The Deadly Embrace (18 page)

“I swear I won’t take any more insolence from you,” said Kilgore.

“You don’t have to, General. Someone else can ask you the questions—Ernie Manigault, maybe.”

He stopped pacing and came back to the desk.

“Ernie would understand this,” he murmured, as if testing the proposition.

“Why don’t you tell me who paid for the bathroom, General?”

“What bathroom?”

“The one in the apartment you arranged for Lieutenant Barnes, the one with the brand-new fixtures shipped over from the States… the one where all the work was done by U.S. Army contractors.”

“I haven’t got the slightest idea.”

“Lieutenant Barnes didn’t have the money for it.”

“How do you know?” he said without pausing. “I don’t like to pry into the personal lives of my former staff members, but I understand she got around.”

“By getting around, you mean she turned tricks for extra money?”

“You said it, Major. Not me,” he replied.

“So where were you last night, General?”

A glint of cunning appeared in the back of the monkey eyes. He gave Taggart a suddenly expansive smile.

“At the right time, that can be accounted for to Ernie Manigault’s satisfaction,” he said. “Being an officer and a gentleman, I’m sure that you understand even generals need a little rest and relaxation.”

“I found two douche bags in Lieutenant Barnes’s bathroom, General. I guess you kept her working overtime when it came to your rest and relaxation.”

A vein began to pulse at Kilgore’s left temple.

“I’ve taken all of this I’m going to,” he said. “Keep pressing your luck and you’ll find out how the army deals with troublemakers like you.”

Taggart grinned back at him.

“I could kick your ass from here to Sunday,” said the general, sizing up Taggart with a sneer.

“Try it,” said Taggart. “You don’t look all that tough to me. Besides, you’d get that new uniform all wrinkled.”

“Just continue on this track and you’ll find out how tough I am. People get hurt in wars. Things even happen behind the lines,” said Kilgore.

“Behind the lines… You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, General?”

Pulling open the center drawer of his desk, Kilgore removed a brown service folder. Without opening it, he dropped it on the blotter. “You were pegged as a troublemaker months ago. I know how to deal with men like you.”

He began tapping his index finger on the closed file.

“You’re some piece of work, General,” said Taggart.

“Colonel Baird prepared a full report on you, Taggart. If I were to show this to Ike, you would be on the next plane to the Aleutian Islands. I gather you can be very tough to live with… can’t you?”

“So what does that mean?”

“Your wife committed suicide, didn’t she?”

Taggart suddenly felt himself starting to lose control, unconsciously clenching and unclenching his fingers on his lap. He imagined the general’s neck between his hands.

“And we know why as well. We have her suicide note. Very interesting reading.”

Taggart suppressed his rage and said, “You know what I think? I think you murdered Lieutenant Barnes, General, or you had somebody take care of it for you. J.P. was about to become an embarrassment, wasn’t she?”

“Go ahead—keep it up,” Kilgore said, grinning almost merrily. “Dig your own grave.”

“She kept a detailed diary, General, and you are the man of the hour in it. Very interesting reading, as I guess you can imagine. Maybe we should both show what we have to General Eisenhower.”

As Taggart watched, the general’s demeanor subtly changed, the look of the predatory animal slowly melting away as uncertainty crept into his eyes.

“If you weren’t with her last night,” said Taggart, “I want the name of the man you told her to sleep with. I will also need to interview the people who can vouch for your whereabouts at three-thirty.”

Kilgore’s gaze was now centered on the framed photograph of his wife and children.

“General? I’m speaking to you. We believe that Lieutenant Barnes was sexually assaulted before she died.”

“I have never assaulted a woman in my life,” he said woodenly.

“Yeah… I guess you didn’t have to, did you? You just get them drunk and helpless. And when you finish with them, you throw them away like paper plates after the picnic. You’re a lousy pimp in gold braid, General.”

“I had nothing to do with her death,” Kilgore said, his voice starting to quake. “I...”

“We found deep scratches on Lieutenant Barnes’s thighs. There should be traces of her skin under the fingernails of whoever did it to her. I need to take a scraping of the material under your fingernails. It can be typed… just like blood.”

