"Yes. And he puts the clothes in his vehicle, then..."

"Goes to the latrine, washes up, combs his hair, then goes back to his vehicle and drives away."

Kent said, "That's the way it could have happened. But that's just a theory."

"I have a theory that we're going to need another hangar to hold the theories. Okay, about six trucks should do it. And send a sensitive female officer to supervise. And send someone from community affairs who can cool out the neighbors while the MPs empty the place. See you later." I hung up.

Cynthia said, "You have a quick and analytical mind, Paul."

"Thank you."

"If you had a little compassion and heart, you'd be a better person."

"I don't want to be a better person." I added, "Hey, wasn't I a good guy in Brussels? Didn't I buy you Belgian chocolates?"

She didn't reply immediately, then said, "Yes, you did. Well, should we go upstairs before upstairs winds up at Jordan Field?"

"Good idea."

CHAPTER SIX.

The master suite, as I indicated, was neat and clean, except for the shattered perfume bottle on the bathroom floor that now stunk up the place. The furniture was functional modern, sort of Scandinavian, I suppose, with no soft touches, nothing to suggest that it was madam's boudoir. It occurred to me that I wouldn't want to make love in this room. The carpet, too, was unsuited for a bedroom, being a tight woven Berber that left no footprints. Something, however, did stand out: twenty bottles of perfume, which Cynthia said were very expensive, and the civilian clothes in the closet, which she said were equally overpriced. A second, smaller closet-what would have been "his" closet if she had a husband or live-in-was filled with neat Army uniforms for the summer season, including greens, battle dress, combat boots, and all the necessary accessories. More interesting, in the far corner of the closet was an M-16 rifle with a full magazine and a round in the chamber, locked and loaded, ready to rock and roll. I said, "This is a military issue-fully automatic."

"Unauthorized off post," Cynthia observed.

"My goodness." We rummaged around a while longer, and I was going through Ann Campbell's underwear drawer when Cynthia said, "You already looked in there, Paul. Don't get strange on me."

"I'm looking for her West Point ring," I replied with annoyance. "It wasn't on her finger, and it's not in her jewelry box."

"It was taken off her finger. I saw the tan line."

I pushed the drawer shut. "Keep me informed," I said.

"You too," she snapped.

The bathroom was standing tall as they say in the Army: West Point, white-glove immaculate. Even the sink basin had been wiped as per regulations, and there wasn't a hair on the floor, certainly no pubic hair of a swarthy stranger.

We opened the medicine cabinet, which held the usual assortment of cosmetics, feminine products, and such. There were no prescription medicines, no men's shaving stuff, only one toothbrush, and nothing stronger than aspirin. "What," I asked my female partner, "do you deduce from this?"

"Well, she wasn't a hypochondriac, she didn't have dry or oily skin, she didn't dye her hair, and she keeps her method of birth control somewhere else."

I said, "Maybe she required her men to use a condom." I added, "You may have heard that condoms are in fashion again because of disease. These days you have to boil people before you sleep with them."

Cynthia ignored that and said, "Or she was chaste."

"I never thought of that. Is that possible?"

"You never know, Paul. You just never know."

"Or could she have been... how do we say it these days? Gay? A lesbian? What's the politically correct term?"

"Do you care?"

"For my report. I mean, I don't want to get into trouble with the feminist thought police."

"Take a break, Paul."

We exited the bathroom and Cynthia said, "Let's see the other bedroom."

We passed through the upstairs hallway into the small room. At this point, I didn't expect to encounter anyone, but Cynthia drew her pistol and covered me while I peeked under the double bed. Aside from the bed, the room held only a dresser and a night table and lamp. An open door led to a small bathroom, which looked as if it were never used. Clearly, the entire room was never used, but Ann Campbell maintained it as a guest room.

Cynthia pulled back the bedspread, revealing a bare mattress. She said, "No one sleeps here."

"Apparently not." I pulled open the dresser drawers. Empty.

