Nightmare Range (38 page)

Everyone watched. The bartenders, the waitresses, the business girls and even the GIs, because they were aware of the man who’d been spared from hanging this morning.

Choi Yong-kuang’s mother didn’t speak. Head bowed, she held three sticks of burning incense in front of the billowing folds of her red silk Korean dress. She knelt to the floor, leaned forward, and lowered her head three times to the dirty tile.

It was sort of embarrassing. Ernie tried to laugh it off. I kept a straight face. For decorum’s sake, mainly, but also so no one would notice the pressure building in my eyes.

B
efore dawn on the last day of her life, Mrs. Yi Won-suk rose from her sleeping mat beside her husband, washed her face, and slid back the oil-papered front door of her home. She stepped out into her plot of about one-half
pyong
in which she had been tending twelve rows of
peichu
, the thick-leafed cabbage that the people of Korea soak in brine and use as the prime ingredient in
kimchee
, their spicy national dish.

After her husband rose and trudged off to his fields, Mrs. Yi’s daughter, Myong-son, wiped her sleepy four-year-old eyes and joined her mother in the field, making a pretense of holding a flickering candle so her mother could see more clearly as she slashed at the bases of the fat green cabbages.

As dawn broke behind Palgong Mountain, Mrs. Yi continued to work, tossing the heavy heads of
peichu
into her wooden cart. After she’d plucked all the ripe leafy vegetables from the earth, she took Myong-song by the hand and together they washed and changed into freshly pressed skirts and woolen blouses and bright red head scarves.

Myong-son climbed atop the pile of
peichu
, Mrs. Yi grabbed the handle of the cart, and together they walked through the first glimmerings of golden sunrise in the Land of the Morning Calm, heading for the produce market in the city of Taegu.

Today, mid-November by the Western calendar, marked the
beginning of
kimjang
, that time of year when Korean housewives buy large piles of ripe
peichu
and prepare enough cabbage
kimchee
to last throughout the cold winter. Sales in Taegu were expected to be good. Mrs. Yi needed the money to supplement the earnings she and her husband made from the backbreaking work of tending their rented field of rice and soybean.

As Mrs. Yi and Myong-song entered the outskirts of Taegu, three-wheeled trucks and early morning taxicabs swished by on the narrow strip of blacktop that was the main road leading into the city from the west. Straddling the entranceway to the Taegu Market stood a huge wooden arch with fancy lettering welcoming one and all. Mrs. Yi pushed her cart past enormous glass tanks full of wriggling mackerel, past rows of snorting pigs and honking geese, and piled rolls of wool and cotton and silk. The entire market area was laid out like a giant squid in the center of the city of Taegu, with overhanging balconies and eaves and lean-tos made of canvas and bamboo blocking out the sun. Mrs. Yi finally jostled her way through the crowd until she reached the produce area and the stall of the mother-in-law of her husband’s second cousin. The elderly woman smiled and greeted Mrs. Yi and hugged Myong-song and soon enough space was cleared on the raised plywood platform. Mrs. Yi piled her iridescent green cabbages alongside mounds of round pears and red persimmons and jumbled green beans and all the earthly bounty that the fertile southern valleys of Korea offer in such abundance.

Myong-song played, the women chatted, Mrs. Yi sold most of her cabbage at a good price, and for the last day of her life they tell me she was happy.

My partner, Ernie Bascom, held the photograph up toward fluorescent light. His lips were pursed and there was no apparent emotion on his face. Behind the round lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses, however, his green eyes glowed.

“Nice chest on her,” Ernie said finally.

Mrs. Yi Won-suk, like many petite Korean women, was about as flat-chested as it is possible to be. Still, she was beautiful. The photo was taken at a resort area. She stood by the shore of the Naktong River, vamping with some of her girlfriends on an outing just before she was married some five years ago. Her face was calm and unblemished, with full lips and a smoothly rounded nose and eyes that were bright and cheerful. Her legs were straight and the calves, revealed by a short skirt, were full and round.

Ernie and I had been flown down to Taegu by chopper, mainly because the 8th Army provost marshal was worried that once the Korean newspapers got wind of what had happened to Mrs. Yi, the proverbial waste would be splattered all over the Korean tabloids.

