CHAPTER 39

There were probably many ways to approach this, but I persuaded Carol to have some minions deliver the boxes filled with Bales’s and Choi’s case files to my hotel room in the Dragon Hill Lodge. Somehow I didn’t think it was my charm that persuaded her. It would be midnight by the time we got back to base, and she still hadn’t eaten, and Korean restaurants close early. The hotel at least offered room service.

Besides, I had the impression she wasn’t the least bit afraid my manly charisma would make her swoon and end up in my bed. So why not do our work in a comfortable hotel room instead of some musty office?

Three-fifths of the boxes were stuffed with Choi’s files. They were written in Hangul, which posed an intractable problem for me, because the only Korean character I recognized was the one that meant “homosexual,” since I’d seen it written on so many signs lately. Thus Carol. Her job was to rummage through Choi’s files.

I waited till she got off the phone to room service before I explained what I hoped to accomplish. I wanted her to rifle through Choi’s files and pull aside every crime sheet that dealt with an American committing a felony, witnessing a crime, or in any way being involved in aiding or abetting a crime in Itaewon. Don’t bother to read them, I told her. Sift them out and place them in a pile. And nothing older than three years ago. And be sure to write the subjects’ names and ranks in English on the cover sheets.

I dug through Bales’s files. The good thing about being a highly experienced criminal attorney was that I’d spent eight years looking at crime sheets. You do develop a certain expertise. You know which data sections are substantively important and which are filled with meaningless procedural details. You know which pages to flip to immediately and which to ignore.

The other thing was that Bales was highly organized, precise, and not the least bit wordy. I recalled that from his statements in the Whitehall packet, and the same characteristics were evident on his crime sheets. Too bad he was rotten right down to his skivvies. Other than that, he was a dream cop.

I ruled out any crimes committed by anybody lower than a major. Not that lieutenants and sergeants and privates aren’t possibly traitorous, or in vitally sensitive positions, because the clerk to the general in charge of operations sees almost everything his boss sees. I just couldn’t be bothered at this stage. Somebody else could sift through later and see if any of those crime sheets were worth investigating more thoroughly.

I pulled out every crime sheet involving a major or higher, including those that involved their wives and kids. Army regulations require active files to be kept two years back, and a third year back for inactive files. So what I had was Bales’s records going back three years.

It was surprising how many officers or family members were connected in some way or another with a crime. It took me three hours, and Carol and I ate as we worked, but I ended up with a stack of nearly one hundred files. Most of the crimes looked fairly petty – DUIs, shoplifting, blackmarketing PX goods on the Korean economy, Peeping Toms, that kind of thing. But you never know what pushes somebody’s hot button. One guy’s innocuous trifle is another’s unbearable embarrassment. And some of the crimes looked fairly salacious. Several involved prostitution, including the wife of a full colonel who got caught three different times. An Army captain was arrested for armed robbery. A major was caught peeking in a window at a general’s wife. A lieutenant colonel flashed some schoolkids.

Carol’s stack looked twice as large as mine, and she still had another box to go. Both of us were rubbing our eyes a lot. We’d been awake since two o’clock in the morning the day before, when she and Mercer had knocked on my hotel door.

I got up and stretched and then went to the bathroom and threw some cold water over my face. When I came back, Carol was pacing and sipping from her third bottle of Evian. She’d decided to get more comfortable. She’d removed her shoes and stockings and her suit coat, so she was wearing only a short skirt and a thin, sleeveless blouse.

I said, “Tired?”

“Exhausted. This reminds me of first-year finals at law school.”

I chuckled. “Now you see what us lawyers do for a living. See what you’re missing?”

She collapsed onto the bed and her body bounced. “God, this bed feels great.”

Before she could give up on me, I said, “Hey, why don’t you go through that box? I’m gonna start cross-indexing the files.”

She groaned but sat back up. “Is there a method to this?”

“Actually, yeah. Here’s the way I figure their scam works. Choi does the initial investigation anytime an American is involved in a crime in Itaewon, right? He’s the first one on the scene, the first one to gather the facts, interview the witnesses, and collect the evidence. Then he calls Bales. Say the culprit looks malleable and entrappable. What would they do next?”

She ran both her hands through her hair, massaging her scalp. “I don’t know. He’d bring Bales in to meet the suspect, to have an American police officer on the scene.”

“Right. When the suspect sees an American CID investigator, he knows the shit is hitting the fan. Suddenly it’s no longer some infraction committed off base, limited to the Korean courts. Suddenly it’s serious. It’s going to seep into American channels, be reported to his commanding officer, put his career in jeopardy.”

“Putting the fear of God into him.”

“Right. Then maybe Bales’s job is to decide if the victim’s worth the trouble – maybe run a quick background check, see if the culprit’s got any value, if he seems susceptible, if he looks like someone they want and maybe could get.”

“In the meantime, the suspect’s left twisting in the wind, wondering if his life’s over.”

“They let the fear and tension build.”

“I can see it.”

“Okay, say Bales comes back to Choi and says they don’t want him, or he doesn’t seem the right type. They decide to throw the fish back into the sea. How do they do that?”

“I guess Bales goes ahead and fills out an American investigation report on the suspect. He gets the crime entered into the garrison blotter.”

“Exactly. They put the wheels of justice in motion. The suspect has no idea he’s just been vetted and found unworthy.”

“So we’re looking for officers who were arrested by Choi but there’s no corresponding American report filled out by Bales?”

I smiled. “In some cases, it may turn out somebody other than Bales handled it from the American side. In others, maybe the investigation didn’t pan out. But I’m willing to bet we’re going to see some that smell like they could get convictions, except they mysteriously stopped at the American fenceline, if you get my drift.”

“And you really think Choi would keep those files around?”

“Any other course would be stupid. Dangerous even. My bet would be he stamps them ‘closed for insufficient evidence,’ or titles it a dead end, then stuffs it in with everything else. He’s the chief of detectives at the precinct. Who’s gonna backcheck his cases? Plus, what happens if anybody ever asks, ‘Hey Choi, whatever happened to that old case with that American officer who got caught lifting that expensive Rolex from Old Man Lee’s jewelry shop?’ This way he can pull out the file and everything’s hunky-dory.”

Carol started going through another box, while I began cross-referencing the Korean and American files. I had organized Bales’s files alphabetically. That made it go faster. When I was done, I had about twenty unmatched Korean files.

I put them in a neat stack. Carol had culled six more out of the last two boxes. I quickly crossed-referenced the first four, but the fifth caught my attention real fast. It was Colonel Mack Janson, aka Piranha Lips, Spears’s legal adviser.