Cynthia motioned toward a set of large double doors on the far wall. I stood to the side and flung one of them open. A light inside went on automatically, and it sort of startled me, and Cynthia, too, because she crouched and aimed. After a second or two, she stood and approached what turned out to be a large walk-in cedar closet. We both went inside the closet. It smelled good, like a cheap cologne I once had that kept moths and women away. There were two long poles on either side from which hung bagged civilian clothes for every climate on earth, and more Army uniforms, ranging from her old West Point uniforms, to desert battle dress, to arctic wear, to Army whites, blue mess and evening mess uniforms for social functions, and sundry other rarely worn uniforms, plus her West Point saber. The overhead shelf had matching headgear, and on the floor was matching footwear.

I said, "This was one squared-away soldier. Equally prepared for a military ball or the next war in the jungle."

"Doesn't your uniform closet look like this?"

"My uniform closet looks like the third day of a close-out sale." Actually, it looked worse than that. I have a tidy mind, but that's as far as it goes. Captain Campbell, on the other hand, seemed clean, tidy, and organized in every external way. Perhaps, then, her mind was pure chaos. Perhaps not. This woman was elusive.

We exited the closet and the guest room.

On the way down the stairs, I said to Cynthia, "Before I was in the CID, I couldn't see a clue if it bit me in the ass."

"And now?"

"And now I see everything as a clue. The lack of clues is a clue."

"Is that so? I haven't progressed to that level yet. Sounds Zen."

"I think of it as Sherlockian. You know, the dog that did not bark in the night." We went into the kitchen. "Why did the dog not bark?"

"It was dead."

It's hard adjusting to a new partner. I don't like the young, sycophantic guys who hang on your every word. But I don't like smart-asses, either. I'm at that age and rank where I get respect and earn respect, but I'm still open to an occasional piece of reality.

Cynthia and I contemplated the bolted basement door. I said, not apropos of the door, but of life, "My wife left clues all over the place."

She didn't reply.

"But I never saw the clues."

"Sure you did."

"Well... in retrospect I did. But when you're young, you're pretty dense. You're full of yourself, you don't read other people well, you haven't been lied to and cheated too much, and you lack the cynicism and suspicion that makes for a good detective."

"A good detective, Paul, has to separate his or her professional life from his or her personal life. I wouldn't want a man who snooped on me."

"Obviously not, considering your past."

"Fuck off."

Score one for Paul. I threw back the bolt on the door. "Your turn."

"Okay. I wish you had your pistol." She handed me her Smith & Wesson and opened the basement door.

"Maybe I should go and get that M-16 upstairs," I offered.

"Never rely on a weapon you just found and never tested. Says so in the manual. Just call out, then cover me."

I shouted down the stairs, "Police! Come to the staircase with your hands on your head!" This is the military version of hands-up and makes a little more sense if you think about it. Well, no one came to the base of the stairs, so Cynthia had to go down. She said in a quiet voice, "Leave the lights off. I'll break to the right. Wait five seconds."

"You wait one second." I looked around for something to throw down the stairs and spotted a toaster oven, but Cynthia was off and running, down the cellar stairs in long leaps, barely hitting the steps on her way down. I saw her shoulderroll to the right and lost sight of her. I followed, breaking to the left, and wound up in a firing crouch, peering into the darkness. We waited in silence for a full ten seconds, then I shouted, "Ed, John, cover us!" I wished there were an Ed and John around, but as Captain Campbell might have said, "Create phantom battalions in the minds of the enemy."

By now, I figured that if anyone was down there, they weren't lying in ambush, but were cowering. Right?

Anyway, Cynthia, who was obviously impatient with my caution, bounded back up the stairs and hit the light switches. Fluorescent bulbs flickered all over the large open basement, then burst into that stark white light that I associated with unpleasant places.

Cynthia came back down the stairs and we surveyed the basement. It was a standard layout of washer and dryer, workbench, storage, heating, air-conditioning, and so on. The floor and walls were bare concrete, and the ceiling was bare beams, electric, and plumbing.

