Martin Limon - Mr. Kill

“About an hour. But they’re not all in the van.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean Freddy Ray had to return to his unit. And Casey gets carsick easy. So Marnie and her are taking the train back.”

“The train? You mean the Blue Train?”

“What else? The one that left Pusan Station ten minutes ago.”

“Marnie and Casey are alone?” I asked. “The others are in the van? Driving?”

Riley looked peeved. “What did I just say?”

Ernie and I looked at each other. Without discussing it, we put down our beers.

As we walked down the hallway, Riley shouted after us, “Hey! Where’re you guys going?”

Inspector Kill met us at the Pusan Train Station.

The young KNP detective there, Mr. Ho, read from his notebook and gave us a complete rundown of what he’d observed. A tall blonde woman with a small child had boarded the Blue Train about ten minutes before its departure. There were five other foreigners, none of whom matched the description of Parkwood. However, Mr. Ho admitted, Parkwood’s description matched a lot of Caucasian males and could have been easily altered, by something as simple as wearing eyeglasses, for instance.

I checked with the Pusan Rail Train Office, and the G.I. who worked behind the counter handed me the manifest. Parkwood wasn’t on it, but he could’ve been using a stolen ID. I described him to the clerk. The guy shrugged. He didn’t look at his customers much. He hated them, he told me, after doing this job for almost a year, and didn’t bother looking at them.

“They’re always whining about their seating or about how long they have to wait for their ticket or something else that nobody can do anything about. Besides, I’m a short-timer,” he said. “Too short to care.”

Under normal circumstances, Ernie might’ve slapped the guy. As it was, we didn’t have time. Inspector Kill had already arranged for a helicopter to fly us north. On the drive to the airfield, he said, “Parkwood could board that train at the East Taegu station or even up in Taejon.”

“Yes,” I replied. “He’s had enough time to get up there from Kuangju. But he wouldn’t know that Marnie is on the train.”

Ernie pulled a photograph out of his pocket and showed it to us. It was of a blondish woman in her early to mid-thirties, wearing a tight skirt, a tight vest, and a pillbox hat with a half-veil. Next to her stood a young boy in shorts and bow tie and jacket and, on the other side, tugging on the hem of her skirt, a little girl in a flowery dress with curly brown hair sticking out from beneath a straw bonnet with a long ribbon.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked Ernie.

“At the bottom of Parkwood’s wall locker, up at the Mount Halla commo site. I guess he dropped it there when he was packing.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

Ernie shrugged. “At the time, it didn’t seem so important. Besides, I had other things on my mind.”

“This must be his mom,” I said, showing the photo to Inspector Kill. “And him and his sister, the one who was abused on the train when they were children.”

I repeated the story Parkwood had told us to Inspector Kill. His face looked grim.

“Marnie Orville,” he said, pointing at Parkwood’s mother, “does she look like this woman?”

“A little,” I said. “Both tall, both blonde.”

“And both traveling with children,” Ernie added.

Once we were in the air, the chopper pilot flew low, following the track of the Blue Line. Mr. Kill was tense. He didn’t like flying and avoided it whenever possible. Eventually we caught up with the train, moving past Kyongju, the ancient capital city of the Silla Dynasty.

Inspector Kill ordered the pilot to take us to the East Taegu station, the next stop on the Blue Train’s itinerary, with all due haste. He had a plan. I listened. Ernie and I would board the train in Taegu. Alone. The Korean National Police, meanwhile, would not try to board the train in Taegu because they had not yet mustered their forces and Inspector Kill was worried that a haphazard operation might scare Parkwood away. He was a resourceful criminal, according to Kill, and at the first hint of police gathering, he would flee. How long it would take us to find him then was anybody’s guess; but while we searched for him, he could cause a lot of damage.

“We have to assume,” Kill told us, “that Parkwood will try for Marnie Orville, and if he does, we have to catch him today, while he’s still panicked and on the run. There can be no mistakes.”

So the plan was for me and Ernie to board the Blue Train in Taegu, keep a low profile while the train was rolling, and then, as we approached the next stop, Taejon, to search every compartment for Parkwood. Meanwhile, Inspector Kill would be waiting for us at Taejon, with an emergency team ready to surround the train and respond to any unforeseen contingencies.

“Are you armed?” he asked.

I showed him my. 45.

Inspector Kill nodded approvingly.

Of the four stops along the route of the Blue Train-Pusan, East Taegu, Taejon, and finally Seoul-East Taegu is the most bustling, second only to the Seoul Station itself. It’s a large station, monumental in its concrete dimensions. As the Blue Train huffed and chugged its way into the station, four or five dozen people stood on the loading platform, holding tickets, waiting to board. None of them was Parkwood.

Ernie and I waited under a dark awning. Steam blew out of the sides of the Blue Train and it finally came to a halt.

“Did you see Marnie?” Ernie asked.

“Not yet. The windows are all fogged.”

“She has to be in there.”

A few dozen people filed off of the Blue Train. As soon as they had pushed their way onto the platform, the new passengers holding tickets started to board. Ernie and I waited until the last minute-when the Blue Train started to roll forward-to sprint to the train and hop on. We took a seat in the last car, one arranged for us by Inspector Kill. At first we did nothing, just stared ahead at the sea of black-haired Koreans in front of us.

The uniformed conductor came by and punched holes in our tickets. The stewardess smiled as she walked by but didn’t make eye contact. A vendor came by with a tray strapped around narrow shoulders, selling dried cuttlefish and ginseng gum and tins of imported guava juice.

Ernie fidgeted in his seat. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe deeply.

I felt bad about the rape of Mrs. Oh Myong-ja, the first victim, and worse yet about the rape and murder of Mrs.

Hyon Mi-sook, especially considering that her children were forced to huddle in the bathtub while she was systematically humiliated and then sliced to death. But those were crimes that I had no personal hand in, crimes that would have been impossible for me to prevent. The murder that bothered me most was the murder of Specialist Vance, the young technician who worked at the Mount Halla Communications Center.

“We shouldn’t have left him there alone,” I told Ernie.

“Bull,” Ernie replied. “At the time, we had no way of knowing Parkwood was the killer.”

“Sure we did.”

“How?”

I explained it to him. First the stalker of the Country Western All Stars. We hadn’t taken the musicians’ complaints particularly seriously, assuming they were random acts. But what had disappeared was a microphone, a pair of the bass player’s underwear, and finally a lone cowboy boot. All three of those things were among the piled-up junk in the G.I. living quarters on Mount Halla.

“That could’ve been coincidence,” Ernie replied. “And anyway, how were you going to pick them out?”

“And the checklists,” I continued. “When you work at a remote signal site, your life centers around checklists: maintenance checklists, communications checklists, electronics checklists. That’s all you do, hour after hour. Day after day.”