I took the photograph out of Ernie’s hand and slid it into the neat dossier that the Taegu detachment of the Korean National Police had prepared.

Our host was Lieutenant Rhee Han-yong. He’d picked us up at the military helipad and transported us over here in a police van, sirens blaring, until we reached this red brick police headquarters building in the heart of downtown Taegu.

Lieutenant Rhee pulled out a pack of cigarettes, Turtleboat brand, and offered one to me and then Ernie. We both declined. Lieutenant Rhee had the weathered face of a cop who’d spent many years standing on a round platform directing traffic. Now he directed a homicide squad. Smoke swirled past his flat nose, causing him to squint.

“GI,” he told us. “Must be. Other foreigners live in Taegu we already check.”

“They had alibis?” Ernie asked.

“Yes. Alibi. Good alibi. Very good.”

“What kind of alibis?” I asked.

“Two Peace Corps workers. That day they take go mountain somewhere. Also five priests. How you say?
Chondu-kyo
.”

“Catholic,” I said.

He nodded. “Yes. Catholic. Everybody say they inside church that day.”

Taegu is a city of about a hundred thousand people. It sits in the central valley of South Korea and is responsible for more than half the country’s output of exportable produce. Few foreigners live in Taegu because there are few business opportunities. The big industrialized capital of Seoul gobbles up most of those, along with the dynamic seaport of Pusan to the south.

That meant that the main source of foreigners living in Taegu was the US Army compound, Camp Henry, headquarters for the 19th Support Group. I’d already checked before Ernie and I left Seoul. Camp Henry was home to about fifteen hundred GIs. A decent-sized pond for a criminal to swim in.

Forensic science is not the most highly developed art in Korea. In fact, it has not developed very well here at all. Why? Because with the Park Chung-hee government firmly in power and the Cold War raging and President Nixon and now President Ford providing total backing to the Park regime, the Korean National Police enjoy the luxury of solving crimes with methods more traditional than forensic.

A judiciously employed rubber hose is one example. A sucker punch to the stomach another. But in this case those crude techniques wouldn’t do much good.

No suspect was in custody.

Why were the KNPs so sure that the perpetrator had been a foreigner? Two pieces of evidence: the semen and the pubic hair. The semen showed a blood type of O positive, extremely rare amongst the ancient and largely homogenous tribe that occupies the Korean Peninsula. And the pubic hair was obviously Caucasian. Short, curly, light brown.

Because of this evidence, the Korean National Police had requested our presence to help them find the GI who had raped and murdered Mrs. Yi Won-suk.

When a married woman is violated and then strangled, right
in front of her four-year-old daughter, it is bad enough. When that unspeakably hideous crime is perpetrated by a foreigner, it becomes intolerable. The KNPs would go to any lengths to nab the killer. But their long arm didn’t reach into the inviolable sanctuaries of US Army compounds.

That’s where Ernie and I came in.

“I need to see the site,” I told Lieutenant Rhee.

“You no go check compound?”

“We’ll check the compound and we’ll find the GI who did this. But first I see the site.”

Ernie nodded his agreement.

Lieutenant Rhee glanced back and forth between us, not liking the idea. Finally, he sighed and stubbed out his cigarette. As he stood to his full height, he straightened his wrinkled khaki uniform and said, “
Kapshida.
” Let’s go.

Lieutenant Rhee, like most Korean cops, didn’t want the 8th Army CID interfering in his operation. What he wanted us to do was the same thing the powers that be here in Korea wanted US military police to do. Control GIs. Slap them down when they became unruly and particularly when their wild ways caused grief to Korean civilians.

Not that the Korean government wanted us gone. Quite the contrary. Communists on the northern side of the Demilitarized Zone were massively equipped by the Soviet Bloc, fielding a standing army of over seven hundred thousand soldiers. South Korea’s army could hold the northern troops off for a while, but in a prolonged conflict, the naval and air support of the US would prove indispensable.

The Koreans needed us here for their very survival.

But sometimes those of us assigned to defend their country—especially young GIs far away from home and far away from everything that made them civilized—could prove to be a royal pain in the butt. Like when they became drunk and unruly and brawled with whomever happened to be in their way. Or
when they drove their tanks and their armored vehicles too fast through sleepy, straw-thatched-hut villages. Or when they treated Korean women as if they were dolls to be toyed with and then discarded.