We examined the workbench and the dark corners, but it was uninteresting in the extreme except that Ann Campbell possessed a lot of sporting equipment. In fact, the entire wall to the right of the workbench was pegboard, from floor to ceiling, from which protruded those wire holders in every size and shape, and hanging from the wire holders were skis, tennis rackets, squash rackets, a baseball bat, scuba gear, and so forth. Very organized. Also, fixed to the pegboard with screws was a recruiting poster, about six feet from top to bottom, showing none other than Captain Ann Campbell, a head-to-foot shot of her in battle dress uniform, wearing full field gear, with an M-16 rifle slung under her right arm, a radiotelephone cradled against her ear, while she juggled a field map and checked her watch. Her face was smeared with camouflage greasepaint, but only a eunuch would fail to see the subtle sexuality in this photo. The caption on top of the poster said, Time to Synchronize Your Life. Time to Synchronize Your Life. On the bottom, it said, On the bottom, it said, See Your Army Recruiter Today. See Your Army Recruiter Today. What it didn't say was, "Meet people of the opposite sex in close proximity, sleep with them out in the woods, bathe with them in streams, and engage in other intimate outdoorsy things where no one has any privacy." What it didn't say was, "Meet people of the opposite sex in close proximity, sleep with them out in the woods, bathe with them in streams, and engage in other intimate outdoorsy things where no one has any privacy."

Well, maybe I was projecting my own sexual reveries into the photo, but I think the civilian advertising types who put the poster together were a little bit aware of what my dirty mind saw. I nodded toward the poster and said to Cynthia, "What do you think?"

She shrugged, "Good poster."

"Do you see the subliminal sexual message?"

"No. Point to it."

"Well... it's subliminal. How can I point to it?"

"Tell me about it."

I had the feeling I was being baited, so I said, "Woman with a gun. Gun is penis object, penis substitute. Map and watch represent a subconscious desire to have sex, but on her terms, timewise and locationwise. She's talking to a man on the radiophone, giving him her grid coordinates and telling him he has fifteen minutes to find her."

Cynthia glanced at her own watch and informed me, "I think it's time to go, Paul."

"Right."

We started back up the stairs, but then I glanced back into the basement and said, "We're missing some floor space."

As if on cue, we both turned and beelined for the pegboard wall, the only wall that did not show the bare concrete foundation wall. I knocked on the pegboard, pushed on the four-by-eight-foot panels, but they seemed solid enough, nailed firmly in place to a stud frame, which I could see through the small peg holes. I found a long, pointed awl on the workbench and slid it through one of the peg holes, and after about two inches it struck a solid object. I pushed farther, and the point of the awl penetrated into something soft, something that was not a concrete foundation wall. I said to Cynthia, "This is a false wall. There's no foundation behind it."

She didn't reply, and I looked to my left where Cynthia was standing facing the recruiting poster. She grasped the wooden frame of the poster with her fingertips, pulled, and the poster swung out on blind hinges, revealing a dark open space. I moved quickly beside her and we stood there, back-lighted by the bright fluorescents of the basement.

After a few seconds, during which time we were not perforated with bullet holes, my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the space before us, and I could begin to make out some objects in the room that appeared to be furniture. I could also make out the glow of a digital clock across the room, and I estimated that the room was fifteen feet deep and probably about forty or fifty feet long, the length of the town house itself from front to rear.

I handed Cynthia her .38 and felt along the inside wall for a light switch, commenting, "This is where the Campbells probably keep their demented, drooling relative." I found the switch and flipped it, turning on a table lamp, which revealed a completely finished and furnished room. I moved forward cautiously, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cynthia in a firing crouch, her .38 sweeping the room.

I kneeled and peeked under the bed, then stood and moved around, checking the closet, then a small bathroom off to the right, while Cynthia covered me.

Cynthia and I stood across from each other, and I said, "Well, here it is."

