Nightmare Range Read Online Free PDF Page B

brick building that was the headquarters of the CID detachment seemed to be waiting to swallow us as we approached.
    The first sergeant wasn’t in his office, but down in the admin section barking into telephones and ripping off teletype reports.
    “What the hell happened with you guys?” he said when he noticed us. “I send you on a simple black market detail, and you turn up with a corpse.”
    Ernie sat down on the edge of Miss Kim’s desk and offered her a stick of gum. She smiled and accepted a piece with her long manicured fingernails.
    “Bascom! Get down to my office! You too, Sueño!”
    The ass chewing was royal. You would’ve thought we’d killed the girl ourselves, and in a way that’s sort of what he said. At least we’d been in the vicinity and had the opportunity—if not the motive. He told us that if she’d been raped we’d probably have been charged and locked up by now.
    Shows you the high opinion our leadership has of us.
    He’d given the case to Burrows and Slabem, affectionately known around the office as the Boot Hill Brothers, his favorite investigators when it came to burying inconvenient facts. When the dependent of a US serviceman gets murdered, all hell breaks loose up at the Eighth Army Headquarters. Colonel Stoneheart, our provost marshal, was briefing the commanding general rightnow. The first sergeant felt that only a trustworthy pair of sleuths like Burrows and Slabem could properly handle the case.
    “You mean properly cover it up,” Ernie said.
    The first sergeant freaked, chasing us out of his office and warning us to stay off the case unless Burrows and Slabem had some questions for us that weren’t covered in our initial report.
    We wandered down the long hallway.
    “What would we do without the first sergeant’s hoarse voice echoing down the halls?”
    “I wouldn’t know how to act.”
    Ernie winked at Miss Kim on the way out, and we jumped in his Jeep and went directly to the Itaewon police station.
    Exactly what the first sergeant had told us not to do.
    Burrows and Slabem were there. Burrows, tall and skinny with a pockmarked face; Slabem, short and round with a pimply face. The Korean police wouldn’t talk to them. Neither would we. They harrumphed and tried to look officious. Chins met necks. Except in Slabem’s case.
    I greeted Captain Kim, commander of the Itaewon police station, and spoke to him in his own language.
    “Were you told anything by the offender?”
    “Yes. He told us everything.”
    “How did you get his confession so quickly?”
    Captain Kim slammed his fist into his cupped hand. “The lie detector.”
    He ushered us back to the cells and the guy on the bicycle lay on a moist cement floor. I recognized him because of his clothes. His face was a puffed hive of purple welts.
    Burrows and Slabem, the Boot Hill Brothers, glared at us as we walked out. Somehow I didn’t think they’d keep our little visit a secret from the first sergeant.
    We talked to a lot of the folks in the neighborhood, covering much of the same ground the Korean police had alreadycovered. The only thing unusual anyone had noticed was me and Ernie hanging around. The man on the bicycle had been conducting black market business with the GI wife in the neighborhood for many months, without incident as far as anyone knew.
    The whole thing was a mystery to me. Why would a black marketeer kill one of his sources of income?
    Ernie thought it might have been Janson. Husbands are always a first suspect in a murder case. But we checked the back of the building. The walls were ten feet high, sheer, with shards of glass embedded in cement on the top. When we had seen Janson, his uniform was still neat, with no more wear than one would expect from a hard day’s work at the office.
    We couldn’t interrogate him. Burrows and Slabem would be handling that, on compound, in conjunction with the chaplain who was giving him counseling and trying to pull him through this crisis.
    “Might as