearance was a coincidence in and of itself. But when you added the fact that Private Druwood-at least according to Anne Korvachek-had harbored an unrequited crush on the selfsame Corporal Jill Matthewson and he’d actually been following her around, then the coincidence was too great for Ernie and me to ignore.
Late in the morning, Ernie and I stopped at Camp Casey’s 13th Field Dispensary. As usual, four or five Quonset huts of various sizes were hooked together by short walkways. I wanted to take a look at Private Druwood’s body. Maybe it would tell me something that would give me a clue as to Jill Matthewson’s disappearance. More likely, it wouldn’t. But if the corpse was still here on Camp Casey, I wanted to see what I could. In any investigation, more information is always better than less.