We ducked through a rickety wooden gate and entered a small courtyard. Earthen jars, probably filled with winter
kimchee
, lined the wall to the right. On the left, chicken wire housed a skinny white rooster who was busy scratching the earth. Flagstone steps led to a raised wooden platform that served as the floor of the hooch. In front of the sliding door sat an old woman. The neighbor, Lieutenant Rhee told me, and the first person to hear the four-year-old Myong-song when she burnt her hand and started wailing.

I nodded to the old woman. With sad, wrinkled eyes, she nodded back.

Next to her, leaning against a pedestal, was a large photograph of Yi Won-suk bordered in black. In front of the photo stood a short bronze incense holder.

Cops at a murder site are not expected to participate in ritual behavior. I could tell by his body posture that Lieutenant Rhee wanted me to keep moving. But rules had been broken here. The KNPs had allowed this old woman to set up this shrine to the dead not more than a few feet from a police crime scene. The KNPs had let their own rules be broken not only out of respect for the dead but also because of the age of this mourner. Old grandpas with poor eyesight can totter across busy intersections in Seoul, against the red light, and cops with whistles will stop traffic and make sure that younger drivers swerve safely around the old man. To ticket a venerable elder for jaywalking would be considered the height of impropriety.

And no one had the heart to shoo away this old woman.

Ernie was already slipping off his loafers in front of the raised floor, but I didn’t join him. Instead, I approached the old woman,
bowed, and spoke in Korean. “I’m very sorry for your trouble, Grandmother.”

She cackled. Surprised to hear a foreigner speak the tongue of the gods.

“No trouble for me,” she answered. “Trouble for the young Mrs. Yi. And more trouble for her husband. And for their child, Myong-song.”

“Yes. For my country’s part in this, we are greatly ashamed.”

“Good for you. But don’t waste your breath on a foolish old woman.”

“Did you see the man who did this, Grandmother?”

“No. I heard Mrs. Yi return from the market and push her cart through the gate, but after that nothing. Apparently Myong-song was asleep from the long ride home. All was quiet, so I went about my business until about an hour later. Then I heard Myong-song scream.”

“And you came over here?”

“Yes. Myong-song was a quiet child. I’d never heard her scream before. I found her in the kitchen. Apparently her mother had taken a pot of warm water off the charcoal brazier, but she must’ve been interrupted because she left the flame exposed. Myong-song reached in and burnt her hand.”

“And her mother?”

“In the back room.” The old woman shook her head. “Don’t ask me more. That young policeman knows everything.”

I thanked the old woman, slipped off my shoes, and stepped into the silent home.

The front room was wallpapered but barely furnished. Only a small wooden chest with brass fittings and a stack of sleeping mats and folded blankets sat neatly against the wall. The floor beneath my feet was still warm. Apparently, the old neighbor woman had been good enough to change the charcoal for the heating flues that ran beneath the stone foundation. The late Mrs. Yi must’ve been a good housekeeper. The floor’s vinyl covering was scrubbed immaculately clean.

We entered the kitchen. Pots and pans hung from the wooden rafters. No sign of struggle. Only an open charcoal brazier that had now died out. The metal lid had not been replaced. Surely the old woman was right. When Mrs. Yi Won-suk pulled the pan of hot water off the open charcoal flame, someone must’ve jumped her from behind. Someone huge. Overpowering. She wouldn’t have had a chance to struggle. Yet someone who was stealthy enough to tiptoe past the sliding door and across the vinyl-floored front room without being heard. Or if she had heard him, maybe Mrs. Yi thought it was her husband returning early from the fields.

We entered the back room, where Mrs. Yi had been taken. Again, no sign of struggle. A small table in the corner with a mirror, bottles and jars of ointments and lotions, all undisturbed. Maybe the man had threatened Mrs. Yi with a knife. Or worse, threatened to hurt her daughter.

Lieutenant Rhee pointed to the center of the floor.

“The body was found here,” he said in Korean. I translated for Ernie.

Then he told us that her skirt had been pulled up, her long underpants and leggings ripped off, and that the doctor who examined her corpse found enough tearing in her small body to conclude that she’d been violated forcibly by a powerful man.