A Mortal Terror Read Online Free PDF Page A

fracture as the cause of death. I could tell as much from the angle at which Landry’s head canted on the ground. He had been killed in a bivouac area near San Felice, a small village about five miles from headquarters. His regiment was resting and refitting there after being pulled out of the fighting along the Volturno Line, where he was one of thousands of GIs. A report from the MP noted that Landry had been popular with his men, a platoon he’d led at Salerno and on the road to Cassino before they were pulled off the line for rest outside of Naples. The fact that he’d survived, and that his men liked him, told me two things: he was a good soldier, and he led from the front. Lots of platoon leaders get killed quickly. Others who survive do it by staying behind their men. If Landry’s men, especially the veterans, liked him, then he wasn’t one of those.
    The last person to see him alive, other than his killer, was Lieutenant Kenneth Dare, the chaplain attached to Landry’s battalion. I wondered if it had been a social call or if something more serious was bothering Landry.
    The photographs showed the ten of hearts clearly. In the closeup, it was easy to see the card was brand new, clean and crisp. It must have come out of a new deck and gone straight into Landry’s pocket. Maybe the ten of hearts was his good-luck charm, who knew?
    The report on Captain Max Galante was more detailed, not surprisingly. Even before the MPs got the playing-card connection, this murder had been a priority. Captain Galante was a medical doctor assigned to the Fifth Army headquarters staff at Caserta. He got noticed, if not for his rank, for his proximity to the high and mighty. General Mark Clark, commander of Fifth Army, and his boss, British General Harold Alexander, of Fifteenth Army Group, both called Caserta Palace home, along with a passel of rear-area brass.
    The MP’s report included the duty roster from the 32nd Station Hospital, where Galante worked. He’d gone off duty at 1800 hours, and planned to meet two other doctors for dinner two hours later, at eight o’clock civilian time. The other doctors rented an apartment in town and paid their rent in rations, which their landlady cooked for them. Galante never showed.
    The hospital and the apartment were on the south side of the palace. A hand-drawn map was paper-clipped to two photographs; the first showed the hospital and the tree-lined boulevard with the palace at the end. The second photo, according to the map, was taken from the opposite side of the palace. Gardens and walkways sloped gently downward, over a mile of it all, leading to the end where the statues of Actaeon and Diana stood against the backdrop of a waterfall. That gave me the basic layout, but no answers about why Galante ended up at the far end of the gardens.
    I went through the photographs again studying the position of the body. While it appeared that Landry had been left where he fell, Galante’s body looked like it had been laid out, tucked alongside the rocks that bordered the pond fed by the waterfall. Had he even been killed there? From what I could tell from the photos, there were no scuff marks in the grass, no telltale gouges of earth where a heel dug in during a struggle. But I had no way of knowing for sure; whoever took the shots hadn’t bothered to show the surrounding area, away from the body and the pond. Within the pond were the two sculptures, one of Diana and her maidens, all aflutter at Actaeon seeing her naked, and opposite was poor Actaeon with the head of a stag, being killed by his own hounds. Death and beauty sharing the same tranquil spot. Was Galante killed by one of his own? Had this spot been chosen for some reason other than its seclusion?
    The jack of hearts stuck out of Galante’s pocket, just as the ten was positioned in Landry’s. Side-by-side shots of the two cards, front and back, showed that they were from the same pack—or at least the same kind of pack—and