General Kilgore continued to stare at the photograph on the desk, his cheeks mottled a deep red. Removing his pocketknife, Taggart opened the blade and came around to Kilgore’s side of the desk. He was prepared for a fight, but there was no resistance when he grasped the general’s right hand and took the scrapings. Taggart swiped the blade inside an evidence packet and put it in his breast pocket.

“One final question… Did Lieutenant Barnes have either direct or indirect knowledge of the invasion plans?”

Kilgore was now gazing at the far wall, seemingly oblivious, but Taggart could see the hatred in his eyes.

“Yeah … how could she not?” said Taggart disgustedly.

The blonde WAC in the outer office was in the process of filing her newly painted nails when he came past, her tongue still projecting through her front teeth. She stared up at him as he went out the door, slamming it behind him.

The room was silent for several seconds.

“Tell Colonel Baird to get up here immediately,” called out the general from inside his office.

CHAPTER 15

A
lone in a dank, evil-smelling room within the pathology wing of the hospital, Liza glanced nervously up at the wood-framed clock on the wall. It was almost midnight. She took comfort in the occasional laughter that came from the night staff in the morgue, farther down the corridor.

It had taken her almost two hours to decipher Dr. Channing’s hastily scrawled and bloodstained postmortem notes. While waiting for J.P.’s fluid analyses from the laboratory, she found herself nodding off to sleep several times before she could finish the typewritten report. Then, after collating the original and two carbons, she carried one copy down to Dr. Channing’s empty office and left it on his desk.

“Death by probable suicide,” was the inescapable conclusion they had jointly reached after Dr. Channing completed his internal examination and Dr. Cabot came back to confirm that the grooves of the two bullets were an identical match under the microscope. Once Dr. Channing had left the autopsy suite, the young doctor grinned broadly at her and said, “We make a good team, don’t we?”

She could only laugh at his relentlessly obvious approach.

“Yes, we do,” she agreed, bone-weary and suddenly famished.

“So—how about dinner?” he asked. She found herself saying yes.

They went around the corner to a small Italian restaurant he recommended and enjoyed a simple meal of pasta and red wine. Liza was surprised to find that she actually enjoyed his company, not in a romantic sense, but in the casual way he had of making her laugh, something she had sorely missed in recent weeks. It turned out that he had also gone to the New York Medical College, and they compared notes on several of the professors.

When they returned to the pathology unit, she fended off his advances without hurting his feelings, and shooed him after a pretty nurse who came into the lab to drop off a supply of fresh towels. By then, she felt thoroughly worn out. As soon as she completed the postmortem report, she decided to go straight back to her room on Grosvenor Road.

As she headed out the front entrance of the hospital, air-raid sirens began their strident wail all over the blacked-out city. After so many hours in the smelly pathology unit, the thought of spending the rest of the night in one of London’s foul-smelling shelters seemed intolerable. Besides, she assured herself, the recent raids had concentrated on the East End dock facilities.

Knowing there would be no chance to find a taxi, she struck off for the Thames Embankment on foot. Within minutes, she heard the low, sinister drone to the east signaling the arrival of the first Luftwaffe bombing formation. She sped up and turned onto one of the narrow cobblestoned streets that led toward Horse Guards Row and the Thames Embankment beyond.

One by one, the powerful searchlights mounted near the rooftop anti-aircraft batteries began to light up the sky over London. She moved into a slow trot as the anti-aircraft spotters probed the sky for the first German pathfinders.

In the street ahead of her, a dozen people were running from their homes to one of the many air-raid shelters identified by a big white-painted “S” over the doorway. Most of them were already dressed in their nightclothes.

The concentrated gun batteries near Battersea and Holborn opened fire with a great booming roar as the German bombers appeared in the distance. While Liza continued running, she tried to occupy her mind with something that Charlie had told her when the “baby blitz” had begun a few weeks earlier.

Employing the tone of a condescending professor, he had explained that the German bombs fell at a speed of 150 miles per hour, and that based on the German’s usual bombing altitude of twenty thousand feet, it took the bombs ninety seconds to land. After providing her with a needlessly technical explanation for how increased air resistance created the whistling noise, he said that the distinctive wail began one minute after their release through the bomb bays.

