Thomas Whitehall, it appeared, was a singularly energetic and competent officer. Of course, he’d told me he was the first time I’d met him. But you learn to discount that kind of stuff, because if there’s one thing most officers get pretty good at, it’s spit-shining their own asses.

I turned back to Specialist Fiori, who, while I wasn’t looking, had somehow gotten herself fully up on top of her desk and into this strangely contorted position where her hips were twisted sideways, and her shoulders were slung back, and her breasts bulged tightly against her battle dress. If she were wearing a bikini, it would’ve been a glorious sight. Even in camouflage battle dress it had its righteous qualities.

And that’s when I realized what a sly dog Tommy Whitehall really was. No wonder he’d planted her in his outer office. If she wasn’t a full-blown nymphomaniac, she sure pulled off a lavish impersonation. That slick devil. She was the replacement for that girl’s picture he’d kept on his desk back at West Point; his latest piece of camouflage.

I smiled at Specialist Fiori and thanked her for her honesty. She sucked in her lower lip, fluttered her eyelashes, and swiveled her shoulders in this sideways, provocative, swaying motion that made her uptoppers undulate like a couple of humongous sand dunes in a windstorm. She’d seen a few too many Marilyn Monroe movies, if you ask me.

“So, you’re a lawyer?” she asked, licking her lips.

“Yep, that’s right.”

“Does that mean you get paid more than other officers?”

“Nope,” I told her, making my way steadily toward the door. She only had time to give me one more sizzling glance before I made it to the safety of the hallway.

I rushed straight back to the hotel to see if there were any messages. But the moment I walked into the lobby, I ran smack into the middle of a large gaggle of men. They were mostly in line, getting checked in. There were probably fifty in all; some wore black-and-white collars and some didn’t. By their noisy chatter, they sounded like a convention of southern rednecks. How very curious, I said to myself.

I artfully worked my way to the end of the line and stood behind a fleshy older gent, tall and rotund, who had nothing but some frizzy fuzz left on his big head. He looked like a big walking peach, nudging his bags forward with the tip of his foot as he inched up in line.

I bumped up against him and he spun around.

I winced and said, “Uh, gee, sorry. I hope that didn’t hurt.”

“Not at all, son,” he responded in a syrupy, deep southern drawl that made it sound like “not’all, sun.”

I grinned. “Well, welcome to Korea. This your first time here?”

“Actually, nope. I was here in ’52, as a private, during the war.”

“Place has sure changed, hasn’t it?” I asked.

This was always a surefire opener to use with old Korean War vets. The last time they laid eyes on Korea it was nothing but shell-pocked farming fields that reeked literally of shit, and countless tiny, drab villages composed of thatched huts, and miserable, squalling people who couldn’t rub two nickels together. Now it was cluttered with skyscrapers and shiny new cars and, believe me, more than a few billionaires.

“The Lord surely has wrought a miracle,” he pronounced.

“Indeed he has. Is this some kind of returning vets’ group?” I asked, nodding with my chin.

“Nope. We’re all preachers and deacons.”

“Aha!” I said to Preacher Peach. “I suppose, then, that you’re all here for some religious convention?”

“Not actually, no. We’re here ’bout this Whitehall thing. Y’know, that murderin’ ho-mo-sex-u-al,” Preacher Peach intoned, painfully stretching out every single vowel, like it was just so damned hard to force that particular noun through his lips.

“Uh-huh. I guess that makes sense.”

“We’ve been invited by the Army,” he said, obviously immensely proud of that.

“The Army? No kidding? What? They asked you to come over?”

“They sure did. See, we were in Washington, for the big march. You see that on TV over here?” he asked in such a tone that it sounded like, Hey, did you see me land on the moon?

“Uh, yeah, I did. Very impressive,” I assured him.

“Yep. Well, we’re the fellas who put all that together. Anyway, a group of us was asked to stop over at that Pentagon, and the Chief of the Staff of the Army, he asked us hisself if we wanted to come over. Even loaned us a plane. A real nice fella, you ask me.”

“Well, ain’t that really something,” I remarked, slyly slipping into my own version of a bacon-and-grits brogue. “Mind if I ask, what’s the Army expecting y’all to do over here?”

“Ah, well, there weren’t no conditions nor nothin’. We’re just here to represent the views of all good Christian ’Mericans,” he said. “We’re here to show the cross.”

“You got any plans for how to show the cross?” I asked as offhandedly as I could manage, under the circumstances.

“You’ll be seein’ us around.” He smiled and beamed, nudging his bag up another yard or so. Then he looked at the lawyer insignia on my collar, and his eyes moved down to my boots and back up again.

“Say, you’re a lawyer, ain’t you?”

“Yep,” I admitted. “Worst thing in the Army to be. Dregs of the profession of arms.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, like from his experience that surely was true. “So, you got any opinion how this Whitehall devil’s gonna fare in court?”

“Sure do,” I announced.

“And what’s that?” he asked. Immediately seven or eight more of his preacherly brethren turned around to hear what I might say.

This was what you might call a golden moment. I mean, no way it was going to be a good thing having a bunch of fired-up, overzealous preachers demonizing our client. The environment was already poisonous enough. Besides which, the only leverage we had over the Korean government was its fear that American public opinion might be on our side. We didn’t want anybody creating the impression that fear was unfounded.

I put on my most lawyerly expression and recklessly announced, “I think he’s gonna get off.”

His chin flew back and his big beefy jowls shivered like poked Jell-O. “Get off? Now, how could that boy get off? He was sleeping right next to the corpse. His own belt was wrapped around that child’s neck. And his devil’s fluids were inside.”

His explosion was so loud that nearly twenty of the preachers and deacons began gathering in a knot around us, collectively eavesdropping on every word. There were more than a few apprehensive faces. The last thing they wanted was to publicly vilify a man who might subsequently be found innocent. How could they ever return home and look their flocks in the eye?

“Look, there aren’t many lawyers over here, and y’all know how us lawyers love to talk, right? Rumors fly around pretty thick.”

“That right?” another preacher stepped forward to ask. This one was a few years younger than Preacher Peach, and leaner, and weathered in that tough, parched, dried-out way some southerners get. He had hard eyes, too. What my mother used to call brimstone eyes. He would be Preacher Prick, I decided.

I said, “Well, I hear things.”

Preacher Prick’s neck shot forward an inch or two. “So what you hearin’, son?”

“That maybe the police didn’t do such a thorough job. They might’ve jumped to conclusions a bit, if you get my meaning.”

“Nope,” he said. “Don’t get your meaning at all.”

“Well, I’m only going on rumors now, but the word is the Korean police rushed into that apartment and messed up the scene of the crime something terrible. Contaminated the evidence, shoved around the witnesses. Also, given who died and all – if you’ll excuse my language – they were getting their nuts squeezed something awful to name a suspect. Any suspect, even if meant cramming a square peg into a round hole.”

The lids on Preacher Prick’s tight eyes screwed down even tighter, until all there was were two thin black slits, and the part of his face beneath his nose started moving around, like he was chewing something hard with his lips.