And, indeed, there it was. There was a double bed, a nightstand on which sat the lighted lamp, a chest of drawers, a long table on which sat a stereo system, a television, a VCR, and a camcorder with a tripod for home movies, and everything sat on a deep white plush carpet, which wasn't as clean as the other carpets. The walls were finished in a light-colored wood paneling. To the far left of the room was a rolling hospital-type gurney, suitable for massages or whatever. I noticed now a mirror mounted on the ceiling over the bed, and the open closet revealed some lacy and transparent numbers that would make a clerk in Victoria's Secret blush. In addition, there was a nice, neat nurse's uniform, which I didn't think she wore down at the hospital, a black leather skirt and vest, a sort of whorish red-sequined dress, and, interestingly, a standard battle dress uniform of the type she would have been wearing on duty when she was killed.

Cynthia, Ms. Goody Two-Shoes, was looking around the room, and she seemed somewhat unhappy, as though Ann Campbell had posthumously disappointed her. "Good Lord..."

I said, "How she died does indeed appear linked to how she lived. But we will not jump to conclusions."

The bathroom, too, was not so clean as the other two, and the medicine cabinet held a diaphragm, condoms, contraceptive sponges, spermicidal jelly, and so on: enough birth control devices to cause a drop in the population of the Indian subcontinent. I asked, "Aren't you supposed to just use one method?"

Cynthia replied, "Depends on your mood."

"I see." Along with the contraceptive devices were mouthwash, different-colored toothbrushes, toothpaste, and six Fleet enemas. I didn't think anyone who ate bean sprouts would have a problem with constipation. "My goodness," I said, picking up a premeasured douche bottle whose flavor was strawberry; not my very favorite.

Cynthia left the bathroom, and I peeked into the shower. That, too, was sort of grungy, and the washcloth was still damp. Interesting.

I rejoined Cynthia in the bedroom, where she was examining the contents of the night table drawer: K-Y Jelly, mineral oil, sex manuals, one regular-sized vibrator, batteries included, and one rubber charlie of heroic proportions.

Fixed high up on the false wall that partitioned this bedroom from the basement workshop was a set of leather manacles, and lying on the floor below was a leather strap, a birch switch, and incongruously, or perhaps not, a long ostrich feather. My mind involuntarily took off into a flight of fancy that I think brought a red blush to my cheeks. "I wonder," I mused, "what those things are for?"

Cynthia made no comment, but seemed transfixed by the manacles.

I pulled back the bed sheets, and the bottom sheet looked a bit lived in. Here was enough pubic hair, body hair, peter tracks, and undoubtedly other dermatological refuse to keep the lab busy for a week.

I noticed Cynthia staring down at the sheet and wondered what was going through her mind. I resisted the urge to say, "I told you so," because, in fact, on one level, I almost hoped we would find nothing, for, as I've indicated, I had already developed a soft spot in my heart for Ann Campbell. And, while I'm not judgmental in regard to sexual behavior, I could imagine that many people would be. I said, "You know, I'm actually relieved to see she wasn't the sexless, androgynous poster girl the Army made her out to be."

Cynthia glanced at me and sort of nodded.

I said, "A shrink would have a field day with this apparent split personality. But you know, we all lead two or more lives." On the other hand, we don't usually outfit a whole room for our alter ego. I added, "Actually, she was a shrink, wasn't she?"

And so we moved to the TV, and I popped a random tape into the VCR and turned it on.

The screen brightened, and there was Ann Campbell, dressed in her red-sequined dress, with high heels and jewelry, standing in this very room. An off-camera tape or disc was playing "The Stripper," and she began taking it all off. A male voice, presumably the cameraman, joked, "Do you do this at the general's dinner parties?"

Ann Campbell smiled and wiggled her hips at the camera. She was down to her panties and a rather nice French bra now, and was unclasping it when I reached out and shut off the tape, feeling very self-righteous about that.

I examined the other tapes and saw they were all handlabeled, with rather pithy titles like "Fucking with J.," "Strip search for B.," "Gyno Exam-R.," and "Anal with J.S."