Carlson sure as hell looked great, but there wasn’t a guy in that law school who could work up a smug smirk and say she put out. She was always surrounded by other girls, and most of them looked pretty masculine to me.

I threw my clothes on the bed and stepped into the bathroom for a long-overdue shower. After I finished shaving, I wrapped a towel around my waist and lay down. I was damned tired and still hadn’t adjusted to being yanked out of the lethargic, unhurried pace of Bermuda. I closed my eyes and was just at that point of drifting off when the phone rang.

“Hello,” I mumbled, or grumbled, or something.

“Attila, I’m having a defense meeting in ten minutes. Be here. And be on time.”

Then she hung up. She hadn’t said where she was having her meeting. She hadn’t said where she was staying. She hadn’t said who else was going to be there. I wanted to strangle her.

I called the front desk and asked if she had a room here at the Dragon Hill Lodge. I was lucky. She did. In fact, only two floors down. I slipped on my battle dress, speedlaced my boots, and actually was standing at the door to room 430 on time.

I knocked, the door opened, and an amazon stared down at me. I’m not exaggerating, either. She was staring down at me. She was easily six foot three, a lanky, stretched-out lady, with a long, narrow face, a huge, parrotlike nose, and spiky hair. She was wearing a flowered dress that hung down to her bony knees, but nothing was going to make this woman look anything close to feminine.

I stared up at her a long moment. How could I not? I’m only five foot ten, and she’d moved up real close, like she wanted to accentuate her advantage.

I nearly screamed in fright, only I’m too tough for that.

“Who’re you?” she demanded in a gruff voice.

“Drummond, Sean, Major, one each. Reporting as ordered,” I said in my most wiseass tone. When I’m scared out my wits, I get like that – blustery to the point of being obnoxious.

She turned around and yelled, “Katherine, you expectin’ some runt in a uniform?”

“Does he look sort of Neanderthalish and ignorant?” a voice yelled back.

“Uh-huh,” she grunted.

“That’s just Drummond. Let him in.”

The amazon stepped aside and I warily circled past her. There were two other people in addition to Katherine and the amazon. One guy and one girl.

The guy was improbably handsome. He was a few years younger than me, blond with sea blue eyes, perfectly white teeth, a slender build, and facial features that presumptive writers might describe as sculpted. Maybe I was predisposed, but I had the impression of a guy who was naturally good-looking who went to some lengths to be even better-looking; an effort that makes many manly guys somewhat squeamish and mistrustful, if you know what I mean.

The other woman had short-cropped brunette hair that accentuated her delicate, almost tiny features. She was actually an inch or two shorter than Katherine, and was so slight of build that she was what my mother would call dainty. Like Katherine, she was dressed in a fancy silk pantsuit and would have been quite pretty if it weren’t for the gloomy frown on her face. I thought she seemed feminine in a kittenish way, but that got cleared up real quick when the amazon lumbered past me, jumped on the same bed, and threw an extraordinarily long arm around her neck. To say they were an unlikely-looking couple would be to put too fine an edge on it. They looked like a distorted version of a Disney tale – a teeny beauty and a gangly beast.

It’s important at this point to understand that I grew up on military bases and spent my entire professional life in the Army. You become accustomed to the military culture, which has a fairly masculine ambiance and a distinctly conservative bent. Anything that’s divergently different makes your hair stand up. And that’s what was happening at this instant. I literally reached up and patted down the top of my head, so it wasn’t too obvious.

“Hey, everybody,” I said, with this painfully awkward smile.

Katherine said, “Attila, you look like you’re about to faint. Excuse him, everybody. I warned you he’d be a big disappointment.”

“Heh-heh,” I laughed, just to show them I was a good sport.

Nobody else laughed, I noticed.

The amazon said, “I’m Alice. I like Allie, though.”

“Pleased to meet you, Allie,” I incoherently mumbled, since it wasn’t strictly correct. I wasn’t the least bit pleased to meet her.

“I’m Keith,” the guy said, bouncing off the bed with his left hand hanging from a very limp wrist. “Keith Merritt, if you want my full name.”

His handshake was so quick and light, you wondered if it actually happened.

The other woman stayed on the bed, frowned, and complained, “I’m Maria.”

“Hi,” I said, smiling. She didn’t smile back.

“Okay, everybody’s met,” Katherine said. “Get seated and let’s get started.”

I looked around for a moment and wondered where I should sit. Allie the amazon stayed on the bed right next to Maria the grump. Keith patted a spot on the mattress he was stretched out on.

I rolled my eyes and audibly groaned, then went over and sat on the floor in the corner, as far from everybody as I could belligerently get. The rest of them giggled, like my discomfort was just the funniest damn thing in the whole damn world.

Katherine studied us all in a businesslike way.

“We’ve got a court date,” she announced. “It’s set for two weeks from today. They’re bringing in a judge from Washington. Attila, have you ever heard of a Colonel Carruthers?”

“Barry Carruthers?” I asked, and she nodded. There’s actually a fairly small corps of military judges, and lawyers are inveterately gossipy, and if there’s one thing lawyers love to share, it’s stories about judges.

“I’ve heard of him,” I admitted. “I’ve never tried anything before him, but I know his rep.”

“And what’s his rep?” she asked.

“A prosecutor’s dream date. Loose on rules of evidence, murder on theatrics, and he’ll kill you if you deal with the press.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, apparently unimpressed.

She should’ve been impressed as all get out. Barry Carruthers loved to dance with defense attorneys, only it was a very ugly kind of dance, because he always took the lead, he stepped on your toes, and he whirled you around so hard that you fell on your ass a lot. Just hearing he was assigned to a case was enough to make some defense attorneys bawl like babies. The stories about him were legion. He’d once suspended a trial for two months because a defense lawyer raised an objection that so thoroughly aggravated him, he actually threw the attorney in the slammer. It did not escape my notice that the Army was bringing in the most notoriously antidefense judge on its rolls.

I raised my hand like a schoolchild. “Could I ask a question?”

“What?” Katherine barked.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to get too technical at this early stage, but who’s our client?”

The other four in the room all looked at one another like I’d just asked the stupidest question there ever was. I didn’t think it was stupid.

Katherine said, “Captain Thomas Whitehall.”

She started to open her lips to say something else, and I raised my hand again.

“What?” she said, even more agitated.

“Hey, I apologize if I’m getting ahead of myself here. What’s he accused of?”

Katherine shook her head and looked around at the others in exasperation. “I’m sorry,” she explained, very nastily, “I know this case has been plastered for weeks on the front page of every newspaper in the U.S. and Korea, but Attila here doesn’t know how to read. Keith, would you quickly summarize the case for our token Army lawyer?”

Keith turned to me and smiled. “Three American soldiers, a first sergeant named Carl Moran, a private named Everett Jackson, and our client were all seen entering an apartment building in the Itaewon section of Seoul. This was around nine o’clock on the night of May 2. Three different witnesses observed them. There was a fourth party with them, a Korean soldier wearing an American Army uniform. His name was Lee No Tae. The witnesses also testified they heard sounds of a loud party that lasted past midnight.”