“So that gives you thirty seconds to find shelter after the initial wail turns into a mortal shriek,” he said, giving her his lopsided grin.

Still jogging along the sidewalk toward the Embankment, she realized that his scientific reasoning was absurd. A direct hit would mean instantaneous death, and, based on her past experience, there was no way to tell from the whistling noise whether the bomb was dropping directly on top of you or would land two streets away.

Parliament Square was looming up in the distance when several bombs exploded off to the northeast, momentarily lighting up the horizon. She felt the concussion through her shoes, and the pavement trembled menacingly beneath her feet.

Beginning to sprint, she looked up to see the roving searchlights on the roof of Parliament. Far above them, one of the huge, sausagelike barrage balloons floated in and out of the swirling beams.

With her energy almost spent, Liza came to a sudden stop on the sidewalk, her chest heaving madly. She drew in great gulps of air as several more bombs landed a block or so closer. It was when she turned to watch the glare of the explosions a few streets behind her that she saw the man: a dark figure in a broad-brimmed fedora and long overcoat, about thirty yards behind her, running from the direction she had just come.

Liza’s first reaction was one of almost detached curiosity. She assumed that he was doing precisely what she was, trying to get home without having to sit out the raid in a smelly shelter. That thought was immediately followed by the nagging recollection that she had seen the same man on the sidewalk outside the hospital. What if he had been following her? Without knowing why, she sensed deadly danger, and not from the bombs falling out of the sky. It was the primal fear of a hunted animal.

As she began to run again, the hideous images of Joss and J.P. raced through her brain. A rush of pure terror seized her as she desperately looked for a policeman or air-raid warden who might be patrolling the street ahead. She glanced back to see that he was still coming after her. Although now breathing as heavily as she was, he was slowly gaining ground.

Liza came to the next corner. Left or right? She had a fraction of a second to make her choice. She turned left, away from the Embankment and in the direction of Westminster Abbey, where there were sure to be more people. Over the approaching din of the bombers, she could hear the sharp tapping of the man’s boot heels as they struck the pavement behind her in quick succession.

“Footsteps have a rhythm as uniquely characteristic as fingerprints,” she suddenly remembered one of her criminology professors declaring as he droned on through a boring lecture at Barnard. But of what value is the information if you’re already dead? her mind silently screamed.

A moment later, there was a tremendous clamoring roar as the gun batteries around Parliament opened up in a cacophony of earsplitting noise. She felt another concussion beneath her feet as bombs landed a block or two away, near Whitehall. The last tremor shook her violently.

Running on, she could see a chemist shop on fire and passed through a cloud of pungent black smoke. Straight ahead, she saw a white-painted “S” above the doorway of a tall brick building opposite Westminster Abbey, and began to run toward it.

The shriek of falling bombs penetrated her ears as she ran though the opening between the five-foot-high walls of sandbags surrounding the entrance to the shelter. Grasping the bronze handle of the massive metal-studded door, she pulled hard. It was either jammed or blocked from the inside. She turned and saw that the running man was only ten feet behind her. In the glare of a wildly spinning searchlight, she saw something metallic glint in his hand.

There was a brilliant flash of light and she felt a cataclysm boiling beneath her feet. The earth seemed to splinter upward before it slammed her back down to the pavement. She clapped her hands to her ears as a deafening explosion concussed the sandbags next to her head amid eruptions of pink-and-yellow flame. She opened her mouth to scream, but found she could not draw breath. Frantically, she groped closer to the edge of the nearest sandbag.

All about her, the street was raked with bits of glass, brick, and stone. Acrid bomb grit filled her nose and mouth as a section of the sandbag wall collapsed across her back. Horror-struck, Liza waited for the air to clear, feeling like a trussed animal.

A hurricane of anti-aircraft fire was still raging into the sky above her when she finally dislodged the weight and rose to her knees. The first thing she saw was the blazing façade of the building across the street. As she watched, it came tumbling down like a descending stage curtain. In the middle of the roadway, a fountain of black water was spewing high in the air from an exposed water main that lay in the middle of a vast bomb crater.