FLOWERS FROM BERLIN:PROCEED! ADOLF HITLER
1939
TWENTY
"Not very pretty to look at, Mr. Cochrane, sir," said Chief Martin Kugler of the Red Bank, New Jersey, Police Department. The two men stepped from a rusting green and white police car on the curb. Nearby there already stood an entire delegation of police vehicles. Men in various uniforms-local police, county sheriff's office, state police-stood with folded arms and waited. Police Chief Martin Kugler led Cochrane through a trail in the woods. The ground steamed with unexpected September heat, and a cloud of gnats pursued them.
Kugler's tones were apologetic. "We knew a boy was missing from the navy yard, but they get AWOL's all the time. Generally they turn up a thousand miles away at their parents' home. Wish it had been the same with this one, right?"
"Right," Cochrane mumbled, looking ahead. Kugler's waddling, measured steps set the pace. The police chief was a squat, sincere, balding little man with thick arms, an imposing paunch, and a. 45 that hung like a cannon at his left side. This was Chief Kugler's second homicide in nine years, and the first that did not fit into a neat pattern of victim-knowing-killer. He and Cochrane neared a group of men standing around a body in the center of the woods.
Kugler continued. "We read all the F.B.I. circulars, you know. Read them carefully. Think they had your name on them."
"They did," Cochrane answered.
"Well, you know. Since the Adriana went down we been looking for anything funny around here. Then this morning two kids are playing in the woods and they find this."
Billy Pritchard's corpse was in a middle stage of decomposition. The skin was dark and ulcerated, the teeth horribly accentuated by the rotting flesh of the lips, and the hair matted badly from dirt and rain. The entire corpse crawled with insects.
Cochrane stared. The body of an American boy in his underclothes was more real than a thousand ships exploding at sea.
Kugler stared also. The last few hours had been unpleasantly unique in his experience. First the body had been discovered in the woods. He had immediately filed the homicide report with the state police in Trenton. The state police-noting the proximity of the body to the navy yard, that an American sailor was still AWOL, and the events surrounding the Adriana -called it in to Washington.
Moments later, Chief Kugler had found himself talking long distance to someone named Special Agent Cochrane who wanted more of the specifics.
"See, I don't want to make something out of nothing, Mr. Cochrane, sir," Kugler had offered, "but the boy's uniform is gone. Now, you know that British boat that blew up? I was thinking…"
"Don't touch anything," answered Cochrane. "I'll be there in three hours."
Cochrane telephoned the Newark Bureau office and asked for two special agents, Mike Cianfrani and Jim Hearn, whom Cochrane knew from New York, to be placed on local special assignment. As Cochrane took a taxi to Washington's Union Station, Cianfrani and Hearn took their own car to Red Bank to safeguard the crime scene.
Kugler broke the deep silence that enshrouded the dead sailor. "Awful hot out here, ain't it?" the police chief said. "Poor kid. Body stinks to high hell."
"How do you know it's the sailor?" Cochrane asked, still looking down. The eye sockets were dark and discolored.
"Dog tags." Kugler motioned toward what used to be the boy's neck.
"Yes," said Cochrane softly, seeing the flat gray shape of something metal. "Of course."
"That's all that was touched here, sir," Kugler rushed to reassure. "Absolutely all. Rest of the area's as virgin as a Girl Scout tea party."
"I'm sure," Cochrane muttered.
Cianfrani and Hearn supervised the search of the area. Meanwhile, Cochrane excused himself to wander the area on his own. He had seen enough of the victim. The local police placed a sheet across the corpse.
Moments later, Cochrane heard a body bag unzipping. Cochrane walked farther into the woods, looking for the odd item-a scrap of cloth, a bottle, a button, anything – which might yield a fingerprint or a clue. He found nothing.
The gnats pursued him but his thoughts focused upon Billy Pritchard. It was doubtful that the young man had been taken to the woods and strangled. So where had the crime been committed? And why? Had Siegfried simply wanted a uniform to gain access to The Adriana? Or was this homicide one of those maddening coincidences that sends a detective in the wrong direction for months?
Cochrane pondered as he continued to walk. He saw a clearing ahead and, when he reached it, was surprised to come upon an old gravel and dirt parking lot. He stood perfectly still for a full minute and stared at the abandoned diner and the lonesome telephone booth.
He took a few more steps forward and noted that a road wound down the other side of the hill toward Red Bank. "Accessible by car," he said to himself. Then he walked back to where Billy Pritchard's remains were now in a yellow canvas body bag on a stretcher.
Chief Kugler, looking more and more shaken, glanced up to Cochrane. "Don't get much of this around here," said the police chief. "This is a family region. Worst thing that'll normally happen is a man will take a deer out of season."
"This incident didn't happen, Chief," Cochrane said. "The boys who made this discovery actually found a wino sleeping in the woods. That's all."
Several heads turned.
"Oh, well, that's just dandy," Chief Kugler snapped. "As soon as the county medical examiner gets the body-"
Cochrane interrupted. "The corpse is going to Newark for a postmortem. F.B.I. forensics lab," he said. Cochrane nodded to Cianfrani and Hearn. "Twelve hours should be sufficient for a thorough autopsy. If there are any doubts or delays, this is upon the authority of J. Edgar Hoover's office. Any questions?"
There weren't.
Two state troopers accompanied the Newark agents down the hill with the yellow canvas bag. Cochrane turned back to Kugler.
"Did this Pritchard boy have friends?" Cochrane asked.
"A boatload. Down at the yard." Kugler paused. "Parents, too."
"I'll start with the friends," Cochrane answered.
*
What emerged that afternoon was a portrait of a homesick, clean-cut, dutiful young naval officer, half-man and half-boy, and totally naive to the malevolence of the world beyond Kansas.
"Is he dead?" asked one shipmate.
Cochrane wasn’t happy with a lie, but he was stuck with it. "This is a standard investigation. Ensign Pritchard is AWOL from a sensitive installation. Now, perhaps,"
Cochrane nudged firmly, "you could recall your friend's daily routine?"
At Reilly's, Pritchard's friend recalled, the young man liked to hobnob with the local females, and even shoot a round of darts with some of the English sailors, to whom he always lost.
"A terrible dart player!" another of Pritchard's friends remarked. "The worst in the house."
"Second worst," Buck Reilly, the bartender and owner, recalled that evening as he removed the padlock from his front doors and opened for business. "The worst was Pritchard's pal. The old man."
"What old man?" Cochrane asked.
"Elmer," said Buck Reilly, his ham-hock arms swinging at his sides as Cochrane followed. "And come to think of it, he's disappeared, too."
Cochrane took up a place at the end of the bar. "Elmer who?" he asked.
"I don't know Elmer who," said Reilly. "I don't learn last names unless a customer is behind on his tab. Elmer used to hang around here at nights."
"Continue," Cochrane asked.